Can we get a dishonorable mention for Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman and Curtis LeMay? I think that the massacre of 500,000 – 1,000,000 civilians during the terror-bombing of Japan may even be a tad worse than Right-wing demagoguery, or turning over a fort to the bloodybacks.

Patrick: “Warrantless surveillance of American citizens is expressly forbidden by FISA and the Bush Administration is a threat to democracy.”

Just to test what counterfactuals are supported here, if warrantless surveillance of American citizens weren’t legally forbidden, would you be O.K. with Bush doing it?

As far as “the existence of ‘substantial and often gruesome atrocities’ in postwar Cambodia” goes, I think Orwell said it best:

“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. I should expect to find — this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify — that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”

—“Politics and the English Language” (1946)

But I would like you to consider the Rwanda scenario or some other humanitarian scenario. … I think what you would like to say here is that we are fighting a defensive war on behalf of the citizens of Rwanda. Which sounds kind of right, but it also seems very odd to call such a war a “defensive” war.

Well, would it sound any less odd to call it an “aggressive” war? “A war in defense of the Tutsis,” on the other hand, doesn’t sound odd at all.

As a side note, I do agree with you that there are cases — and the genocide in Rwanda is one of them — where massive violations of human rights could, in principle, justify war by third parties in defense of the victims. But it is important to remember that there are lots of different ways of conducting wars, and that signing on, in principle, to a war by third parties doesn’t mean signing on to any kind of war by any kind of third party. (For example, liberal interventionists usually use cases like Bosnia-Hercegovina or Rwanda as exhibit A in the argument for justifying large-scale wars by alliances of governments, especially the global powers, with aerial bombing and typically a period of foreign occupation. But all of these terms are debatable. Wars don’t need to be sponsored or conducted by governments, let alone alliances of them, and don’t need to be conducted by means of the usual full-scale military assault that the Great Powers typically engage in. Maybe the genocide in Rwanda would justify a military intervention by NATO or a UN-sponsored coalition, but I think that’s very much less obvious than many people seem to think, because it is much stronger than the claim that some kind of war or another would be justified than many people realize.)

Patrick,

The primary claim above is not that all wars of aggression are unjust (although I do, as it happens, think that that’s analytically true). It’s that “aggressive” and “defensive” are contrary terms, whether the object of the defense is yourself or others, so that if your justifications for a war all appeal to the defense of others, then you are presenting evidence that the war wasn’t aggressive, not that it is both aggressive and just.

As for whether wars in defense of others could in principle be just under some set of circumstances or another, I suspect that very few people would disagree with you. But it does seem to me that there are pretty good reasons for saying that when a war is not justified by self-defense, there’s a correspondingly higher standard that needs to be met in order to justify military action (for a lot of reasons, moral, epistemic, and practical). And all that the anti-war movement needs to make a general case against these kinds of interventions is to show that the standard that needs to be met is high enough that governments intending to go to war generally don’t meet it. (And if that is their point, I think they are quite right.)

Patrick,

Just out of curiosity, if “Stalinists” leading the organizing of anti-war protests is the problem, why don’t good sensible liberals in the Democratic leadership quit crying about it and organize their own public demonstrations that they can show up to in good conscience? It’s not like we are talking about people without organizational resources to draw on here.

Geoff,

“Aside from Corn’s reporting that “Paul Donahue, a middle-aged fellow who works with the Thomas Merton Peace and Social Justice Center in Pittsburgh, shouted, ‘Stalinist!’” at a WWP-affiliated speaker at a rally several years ago, he nowhere offers anything resembling evidence for saying that the WWP consists of Stalinists; indeed, nowhere else does he even mention Stalin or Stalinism.”

This requires some digging into the complicated and sometimes rather silly history of sectarian Communist parties in the United States.

The Workers’ World Party is a dissident Communist sect that was founded under the leadership of Sam Marcy in 1959, when it formally split from the Socialist Workers’ Party, the leading Trotskyist organization in the U.S. at the time. For a few years before the formal break the Marcyites had been a dissident faction within the SWP. The split was the result of political turmoil within the Fourth International (due to the failure of World War II to produce global revolution as Trotsky had predicted); the Marcyites decided, with the postwar revolutions in China, North Korea, and Yugoslavia, and the creation of Communist governments in Eastern Europe, that global revolution was on anyway, and aligned themselves with the newly-existing Communist governments, especially in China (and later in Cuba). Since all of these governments except for Yugoslavia’s were Stalinist, that meant aligning themselves with Stalinist parties and Stalinist regimes as the leading edge of the global revolution; thus, while still professing to be Trotskyists in doctrine, they downplayed their opposition to Stalinism. They also came to endorse important tenets of Stalinism, such as the theory of national-state socialism (as opposed to the more strictly internationalist view held by the Trotskyists). The formal break with SWP was mainly caused by Marcy’s support for the Soviet invasion of Hungary (most Trotskyists condemned it as an imperialist assault on workers’ autonomy; the Marcy faction condemned the Hungarian councils and the SWP’s support for them as counterrevolutionary). Over time, WWP support for Trotsky and Trotskyism was even further downplayed (mostly in order to make alliances with Stalinist groups easier). Nevertheless, they never merged with official Stalinist organs (such as the Communist Party USA), and they continue to promote the works of Trotsky, as well as Stalin and Mao, in print. Their official label these days is just “Marxist-Leninist.”

So Corn and the rest are sort of right and sort of wrong when they describe WWP as “Stalinists.” What WWP really are is a rather insular and bizarre Stalinist-Trotskyist hybrid, with a substantial number of positions that are fixed by pure opportunism. In any case the standards of evidence they typically employ are so low that where they’re right, you might as well say they are right by accident. WWP can (sort of) be described as Stalinists, but the mere fact that they issued sycophantic praise for Kim Il Sung no more proves that they are Stalinists than “A Plea for Captain John Brown” proves that Thoreau was a Puritan.

In terms of origins and influences, the WWP are Communists, Marxist-Leninists of a sort, and combine Stalinist, Maoist, and Trotskyist influences. The most apt description for them, though, would probably be “freelance nutcases.”

Hope this helps.

Patrick,

I’ve re-read Leiter’s post and I now think your interpretation is more reasonable than when I quickly read things over this morning. I don’t know if it’s right—and I think that not considering clear alternative readings was a mistake on your part—but calling it a “wilfull misreading” was out of line on mine.

My bad.

That said, I’m a bit puzzled by your and zwichenzug’s discussion of the U.S. role in World War II. For example, when you say:

“Hell, FDR basically fought a low-key war of aggression against Germany for practically a year before Hitler declared war on the US. I mean, Hitler was absolutely right to complain that the US was bascially fighting against him without declaring it.”

Which you then follow by saying:

“I was merely pointing out that some wars of choice are justifiable. Some wars of aggression are justifiable. Some wars which involve the conquest of the sovereign territory of other nations are justifed. WW II is one of them from America’s standpoint.”

But if the U.S.’s role in World War II was morally justified (something that I don’t, incidentally, take to be nearly as clear as you do, in light of the actual conduct of the war), surely the reason that it was justified is that it was a defensive rather than aggressive war. Not in self-defense, prior to Pearl Harbor (and arguably never in self-defense in the European theater), but in defense of others against aggression. You may have an argument that this makes it a “war of choice” (thus a justified one, if justified) — since I don’t know what the hell “war of choice” means, I’d be glad to concede the point anyway. But it is certainly not an argument that it is a “war of aggression” (thus a justified one, if justified). Unless you intend to offer some pretty weird theory about why the U.S.’s role was justified, it seems that insofar as you give justifying reasons, you undermine the reasons for calling it a “war of aggression.”

zweichenzug,

“Very briefly on Afghanistan — if they nation of Afghanistan had attacked the U.S. then the case would be clear. The nation didn’t, so the case is muddy. I’m not claiming to be certain that such a war is unjustified.”

Do “nations” ever attack? If so, what constitutes an attack by a “nation”? (Does everyone have to attack? All at once, or one at a time?) If not, then does that make the case for all wars “muddy”? (I think that it does, but I don’t know whether you’d be willing to accept that conclusion.)

‘One of the things that Leiter likes to say is that Democrats are really pro-war because they only oppose the war on “strategic grounds (See number 3).” But I don’t know what this means. I think that “opposing only on strategic grounds” means that Democrats only oppose the war because “it won’t achieve the proposed objectives.” But seems like a perfectly valid reason to oppose a war.’

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be contrasting two reasons for opposing a policy: (1) because it’s unlikely to achieve the proposed ends (i.e., it’s foolish) or (2) because the proposed ends are themselves not worth achieving, at least not through the means proposed (i.e., it’s evil). And you seem further to suggest that Leiter is trashing the mandarins of the Democratic Party because they oppose the war only on grounds of type (1) rather than grounds of type (2).

But if that’s the right interpretation of what you’re saying, it seems like a wilfull misreading of Leiter’s point. When politicians are criticized for opposing policy X “only on strategic grounds,” this does not — as far as I can tell — typically mean that they’re being criticized for calling something impractical when it’s actually evil. The typical complaint is that their reasons for opposing a policy relate only to their own political career (here, as a matter of electioneering) rather than principled opposition to the policy (of either type (1) or type (2)). That certainly seems like the most plausible and charitable interpretation of what Leiter’s on about in the post that you link to.

Now, maybe Leiter is right about this and maybe he’s not. Maybe you’re right about the proper grounds to oppose the war being of type (1) rather than type (2) and maybe you’re not. But I don’t see that you and Leiter have so much as reached a disagreement yet on these points, since it doesn’t seem to me that your objections are responsive to the point he was making in the first place.

“Richard Posner: I don’t much agree with this guy, but his influence on American jurisprudence is hard to overestimate.”

So is Osama bin Laden’s influence on the Manhattan skyline, but I’m not about to give him my vote for a place among today’s top civic engineers…