-----Original Message-----
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>Nathan, this is the same trick that Camille Paglia and Hilton Kramer have
>deployed with depressing frequency and success: spinning a conventional
>opinion as somehow freshly transgressive and counterhegemonic. .. If
calling >imperialist war a bad thing makes me conservative and stuck in some
old >orthodoxy, so be it.
Again ignoring the point, since the debate on this issue was not the justice of the war itself but of the separate point on the morality of killing civilians versus soldiers, which a number of other people were holding as evil on the universal basis of morality or international law. I had specifically bracketed the issue of the justice of ends in the war (which we have debated endelessly) to have a debate on means.
Terrorism AS A MEANS has been condemned against both the PLO and the US. Sometimes the ends have been used to justify such means on behalf of either side (or any number of other terrorist actors), but this was a debate about whether and where terrorist means are appropriate.
The argument I made, to repeat, was that terrorism is justified when FEWER people are killed because of the user of terror than would have been killed through normal military means.
A secondary point was that killing soldiers is not more morally justified than killing civilians in certain cases.
A third point was that the bias towards killing soldiers is a piece of international law that serves not justice but the interests of elites that can engage in warfare while largely avoiding endangering themselves or their family.
None of these arguments hinge on whether the specific war in the Balkans is moral or not, although some have used the supposed immorality of means to attack the morality of ends in the war.
And yes, there are orthodoxies at all points on the spectrum.
--Nathan Newman