>>> "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman at yale.edu> 05/11/99 07:29PM >>>
Seth Ackerman- "Oh my God"
Carl Remick- "Terrorism cannot be countenanced under any circumstances"
Henry Liu- "One would think that everyone with the education and intelligence to participate on lists such as lbo/pen-l would understand the moral difference between war and murder."
Charles Brown- "Aren't you in law school?" -------------------------------------------
There is an intellectual conservatism to the anti-bombing position that is really captured in all these calls to authority: "God", "education and intelligence" and "law school", however seriously meant.
Charles: International law has a left progressive position relative to yours on this issue. Your support of imperialism is the conservative position in the war. THE "autoritarians" in this dispute are the U.S. and NATO as they represent the transnational ruling class.
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My frustration in these discussions is that basic arguments I make are distorted, not because I think the anti-bombers are of bad faith, but because there is a resistance to any argument that does not follow traditional left orthodoxy. The lack of understanding (or misrepresentation) of the argument is just the sign of that intellectual conservatism.
Charles: You have an illusion that your position advances beyond long term left position of opposing capitalism and imperialism. The radicalism, not conservativism of that classical left position has not been surpassed, so it is you who are the left conservative who has illusorily transcended the classical left position.
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I gave a whole set of justifications for terrorism, which the Left has used in defending the PLO, the IRA and a whole host of other anti-colonialist groups over the years. Because they are applied on behalf of NATO (I admit an unorthodox intellectual move), suddenly all the bourgeois defenses of legal authority and morality spring to life.
Charles: It is not just unorthodox. It is right wing. The legal authority I am applying is not bourgeois, but that that has been influenced by the socialist naitons and nationally liberated colonies of the last 50 years, in struggles in UN jurisprudence etc. You can't erase all of that struggle and its fruits in the UN covenants and conventions. The U.S. delayed signing and modified their signings because in general this body of law is more progressive than U.S. domestic or BOURGEOIS law.
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Carl worries I am justifying mass murder. Since I specifically noted that the main justification for terror was to prevent the GREATER number of deaths that military action would entail, that seems a direct refusal to engage the argument.
I noted that it is the institutionalization of war and the ability of civilians to send soldiers off to war that often leads to mass murder and death. Henry then responded not by engaging the argument, but just restating the point I was questioning: "Civilians and hospitals are outside the institutional limits of war and the destruction of hospitals and killing of patients, regardless of their personal views, are barbaric acts of murder."
I asked why killing a soldier, drafted against his will, was less murder than killing a civilian who had voted to send that soldier off to war. Saying one is "barbaric" is an orthodox opinion, but seems wrong to me. Both look like murder to me. And the issue is whether isolating civilians from the carnage of death only encourages war. It is not original with me to argue that when war is institutionalized and made less horrific for the general populace, the result is often a longer, bloodier war.
This preference for killing soldiers over civilians seems a strange preference for socialists. On average, soldiers are more working class than the population as a whole. The whole ban on killing civilians, like the traditional war rule against assassinating enemy leadership, looks like a mutual class protection scheme among the elite. The elite's children will not go off to war as soldiers and the elite themselves are protected, since they are blameless civilians who are untouchable by the "laws" of war. So the costs of war are borne only by working class soldiers, making war safe for the elite on both sides of the conflict.
As the Church Lady would say, "How convenient."
Charles: You don't respond to the charges under the PROGRESSIVE international law standards. Nor do you articulate any new international law standards for your phantom,post-left ,legal progressivism
Charles Brown