> > >All wars are crimes against humanity.
>> >
>> >Ian
>>
>> Including the American Civil War, for instance? Slaves and free
>> blacks would have disagreed with you!
>===================
>
>The US' un-Civil War was not fought to free the slaves:
>
>"Congress tried to make the railroad surveys a scientific solution to
>what was essentially a political problem. The real issue was whether the
>North or South would be the terminus of the transcontinental railroad.
>Congress deadlocked [oh, metaphor!], and so public officials looked to
>scientists to consult nature for the best route. In charge of the
>organization of the expeditions was Jefferson Davis, then US secretary
>of war and within a decade to be president of the Confederacy. Davis,
>like most southerners, had already decided upon the best route - the
>32nd parallel route to San Diego- before the railroad expeditions even
>departed. He was willing to allow other routes to be surveyed, but he
>had decided in advance that none of them was likely to be feasible.
>Nature, Davis believed, favored the South." [Richard White, "It's Your
>Misfortune and None of My Own" 1991 Univ of Oklahoma Press, p. 125]
You mean the real issue _in the minds of some US public officials_ wasn't slavery. What of slaves and free blacks? What was the real issue _for them_? Whether "the North or South would be the terminus of the transcontinental railroad"? I don't think so. The Civil War ended chattel slavery in the USA (regardless of ulterior motives of the Northern white elite), and that's what makes it a just war for the Union.
> > People have the right to defend themselves, overthrow tyrannical
>> regimes under which they suffer, liberate their land from colonial
>> occupation, and so on, but they don't have the right to wage war for
>> conquest, colonization, retaliation, etc. That's a question of ends.
>==================
>
>All contestable concepts no? See how quickly you express the legitimacy
>of the right to defend when if there is no right to inuagurate agression
>how can there be a right to defend? How many times have folks on this
>list pointed out the unavoidable circularity of rights discourse? When
>have the aggressors ever 'fessed up to claiming they were inaugurating
>aggression pure and simple? If there is no right of aggression, and I
>think we both agree there isn't, how can there be any just wars?
American Indians who attacked colonial settlers had a just cause. Slaves who rose up in revolts and the Haitian revolution had a just cause. The Union (in the American Civil War) had a just cause. Jews who fought in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had a just cause. Partisans who resisted fascist occupiers had a just cause. Chinese, Korean, and other communists who fought against Japan had a just cause. Vietnamese communists who struggled against France, Japan, USA, etc. had a just cause. Palestinians who resist Israeli occupiers have a just cause. And so on, and so forth.
I'm sure most American colonial settlers didn't think that American Indian attacks on them were justified; nor did slave owners attacked by slaves; nor fascists; nor French, Japanese, US, and other imperialists; nor Israeli power elite and settlers; etc. So what?
There are cases where it's not clear which side, if any, had a just cause, but there are others (such as the American Civil War) over which there shouldn't be any doubt about which side had a just cause among people who are not on the far right. The Union had a just cause (and they won as well) -- except in the minds of racists who think that the Confederacy had a noble lost cause.
>BTW, by
>conservative estimates there are some 25 million people currently living
>in slavery; who should be attacked and who should authorize the attacks?
25 million slaves today? Slaves _in the same sense_ that blacks under chattel slavery were (slaves who have little hope of manumission and whose children become slaves by virtue of being born of slave mothers)? Where? Whose estimate?
In my opinion, slaves (whether they are under chattel slavery or not) have a just cause to fight against slave owners and overseers, including the right to engage in armed struggles against them.
> > Now, a question of means. Some means are justifiable; others are
>> not. For instance, rape, torture, murders and mistreatments of POWs,
>> attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, etc. are war
>> crimes, even if they are committed by those who are fighting for an
>> otherwise just cause (e.g., national liberation from colonial
> > occupation).
>
>Ah, the torch of Platonism burns deep in the belly. If there were an
>intelligible transcendental realm of right and wrong with regards to
>behavior in war there'd be no desire for aggression, conquest and the
>like. Justifiability is also an essentially contestable concept and
>those who engage in the behaviors you condemn would surely assert you
>were begging the question[s]. To take one example how can there be a
>right to kill a combatant in war, but not torture them? Because a bunch
>of lawyers said so?
The majority of people today find it more abhorrent to be tortured than to be simply killed. Maybe you are an exception, and you'd rather be tortured than simply killed. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>