r/TopCharacterTropes • u/AporiaParadox • Sep 11 '26

Hated Tropes "Good guys" committing perfidy (fake surrender) and it's treated as a clever heroic ploy instead of a war crime or something morally dubious

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  1. Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Anakin pretends to surrender to the enemy multiple times during the Clone Wars. And no, it's not used to indicate that Anakin is falling to the Dark Side, other characters like Obi-Wan do it too.
  2. The Iliad. The Trojan Horse was a real dick move, a fake surrender compounded by a fake peace offering, followed by a massacre. I get that it was a different time, but still, most modern adaptations just treat it as a cool thing. One thing I'll give Nolan's The Odyssey credit for is that Odysseus recognizes that what his "clever plot" was wrong.

Perfidy is a serious war crime, because morality aside, in exchange for one victory, you're dooming all of your allies who might want to legitimately surrender in the future because now the enemy is just going to execute them, not to mention that now the enemy won't surrender to you and will just fight harder.

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194

u/DistrictDry2852 Sep 11 '26

To add to your last point, Japanese soldiers used to do it all the time. Eventually American soldiers started just shooting all surrendering Japanese soldiers.

145

u/coatimundos Sep 11 '26

And that’s exactly the issue with false surrender.

39

u/Dartz_Reverse Sep 11 '26

Wasnt an issue from their perspective.

According to their code, anybody trying to surrender in earnest deserves to die anyway.

2

u/Blitz_Prime Sep 11 '26

Reminds me in Fallout New Vegas Caesar’s Legion has their soldiers trained to kill themselves rather than be captured, but Centurion didn’t as he saw his death as a useless waste of resources and planned to escape. Caesar however has him marked for death, and would sooner spend even more lives to have him killed than rescued.

2

u/Johnny_Banana18 Sep 12 '26

Their code was pretty arbitrary, the no surrender idea wasn’t a long held idea but was added as a perversion of bushido.  

1

u/Cory123125 Sep 13 '26

They had a crazily disorganized set of military institutions.

They ended up doubling up on development work a lot of the time due to it.

1

u/Johnny_Banana18 Sep 13 '26

And every faction in the military basically hated each other and disregarded each others ideas 

2

u/elderlybrain Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26

The resulting legal, financial and psychological penalties were enormous.

Japan's treatment of its prisoners was so monstrous that the penalties on Japan were probably the highest of any axis power bar Germany.

It basically was dismantled as a nation. It lost 2 cities in the atomic bombings. It totally lost its overseas territory completely, the entire political system was restructured and it had to contribute 42% of its GDP to war reparations. It's entire leadership, bar Hirohito was hanged.

It was such a devastating and powerful punishment that Japan's entire psyche was changed from an imperialist warrior led hierarchy to what it is today.

There's a reason why so many Japanese still venerate the clsss-a war criminals at Yasakuni shrine, they recognise that Japan was utterly and totally neutered after world war 2. They refuse to accept that it was consequences.

44

u/Johnny_Banana18 Sep 11 '26

It really came into play late in the war when Japan was using a lot conscripts as well as colonial troops and way more Japanese soldiers were surrendering. 

For the Japanese command though, this was intentional, they wanted the U.S. to kill surrendering troops because they didn’t want their troops to surrender in the first place.

21

u/[deleted] Sep 11 '26

[deleted]

1

u/ProfessionalTruck976 Sep 11 '26

Really? I know they often played dead, or killed medics if they were wounded and Americans tried to give first aid.

But first one is NOT a fake surrender at all and the other is only fake surrender if you indicate you are surrendering

61

u/LordOfDorkness42 Sep 11 '26

My dude... Playing dead for the sake of a feint is also a Perfidy war crime.

Doing that means all wounded and dead get shot in the head, because the dead are no longer trusted.

-16

u/ProfessionalTruck976 Sep 11 '26

Nope, there is no meaningful protection in law fo dead so you are not abusing any protected status

14

u/Lewa358 Sep 11 '26

You're actually advocating in favor of desecrating the corpses of enemy combatants as a standard practice?

-7

u/ProfessionalTruck976 Sep 11 '26

More like I have no particular reason to care about it enought to protest it? Once I am dead my cadaver is of no further use to me, if I happen to die in battle it is also extremely unlikely it will be of any use to anyone else for spare parts.

So whyever would I care if it gets shot again? I am dead. I can't be more dead than dead. Frankly if it gets used as a "sandbag" by anyone on my side still alive that is the only good future use it will ever be off to anyone.

8

u/Lewa358 Sep 11 '26

It's not about you as a corpse, it's about your comrades in arms killed in action, and soldiers' families

Which would you rather have returned to you after a battle--your friend's body, mostly intaft save some lethal wounds, or a barely-recognizable slab of meat?

Not to mention the legitimate logisitcal concerns of not being sure which of your combatants are KIA and which have been captured or gone AWOL.

-4

u/ProfessionalTruck976 Sep 11 '26

If my comrades care more about treatment of my corpse than about leveraging it as an advantage, then I am runnuing with unberably sentimental fools.

3

u/InevitableSilent6969 Sep 12 '26

Article 37 of the Geneva Convention outlines the prohibition of perfidy, which includes this list of examples:

"a) The feigning of an intent to negotiate under a flag of truce or of a surrender

b)The feigning of an incapacitation by wounds or sickness

c)The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status; and

c)The feigning of protected status by the use of signs, emblems or uniforms of the United Nations or of neutral or other States not Parties to the conflict."

1

u/ProfessionalTruck976 Sep 12 '26

"by wounds or sicknes"

Not by death though.

1

u/InevitableSilent6969 Sep 12 '26

Article 37 also states, "Acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence, shall constitute perfidy."

In the Red Cross' book on customary international humanitarian laws, one can find Rule 113: "Each party to the conflict must take all possible measures to prevent the dead from being despoiled. Mutilation of dead bodies is prohibited."

Pretty straightforward, and a perspective that's shared by almost every government in the world:

"The obligation to take all possible measures to prevent the dead from being despoiled (or pillaged) was first codified in the 1907 Hague Convention (X).[1] It is now also codified in the Geneva Conventions.[2] It is also contained in Additional Protocol I,[3] albeit in more general terms of “respecting” the dead, which includes the notion of preventing the remains from being despoiled.[4]"

It goes on, but I digress. Point is, pretending to be dead for the purpose of luring the enemy into an ambush is a war crime.

1

u/ProfessionalTruck976 Sep 12 '26

Ruler 113 was made by sentimental idiots, for sentimental idiots and is only followed by idiots.

1

u/InevitableSilent6969 Sep 12 '26

Everything you've said is so utterly vapid, immature, and based on nothing but your completely unfounded ideas about how the world works - ideas which have so far been completely and demonstrably incorrect - that I'm guessing you understand so little of my previous comments that you think Rule 113 is like...a rule that everyone signed at the UN or something like that.

What the Red Cross describes as "rules" are essentially guidelines to things which have pretty much universally been agreed upon by the vast majority of governments around the world, in a variety of conflicts, peace conferences, ceasefires, international court trials, etc., over the last 100+ years. Rule 113 for example is stated to have been demonstrated by: the 1907 Hague Convention, the Geneva Conventions (which were ratified into four sections in 1949, and signed into agreement by 196 countries), quotes the the US Military Tribunal as stating that looting corpses "is and always has been a crime" during the 1947 trial of Oswald Pohl, mentions multiple other trials in the aftermath of WW2 which resulted in convictions for the mutilation of corpses, and mentions how many military manuals from around the world "prohibit the mutilation or other maltreatment of the dead."

Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ethiopia, Gambia, Georgia, Ghana, Guinea, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Latvia, Republic of Moldova, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Norway, Romania, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Tajikistan, Togo, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Yemen, Zambia, and Zimbabwe are the countries which is lists as having domestic laws saying the same thing.

The end of the section is this: "No official contrary practice was found with respect to either international or non-international armed conflicts." In other words, an international team of experts writing the guidebook to this stuff couldn't find a single example of any government or military that agrees with you. You basically just said that you think that every single government and military leader in every armed conflict on the entire planet, for over a century, have been sentimental idiots, and you also just called literally every soldier who fought in those conflicts a sentimental idiot.

The section does mention a few men who you didn't insult with your edgelord nonesense. Specifically, the SS officials who ran the Nazi concentration camp system, and some Imperial Japanese Army officials who executed POWs and chopped up their bodies and ate them. Of course, Oswald Pohl and Yochio Tachibana were both executed by hanging, along with some other fellows they'd committed war crimes with. Executed by a bunch of sentimental idiots, as you put it.

9

u/Johnny_Banana18 Sep 11 '26 edited Sep 11 '26

There was a story in Guadalcanal where the allies thought a group of Japanese were trying to surrender and send a platoon to help them and the platoon got massacred. Japan denies the story (which isn’t really proof though as Japan denies many war crimes), but modern historians say it could have been a misunderstanding, that the original solider that went over honestly thought that the rest would have surrendered, and that the allied soliders mistook the Japanese flag as a white flag. 

11

u/Grimpatron619 Sep 11 '26

that is still perfidy. its ''hors de combat'' as the frogs would say

-2

u/ProfessionalTruck976 Sep 11 '26

Only if you are not in fact wounded.

9

u/Grimpatron619 Sep 11 '26

either way, playing dead till they get close is perfidy by pretending hors de combat and the pretending you're too wounded and need help till they get close is also pretending hors de combat.

its perfidy either way

-1

u/ProfessionalTruck976 Sep 11 '26

How the fuck is one to get a leg up then? What next legal authority for occupational administration? Fuckery, all of that.

13

u/InspiringMilk Sep 11 '26

Probably not in a way that leads only to more war crimes on both sides.

5

u/GimpMaster22 Sep 11 '26

I have no idea how widespread it actually was, but there were certainly instances when Japanese faked surrender and then pulled a pin from grenade when US soldiers got close enough, at least of I remember correctly.