The Ethical Warrior

I knew there would be a loophole. :bugeye:

Whats a just reason to perform a bombing?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

I just told you, it is ethical to prevent a bombing/war or stop a war, with war. All other reasons, which can be solved without the use of war, are unethical cases to use war because war is unethical, it can only be justified.

Why is this so hard to swallow?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

So a pre-emptive bombing is a just war? Like Iraq?

 

Log in or Sign up to hide all adverts.

It could be, if Iraq really was a current threat.

 

But now its not, which it might have been, which we'll never know, since there was preemptive bombing.

So every preemptive bombing is a just war!

Thats pretty good actually.

 

As long as war is emminent and all diplomacy has failed.

 

Strangers with candy

Because one can never have too many religious zealots running around with nukes?

In the long run, the underlying question is problematic. War isn't ethical. Ethics developed in order to facilitate civilized society. But in those days, nobody really stopped to chastise you in the middle of a war if you stomped a dying man's testicles to mush in order to work out some extra frustrations.

The twentieth century, at least, should demonstrate the problem with "ethical" warfare. We in the United States are enduring that debate at present, as well. Yes, terrorists blow up children and innocent civilians, and torture people, so we should show how much better we are by blowing up children and innocent civilians, and torturing people. It's "ethical".

Not that I don't sympathize to a certain extent with such brutality. But we're supposed to be a civilized nation. Personally, I think that war dogs everywhere—whether in Somalia, America, Israel, Pakistan, or anywhere else—offer humanity nothing but blood, tears, and hatred. The world would be better off without them. Yet, much like my view on capital punishment, it isn't proper to simply take them out back and shoot them, no matter how much one thinks they might deserve it. If homicide is wrong, homicide is wrong and stop making excuses.

However, cluster bombs, nukes, and such aside, I'm of the opinion that if Israel, for instance, wants to pretend they face an existential threat in the form of a bunch of refugees bullied off their land, we ought to oblige. After all, if suicide bombing is what delegitimizes the Palestinian claim, let's set them up with a nice loan, sell them a bunch of precision-guided missiles, and then when they hit a school or a market, the Palestinians can do what other nations do, either say it is an unfortunate toll of war, pretend the incident never happened, or Israel of lying about the target site and death toll.

(If you watch closely, especially in American politics, it's amazing who people will sympathize with. If an enemy says it was a useful factory and not a military site, they're lying. Unless, of course, there's a Democrat in the White House, in which case it's another example of atheist faggot liberals attempting genocide. In other words, there are no ethics in war, no matter how much we pretend otherwise. In the meantime, civilized peoples will continue to strive for a better world, and the rest will elect George Bush or praise Osama bin Laden.)

 

I disagree that there cannot be an ethics of war. I reference the extraordinary book: Rising Up and Rising Down : Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means, by William Vollmann.

 

So why has the last century been filled with wars by civilised peoples striving for a better world?

 

A question of civility, and the cyclical problem

That includes Stalin, the Nazis, Pinochet, Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, Khomeni, Qadafi, a bunch of guys in the former Yugoslavia, the IRA, Shining Path, Maoists in Nepal, Pol Pot, &c.

Of course, there is the word civilized to account for, but that's the thing.

Everyone is still so pissed at the Iranian Revolution that few pause to think about how it occurred. Kapuscinski describes a morbidly beautiful, surreal scene with thousands of white-clad, unarmed Muslims marching straight into the guns at Qom. They were cut to pieces, and the military still couldn't win. Children tore away sections of their robes and dipped them in the blood running in the streets, scampered out to the periphery of the conflict and waved their flags as both invitations and warnings.

And while that's not the whole of the revolution, the scene sticks with me because, as we've heard so much these last years, the United States is a "Christian" nation, and Islam is a religion of death.

There is only a certain extent to which you can fight fire with fire. Even those truly civilized people who feel obliged to pick up guns, Molotov cocktails, and the like, can only accomplish so much by force. The French won their revolution and then set about killing one another for the hell of it. The Russians won their revolution and then set about destroying themselves for the hell of it. The IRA had valid complaints against the British, but why blow up an ice-cream shop with children inside? The United States is supposed to be the embodiment of justice and noble human spirit, but we're willing to bomb children for revenge, or torture people for information we don't expect them to have.

At some point, people need to stop and figure out why they're fighting and what it takes to stop killing one another. In the meantime, we're caught in a moral/ethical conundrum with substantial impacts. Exceptions to general rules can have dire consequences. It is a common social value that killing is wrong. It is also a common social value that it is acceptable to find any loophole one can in order to justify a killing.

If, for instance, we took all the war dogs out back and shot them—thus applying a sense of justice that is acceptable to the war dogs—we would still be establishing that precedent, and there would always be at least one person or faction attempting to reiterate that standard. If we said, "Okay, this is the last time: We'll kill off all the war dogs and get on with peace and prosperity", we'd say it again maybe ten years later.

Injustice—deliberate or circumstantial—is the basic key to human strife. We can take up arms for a better world all we want, but until we address that nearly infinite tangle called injustice, we'll be taking up arms for a better world until there's nobody left to fight.

And then we'll be lonely. We'll cry, and say, "Why does nobody want to come out and play?" Kind of like Sciforums, only bigger, and much more important to the species.

 

So its all about greed?

 

A middle road

I suppose that depends on how you define greed.

One of my high school teachers, a mathematician, entered his profession because when he was in college, he was desperate for money to stay in school. A scholarship was available through the metallurgy program, so he applied and ended up a science student. I knew that story for years, but a friend who knew the guy better told me he was a closet poet.

My father was a trained and licensed biology and PE teacher. He did this so that he could be a football coach. Over the years, then, he has worked as a salesman, a designer, a manufacturer, and a small-business owner. Oh, he also sold shoes in there somewhere, too. And jockstraps. And in the end, he left my mother, made some money on the stock market, bought a boat, lost a bunch of money on the stock market, and is currently hanging out in Mexico with his new wife. His regret about the failed marriage? That he put her through it at all. Thirty-one years of pantomime, and both of them knew it the whole time. My father, the capitalist who wanted to be greedy but felt insulted if anyone used the word, finally checked out of that strange room and rejoined humanity.

I am part of an American generation that still wrestles with the effects of a certain phenomenon. In comedy writing, there is a Jewish stereotype by which young men aspire to be accountants or dentists because their mothers want them to. Like all stereotypes, there exists in the culture a real seed of the idea. I cannot say how prevalent the situation is among American Jews, but I do know that it's not limited to the Jewish community. I know plenty of people who went to college and got the degree they were told to, and who hate their field, hate their job, and would be happier stringing flowers onto a necklace.

So why don't they do it? you might ask. Same reason a gay man marries a woman and has kids. They just don't figure it out in time, or if they do, they feel there's nothing to be done about it.

This is, obviously, an American example. Oh, shit, a dentist or an accountant. Try picking which of your kids has to go hungry tonight. I get it. But that's the thing. In my utopia, people would do what they wanted to do. One of my friends should have studied music his whole life, but he could only afford to go to college if he studied something "useful". So he majored in communications and dropped out a term shy of graduation. Eventually, with the help of friends, he made it over to England to spend some time at LIPA. Now his father is dying—slowly—and after years of toiling in the software industry, my friend is unemployed and has moved back home to change daddy's diapers and watch the old man fade to nothing. He didn't finish at LIPA, though, and that's a tragedy. He ran out of money. His classmates? Some of them are unbelievable bastards, but they're making a quarter-million a year in production.

The question, then: Is my friend greedy? Sure, he could be making a quarter-million a year twiddling dials for the next Britney album—and he can make a better album with a MacIntosh and no investment capital than most major labels could put out for a million-dollar budget—but at the same time, a lot of that money would go to his father's care, or to a sister who did time for trying to save her girlfriend from a smack dealer who moonlit as a pimp.

It's not just what people want, but why they want it and what they're doing for it.

I have a community of writers around me that is slowly lifting my spirits. My mother expressed a regret not too long ago that she wished we'd started down this course sooner. (As a kid, the only parental advice I got on writing was, "Do something else.") That's twice, now, she's used writers to save my ass, and while I occupy this strange, magic world where I am at once writer, editor, student, and teacher, I now find a possible career opening up for me (professional manuscript editor) in a direction I never considered before. Both my mother and I have paused to wonder what could have been.

And now that I'm in my thirties and have a kid ... now my family switches from the "make money" argument to, "I just want you to be happy".

So imagine that those who love words get to study and work with words. Those who love numbers, or music, or art ... those who are fascinated by the sciences—biology, medicine, physics, and so on. Think of it this way: If people did what they want, how many more astronomers, botanists, and mathematicians would we have? What would they be doing, and what would be their impact? How much better would stories and songs be if the musicians writing them did so for other reasons than money? (How many of your all-time favorite songs have been Billboard #1 hits? And, yes, considering some of the manuscripts I've seen recently, and the advice I've heard agents and publishers giving young writers ....) If it wasn't about money, how many personal injury lawyers would there be? (There's a great but obscure Doonesbury joke there.)

This is what industrial society can bring. Even in a society as decadent as ours, it is possible to aspire to better things without being greedy. Hell, consider the slow progress about workplace sexual harassment. This country is littered with women who would have given a lot for the opportunity to tell their boss to keep his fucking hands to himself without worrying whether they could feed their kids the next month. It's not all greed.

Now, to run down the list:

• Math teacher: Diving into an unknown major in order to stay in school is not greedy; by contrast, the movie Soul Man, in which a white guy pretends to be black in order to get a scholarship ... now that is greed. But the math teacher was doing what has long been tacitly part of the American dream. Work hard, live well, but don't dream too big. The majority of American workers simply took a job because they needed it. Wanting a life where they can survive (e.g. pay bills) without being miserable every day at work isn't greed by my standard. But it's tragically unsatisfying.

• My father: Nobody becomes a teacher for greed. The failed businesses, the 2,300 square-foot lakefront house, the time he called our family—which possessed two houses in different states, four boats, five cars, three personal computers, two televisions, and a VCR (ca. 1992-3)—poor. The lectures about capitalism, the denigration of compassion. These are all greedy. But at the same time, he really did believe for a long time that this was the proper way to maintain a family. He wasn't trying to be greedy; he was just trying to be good and proper. And, yes, he dreamed of working up the ladder and coaching pro, or maybe running a college program; among his co-workers at the time are a couple Super Bowl rings, three top-division programs, a WFL title, an XFL endeavor, and a personal disaster at one of the most storied football programs in the country. The last active that I know of among is college-coaching friends runs a program in Conference USA. I don't blame my father for loving football. I understand why he misses it. But all dreams die, and when this one went to dust, he became a capitalist.

• My generation: Generation X is plenty greedy. We were raised by capitalists, and our values are coming to fruition in the present economic crisis. While we all recoil in horror and disgust at what has happened, it is hard to escape the notion that nothing about this crisis is really all that strange. Everything we did leading into it, no matter how corrupt our abstract judgment might find it, was generally accepted. Only us fringe lefties screaming so unreasonably and cluelessly that the system could come apart with frightening implications didn't like it. Well, that's not true. I know a conservative Christian who doesn't like it, but takes part anyway. Although, to be fair, he invents Bible passages sometimes to justify himself. And it shows. His daughter is, depending on who you ask, either slightly unstable or a raving lunatic. And she's greedy as hell. You know the kind. Remember when people could really easily steal long distance time from phone companies? Most people I know who did that said something about sticking it to the man. And say what we want about stealing from conglomerates, but she didn't have any such concerns. You could do it, therefore it wasn't stealing. (And, no, don't challenge me on the implications of that; I'll likely agree with you.) But our generational greed isn't complete. Many of us have checked out of society temporarily or permanently because we just can't cope with the stress of being a contemptible bastard all the time. And some would call that greedy, but I don't see how sitting around in squalor, stinking for a lack of shower, using up other people's drugs, and hating yourself makes for greed.

• American Jews: Like I said, it's a comedy stereotype. But the broader phenomenon is fairly common. I'm sorry, but who the hell wakes up one day in youth and says, "I know ... I want to be a shop steward at a recycled-rubber manufacturing plant when I grow up!" People make decisions that they regret. Sometimes this is conditioning; sometimes it is arbitrary; sometimes it is a wholly independent choice. Taking a certain job because it's there, or studying a certain field because circumstances dictate you should, are common routes to dissatisfaction. Correcting that dissatisfaction is not greed.

• Musician: We all have our greedy side. This isn't one of his. I think there's a fair question involved: What's with the $10,000 'cello and the years of paid instruction if you don't want me to play the thing? He keeps three instruments close to him these days. His first professional bass guitar, bought for him by a friend who had a good week dealing drugs, a Parker Night Fly six-string electric guitar that he bought with his severance after the second time he was bought out and downsized by the French, and a cheap electric guitar that his biological father (not the dying one) bought five years ago for eighty bucks at a garage sale. It has no sustain, won't stay in tune, and will never see the stage lights. It is his favorite musical instrument, ever. The 'cello was rented. The cheap guitar is the only musical instrument any of his parents ever bought for him, and it just means that much to know that at least one of them believes in the music.​

Now, looking back to "wars by civilised peoples striving for a better world", it really does come down to a measure of greed.

In the United States we agonize over accounting or dentistry, wages or health care, chicken or steak. And I don't call this greed. Rather, it is an attempt to answer the questions that life—by circumstance—puts before you.

And if I don't call those aspects of American life greed ....

No, running around sixpacking your neighbors isn't a good idea, but neither were the Irish wrong to want a chance at being equal to their British neighbors. A hundred sixty years (at least) later, a drama that started with the landlords exporting food until a nation starved has yet to close. (Even in 1849, American newspapers in heavily-Irish cities like Boston and Chicago criticized the Irish as "ingrates" for rejecting everything the noble Crown did for them.) In India, people were sick of the patronizing tone and deprivation of colonialism, and being forced to violate their religion (e.g. Khyber Rebellion). All through the third world, people just want something to eat, or some clean water, and wonder why their children are dying from simple diseases. The disaster otherwise known as the Russian Revolution? Sending an untrained, deliberately ill-equipped peasant army to fight the war while you stay home, get drunk, and bang your relatives is a quick road to revolution.

These struggles don't represent greed. Certainly, elements of greed can be found in them, but the general concept of civilized people striving for a better world does not, in and of itself constitute greed anymore than a wet dog looking to get out of the rain is being excessively selfish.

There is a middle road. It just isn't always clearly marked. Nor is it smooth, straight, or well-lit once you're on it.

 

Actually it is the sons and daughters that are the first ones lost.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

I recognise some of those echoes. Someone who wanted to be a lawyer but became a doctor, then told his son to just be happy and do what he wanted.

The son did what he thought he wanted. He's unhappy. He missed out on the things he now thinkshe should have done.

The trouble with being told to do what you want is that sometimes its just so bloody hard to figure out exactly what it is.
Or perhaps we always want something else?

Does dissatisfaction make for war? Are people so smallminded and vindictive?

 

Tiassa: we'll be taking up arms for a better world until there's nobody left to fight.

There will always be someone left to fight...maybe not members of the same group but always someone. Peace is just another interval between war, perpetual peace is as unrealistic and unnatural as a perpetual state of war.

Sam its perspective right?

The state of Israel came about through the violent efforts of the Haganah and Irgun against the British and arabs. The founder Jabontisky stated the groups ideology as "every Jew had the right to enter Palestine; only active retaliation would deter the Arabs and the British; only Jewish armed force would ensure the Jewish state".

Well he turned out to be right and the political arm of the group went on to become the Likud party. At the time the Irgun were considered a terrorist organization, they bombed the King David Hotel and carried out systematic offensive attatcks. Wiki says:

'In March 1938, David Raziel wrote in the underground newspaper "By the Sword" a constitutive article for the Irgun overall, in which he coined the term "Active Defense":

The actions of the Haganah alone will never be a true victory. If the goal of the war is to break the will of the enemy - and this cannot be attained without destroying his spirit - clearly we cannot be satisfied with solely defensive operations... Such a method of defense, that allows the enemy to attack at will, to reorganize and attack again... and does not intend to remove the enemy's ability to attack a second time - is called passive defense, and ends in downfall and destruction... whoever does not wish to be beaten has no choice but to attack. The fighting side, that does not intend to oppress but to save its liberty and honor, he too has only one way available - the way of attack. Defensiveness by way of offensiveness, in order to deprive the enemy the option of attacking, is called active defense.'

No wonder the State of Israel is so intent on crushing palestinian resistance! The way of the sword did not bring peace but it did successfully bring about a state, a homeland. Why Israelis and the western world now point at Hamas and call it a terrorist organization as if the method were some unholy unsanctioned way of achieving ones end is beyond me, especially when it worked for the IRA in N.Ireland, the FLN maquisards also known as the Touissant Rouge in Algeria and the Irgun in Israel and Maoists in Nepal which had overwhelming public support against the royalists. Sometimes it gets crushed like the Tamil Tigers but it is a legitimate form of...dare I say it...warfare. One thing for sure is that the Irgun were called 'terrorists' until they were legitimized politically. Same way we no longer call Jerry Adams a terrorist because he was invited to sit down at number 10 Downing Street.

Was all this ethical? Maybe, I don't know. History shows us its a method that works. One man's legitimacy is another man's occupation. One man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. Resistance or mere survival will always find its ideological imperative, its ethical motives.
Would the palestinians have more sympathy for Israelis if they had the upper hand? Maybe Israel has no choice but to continue to crush its opposition? The Palestinians won't stop because the Israelis won't stop and vice versa


It is what it is.

The moral high-ground shifts and it no longer rests under Israel anymore than it rested under Bush's America.

Sam: So every preemptive bombing is a just war!

In a nation of Newspeak yes it is. War is peace, Freedom is slavery etc. etc.

Or as Raziel wrote in 1938 'Defensiveness by way of offensiveness'


Sound familiar?

 

Monkey fights in Kilkenny?

To a certain degree, it's all the same. There once were two cats from Kilkenny ....

The problem I have with that definition is that it concedes the inevitability of any given war. If we were Clarke's ancient monkeys (2001: A Space Odyssey), or wild dogs snarling through the streets of New Orleans under a full moon, yes, I would concede the inevitability of that kind of conflict. But we are human beings, and one of the hallmarks of the human endeavor is that we can make certain kinds of choices.

The fact that peace is possible, that we might elect peace before attrition and circumstance require it, is not insignificant.

 

I believe in choice...limited choice. Human beings have limited choices within nature. There is no evidence that perpetual peace is a natural state for human beings. We may not be dogs nor apes but we are another animal species within nature.We are neither above nor outside nature nor its dictates. Human beings do not 'elect' peace, we create situations to avert war IF THAT IS POSSIBLE, if not we win the war and earn our peace.

What does it mean to be a human being anyway? The ability to destroy faster and more efficiently than any other animal seems to be one definition.

All of nature is engaged in a struggle to survive. History is a long struggle between one human tribe, ethnic group or nation for resources, land, sometimes its cultural supremacey or political domination. Early American citizens didn't create their democracy by being peacniks they fought the British for the right to create it, then they fought and or killed the native inhabitants to make sure they had complete control over the land, the 'safe place' to realize their 'democracy'. Were they wrong? I don't know.
There is no evidence that peacful means are successful under all circumstances. Pacifism is simply a tactic, a strategy as a means to an end, its not a way of life nor the only means to an end especially if it proves ineffective.
There is no evidence that perpetual peace is desirable for human populations. Is it possible to achieve perpetual peace without the use of oppression and complete control? I don't think so. Is this a scenerio you would prefer? War is ugly, people die, its hellish but at times it is a necessary means of struggle. To choose ones war wisely that's the problem, that is the challenge. To know when it is time to put down the sword, end bloodshed and show compassion and creatively work towards justice, trust, peace and HEAL past wounds that's a sign of collective wisdom but we are still dumb animals.

 

Actually no. Israel has not declared open war. They have tried time and time again to achieve peace and time and time again have come under Palestinian fire and not returned for multiple days. Look at this last conflict. The Palestinians were launching rockets into Israel for many days before Israel decided to retaliate. Israel gave Hamas every chance to stop the attacks and suffer no retaliation but Hamas refused.

You have to look at the larger picture here. If you remove religion form the picture you would see that Israel has been entirely too tolerant.

 

It would be interesting to see if you'd have the same opinion of some other religious fanatics moving in and doing exactly what the Israelis doing in your own state. Would it still be too tolerant ethical warfare if you were at the receiving end of such dispossession?

 

Give a man a bomb, and he kills for a day. Give him an axe, and you give him the means to kill for life!

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

Or at least until the axe breaks, or the blade dulls. Oh well.