It may not need saying how romanticism for guerrillas is ultimately an expression of the cult of redemptive violence, which is simply the cult of violent masculinity. By treating the armed faction as if it were identical with, or at least representative of, the common run of the people, the romantics get their morality on the cheap: they get to protest their compassion for innocent bystanders while holding on to a visible, organized, armed, and active force in the war to side with. Not having a side to cling to is, by comparison, terrifying, because it means really thinking about the helpless (i.e. the people who have neither mobile rocket launchers nor bomber jets) and having little more than your moral convictions with which to confront suffering.

And thanks to the moral laziness of the rally-‘round-the-flag crowd within the Left, armed factions like Hizbullah will continue to be applauded for acts of indiscriminate retaliatory violence (because, hey, they’re “doing something,” “resisting,” blah blah blah), all while they continue to demonstrate incredible callousness to the likely effects of their actions on the neighbors they are supposedly defending.

“There are so few wars of people’s liberation, for the people have so seldom risen–-only the armed faction. Listen-–the armed faction lies; they recreate the state through their action. When the people rise, it is not they, but the state which dies.” – Utah Phillips

I’m afraid Alison Bechdel already beat you to the joke:

Mo: Sydney? Sydney! Are you there?
Sydney: Oh…sorry. I got distracted. I was googling myself.
Mo: Is that what we’re calling it now?

DAP,

I do indeed think that there is something unreasonable about Ghate’s position. Several things, actually, but the most important one is the complete disregard for considerations of proportionality. There are limits on the amount of violence you can inflict in retaliation against aggression, and how much violence against innocent bystanders you can blame on the initial aggressor. Living in a relatively advanced society does not entitle you to the strategy and tactics of Genghis Khan.

To test your own leanings, consider a hypothetical example. Suppose that the Israeli military determined that the most efficient way to retaliate against Hizbollah was to firebomb southern Lebanon until everything moving was dead. Would you consider this a morally legitimate response to the killing or capture of a handful of Israeli soldiers and the indiscriminate firing of inaccurate rockets? Would all of the blame for the tens or hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths rest solely on Hizbollah?

DAP,

Are you referring to Onkar Ghate’s article, “Innocents in War?” If so, it seems to directly contradict your earlier claim that you do NOT approve of employing any means necessary, whatever the level of violence inflicted on innocent third parties, to assassinate dictators and terrorists.

Ghate explicitly argues that there is no moral limit to the level of violence that a “free nation” can use against a “terrorist state” in a just war. Thus: “The moral [sic] principle is: the responsibility for all deaths in war lies with the aggressor who initiates force, not with those who defend themselves.” Ghate goes on to argue that even deliberate targeting of civilians (as at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden) is justifiable.

I think this position is absolutely barbarous. But whether reasonable or not, it would entail a “Yes” rather than a “No” to my question above, unless there is some subtly I’ve missed.

“But I fancy I hear some one of my audience say, it is just in this circumstance that you and your brother [sic] abolitionists fail to make a favorable impression on the public mind. Would you argue more, and denounce less, would you persuade more, and rebuke less, your cause would be much more likely to succeed. But, I submit, where all is plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the people of this country need light?

“… What, am I to argue that it is wrong to make men [sic] brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to burn their flesh, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters? Must I argue that a system thus marked with blood, and stained with pollution, is wrong? No! I will not. I have better employments for my time and strength, than such arguments would imply.

“What, then, remains to be argued? Is it that slavery is not divine; that God did not establish it; that our doctors of divinity are mistaken? There is blasphemy in the thought. That which is inhuman, cannot be divine! Who can reason on such a proposition? They that can, may; I cannot. The time for such argument is past.

“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, to-day, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.”

From Frederick Douglass’s 1852 oration, What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?

DAP,

Can you give me a ballpark figure for the number of innocent bystanders who can be killed in the process of getting to the dictator or terrorist before the violence exceeds the limits of proportionality? One? Two? Twelve? Forty? Seven hundred?

jeffrey smith,

If you don’t like dead babies “posed” for press photography, then I would suggest that the best way for the Israeli military to avoid this problem would be not to fucking kill children.

DAP,

Do you approve of the assassination of dictators and terrorists by any means necessary, no matter what the level of violence inflicted on innocent third parties in the process of carrying out the assassination?

Even with the advent of atomic bombs, “fissile brew” is still an atrocious mixed metaphor.

How often do you suppose preparing a beverage through boiling or steeping ends up with something likely to produce a nuclear explosion? Strange brew indeed.

Dear Mr. Clark:

I have a couple of questions about your recent column on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

You write: “To rational people, the answers are simple enough. President Truman knew them in August 1945. Americans had been dying at about the 320-per-day rate (counting all war-induced deaths) for some three-and-a-half years. Why should more of them die just because a cruel regime had decided to conquer and enslave Asia, for starters, and the rest of the world, in time?”

One of the important differences between the 320 Americans being killed each day and the more than 200,000 Japanese people killed in the atomic bombings was that the Americans being killed were soldiers in uniform, whereas the overwhelming majority of the Japanese people killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians. Many of those killed by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima were schoolchildren. There were also about 20,000 Koreans prisoners killed, who had been forced into labor by the Japanese militarist regime.

Are you seriously suggesting that the United States government was entitled to deliberately kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in order to avoid the death of soldiers in combat?

You also wrote: “Had the Japanese not been defeated, … American women today would be in the ‘Comfort Brigades’ shipped all over the world.”

Are you seriously suggesting that if surrender had not been forced through the atomic bombings in August 1945, Japan would have posed a substantial threat of invasion to the United States? Are you aware of the condition of the Japanese military as of August 5, 1945?

Jeremy: Alli, I would simply ask what it is about the State that makes its guarantee so convincing.

I’d answer: sheer mysticism. As Randolph Bourne put it:

“Government is obviously composed of common and unsanctified men, and is thus a legitimate object of criticism and even contempt. If your own party is in power, things may be assumed to be moving safely enough; but if the opposition is in, then clearly all safety and honor have fled the State. Yet you do not put it to yourself in quite that way. What you think is only that there are rascals to be turned out of a very practical machinery of offices and functions which you take for granted. … Government on the other hand is synonymous with neither State nor Nation. It is the machinery by which the nation, organized as a State, carries out its State functions. Government is a framework of the administration of laws, and the carrying out of the public force. Government is the idea of the State put into practical operation in the hands of definite, concrete, fallible men. It is the visible sign of the invisible grace. It is the word made flesh. And it has necessarily the limitations inherent in all practicality. Government is the only form in which we can envisage the State, but it is by no means identical with it. That the State is a mystical conception is something that must never be forgotten. Its glamor and its significance linger behind the framework of Government and direct its activities.”

(This may be a more belligerent answer than fits the tone you’re trying to set, but I think it has the recommendation of being true. The question is how best to disabuse people of the lingering mysticism of the State. I think part of the answer has to do with the right sorts of arguments to make and the right sorts of conversations to have, as you’ve discussed here. But I also think that a lot of the answer is as much a matter of aesthetics, imagination, etiquette, and a bunch of other stuff that needs to be addressed through means other than dialectical reasoning.)

LB: Well, I think we are all “trained” by threat of force. That’s how parents raise their children, to a certain degree. Watch how children act when there are no limits and consequences applied in the home. Its nuts.

Besides endorinsg what Jeremy said, I’d also like to add that I’m not at all convinced, at least not by the evidence that I’ve been given so far, that (1) beating children is necessary as a means to establish “limits and consequences,” or (2) that the sorts of “misbehavior” that children often engage in when they aren’t beaten are actually anything worth worrying about in the first place. (A lot of the so-called “problems” only look like problems if you take for granted what you’re trying to prove — e.g. that children need to act deferentially to their parents, need to obey every demand promptly, shouldn’t be assertive about what they want, etc. Generally speaking, people who want to prove a point by referring to the rearing of children need to do a much better job in making explicit just what sort of “problems” they have in mind when they say that rearing children too laxly causes problems.)