Memorial Day

Related: a teacher once chided my teenage self for deriding mass-surrendering Italians in North Africa; saying instead that this was a very sensible, humane choice and asking why it was better to die in a ditch for Mussolini. That stuck.

To deserters and all who decided not to throw lives away in lost causes.

JCVD it is. Too slow on the refresh.

Long ago, as a hitchhiker in Eire, I got into an amiable conversation with a man who had given me a ride. What stuck was “Ireland has had too many willing to die for their country, too few willing to live.” Probably not original, but right, I think.

Where the Iraqi army began deserting in 2003, I thought they were the only ones with any sense. Too simple, I know, but still…

Hi,

The Good Soldier Å vejk is an excellent book that should be required reading in schools. I read it many decades ago, and loved it. It was a formative experience at the time, and I’ve thought of it often since then too. The book is very funny, in a very serious way, and has a lot of humorous drawings to boot. It’s only when the politicians can no longer find good people to do their killing, that they will need to find other ways to conduct themselves. The good-natured, bumbling, Å vejk is a model of resistance within a mindless compulsory military service.

Have a nice day,
Antti

The trouble with Henry’s approach, it seems to me, is that it mixes up a lot of things and casts very general aspersions. Civil wars, other kinds of wars, revolutionary romanticism, conservative values like loyalty and bravery and obedience and respect for the dead.

War is bad. But things are complicated, and these debates too often become simplistic left/right affairs.

Hemingway got away with glorifying a deserter in one of his short stories. But he had earned the right to do it, and it was a subtle, human story.

Catch-22 presented desertion as the only sane response to a war in which American participation has traditionally been considered necessary.

The Netherlands have struggled for decades with the existence of Poncke Princen, a guy who deserted from the colonial war to join the new Indonesian army. As late as the nineties, there was still a large political debate about whether Princen should be granted a visum to visit the Netherlands before his death.

Younger generations tend to accept that he picked the right side, even praise him for it. That pisses off former soldiers from the colonial war. Who might have a point, it’s a bit too easy for my generation to wash its hands of the past.

I wonder if something similar is at play in Germany. If you make statues for deserters, or paint ‘Nazis raus’ on walls, you absolve yourself, put yourself on the right side with hindsight.

What Salient said

I think the cunning or self-interested deserter is just as admirable as the pacifist. The pacifist has the assurance of a form of belief. The self-interested deserter is doing the same thing — refusing to kill or be killed — without being able to fall back on that. And what is admirable is the act of refusing to do it; the justification is not required.

How about draft dodgers?

Indeed.
And then when they ran out of nationalist heroes and priests to commemorate, they erected a statute of Thomas Meagher in full (US) civil war regalia in (my hometown) Waterford. Such an odd set of priorities.
Thank God for anarchists and pacifists (and deserters, objectors, ‘cowards’ and, most of all, ‘traitors’)

Engels: My take is that draft dodging is just fine, right up to the moment you start cheerleading for the war and insisting on the importance of other people going and taking the risks you opted out of.

Italian soldiers deserted in WW2 because they were not provided with equipment or even weapons. Also their commanding officers also deserted, many of them.

The problem with the US war on Vietnam wasn’t its “futility” — the inability to achieve stated US goals — it was its immorality. The goals were evil.

Well, my late father was doing his national service when the Germans invaded Hungary, and he managed, through connections, to desert the Hungarian army. I think that might have been the finest thing he ever did in his life. (He went off to school in Transylvania to lay low. His unit went on to occupy northern Serbia, before being shipped off to the Russian front).

The bell was late in ringing, sorry.

I am not entirely clear as to the dates of the actions described in the original post, but a major meme, if not the main meme of tiqqun is “Revolution Through Desertion in Place” and it would be my guess that the displays, though pre-dating tiqqun, had as much to do with that post-Maoist idea as anything to do with war or military. Especially because of the image of running into a wall.

I won’t link to revleft just steal a comment or two

“I think it differs from a “drop-out” theory in the it is almost closer to a post-Maoist conception of building “base areas” – differentiated by the fundamental change in territorialization, etc. within the imperial metropole. Rather than fleeing to the mountains, one creates an unnavigable terrain “within” (since looking for an “outside” at this point is pretty hopeless). Desertion, in a way “dropping out” isn’t usually, can be understood as sympathetic to an insurrectionary practice – or even necessitating it (capital as hydra, etc.).”

“This method is desertion. The best way to destroy a system is to simply walk away from it. To ignore it and refuse to comply with it. To acknowledge the injustice and swear to yourself that you will resist it no matter what the consequences.”

“have you ever heard your Civil War (in which I think desertion from the Federal army was far from admirable) described as the War of Northern Aggression?”

I live in Mississippi, and happily the only uses of that term I’ve heard have been arch ones. It’s a warning flag when anyone says it seriously.

I would sympathize even with a Northern deserter, but I would also appreciate the practical necessity behind capturing and punishing him. War is ugly like that. (I think Northern deserters *would* have the argument that “conscientious objectors” were not recognized, leaving them with no good alternative.)

Thousands of Wehrmacht soldiers in WW2 were shot for desertion or disobeying orders, both after regular courts-martial and by SS drumhead gangs in the closing months. These men were doing the right thing.

#24

Göring: Why, of course, the people don’t want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

“2) Another French philosopher, certainly not Voltaire: alas, the choice is sometimes between Auschwitz and Verdun.”

I’m no pacifist but I can’t take that quote seriously. Does no one remember who the hero of Verdun was and what exactly he did during WWII?

where war memorials rarely show any ambivalence about war being a good thing
I’d read this as “German war memorials are usually anti-war.” To me, the plaque inside the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, the ruined church on the Kurfürstendamm of Berlin (former centre of West Berlin), was striking: “To remind us of the time when the punishment of God was laid heavily on us.” You can’t get much more downbeat than that.

The last bit ” In addition, when he is pursued, it is possible that quite blameless people are hurt, if and when the deserter is stopped by violence” strikes me as particularly weird. For example Jews fleeing the Warsaw Ghetto would bear the responsibility that “quite blameless people are hurt, if and when the [escapee] is stopped by violence “

It is quite sad to see the dignified gestures and noble sentiments of the German anarchists violently ripped from their context, shorn of meaning, and used as a makeshift mortar to score grubby points in Ireland’s fetid history wars. The clever point that Henry Farrel thinks he is making by using the German anarchists in this way, really falls flat when more recent developments than Ireland’s Civil War are considered.

Ireland’s political elite (which contains many, if not all, descendants of Brian MacNeill and all profiting ably, it has to be said) have recently decided to pardon those deserters who fled the Irish Army and may have joined the British Army during WWII. In this way the political elite of Ireland seem to be mocking the sentiment of the German anarchists by using deserters – not to challenge – but to continue the old lie (or ‘the cult of blood sacrifice’; dulce et decorum est pro patria mori). A large part of the Irish political elite and ‘intelligentsia’ today have absolutely no qualms with ‘the cult of blood sacrifice’ as long as it is not infected by any (Irish) nationalist sentiments.

In Ireland, they could do with a lot less deserters and a lot more conscientious objectors willing to speak truth to power.

There’s another view towards certain deserters that Ireland has taken recently. Ireland Pardons Wartime Deserters

Re some of the comments: Violence is a bad thing – there is a “but” because sometimes what we view as the evil of violence is outweighed by the good it helps accomplish. Only the ideologue lives in a world without qualification. Imho, absolute pacifism bears all the hallmarks of the more astonishing varieties of libertarianism, that would surrender the planet to an asteroid to avoid the unclean touch of an encroaching tax.

The progress of human rights and human welfare has required, among many other things, the existence of armed forces subordinate to the civilian governments of liberal democracies. The existence of those armed forces has required women and men willing to serve, and sometimes to die, even when the policies they furthered were believed by them or others to be mistaken. They exemplify not only physical courage, but often moral courage as well. Remembering them, and their importance, is not to endorse every war they fought; and surely remembrance of the fallen is a better spur to the achievement of our ends without death and injury, when possible, than is a monument raised to those who ran away.

If you live in a Western democracy, then your way of life and the protections of your rights that you enjoy were purchased, in part, by the sacrifice of the fallen who were honored on Monday.

As for those who deserted – not merely refused to obey an immoral or illegal order – society has been given nothing by such acts, and owes them nothing in return.

@Lurker #40: to clarify, I was referring to war memorials in the conventional sense, those commemorating soldiers (either individually or collectively, or the ‘unknown soldier’ kind) – those memorialising war in general or civilian victims (in both cases I can’t think of any examples pre-WWII) are a different sort of thing.

“If you live in a Western democracy, then your way of life and the protections of your rights that you enjoy were purchased, in part, by the sacrifice of the fallen who were honored on Monday.”

It may be worth while to recall, for a moment, that the original anarchist gesture was to salute deserters from WW I and WW II in Germany. Are we really supposed to condemn those deserters? Or should they have stayed loyally on, serving the Kaiser or the Fuehrer?

Now let’s turn our thoughts to the U.S. troops who killed and tortured civilians during the wars of the latter half of the 20th century — not following “illegal orders”, but quite legal ones. Like the troops who helped to train the death squads in Iraq. Should we really say that they were protecting our rights?

Sure, there have been soldiers who fought on the right side in history — I’m willing to say that people on the Allied side in WW II were on the right side. They’re an exception. We’d do a lot better with a default attitude honoring refusal to serve in war and have to go through contortions to justify it in the rare cases when it’s necessary.

Rich Puchalsky@48
“I’m willing to say that people on the Allied side in WW II were on the right side. ”
Well, that’s generous of you. Does it apply to the Soviet allies also? Does it not apply to Finns or Romanians on the other side?

Are there other post-WWI I cases where some people were fighting on the right side?

Earwig, I respectfully disagree. I don’t see how our Cold War goal of preserving an independent Republic of Vietnam in the south was immoral. The Saigon regime was corrupt but they were, like South Korea, a work in progress. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam was hardly a paragon of virtue, and is famously corrupt today even as peace reigns throughout Vietnam and between Vietnam and the USA. Bombed ’em from one end of the country to the other, but they are an amazing people and don’t hold a grudge.

On the other hand, the futility of our involvement in Vietnam is very clear to me. There was really only one difference between the Korean War and Vietnam, and it was military geostrategic distinction that made success possible in Korea but not in Vietnam. A glance at a map is all you need. In Korea the peninsula was flanked on both sides by seas we controlled. In Vietnam, one flank was jungle and mountains through which the North Vietnamese could and did resupply and reinforce their troops in the South, and we could do very little to stop it. One US military theorist, Col. Harry Summers, proposed that the US extend the DMZ across Laos to the Mekong River, totally sealing off the South from the North. Although extremely difficult to accomplish, I believe it would not have been impossible, and would have preserved South Vietnam. Of course we would still have troops there manning the DMZ, as we do in Korea.

So, futility I accept, but immorality I can’t quite see — particularly for a war after which time seems to have healed all wounds.

@52:
I would suggest that a futile (and stupid) neocolonial war is an immoral one, even if, as you note, the Vietnamese have been uncommonly forgiving about having been bombed back into the Stone Age and even granting the questionable notion that we were in the war for only the best of reasons. As for time having healed all wounds – it seems to me the war was very much a live and painful issue when John Kerry was running for President (and not long before that there was the never-quite-resolved matter of Bob Kerrey and those dead villagers).

Sure, time heals all wounds, except for those of the hundred thousand people or so that we killed in the Vietnam War. But they don’t matter, I guess, because those dead people are certainly not complaining about it now.

It is indicative of our authoritarian and militarized societies that people reflexively find the deserter suspicious and not the soldier. It is the deserter who has to justify himself and is held to the highest moral standards, while the soldier is by default a hero, or at least a brave lad and will get away with most anything unless he kills babies or something (and even that isn’t such a big deal if it’s done from a sufficient distance).

Especially in a volunteer army soldiers should be held accountable not only for their individual, but also for their collective actions – and no, the Nuremberg Defense just doesn’t cut it.

@Ralph Hitchens, 56:

Sorry, but that doesn’t cut it. The Eisenhower Administration opposed a U.N. sponsored vote on the question of unification in the mid-50s, because it was a certainty the population of the South would vote for unification with the Communist North. The question of what form the government would take would then be an internal political matter, making it much more difficult politically to intervene. This should be the background for any discussions concerning justification of the Vietnam War.

By no stretch of the imagination does that war come close to meeting just war doctrine, which, IMO, is the only defensible standard.

Rich: your Vietnamese casualty count is low by more than an order of magnitude. Without googling, I am confident that reasonable estimates range over a million. fifty-eight thousand (and few U.S. civilians) as against more than a million (relatively, nearly all civilians). This does not count the deaths (estimates 200-500,000) caused by the illegal bombing of Cambodia, a neutral country.

These fatality rates represent the traditional colonial ratio, which has continued to be met by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. It reminds me of Twain’s powerful polemical essay on the genocidal suppression, by the U.S., of the Aguinaldo revolution in the Philippines: “Thirty Thousand Killed A Million”.

Twain was our first, and arguably greatest, anti-imperialist.

I didn’t want to fact check it because numbers were not really the point, but of course now they’re the point.

More like 4 or 5 million killed. Up there with the greatest historic atrocities — but when we do it, it’s not a war crime.

South Korea, Taiwan, South Vietnam, Singapore, etc. would almost certainly all have enthusiastically voted themselves into communism and ensuing poverty. This isn’t hypothetical; insofar as votes were permitted to happen, they did. And then – with the obvious exception of Vietnam – their most murderous authoritarian capitalist periods in history would be their periods of greatest growth and prosperity, with stagnation and liberalism occurring together.

If you don’t take that into account either…

68. Yes we can’t let them make the desicion between communism and fascism. We must make it for them, in the way that benefits us.

My reply to Rich was stuck in the moderation queue for a bit, but is up at 57.

I really only have this to add, given recent comments: whether a given war is justified does not determine (though it is related) the duty of the military operating under a liberal democratic government. The more complicated question for the military is whether a war is so clearly unjustified, so obviously unethical, that it becomes justified to disobey the orders of the civilian government, with all the attendant consequences.

These are separate questions from whether particular conduct in war is justified, of course.

For some here, imho, the purpose of Memorial Day may seem indistinguishable from an endorsement of war generally (indeed, of every war in which the US fought), and this is emphatically not the case.

My only criticism of Memorial Day is that, while I believe the barbecues, outings, and general holiday spirit are fitting, a national moment of silent recognition during the day would be appropriate as well. There is one designated, but it is not well publicized, and goes unobserved (it seems) in most of the US.

Having now read Andrew F.’s moderation-delayed reply up at #57, I don’t disagree that strongly with him. It’s a matter of emphasis. I think that our societies are currently so overbalanced in favor of war that I see no harm in celebrating desertion without inquiring why any particular person deserted. If the majority of people were condemning soldiers who served honorably according to the principles that Andrew F. talks about, and desertion became as celebrated and socially reinforced as war service is now, then I’d have to argue in the terms that he does, probably.

But this isn’t merely contrarianism. He’s presenting the non-jingoistic case for service in war. I think it’s an important question to ask whether his rationale can ever realistically obtain. There’s a reason why I don’t think the counterfactual that I present in the paragraph above is ever likely to occur.

Memorial Day in the US was created after the Civil War. Which sort of negates all the talk about “civilian control of the military”–we were honoring, among others, traitors. For them, desertion would have been the far more ethical–and honorable–choice.

novakant and others are clearly right. People will have combination of motivations for anything they do. Someone who would have bravely stayed to fight in a just war might find it a lot harder to find the courage themselves for a war they believe to be wrong. Someone who stays to fight might only be doing so because they fear punishment, shame, or other personal consequences of leaving. In general, human beings are going to be more motivated to guard their own lives, or those of their countrymen, then foreigners, so it’s wrong to apply a different standard of judgment to the deserter than the combatant.

If we must judge them, we should judge them by whether the war is justified–deserting a justified war is wrong, staying to fight an unjustified war is wrong. Orders from a civilian leader are necessary but not sufficient to morally justify (or oblige) participation in a war as a soldier. But in general, we should probably avoid that kind of judgment. Once someone has been ordered into combat, whether they decide to follow orders or desert they’re stuck in a horrible situation, and they probably merit our sympathy and compassion more than our judgment.

Furthermore, there is no dividing line between an unwise and immoral wars. Not just because, as Suzanne@56 was saying, an imprudent war with good intentions still causes mass suffering. But because the soldier themselves is still a human being with a legitimate claim to life. Even supposing an imaginary war that imposed no risks on anyone but soldiers on our side, if that war is unwise the solider can still make a moral claim against it: it’s immoral to ask someone to risk their life pointlessly, and a soldier might find it immoral to comply with that request, even if the only life at stake is their own.

I’m not saying it’s always wrong to punish deserters, but those punishments should be seen as a necessary evil in peculiar circumstances, like conscription. If the only way to prevent everyone in the village from being slaughtered is to threaten to kill any villager who runs away (e.g. Seven Samurai), it’s hard for me to condemn that. It’s wrong to force someone to fight–it’s even wrong if they say they will fight but later change their mind–but it’s the kind of wrong that’s harder to condemn when it’s the only way to survive. I share Anderson@33’s sympathy with both the deserter and the people trying to capture and punish deserters. But rather than normalize the (sometimes) necessary evil of punishing deserters by doing so even when we aren’t fighting desperate existential wars, it’s something we should only do in emergencies, like suspension of habeas corpus.

I agree with that, John. And to that end I would add that wars should be studied academically and depicted in the media from the perspective of civilians much more than it is currently done. It is civilians who in the vast majority of cases suffer the most in wars and academic debates about war or the pictures we see on CNN are far removed from the gruesome reality as it happened on the ground. People very close to my heart have lived through wars as civilians and listening to them certainly changes one’s perception.

@novakant

Neither you nor salient are helping the anti-war position by trying to shut off any discussion with a three-word statement and calling everybody who dares to say anything beyond that a warmonger.

The very fact that ‘anti-war’ is a readily recognized and accepted term is telling, I think. We generally don’t label people as anti-burglary, anti-cruelty-to-pets, or anti-enslavement. These would be assumed as the default among everyone reading CT, and it would just feel weird to use those labels unless there was a very peculiar context justifying them. “My anti-war cousin called to wish me happy birthday” actually sounds like a coherent sentence in a way that “My anti-burglary cousin called to wish me happy birthday” does not. And this dovetails with the change-in-conjunction premise — generally speaking, almost everyone in our society nowadays would feel more impulse to think “Burglary is bad. Therefore” than “Burglary is bad. But” — even though the latter is legit, and worth considering, it’s not the default impulse.

But, whatevs. I didn’t call anybody a freaking warmonger. I said there are too many people who, when war is the topic, spend far more thought on what should constitute an exception to the rule than they do contemplating the rule’s implications. That’s a far cry from warmongering, which I would characterize as something somewhat like, “war is good as long as it’s enabling people I identify with to assert and exercise power over people I don’t identify with.” Something like that.

I also didn’t say that a perfectly ideal society would have to have very few thinking “War is bad. But” — I just said (1) that in our culture nowadays, proportionally speaking, that angle is waaaayyy over-represented relative to “War is bad. Therefore,” and (2) that this imbalance has a strong adverse effect, which I specified as a general intolerance for, and ill will to, people “War is bad. Therefore I refused to participate.”

The idea being, generally, most folks are in effect placing the burden of proof on the pacifist, justify why this particular war you intend to abstain from is unjust. Instead, I’d rather live in a society in which pacifists (and people generally) are always placing the burden of proof on the soldiers and officers, justify why this particular war you intend to participate in is just.

In fact as you say, all governments involved except maybe Belgium’s were engaged in aggression.

Oh jesus, this again? (MAYBE Belgium’s?) Incorporate the two relevant recent threads by reference.

… This thread has been excellent in exploring the ethics of desertion, but I fall a bit short of agreeing with those who say all desertion is good. It was not, I think, a good thing that so many French deserted (or actively gave themselves up to the Germans, more or less the same thing) from 2d and 9th Armies in 1940.

JQ@69: “In fact as you say, all governments involved except maybe Belgium’s were engaged in aggression.”
No, that wasn’t what I meant to say. I meant: all governments except maybe Belgium’s were thought by somebody or other to be engaged in aggression. There is an important difference.
Anyone who might have thought (I doubt if anyone did) that the Belgian government were aggressors by not wanting to be invaded is, in my opinion, far away from reality.
Anyone who thought that the French government were aggressors by not agreeing to surrender their frontier fortresses to the Germans is equally distant.
Likewise anyone who thought the British government were aggressors by having a powerful fleet and not abandoning their treaty obligations to Belgium.
My point was not that all were aggressors: but that people at the time, with varying perspectives, had great difficulty in deciding who were the aggressors. Which is a considerable problem when you come to deal with Salient’s “Acts of aggression are bad.”

Salient@81: “I agree with “the act of desertion is good without trying to judge the rationale” completely. ”
Ummm. Desertion from the Union army in the US Civil War, desertion from Washington’s army, desertion from the Allied armies in WW2, desertion from the Republican armies in the Spanish Civil War, desertion from the Vietnamese army against the Americans: these acts were good in themselves?
Really?

“Ummm. Desertion from the Union army in the US Civil War, desertion from Washington’s army, desertion from the Allied armies in WW2, desertion from the Republican armies in the Spanish Civil War, desertion from the Vietnamese army against the Americans: these acts were good in themselves?”

The dialogue below is made up:

A: “I think that it’s always a good thing to refuse to shoot people!”
B: “But wait. In some circumstances, it may be necessary for a police officer to shoot a depraved criminal because that’s the only way to stop him. How can you say that it would be a good thing for the police officer to refuse?”
A: “Those cases are very rare. Why not just congratulate everyone who doesn’t shoot, and not bother to worry about the rare cases in which they really should have?”
B: “Because I’m really, really interested in those cases. In fact, have you ever considered that if a terrorist knows the location of a ticking bomb, it may be the right thing to do to torture him?”
A: “What?”
B: “Why are you condemning torture in such a blanket way? There are some cases in which it’s the right thing to do to torture someone. ”
A: “Um.. torture is bad. Even if you come up with some rare case in which it seems to be the best of a number of bad options–”
B: “How can people keep up their morale for righteous torture if you won’t even congratulate them in the cases where they must have had to do it? Simplistic “torture is bad”” etc etc.

Desertion from the Union army in the US Civil War, desertion from Washington’s army, desertion from the Allied armies in WW2, desertion from the Republican armies in the Spanish Civil War, desertion from the Vietnamese army against the Americans: these acts were good in themselves?

@everyone but Stephen
Let me pull a Graeber here; it’s warranted. This is exactly the kind of confrontational derision a person knows to anticipate if they’re gonna speak up about pacifism. Warisbad BUT WHAT ABOUT FIGHTING THE NAZIS AND THE CONFEDERATES.

If enough people demand that you immediately and explicitly exert a lot of energy carving out counterexamples, you learn to just shut the fuck up. Stephen isn’t requesting information, here. (Either he’s fairly certain that I wouldn’t endorse enabling the Nazis, or he’s an idiot. He’s not an idiot. Ergo.)

I would probably be more sympathetic with Allied and Union deserters than Steven would be, insofar as it’s even possible to quantify and compare emotional reactions. But these questions aren’t phrased to invite a consideration of that.

Nothing’s gained by Stephen asking these questions or by me answering them (or me just conceding his point). So what’s the point of asking them? Why waste the breath, why write the sentences? Pushback.

Hard to hold Stephen individually responsible for this — it’s the kind of pushback I always receive the moment I speak up for even a carefully hedged pacifism (some people go so far as to invest a lot of creative energy into re-characterizing Nazis so that they slip past the hedges). It’s a climate thing, exactly the climate thing I’ve been going on about.

@Stephen
Are you being dense intentionally? We were implicitly talking about circumstances in which we consider unjust or at least non-imperative, and contemplating whether or not we should distinguish between deserters who justify their act on principle and deserters who either don’t justify their act or justify it on purely self-interested grounds. There should be no need for us to make that explicit; in fact, part of my earlier point was that way too many people experience the impulse that compelled you to hammer out a whole series of dumb rhetorical questions about fighting the Nazis and the Confederates.

“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

“But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

“I shot him dead because —
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although

“He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,
Off-hand like — just as I —
Was out of work — had sold his traps —
No other reason why.

“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.”

“When your moral principle has so many counterexamples that it’s close to useless, maybe the problem is with your principle, not with those horrible people propounding counterexamples.”

I haven’t yet heard an exception to “War is bad, although there are some very rare cases when every other course of action seems worse.”

Stephan has come up with maybe one or two cases. Clearly Vietnam as a whole would have been better off, both then and today, if the Vietnamese had surrendered en masse. The Spanish Civil War Republican armies were in fact doomed, and I certainly wouldn’t blame anyone who sloped off rather than getting shot. Washington’s army? Without the Revolution, the U.S. would now be in the horrible position of being Canada. The U.S. Civil War? I guess that we’re not allowed to blame everyone who let it get to that point. So sure, as Salient writes above, it’s “WHAT ABOUT FIGHTING THE NAZIS AND THE CONFEDERATES.”

Why does your moral principle depend on two cases? I think that mine covers a whole lot more cases than yours does.

Come to think about it, I don’t think Heller even mentions the Enemy, so lesser-evilism may not even come into play. It is all about looking around and asking:

“Am I going to kill and die for THIS”

The Authority will try to tell you what the THIS is that you must kill and die for: Mom, apple pie, little sister’s virtue, cherry blossoms, linden trees, freeing the slaves or keeping the Union, saving Democracy or Socialism. The prior sacrifices of heroes.

But you have eyes like Yossarian and you know who always win all the last wars.

You can fight;you can go fishing; you can turn your gun around on the bosses; you can go Bartleby in place.

What you can’t do is believe you are the good guys.

The 2013 UK TV series, The Village explores this subject through the lives of an English village during the Great War.

a farmer’s son who’s Shot at Dawn for ‘desertion’ after being physically unable to return to the front-line and fight on,

a toff tortured by his family’s ability to get him an exemption, and who finally manages to get himself over to France,

a Methodist preacher who sermonises against the war and the characterisation of the German as evil, including before a class of boys at the local school

a school teacher who refuses his conscription and suffers for it in jail, and on his return to the village after the war.

I thought it interesting that this went on air in the UK this year. What conversations did it provoke? Did anyone else watch it yet?

Also, Un long dimanche de fiançailles (2004).

It does seem that I was wrong about Memorial Day and Confederates, I was just going by a combination of the top of the wikipedia article and my vague memories of a description of Decoration Day from a high school textbook.

Although I’m not pacifist, I can’t be certain that pacifism is wrong, therefore I think it’s wrong to force someone to fight. Even those who have previously agreed to fight–one should not be able to contract oneself into slavery. The military could better compensate those who stay and fight (or their next of kin), or sue the deserter for breach of contract, but moving beyond civil penalties to incarceration or execution is morally wrong. (Though in an emergency it might not be the worst wrong.)

Immoral government orders should not be obeyed. Authority cannot replace individual responsibility–if we kill someone, that is always on our own individual conscience. Someone ordering you to killing might share the blame, but they can never take the entirety of it. The government has every right to order me to avoid killing, they even have the right to kill me. But they do not have the moral right to force me to kill someone else. (That goes way beyond requiring me to buy broccoli!)

The military might be less effective if it couldn’t impose criminal penalties on deserters, if people were leaving when they felt their orders were immoral. (An order asking someone to risk their life without good reason is immoral.) I say “might”, because I’m not at all convinced–perhaps if the military didn’t have such a culture of coercion, it wouldn’t have quite the problem it has now with rape (it’s not hard to imagine that a rape victim would be more willing to report rape if they had the option of leaving the service immediately as they reported it.) Maybe commanders, military and civilian alike, would take better care when issuing orders if their subordinates had more agency. And, at times, the world would be a better place if the American military were less effective.

But assuming all that away isn’t enough to justify something fundamentally immoral like forcing one person to commit an act of violence against another. As I said above, in desperate emergencies that kind of coercion could be justified, but it’s madness to make something fundamentally wrong into standard practice.

“At the very least, monuments to the act of desertion would be controversial and divisive; and the best argument for peace would surely show it to be a unifying concern.”

Peace is not unity. It is tolerance. To say that we must unjustly disrespect someone in order to avoid controversy or division is disgusting.

A personal note: I regarded the Vietnam war as a crime and demonstrated against it, but I was of an age that made my unwilling participation in the U.S. military all but inevitable. Assuming I’d be drafted as soon as I graduated from college, I planned to join the navy, supposing they’d have a better use for a newly minted mathematician than the army, and that this would at least not put me in a position of having to kill other people. As it happened, the lottery had been instituted meanwhile and I wasn’t called up.

I consider myself fortunate in having been required to demonstrate neither moral nor physical courage.

“they still bore an ungrudging admiration for the loyalty and sacrifice of its devoted soldiers.”

Just dont think this is true at all, for me certainly not. I feal sorry for all those who died, or had to suffer otherwise, no matter under which circsumstances, even when they were quite evil people. Admiration? No, not at all. I have some admiration for the communist leaning grandfather who was against the war right from the start and dodged war participatin as good as possible by driving an ambulance during the war, even so this was more likely than not based on self interest for the most part. I am not going to blame the other grandfather either who enlisted in the army volunarily before the war started and im sure going to admire anyone who enlisted in the US army and deserted at some point during the Afgahnistan or Irak war, even when the decission includes a large dose of self inerest.

It still makes perfect sense to have more memorials for dead soldiers, since those are far more numerous, those do not even exclude dead deserters in the first place. Those who advocated to desert during WWII and were excuted for it, sure do get quite a bit positive press reporting and similar when, and no negative one at all.

1) I am not very good at the moral, immoral, just-war stuff. As my list above shows, if you believe wars can be “justified” you will always be able to justify your war. And as the Athenians told the Melians,you don’t really need no stinking reasons. The only important reason you go to war is because you can.. If we had been 1/10 the size of Japan, Pearl Harbor would not justify social suicide.

2) This capability is of course complexly determined, especially in a democracy. Here I invoke Schmitt, sotto voce. The polity is that which can choose to go to war, risking its existence, moving beyond politics, and negating all previous contracts. If you think you can choose otherwise, declaring “this is an unjust war” then you have deserted the polity.

And deserting the polity is about the neatest thing you can do.

Besides reading the James C. Scott this week (not his intended audience, he is way under theorized), I have also spent some time looking up these “Monuments to Desertion.” The Germans do understand what they really mean.

At the end of the Wiki article on “Conscription” under Arguments for Conscription they redirect to “Social Contract” and “Social Solidarity”

You think you aren’t contracted to fight, kill, die, give up your labor and possessions, when the screaming hordes cross the border? You think you are not the Army reserve?
You think that your property and personal rights, positive and negative, that you own by residency or citizenship are not entailed?

If you do think so, if you think you are free of such obligations, then you are a deserter. Or perhaps a “nomad,” not committed to a place and without much property.

This also applies to “refusing to work” in most propertarian societies.

It’s your logic, dude. The same logic used to say that we can’t blanket condemn torture because there was a case once.

Salient@91.
I think you may have misunderstood me (and I am sure you are mistaken in thinking I am SHOUTING AT YOU IN LARGE CAPITALS).
I’m not putting forward rhetorical examples.I’m responding to your statement that “I agree with ‘the act of desertion is good without trying to judge the rationale’ completely”. I have provided real examples (and I could have provided many more) of cases in which complete agreement with the act of desertion being good seems to me to be a serious misjudgment. Rational disagreement would have been welcome.
Instead, you seem to believe that pacifism is always good, and desertion justified, but there are some cases where few people would agree (Nazis, Confederates), so anyone who mentions these is the enemy, and these are rare cases that can almost be ignored. Have I misunderstood you?
My actual position is that peace is usually preferable to war (not an original thought: intensified, in my case, by growing up expecting there might be another major war that I would not survive, and later by seeing the effects of local minor war) but there are cases where war could not justly be avoided. We would, I think, agree that N&Cs are two such. I would suggest there are a large number of other cases about which reasonable people may reasonably differ. Would you agree?

@Bruce “Who are you going to convince?” Well, you and the rest of the anti-anti-war commenters here would be a start.

Your argument is equally applicable to any subject whatsoever. Cross out “war” and put in anything from “torture” to “underpaying workers” and your comment would be equally valid or invalid.

Rich Puchalsky@95
No, it’s not just one or two counter-examples, it’s (as Anderson recognises) a shoal of them, in the opinion of many if not of yourself.

You may be thinking only in terms of wars involving the USA. Well, one particular US-related counter-example you mentioned: “Washington’s army? Without the Revolution, the U.S. would now be in the horrible position of being Canada” is I think uncertain. As many of the anti-war party in England maintained, there is a good case for thinking of the Revolution as being fought in defence of the traditional rights of Englishmen against the encroachments of Hanoverian authoritarianism: and also for thinking that the current superior position of Canada is due to the British governments having learned the lessons of the Revolution.

As for other US wars: there are arguments for the justice of their involvement in WWI, in the UN action in Korea, in Grenada, in Bosnia, in Kosovo, in the Kuwait war, doubtless others. There are even arguments for the justice of (though not for the execution of) the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Also for the US being prepared to go to war (which would have been catastrophic if they had, and I am very grateful they never had to: but the effects of their retreating from their positions would also have been catastrophic) in western Europe before the collapse of the USSR.

If the possible justice of non-US wars is permissible: leaving WW1 aside as too debatable, and WW2 as too obvious, try the Polish resistance to Soviet invasion in 1921, the pro-Treaty side in Henry’s original example of the Irish Civil War, the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (eventually doomed, but when did desertion become forgivable?), the Chinese opposition to the Japanese, the Malayan war, the Indian invasion of East Pakistan, the Tanzanian invasion of Amin’s Uganda, the Vietnamese invasion of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the Vietnamese resistance to the subsequent Chinese invasion, Chad’s Toyota War against Gadaffi, the Falklands, the minor campaigns against the IRA from the 1920s to the 1960s, the small war in northern Ireland until the Good Friday …
There are no doubt more. Add or subtract according to taste. But to call it “a couple of counter-examples” is odd.

“It is all very well to assert, “War is bad” — who is going to argue? ”

People here, apparently. But yes, as John Quiggin already wrote, what’s the alternative that you’re proposing to what you describe as “unfounded self-satisfaction”? Surely you must have one that’s better, right? Describe it, please.

You’re done this argument before, and it’s silly. I’m not making policy for the U.S., and it would be kind of delusional to act as if I were. I don’t have the ability to write a philosophy that everyone’s going to follow, and I’m not in charge of setting up a system to prosecute war criminals. Are you in charge of these things?

Rich Puchalsky@117:
“It is all very well to assert, “War is bad” — who is going to argue? ‘ People here, apparently”
Please provide one example of anyone here who has argued that war is not bad.

“Please provide one example of anyone here who has argued that war is not bad.”

You did. You just listed a whole bunch of wars that you said were not bad. “the Polish resistance to Soviet invasion in 1921, the pro-Treaty side in Henry’s original example of the Irish Civil War, the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War (eventually doomed, but when did desertion become forgivable?), the Chinese opposition to the Japanese, the Malayan war, the Indian invasion of East Pakistan, the Tanzanian invasion of Amin’s Uganda, the Vietnamese invasion of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, the Vietnamese resistance to the subsequent Chinese invasion, Chad’s Toyota War against Gadaffi, the Falklands, the minor campaigns against the IRA from the 1920s to the 1960s, the small war in northern Ireland until the Good Friday …”

That’s 13, not even counting the U.S. ones. Are there two people posting as Stephen?

How many wars do you have to say are not bad before someone can describe you as saying that war isn’t bad? Should we pick a number and have you shave your list up or down a little?

@111, Stephen, the last paragraph of Salient’s post @91 should have made this clear, but the issue is whether we should judge deserters by their rationale for desertion. If you go back to Rich’s post @46, where that “desertion is good” quote comes from, you can see he’s talking about the difference between people who desert “a means of political protest” and people who flee because they’re frightened. That distinction simply doesn’t have anything to do with Nazis or Confederates.

It’s like you’re just taking your standard arguments against pacifism and applying them against desertion. They’re two different issues.

The same may be true for you arguments @115 and elsewhere that some other wars might have been good. I can’t condemn someone for fleeing a war “about which reasonable people may reasonably differ”.

..ah, okay. I can see how my 120 could also be read

John Q’s link at 122 is excellent, btw. And tying into this thread nicely, it seems that the Telegraph “has joined the Bomber Command Association to help raise funds to erect a permanent memorial to the 55,000 bomber aircrew killed in the Second World War.”

Is that a permanent memorial to Allied war criminals? How will this memorial to men who burned women and children to death be materially different from Japan’s Yasakuni Shrine?

“This torture analogy is silly. First, the ticking-bomb shtick is b.s. ”

While defending the vital need to fight over the Falklands isn’t?

The war-defenders here are only willing to treat “war is bad” as a bromide that no one really believes. They get very indignant about it. “What?! You just heard me say ‘War is bad!’ Of course I believe that war is bad, who doesn’t? And by the way we should totally go to war the next time something like the Falklands comes up, or Grenada.”

“This torture analogy is silly. First, the ticking-bomb shtick is b.s. Second, the decision whether to torture — a foolish alternative to professional interrogation — is not comparable to the decision whether to resist the invading Germans by force..”

I think this is one of those moments when the ticking time bomb scenario works..It has no *practical* value as a thought experiment (neither does ‘should be resist a German invasion’)..but as a way of highlighting a moral certainty, (wherre you stand on torture/war) I think it’s effective enough

“Grenada was silly (Yank talking here); I think the self-determination of the Falkland Islanders for British rule matters.”

All right, so we have an actual disagreement, not one based on straw. And we’re finally not talking about the Nazis. What atrocities would have occurred if the British had said “OK, you can have the Falklands”. Or if once the British decided to fight, the Argentines had said “You know what? Never mind, you can have the Falklands after all.” What benefits accrued that balanced out the 907 people killed?

Is there any sense in which you treat “war is bad” as having actual relevance when talking about a war that you’ve decided that you like, for some reason?

Here’s a reasonable list of wars from 1816 to 2007: Correlates of War Project

There appear to be nearly 650 of them. Although I have not yet found the Excel function for sorting them into just and unjust wars, it seems fair to say that Stephen is correct in that there are a non-trivial number of just conflicts, and that Rich is correct in that an alarmingly large number of wars are quite unjust.

Since the CoW methodology defines a war as sustained combat between organized forces causing at least 1,000 battle-related deaths, there are also a fair number of military actions resulting in casualties that are not included.

“War is bad” as a deontological rule, a moral absolute, strikes me (and nearly everyone else it seems) as incorrect. As a generalization used to inform a more consequentialist mode of reasoning, though, I’d imagine that everyone here would think it correct. So as Rich said above, the difference may simply be one of emphasis.

On the question of how war is considered in the US and elsewhere, though, the default position in liberal democracies is peace. Offensive military operations require some government authorization, and the larger actions we would call wars require extensive government authorization (and, usually, are the occasion of significant national discussion and debate). There are very few people in the US who believe in some 21st century version of manifest destiny. Service and combat overseas are generally viewed as a regrettable burdens, like the need for firefighters to enter burning buildings, not as glorious endeavors in imperial conquest. Americans – almost entirely I would say, though I have no polling data – view the descriptors “imperial” and “conquest” as criticism, not praise. I do not see either political party in the US as eager for war, though the dominant view in each may differ somewhat on what policies will produce the least amount of war.

“On the question of how war is considered in the US and elsewhere, though, the default position in liberal democracies is peace..”

Im not sure if this is right..Afaik the correlation between regime type and propensity to go to war is far more complicated (unless youre talking solely about public perceptions of war, but I dont see how that could be measured comparatively etc)

“On the question of how war is considered in the US and elsewhere, though, the default position in liberal democracies is peace..”

Yeah, I’m a bit skeptical on this one. Perhaps the error is to assume the U.S. is a liberal democracy ….

what’s the alternative that you’re proposing to what you describe as “unfounded self-satisfaction”? Surely you must have one that’s better, right? Describe it, please.

I believe that abstract moral arguments will only ever convince a small minority of people – and when we’re talking about war they tend to be on pretty shaky ground, since we cannot simply characterize all armed conflict as immoral, e.g. self defense against an invasion or rebellion against an oppressor.

One alternative is to work on a more personal level, i.e. intercultural exchange, e.g. through the media/arts and student exchange programs – war requires dehumanization of “the other” and people are much less susceptible to this when they’ve met a couple of those others in person or identified with them by reading a book or watching a film.

You’re looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, and saying that the decision to go to war in the first place was correct in this instance of the Falklands.

I was addressing war in general, not that one. Though I don’t think much hindsight is required. If Cuba seized Puerto Rico, I don’t think that would be a hard case, either.

And how are those international laws of war doing at ameliorating its evils? Very effective, are they? In that case, I guess that war isn’t so bad after all, right?

I’m not sure what your point is there, other than obnoxiousness.

how war is considered in the US […] the default position in liberal democracies is peace. […] very few people in the US who believe in some 21st century version of manifest destiny. Service and combat overseas are generally viewed as a regrettable burdens […]

If trolling, congratulation. If not, this is probably hopeless. If not, please have a nice cup of reality based community.

Criticizing the behavior of a colonial power doing anything but withdrawing already, yes; declaring the limits on acceptable tactics for fighting them, no.

Glad you brought this up — it’s what I’ve found myself thinking of throughout this thread. Leaving aside the specific questions of desertion (which I’m all for), I’m pretty much with Salient/JQ/Rich Puchalski on the “war is bad” bit. But I find myself extremely hesitant to extend this to a blanket condemnation of violence—even with Teh Nazis excepted, etc.—because even granting the virtues of non-violent resistance, which are of course legion, I can’t bring myself to violent or armed resistance to systematic oppression, whether colonial or not.

Note again that this isn’t a question of an exception or a set of exceptions. It seems to me a categorical distinction, though with all sorts of in-between cases (superpower attempts to subdue sovereign state, triggers violent insurgency, etc.). (Sorry if this somewhat OT.)

“But I find myself extremely hesitant to extend this to a blanket condemnation of violence”

I didn’t actually call start with calls for a blanket condemnation of anything. I called for a blanket congratulation of deserters. I think there’s a difference. Similarly, “war is bad” is — if you actually believe it — a reason not to go to war. Not a condemnation as such.

That said, I invite people to consider the example of Vietnam again. Should the U.S. have involved itself in that war? Of course not. Should the North Vietnamese have just surrendered, once the U.S. intervened? Of course. Would the atrocities have in fact been greater if the U.S. took over the country than they were in the actual war? How long would the U.S. have held the country? Would it still be under U.S. rule now? How well did they do under the rule of their own home-grown despots?

very few people in the US who believe in some 21st century version of manifest destiny

*Besides* the Republican Party? Because Daniel Larison spent much of 2011-12 calling those Repubs out for exactly that.

I didn’t actually call start with calls for a blanket condemnation of anything. I called for a blanket congratulation of deserters. I think there’s a difference.

I get this. I think I agree with pretty much everything you’ve said. At the same time, I find it hard to assent to, “The North Vietnamese should have surrendered,” but I’m not even sure I can defend that adequately. I guess I find it hard to give any clear sense to “should” in that sentence — so, e.g., I’m not any happier assenting to, “The N. Vietnamese should’ve fought tooth and nail.” But I do think it was quite legitimate of them to fight rather than surrender. (Anyway, like I said, my comment might’ve been a bit off-topic to begin with, and I’m happy to not push it any further.)

“I guess I find it hard to give any clear sense to “should” in that sentence — so, e.g., I’m not any happier assenting to, “The N. Vietnamese should’ve fought tooth and nail.””

One way to resolve this is to say that since you’re not Vietnamese, you shouldn’t be telling them what to do at all. But in a consequentialist sense, what did they gain and lose by winning that war? National pride, and a million dead. Oh, and “self determination” which consisted of rule by an internally generated despotic elite rather than an external one. I can only say that insofar as I can imagine myself being Vietnamese, I would have been looking for any way to desert that I could.

Fair enough, and in the back of my head Im aware* that you’re a philospher and all the rest of it, so Im not making this point with any conviction, but curiosity ..but isn’t there a difference between saying something has no real world application (which I agree the TTB doesnt) and using it to ‘discover’ (I guess) where you stand on an issue

Before I respond to this, I have to point out that anyone who hasn’t followed your links @150 and @68 had better not be wasting any time reading stupid things I have to say.

I think, even just for the philosophical project of sorting out the reasons for our moral beliefs, the TTB is suspect. Consider the following arguments against the use of torture.

1). In any situation, torture will decrease utility. (E.g. I will be misled by a lying detainee, or torture would interfere with some more effective interrogation method. Note that the latter is especially relevant if there is a literal ticking bomb that will detonate hours from now–there is a good chance that any kind of torture sufficient to break a person in a matter of hours will cause the detainee to pass out or die, leaving you unable to try anything else.)

2). It is possible that torture might increase utility in some situation, but it’s not possible, in the moment at which you are considering torture, to distinguish between those times and the much more likely cases when torture would decrease utility. In every situation, the expected utility of torture is negative, even if torture does sometimes work.

3). There are some situations in which a perfectly rational being would conclude that torture has positive expected utility. However, no human being is perfectly rational, our minds are likely to be clouded by our anger at the detainee for concealing life-saving information from us, and the desperation of our situation. When looking for situations in which torture has positive expected utility, we’re far more likely to make type I than type II errors. Simply put, if I think that torture has positive expected utility, I also expect that I’m wrong about that.

4). There might be some situation in which it’s so overwhelmingly obvious that torture would help that it overrides the concerns enumerated above. However, these situations occur rarely, if ever. The probability that that situation occurs, times the expected utility of torture in that situation, is less than the utility we would gain by committing ourselves to avoid torture no matter what, even if that commitment were enforcible (e.g. if Asimov-style robots physically prevented us from torturing no matter what the situation).

5) There might be situations in which we should torture, and it could be so important that we torture in those circumstances that we should avoid any enforcible commitment that would prevent us from torturing when necessary. But explicitly thinking about and discussing what we would do in those rare situations is harmful or dangerous. It’s better to craft morality to fit the cases we expect to happen, rather than spend time enumerating all situations like “would you personally do X, Y and Z to your own children to stop the Death Star?”.

6). Torture is categorically wrong, no matter how many lives you expect it to save.

The problem with using the TTB to separate our intuitions about these topics is the continuity between each of these positions. If someone says “torture doesn’t work”, that could mean any of positions 1-4. If someone says “torture is always wrong, whether or not it works”, they could really believe any of positions 4-6. Moreover, anytime you’re talking about decreased utility in 2-5, there’s room for 6 to sneak in–the intrinsic wrongness of torture itself imposes utilitarian costs (and 1-5 all provide reasons why simply making the bomb bigger isn’t enough to surpass those costs).

At the most abstract level, we could wonder if in an alien world in which TTB situations happened all the time (an alien species had evolved some biological exploding mechanism) and torture was somehow always successful in averting them if our human intuitions about torture would make any sense whatsoever. Torture simply wouldn’t be the same thing to such aliens as it is to us. In that sense, I think all moral claims, even the most deontological, rest on an unstated understanding of how the world works. Imagining elaborate TTBs or trolley problems or phaser dilemmas puts us on that alien world and expects our human intuitions to remain meaningful.

Coming back to pacifism, obviously WW2 isn’t like the TTB, let alone an alien planet of constantly torturing aliens. WW2 was a real event rather than a hypothetical. However, I think each of 2-6 above can be adapted, without much work, to apply to war rather than torture. I’m not sure I find those adaptations convincing, but I do find them reasonable.

I guess that my position would be that we live in the kind of world in which torture is always wrong, but not in the kind of world in which war is always wrong. But I think the pacifist has a good objection to me. The world changes, and the beliefs we hold about it might change the world into a different kind. The kind of world in which pacifism were a widely held and adhered to ethical doctrine that seriously influenced public policy or mass behavior in North America wouldn’t necessarily work the same way that the world we know today does. To insist that pacifists, or anyone else, consider these hypotheticals, even hypotheticals based on past events, is to reject the effort to change the kind of world we live in. The hypothetical assumes that the project has failed, that we will always be fighting Nazis and Confederates.

(Obviously there is something self-undermining about this comment I’m posting–if considering some kinds of hypotheticals is bad, it’s probably clear from this post that I’ve spent way too much time considering exactly those kinds of hypotheticals.)

@158: Empirically, I don’t see the notion of ever-warring nation-states as far-fetched, although I suppose the targets may shift from sovereign nation-states to insurgencies and ‘terrorists’ should our lords and masters run out of regular old states to attack.

In the last decade of the 20th century, when the Soviet Union retired from the fray (and then from existence), the response of the U.S. was to push NATO eastward, to look for trouble and empire. (Hence Serbia-Kosovo and Georgia-Abkhazia). According to my desultory reading among bourgeois publications, China is also to be a target, with India an ally, or maybe the other way around. Although things have not been going very well in this regard.

People were talking about capital-e Empire (a la Hardt and Negri) back in the day, which would be quite a different development, sort of believable under Clinton in spite of his numerous military operations, but is capitalism sustainable when it no longer has an outside, a surface? I guess we have to wait and see, because it isn’t happening yet. A state with no one to fight except its own people will be a novel thing, although it has probably happened on a small island somewhere sometime by chance.

btw, I like the outside/surface metaphor, visual image, which is to say, it can thrive only when there’s something else left to exploit, a marked difference. But once you attain homegeneity, perhaps the unintended though inevitable consequence, can one speak of capitalism in any meaningful sense? What else would be there to contrast it with?

Just a Wittgensteinian comment, but what the hell.

I’d surely love to have Marthe Raymond to comment on the situation because of her first-hand knowledge and expertise.

Unfortunately, she’d taken a graceful or not so graceful exit from this forum. As a result of having ruffled some feathers, she’d been declared null & void.

I’m having trouble with the idea that it would have been sensible for the Vietnamese not to have fought the Americans, first because they had a reasonable expectation of winning, and second because they would have had to get around to it sooner or later. The present situation of the country is certainly less than wonderful, and perhaps worse than some of its neighbors, but leaving half the country occupied might not have been a recipe for success.

Rich @140, Anderson@139, Ronan@137, et al

We’ve all strayed a bit from the original subject of the post, but not too far, and given the subject matter, the thread has been remarkably civil and consistently substantive.

On the question of the default position in liberal democracies: it’s simply a legal and political fact that the default position is peace, in that to go to war requires a vote (in the case of a large-scale conflict) or a decision (in the case of smaller operations) to do so. If one does nothing, then one does not go to war. Therefore the default position is peace – at least ordinarily. However – and I admit that this is a big however – there is a fair concern that the global campaign against al Qaeda and “al Qaeda affiliates” is turning into a default position, a new long term normal, without end. I think this concern would make for an interesting discussion, but it’s a topic too large for this thread.

Now there’s a different way of reading default position, that reads “peace is the default position” as the claim that liberal democracies have high burdens of persuasion which must be met before they are willing to go to war.

The latter reading may not have always been true of liberal democracies, but I believe that it is true today.

Rich, neither Afghanistan nor Iraq were undertaken lightly, or for the sake of imperial conquest. Afghanistan was and is a clear case of self-defense; it was viewed as a grim necessity by the public, by everyone, mixed with an understandably vengeful desire to kill AQ. Iraq was preceded by months of debate and discussion, and efforts at resolution short of war; the invasion itelf, moreover, occurred less than 1.5 years after 9/11, and after intense months of argument which included misleading, significant claims about the level of confidence that should be placed on assessments of Iraq’s WMD program. For the political group within the executive that pushed for the war, the aims were more complex, but they accorded with the public on one item: the fighting should be as brief as possible, and US involvement post-fighting should be as minimal as possible. Such was the plan, anyway, such as it was.

Neither case shows a nation eager to go to war for the sake of conquest; neither case shows a nation that goes to war lightly, without enormous deliberation beforehand (if possible) or without enormous provocation. Certainly neither case shows a nation eager for conquest – far from it.

This all becomes more complicated, of course, when we consider military and paramilitary operations short of war, or when we consider other aspects of US foreign policy.

I realize that we probably disagree on some, perhaps all, of these items. But I’m not raising them to simply provoke a reaction. I know enough about this area to know that I am being reasonable, but then I also know enough to realize that I may be wrong. So, all of this is said with an open mind.

“Iraq was preceded by months of debate and discussion, and efforts at resolution short of war; the invasion itelf, moreover, occurred less than 1.5 years after 9/11, and after intense months of argument which included misleading, significant claims about the level of confidence that should be placed on assessments of Iraq’s WMD program. For the political group within the executive that pushed for the war, the aims were more complex, but they accorded with the public on one item: the fighting should be as brief as possible, and US involvement post-fighting should be as minimal as possible.”

The purpose of the war was imperial conquest, openly announced by the neoconservatives, who published articles were about how we should be proud to consider ourselves to be an empire. The ruling party of the country boasted about how we were going to change the whole country of Iraq to be like us; there was no plan for the occupation to be as minimal as possible, but rather for wholesale redesign in our interests. The invasion of Iraq did occur 1.5 years after 9/11, but our leaders openly claimed a connection, and a majority of the country believed that there was one.

The armed forces and political leadership of America participated in war crimes, the most important of which is that of aggressive war, from which all the others follow. Both our political and military leaders should be in jail, if the precedents of Nuremburg were going to be followed. Instead, our current leadership has colluded in shielding these criminals from any legal reckoning, and has therefore become war criminals themselves.

“Also, handing out one size fits all advice on how to resist Western imperialism might be just a little patronizing.”

I guess that the anti-colonialist revolutionaries who had the operation all ready to go but were waiting for my advice will have to give up in disappointment. If only I hadn’t patronized them.

I tried to remember how the country felt then, wondering how Andrew F. could so badly misremember. (No, I don’t really believe that he’s too young to remember.) Here’s a poem I wrote some time in 2004:

It drips red
From the grand liberation
of limb from limb
The bombs of freedom and bullets of freedom
Red as the face smashed through the glass
Caught in a sudden checkpoint
Red as the thousands
— can you imagine thousands? —
only collaterally dead
the desert watered
preemptively

It chills white
White as the knuckle-twisting fear
From the rainbow of yellow, orange, red alerts
Is some one of us, somewhere, a traitor?
Better not to make waves
only to freeze
they say that almanacs are suspicious
better to go nowhere, say nothing
only recite the national anthem
with an eye to the neighbors
sung low

It feels blue
The grade school homilies were false
This is not a special country
It really can happen here
Oh, enemies could always kill us
but only we could destroy the idea
only we could turn the open sky
to the underside of a Tupperware lid
inside, sealed leftovers
outside, bacteria

‘The existence of a state and it’s government assumes either war or the believable threat of war…’
–
Indeed, and see also Hobbes. The liberal state’s reason for being is to save us from he war of all against all which otherwise inevitably ensues.

Sorry, I’m calling bullshit on the bogus pacifists who say war is always wrong, unless white colonialists are being killed.

Apart from the obvious hypocrisy, privileging nationalism over pacifism is bizarre, at least for so-called pacifists.

I’m happy to support anti colonialist war, but as I’ve said, war can be the least bad choice.

Empire has established Dominance over what matters to it. For the rest if us, who don’t much matter to Empire, we get anarchy and civil war as a form of personal expression and identity consumption as production of surplus. Everything you can be, everything you can do, will just be another profit center. Capital is now immanent, and resistance produces property, social capital for Facebook and twitter to leverage.

A deserter is not a rebel. She runs. She hides.

Desertion-in-place is about a) not producing *anything* including intellectual property, and b) wasting, destroying, communising existing property.

“Sorry, I’m calling bullshit on the bogus pacifists who say war is always wrong, unless white colonialists are being killed.”

Yeah Im with Rich on wondering who these pacifists are..

Rich, neither Afghanistan nor Iraq were undertaken lightly

This would be hilarious, if not for all the dead and maimed people and everything.

Is Andrew F. a botnet?

@185

You mean, something akin to a computer virus with trollish subroutines?

For some reason, I’m reminded of this piece by the artist Hassan Khan:

http://artasiapacific.com/image_columns/0004/2137/expanding_asia_07.jpg

I don’t follow presidential speeches, so perhaps you might enlighten us all. A link would help.

There’s been a lot of reaction to the speech — see e.g. (and these are not the high-traffic newspaper or web sites — I’m omitting all the big, obvious ones; and, disclosure — the first one listed is my own post):

http://howlatpluto.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-rebuke-to-misguided-doctrine-of.html

http://www.whiteoliphaunt.com/duckofminerva/2013/05/obama-drones-and-the-matter-of-definitions.html

http://democratic-individuality.blogspot.com/2013/05/obamas-turning-point.html

@rich Any hope that Administration crimes will be punished is long gone. But, in wildly optimistic moments, I hope that, as with torture, the use of assassination or “signature strikes” will be disavowed as, at least, a mistake. Obama’s speech can be read that way, and the number of drone strikes does appear to be falling.

Looking at the bigger picture, it really does seem at times as if Obama is acting against his own wishes, unable to take on the power of the national security establishment. At other times, as with the vindictive attacks on whistleblowers, he’s at least as bad as they other. But this is all Kremlinology – no one can tell what goes on inside, or at least no one can tell the truth and escape retribution.

“War is bad, but” does in fact sound like a sly dodge, a way of paying lip service to the moral injunction against killing while embracing it.

Maybe it is more honest to simply say “war is less bad than the alternative”.
Because we never get to choose between war and peace. By the time a discussion of war takes place, violence and atrocities are already begun somewhere.
Our choice is always only to take part in the violence, or to try to affect the outcome in other ways.

Trying to untangle the morality of joining in the violence is maddeningly difficult if only because while real life circumstances are always muddy, with conflicting information and agendas and motives, with never any clear white or black, ultimately it becomes the most binary decision imaginable- either to kill or not. It doesn’t help that morality is also combined with utility, since tilting at windmills becomes immoral in its own right.

Arguing for or against joining in the violence should at the very least, involve accepting responsibility for the consequences. Or to be more blunt- criticising the behavior of the different parties in the conflict is pointless, a form of moral posturing if it doesn’t shed light on the consequences of joining or avoiding war.

LFC, it seemed a little off topic – the speech was on my mind when I wrote the comment. Since it’s been brought up though…

Here’s a White House summary of the “Presidential Policy Guidance” referred to in the speech.

With respect to the question of so called signature strikes, the footnote on page 2 may be of particular interest. That said, also of particular interest are the statements to the effect that the President reserves the authority to act outside the policies set forth when the President deems it justified, that the policies may still be in a process of transition, and that the policies are being continually refined.

I tentatively agree with you LFC that the address may be important in that it confirms a pivot away from some of the more expansive conceptions of the “global war on terror.”

However, I’m not entirely certain as to all the purposes of the speech, or its implications. Does it portend a dramatic scaling back of the US use of lethal force, or was it an attempt to change the topic of conversation from the number of “scandals” suffered by the Obama Administration recently?

As a hard restriction on the use of lethal force, the policy strikes me as ridiculous. The winning move for a targeted combatant would obviously be to ensure that he is traveling with a non-combatant at all times. The President says in his speech that he would have been “derelict in his duty” not to have ordered the strike on Awlaki. Would that still be the case if Awlaki had been traveling with a non-combatant?

In reality, I suspect the presence of non-combatants in a given case will simply require that the President himself, or someone he delegates, to explicitly authorize the use of lethal force in that instance (I also suspect that this is already the case for UAV counterterrorism strikes).

Also faintly ludicrous was his directive to the Department of Justice to review the Department of Justice’s guidelines for investigations. Nothing about the subpoena for call records relating to the AP’s phone lines appears improper, notwithstanding the media’s melodramatic theatrics. The leak being pursued by the DOJ seems to be more serious by an order of magnitude or two than the Valerie Plame leak (the prosecution for which was completely justified). Imho, the handful of leak prosecutions and investigations is simply evidence of a responsible President.

..sorry just read footnote one, I think that leaves some leeway:

“or an individual who is targetable in the exercise of national self defense. “

r. nowosielski:
Which brings me to my query: What exactly was the point of your retort in #190 to Andrew F? I fail to grasp the significance.

roger: Andrew F. wrote:
there is a fair concern that the global campaign against al Qaeda and “al Qaeda affiliates” is turning into a default position, a new long term normal, without end.

…and I just thought it strange he hadn’t mentioned the speech since it was very recent and dealt w precisely this subject (and indeed he says above he was thinking of it when writing). I guess ‘significance’ is in the eye of the beholder.

As to the details of the new policy guidance, Andrew F., I haven’t gone into them and I can’t rt now, but I will try to do so in the next day or two. I think the importance of the speech may well lie mostly in the conceptual rejection of an endless war, which was the clear implication of the ‘GWOT’ a la Bush. Given presidential proclivities — no matter who the president — to leave room for flexibility in decision-making, I am fairly sure the new guidelines will not be interpreted as a ‘hard restriction,’ much as some of us might like them to be.

@rich
the speech is valueless propaganda

I disagree. Even a quick, cursory reading indicates that it represents a rejection of the endless war approach, in Andrew F.’s words “a pivot away from some of the more expansive conceptions of the “global war on terror.””

You have to look not just at the drones part of the speech, but the whole thing. Generalities may sound like propaganda but they can actually matter in the formulation of policy; history suggests that they do.

Ronan(rf):

Just to add, I’m not sure there was really a disavowal of torture. Instead there was a fear in the CIA of being prosecuted for being involved in torture and so a move towards targetted assasinations, and a reaction in the executive branch to the very specific ways torture was justified post 9/11 and so a disavowal of that justification specifically. The same might happen with drones, but I’d be very sceptical that it will with targetted killings as a policy, more generally, or with the concept of the WOT, aside from dropping the moniker

One of the first acts of the Obama admin, as I recall, was officially to disavow torture.
i
As to drones: I don’t think anyone thinks drone strikes are going to stop entirely as a result of the speech. They may well decrease. It remains to be seen how it plays out.

The Obama admin’s discomfort w the WOT moniker — which it officially dropped or tried to, IIRC, long before this recent speech — is not meaningless inasmuch as it suggests that Obama is not at all comfortable, at a conceptual level, w the notion of a permanent ‘state of exception’ (if you’ll pardon the jargon) which the Bush admin was, it seems to me, comfortable with. The speech confirms that Obama envisions a transition to an era of relative ‘normality’ w/r/t terrorist ‘threats,’ wherein they are acknowledged as a continuing problem but the govt is not obsessed w them.

The level of self-conscious reflection and even agonizing in this speech, plus the way he dealt w Medea Benjamin’s interruptions, is unusual, to the say the least, for a U.S. president, and one need not be an Obama cheerleader (a la A. Sullivan, for ex) to recognize that.

She interrupted three times; it is a bit difficult to believe that the Secret Service does not know how to deal with those who disturb the established order of things more quickly, quietly, and efficiently than that. It’s almost as if they were winking at us.

It’s possible, I suppose, that they knew she wd be there and that Obama told the Secret Service (or whoever) not to remove her immediately but to let her talk. It’s also possible that the Secret Service, being familiar w Benjamin from previous occasions of her activism/interruptions and seeing Obama engage her, decided on the spot not to remove her immediately. I obviously don’t know for sure which scenario applied.

In any case, no one who has read the transcript can call this ‘hippie punching’ with any accuracy. That description is grossly wrong, imho. Unless you think that, by definition, any time a President exchanges in words w a protestor, no matter what is said, it constitutes ‘hippie punching’. Note esp what Obama said rt after the exchange about her concerns meriting being listened to. That’s not ‘hippie punching’.

p.s. Medea Benjamin is 60 years old. So maybe she was a hippie in the 1960s. But she isn’t a hippie now. She is a peace activist and professional protester.

LFC

That read more cynically than I intended. The point I was trying to make is more along the lines of that I think it’s more useful/honest to acknowledge this for what it is, the next stage of the WOT, when the baggage of the first stage which isnt needed anymore (such as the Bush AUMF, or drone strikes in Pakistan which were largely dependant on the Afghan campaign) is discarded
So that’s good, in so much as (hopefully) it means there will be more accountability in the WOT and the most destructive aspects of it are over, for the time being. But it doesnt mean that its over, just that its becoming institutionalised. (How this might work out I obviously dont know, he might develop a genuine coherent effective legal framework for prosecuting it, or he (or those following him) might resort to targetted killings and proxy wars and security measures tagetted at specific communities at home)
I’m not denying that Obama’s speech was thoughtful, or that his options are limited, or that he’s better than the alternatives, or that he has put serious thought into the next stage and how he would like to see the WOT develop. All I’m trying to say is that I dont think he should be given credit for this, for ‘disavowing’ tactics that are no longer needed, or that have become institutionally unpopular – I think that’s more a case of American institutions (rather than his conscience) beginning to do their job again

(Personally, I dont think his disavowal of a torture program which had already ended – which wasnt backed up with any prosecutions for those responsible for it – is worth much. And I dont think those of us who live in liberal democracies should fool ourselves into believing that this was an abberation – that liberal democracies ‘dont torture’, generally)
Which isnt to say that this isnt a potentially positive development

Rich – yes, the Iraqi democratic government (peculiar that an imperial conqueror would allow one – albeit a very imperfect one – much less expend enormous effort to aid in its creation), for domestic political reasons, set conditions on their consent that the US did not want to meet. The US therefore left. Rather odd behavior for an imperial conqueror. As to whether we’d be better off if the military had refused to obey the President when he ordered the invasion, this returns us to the earlier discussion about the implications of such refusals over the long term. As to whether their service was “evil”, I think that claim is deeply incorrect, for reasons already stated above.

LFC @205: Generalities may sound like propaganda but they can actually matter in the formulation of policy; history suggests that they do. Very well put – I agree that the general signal in the speech is likely the most important part.

Ronan – a non combatant is a civilian not taking direct part in hostilities. The definition is clear enough, imho, to result in the perverse incentive I described under the conditions I postulated.

” yes, the Iraqi democratic government (peculiar that an imperial conqueror would allow one – albeit a very imperfect one – much less expend enormous effort to aid in its creation)”

The whole point of having a client is to have them run the area for you so you don’t have to yourself. Again, this is hardly advanced political theory that I’m talking about, this is imperialism going all the back to the original imperialists. Typically the U.S. props up a strongman, but they hardly could this time after having to grasp at “democracy” as one of the many reasons for why they had to conquer. So the plan was to put in a complaisant democratic government, limited in the decisions it could make by being dependent on the U.S. Once again, the stupidity and failure of execution of the plan doesn’t mean that it’s not a plan.

And no, I’m not saying that “the military” should have refused as a whole. That implies a decision by the top-level officers in the military, and brings up all sorts of well-founded concerns about military control and military coups. It’s very different from having the ordinary soldiers walk away.

Do I expect that it’s possible for ordinary soldiers to desert en masse in great enough numbers to stop a war? No. The U.S. and other militaries have had a long time to perfect methods of mental conditioning to keep soldiers in line, and punishment for desertion, and these, not a commitment to serve, are what keeps the war machine going.

On ‘hippie punching’, see http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4663 — apparently the term is current enough. The practice is certainly a standard feature of certain kinds of political discourse, and a graphic yet silly term like ‘hippie punching’ serves well to refer to it.

What is all this bad but bull?

War, as in why don’t I let somebody else tell me who to kill?

Just say, “No” boys and girls, and turn away.