E. Simon: And yet,…
E. Simon: And yet, the use of Israel’s military will prevent Hizbullah from intentionally causing the loss of similarly incalculably valuable Israeli lives.
I’m aware that this is one of the professed aims of the attacks. However, you’ve merely dodged the question rather than answering it. Just how many of those “incalculably valuable” lives of innocent third parties in Lebanon is the IDF entitled to snuff out or ruin in the process of trying to to protect the “incalculably valuable” lives of innocent Israelis? What are acceptable ratios here in your view, and what would amount to disproportionate violence? Fewer civilians killed than were saved by the attack? One-for-one? Two or three Lebanese civilians killed for every Israeli civilian saved? Ten? Twenty? Thirty? Or is any body count at all acceptable?
I should note that I’m asking you this, not because I’m naive about what modern warfare involves, but rather because I’m all too familiar with what it involves, and I happen to think that the nature of modern warfare makes concerns about proportionality of violence very important. Given the fact that some 235 people, most of them civilians, and including scores of children, have been killed in Lebanon so far in retaliation for the death or capture of ten soldiers, along with the murder of about ten civilians in various attacks over the course of the conflict, it seems particularly urgent in this conflict.
E. Simon: But Israel is not responsible for Lebanon’s failures in necessitating that most unfortunate decision.
No, but neither are unrelated third parties who happen to live in Lebanon responsible for Hizbollah’s crimes. Whatever causes the Israeli government may have for going to war, it is certainly not entitled to use any means necessary to achieve its war aims, and if there is no way to carry those objectives out without inflicting wildly disproportionate suffering on innocent third parties in the process, then its objectives had jolly well better be left unachieved.
E. Simon: There are costs, no doubt. But the costs of not thusly, and appropriately disincentivizing against murder are much riskier, given the total analysis.
Please. Do you think I give a fuck about “appropriately disincentivizing against murder”? The issue here is how many innocent people you can maim or kill in the process of protecting yourself or others against being maimed or killed by some unrelated menace. This is life and death that we are talking about, and passing it off as “costs” of diddling with incentive structures is frankly obscene.
George Orwell: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, “I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so.” Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:
“While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.”
The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.
Anticopyright.