A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

The nationalist temptation, part II

Exhibit A

Exhibit B

Granted that neither of these authors is a Christian, they are both writers well within the mainstream of American conservative politics. And both essentially advocate an “anything goes” approach to waging war.

Again, I’m not interested in arguing whether the Israeli response in the current situation is “proportionate,” or meets other just war criteria. What concerns me is that influential writers on the American Right are openly advocating (or at least strongly suggesting) the abandonment of jus in bello criteria in principle.

21 responses to “The nationalist temptation, part II”

  1. Johann Cornelius

    Though Johann Cornelius is only my nom de plume, I am of German descent, through my mother, and spent many years of my childhood living in Germany and growing up among my aunts, uncles, and cousins there. My grandfather and his younger brother were both civil servants and, as required by law in fascist Germany, both joined the Nazi party. I grew up knowing this and knowing also of the atrocities committed by the German people in the name of the Fatherland. It wasn’t something I read about in history books; I had a personal connection to the people who were there at the time. I knew and loved men and women who by omission or commission shared guilt for those atrocities. Since I was a child, I’ve had a very deep antipathy toward nationalism, or even the specter of nationalism on the rise. Think Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society.

    I hope to God that Podhoretz and Krauthammer do not really speak for the mainstream of American conservatism. Apart from their call to all but abandon moral constraints, or to condition our understanding of morality by terms of purely nationalist interests, they completely ignore the endless cycle of enmity that unrestrained carnage perpetuates. Their call for unrestrained killing is neither moral nor an effective strategy for enduring peace or security between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

    Reply
  2. Thuloid

    Well, Krauthammer and Podhoretz both seem to feel a certain natural kinship with Israel, and I think this is coloring their thinking. So is, then, the particular nature of the conflict Israel is engaged in. I don’t think they could be interpreted to speak for American conservatism at large–this set of sympathies isn’t universal, and there are many that other conservatives hold that these would not.

    Anyhow, the argument tends to be that the enemy is one with whom reciprocal agreements limiting the scope of warfare are virtually impossible to make. Therefore, only the national interests of one party can be considered–they might be tempered, depending on the values of that nation, but they’re all that’s at issue.

    Now, this may seem some kind of radical innovation, but I’m not so sure. Our Western tradition of mutually understood limits on warfare sees many of its roots in early Greek hoplite warfare, but those were exclusively reciprocal agreements among Greeks. When they fought non-Greeks, all bets were off. The Romans, too, appear to have felt less restrained when the enemy’s values did not agree with their own.

    Just War thinking is supposed to stand as a universal, but I have my doubts as to how often this has ever been the case in practice. Those conditions under which a given fight or method of fighting are considered justified have been highly sensitive to the particular circumstances of the combatants, even in those parts of the West nominally informed by Just War thinking. Some of what was acceptable in the First World War was no longer in the Second, and some of what became acceptable in the Second was highly controversial in the First. In neither case does it seem the combatants were heavily moved by a non-reciprocal version of Just War thinking (and as best I can tell, European wars rarely have been). Given this, it doesn’t surprise me that some commentators (especially those with particular sympathies for a nation involved in highly asymmetrical conflict) would reform principles around national interest.

    Reply
  3. Thuloid

    Oh, I almost forgot–

    Johann Cornelius, you say that “Their call for unrestrained killing is neither moral nor an effective strategy for enduring peace or security between Israel and its Arab neighbors.” Leaving aside the question of whether they’re actually advocating “unrestrained killing”, what if it should turn out that their proposed strategy, while immoral, is effective for creating an enduring situation of security? It seems you could be certain about the morality (at least, from your own perspective–you could be committed to whatever moral claims you make), but simply in error as to the real-world effects. Not that I necessarily think you are, just that this possibility needs addressing. What if, by brutality, Israel could forge a relatively lengthy peace? It occurs to me that a few bouts of unspeakable violence in the first half of the last century might be credited for the peace Western Europe has experienced of late. Disturbing, but possibly the case.

    Reply
  4. Gaius

    Lee, as you might have said, referring to one of your earlier posts, both A and B advert to allied misdeeds in WW2 both to legitimate and to argue the need for war against the enemy’s civilians.

    Ah, the Good War!

    Reply
  5. Lee

    My point wasn’t so much that Podhoretz and Krauthammer speak for American conservatism at large, but that they are well within the mainstream, not fringe figures, are linked approvingly on conservative blogs, etc. In other words, the idea of eliminating jus in bello constraints has entered polite society.

    Thuloid is correct, I think, that constraints on warfare are often seen, especially in practice, as a kind of reciprocal bargain, which is taken to entail that if one side violates them, then the other side is justified in doing so too. We could call this the “They did it first” defense. This way of looking at it is implicit whenever anyone argues that, for instance, terrorists don’t respect the rules of warfare, so why should we? (Of course, the obvious, and IMO correct, response is: Because it’s the right thing to do.)

    Reply
  6. Gaius

    First, I think you are right on all points you just made.

    Second, I think there are cases where civilians do indeed play a role too close to being a combatant one for civilian immunity to apply.

    But in the case of the Arab-Israeli conflict I am afraid that if the shoe is on either foot, it’s on the one opposite to what CK or JP think.

    And in that case the Arabs are within their rights to actually target Israeli civilians, but not vice versa.

    Directly contrary to what CK or JP would claim.

    Reply
  7. Gaius

    I just realized I want to say a little more about that.

    In the present conflict, I regard various Arab forces as being lined up on one side and the Israelis and ourselves as lined up on the other side.

    That is the Arab view, as well as the view of much of the rest of the world; and I believe it is substantially correct.

    But I think it is quite clear that the moral situations of Israeli and American civilians are quite different.

    The Israelis are each and all personally invaders and ethnic displacers of the Arabs.

    There are cases and there are cases but, on the whole, morally, every one of them is on stolen and still contested land, and plays a part in criminally taking Arab territory, Arab sovereignty, and even Arab lives.

    We American civilians play no such role in the conflict.

    Not one of us personally and physically plays a part in taking possession of Arab lands after forcing them out.

    Hence Israelis are all direct participants in this war of peoples for physical possession of the land of Palestine.

    Americans are not in a like case.

    But it is exactly that factor that I think makes Israelis legitimate targets, and no other.

    And I think, lacking that factor, American civilians are not legitimate targets.

    At least not for that reason; and I think vis a vis this conflict, not for any other, either.

    Hence, Israelis are all legitimate targets for Hezbollah while American civilians were not and are not legitimate targets for Al-Qaeda, or any other attacker.

    On the other hand, if GW sends US forces to do the Israelis’ dirty work in south Lebanon, disarm Hezbollah, and guarantee the de-militarization of that zone for the Israelis, those forces will be de facto allies of the Israelis and participants in their illicit war of ethnic cleansing and conquest.

    That will make those forces, and any US forces, legitimate military targets for Hezbollah.

    As well as the usual parts of the US military supply chain for our own forces and for Israel’s.

    By which I mean that attacks upon those US forces would not count as war crimes of any description.

    Nor would attacks in the US, itself, upon the US military or the supply chain.

    Though attacks on US civilians here at home similar to 9/11, or similar to Spain’s 3/11, would be criminal.

    IMHO, anyway.

    Reply
  8. Lee

    Gaius, I’m afraid I don’t think the distinction you’re trying to draw holds water. I think there’s a fairly straightforward case where what you say is intuitively plausible: If someone trespasses on my property, then (we think) I am entitled to use force to repel his aggression. But many, if not most, Israeli civilians certainly live at one or more removes from such a paradigm case of aggression. Certainly second- or third-generation residents, recent immigrants, children, etc. are not aggressors in the same way that the initial usurper would be. So whatever justice there is in using lethal force in the initial case seems to me correspondingly weakened by those degrees of distance. This point is obscured, I think, by talking about the land as though it belongs to “the Arabs” or “the Jews” collectively.

    Added to that, there is the consideration of likelihood of success. If killing civilians is a futile strategy then it’s wrong for that reason alone, other moral considerations aside.

    Reply
  9. Gaius

    Every inch of Palestine under Israeli sovereignty is an inch of Arab land upon which Israelis living in Israel individually and collectively trespass.

    It is as though they had thrown up a huge factory that they jointly own and operate on somebody else’s land – land from which they forcibly expelled the rightful owners. That huge factory is the Jewish state.

    A conquering people does not acquire uncontestable rightful ownership while the initial struggle of conquest continues.

    In Palestine, the struggle has never actually ceased.

    To pursue the tresspass analogy, a child born and living on a stolen farm taken and operated by his parents is no closer to rightful ownership than they.

    Is it the Israelis who are hiding behind their own children, now? Do they get to claim Arabs cannot attack them because they decided to have babies in a war zone, and raise them there?

    Reply
  10. Lee

    The child may have no rightful claim to ownership, but that doesn’t mean it can be killed at will. I deny that someone can permissibly be killed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

    Also, while my knowledge of the history is admittedly sketchy, it’s my understanding that many Jews moved to Palestine prior to Israel declaring its independence. Presumably those people (and their descendents) had, in many cases, legitimate property titles which they acquired through purchase. So, even if one accepts that Israel as a political entity is somehow fundamentally illegitimate, it would still seem to be necessary to distinguish between holders of legitimate property titles and those without them.

    Reply
  11. Gaius

    You are right about settlement and right about the question of individual property.

    That doesn’t cover the issue, which is one of sovereignty and a concerted effort at ethnic cleansing.

    The adults are legitimate targets. If they bring the kids along into the zone of fire, whose fault is that?

    I agree that targeting children per se is questionable.

    But when they grow up? And since they WILL grow up??

    Reply
  12. Joshie

    Gosh, I hope no American Indians read Gaius’ post. We’d all be screwed.

    Reply
  13. Lee

    Gaius, I still think the further you get from a paradigm instance of aggression the more tenuous the claims for violent retaliation become. If adult Israeli civilians, who themselves never personally aggressed against a particular Palestinian, can be legitimate targets because their gov’t claims sovereignty over the land, how different is that from the argument of Osama bin Laden that any American is a legitimate target because of the actions of his government? Joshie’s point about Native Americans also seems apposite here.

    Plus, it seems to me that the goals of the attacks carried out by, say, Hamas or Hezbollah, are not to remove particular individuals from occupied pieces of land so their rightful owners can reclaim them, but rather to kill enough people so that the Israeli gov’t will evacuate the premises. So, they are targeting them, not qua purported aggressors, but qua citizens of a government whose actions they hope to influence. That’s terrorism by anyone’s definition, ISTM.

    Reply
  14. Camassia

    Of course, the way some Israelis look at it they’re just continuing the 2,000-plus-year struggle to defend their country from invaders. It’s not like the Arabs are aboriginal either. I think you’d have to go back to the Neolithic to find people in that area who didn’t arrive there by force.

    Reply
  15. Gaius

    Re the Amerindians, both you and Joshie ignore my allusions to the right of conquest, which I take to have settled the whole matter of America in a way in which the issue of the Jewish state in Palestine has not been settled.

    Apart from that, the analogy between the two cases is painfully good, and at least during some of the conflicts between white settlers and the Indians the whites were quite in the wrong, the Indians were quite in the right, and they were in the right in attacking settlers and not waiting around for the Army to show up so they’d have “legitimate combatants” to attack.

    (If the Army had known they would wait, why would the Army have come? Just send more settlers!)

    But the truth is that the American case was not a conflict between two peoples for a chunk of land already civilized and settled by one of them, long since.

    Even within just what would become the United States, it was a series of conflicts between settlers of many peoples of the same race (euro-whites) against many indigenous peoples of another same race (a considerable variety of Amerindian tribes and nations, some sedentary and civilized but many others not at all, and many purely nomadic hunters and food-gatherers), over lands so broad and various as to density and type of indigenous settlement that it is simply not true that all the land of North America eventually taken by the euro-whites was land Indians, or anybody else, could antecedently legitimately have claimed to be their own.

    Think how ridiculous and even wicked we now find the spectacle of Columbus coming ashore with a cross and a flag, claiming the whole of Hispaniola, or the whole of the Americas, for his King, himself, and the Catholic Church!

    But the suggestion (for example) that a relative handful of Indians of many different, generally mutually hostile and frequently warring tribes of nomads or semi-nomads could together or separately own the whole of the Great Plains and the West, and somehow exercise sovereignty over that area, allowing for the exclusion of white (or other!) settlers, is equally ludicrous.

    However, there is a vast difference between settlement of land not legitimately subject to any prior claim on the one hand and what was done, say, to the Five Civilized Tribes on the other.

    Begin with a slightly different case.

    I agree with many others that the Aztecs owned Mexico City and some of the surrounding areas with as clear and good a right as any national state has ever owned and held sovereign sway over any territory.

    And I agree that their resistance to the Spaniards was certainly legitimate (the Spanish conquest was certainly not), and say as well that any effort to expel the Aztecs utterly would have been a crime they would have had every right to resist, even to warring on settlers – however much they might have hurried to object that they were non-combatants – moving in in an effort to supplant them.

    Similarly, had the Cherokees (one of the Five Civilized Tribes) been in any position to wage war against the American euro-whites (led by one of America’s most rabidly racist Indian fighters, Mr. Jackson) in defense of their lands and to drive off settlers – whether or not they fought to defend their assertion of sovereignty -, they would have been in the right to do so.

    IMHO

    As for Camassia, she makes the valid point that nobody is aboriginal.

    But the Jewish claim lapsed in favor of other when the Romans destroyed Judea.

    A lot of water flowed under the bridge after that, but the claims of Jewish rightful ownership died under the Roman right of conquest.

    By the time we get to the collapse of the Ottomans and the slow but speeding Jewish immigration from Europe to Palestine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the best claim to sovereignty and legitimate ownership lay with the Arabs then in residence.

    Sound right?

    I think so.

    Reply
  16. Joshie

    Doesn’t to me. You seem to be saying that, basically, might makes right. I don’t believe that is true.

    Reply
  17. Gaius

    Joshie,

    I take it you are objecting to what I have called “the right of conquest.”

    The idea is that with the lapse of time those in possession that has gone unchallenged for long enough acquire a right to what they have, even if it was taken wrongly in the first place.

    Hence nobody must, and nobody may, try to undo the outcome of 1066, or the results of the barbarian invasions of Europe, etc., claiming to be throwing out the rightless descendants of genocidal ethnic cleansers, or the like.

    Or do we have to worry that Camassia’s correct claim that nobody is now aboriginal means nobody is now in rightful possession, and wars to achieve – what, a distribution of peoples over the earth’s surface such that none is known to have come by its assigned territory unrighteously? – would be actually righteous?

    Are you the one, after all, who threatens renewed Indian wars in the USA by rejecting the idea I offer?

    Were the Seminoles to return to Florida, armed and ready for a fight, what then?

    Reply
  18. Joshie

    You seem to only be applying it selctively though. Israelis are now in posession of that tract of real estate, but they aren’t legitimate, but America is legitimate (or England or Mexico or whatever example) because more time has passed? What is the precise time span at which something becomes legitimate? 50 years? 100? 1000? And who determines that?

    My point is that appealing to the “right of conquest” is worthless, especially in a christian context, because it seems to imply that if you kill someone, steal their property and hold on to it long enough, you own it. That just makes no sense.

    Reply
  19. Camassia

    As I understand it, back in ancient Israel all land and possessions were considered to ultimately belong to God. That was the idea of the “jubilee” — all debts were cancelled, leases expired, slaves freed etc. as an acknowledgment of the fact that no one really has an untrammeled right to own anything. The idea of the jubilee was carried on in the sayings of Jesus and in the lifestyle of the early church, as Acts tells us that they all shared possessions and, in fact, were mandated to do so (as the story of Ananias and Sapphira shows).

    Now, there are some obviously practical problems with scaling this system up indefinitely. Generally in Christian history there seem to have been two solutions: a) the monastic and radical Protestant approach of living the Kingdom in the local community and leaving the grand schematics to God, and b) the approach of most other churches, which is to pragmatically allow property rights but place restraints on the violence allowed to defend them, as “there is none righteous” and all that. Neither one is a perfect solution, but the Gaius approach is hardly a perfect solution either, for the reasons Joshie pointed out. I tend to shy away from grand schemes of how the world should be run, because I’ve never seen one without its own monstrosities, and it’s not like anyone has ever been able to implement one anyway. (Trying has sure caused a lot of trouble though.)

    Reply
  20. Gaius

    Joshie:

    “You seem to only be applying it selctively though. Israelis are now in posession of that tract of real estate, but they aren’t legitimate, but America is legitimate (or England or Mexico or whatever example) because more time has passed?”

    YES.

    “What is the precise time span at which something becomes legitimate? 50 years? 100? 1000?”

    SEVERAL GENERATIONS AFTER THE INTITIAL FIGHTING HAS ENDED, I WOULD SAY.

    And who determines that?

    YOU. ME. THE MAN IN THE MOON. WHO EVER DETERMINES ANYTHING? WERE YOU EXPECTING A VOICE IN THE SKY?

    “My point is that appealing to the “right of conquest” is worthless, especially in a christian context, because it seems to imply that if you kill someone, steal their property and hold on to it long enough, you own it. That just makes no sense.”

    I AGREE. SEVERAL GENERATIONS OF UNCONTESTED POSSESSION. NEITHER OF US CAN WIN RIGHTFUL POSSESSION OF ANYTHING WE STEAL.

    Reply
  21. Joshie

    I think your caps lock is stuck, gaius.

    Reply

Leave a reply to Gaius Cancel reply