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

[u/AporiaParadox]

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.

[u/Aickavon]

In star wars the republic learned this very early as they had a garrison fort in the midst of a civilian occupied city.

The mandalorians were not pleased and proceeded to bomb the whole city.

The republic garrisons got a lot more picky with their locations from then on.

[u/flightofthepingu → u/Aickavon]

Do the Mandalorians even have a word for "civilian"?

[u/Aickavon → u/flightofthepingu]

During the Mandalore war it was explained by a literal mandalorian that they would have left the civilian population alone but the tactics of the republic were so cowardly that they would rather make a Turtle Bay level incident than be blue balled by future city based fortresses

[u/BunNGunLee → u/Aickavon]

Basically an instance of "Okay, you want to put your garrison there? Then you get to live with the consequences."

Not touching on the IRL implications of that same argument, just noting that in the Mandalorian's case here, that's definitely the kind of point they'd make. They're a culture that prizes conflict as a cornerstone of civilization building, and hiding behind a civilian target would be shameful in the highest order.

Rather than letting it get out that hiding the garrison among non-combatants would make the Mandalorians just give up on hitting it.

[u/CustodianCloset → u/BunNGunLee]

Not touching on the IRL implications of that same argument, just noting that in the Mandalorian's case here, that's definitely the kind of point they'd make.

In all fairness, we literally have those same rules. You aren't supposed to put military infrastructure inside civilian infrastructure. Nearby is fine, but not combined. Doing so is a violation of international humanitarian law due to unnecessary risk to non-combatants.

I am not defending Russia, but as an example, there was a recent Russian shelling (or maybe a drone strike? I forgot the specifics) of a military ammo warehouse in Ukraine. Civilians died as a result. General consensus was Ukraine fucked up.

[u/BunNGunLee → u/CustodianCloset]

I was more just trying to avoid derailing the point by bringing up the IRL issues, not that I don’t recognize this comes up surprisingly often despite being incredibly unethical for a military.