What is the difference between killing somebody and murdering them? According to the Oxford Dictionary, murder is “the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another”. In order for a killing to be considered a murder, it must be unlawful and premeditated. The killing of one soldier by another during war is thus not murder… But only because it lawful.

Professor Ohlins’s discussion about international criminal law was very thought-provoking for me about the whole concept of war. While he was discussing the punishments that governments face if they unlawfully kill during war, it made me think about the futility of it all. War is literally people killing other people in order to defend their arbitrary boundaries (e.g. countries). Deeper than a soldier’s nationality is the fact that he is human; every soldier on either side of the battlefield is human, with feelings and loved ones and lives of their own. War blinds us to this fact, and leads us to view the other side not as individuals, but as a collection of “communists” or “Germans” or “people from the next tribe over”.

A soldier “kills” another but does not “murder” him simply because our government has said it is okay to kill people fighting for the “bad” side. Through the lens of war, killing one civilian is worse than killing a thousand soldiers. War makes us forget that we are all human.