Carrol wrote:
>The anti-war slogans are trite only in the same sense as is e=mc*2.
>And what is totally irrational is calling anti-war slogans trite. It
>is calling them trite, not in using them, that banality lies. If you
>jump in the water you will get wet. Trite? Perhaps. Also true. Of
>course it is beneath W., apparently, to specify _which_ anti-war
>slogans he considers trite. Why should superior beings like him
>bother to explain themselves.
There is at least one element in common anti-war rhetoric that may be justly characterized as trite: the idea that it is wrong to kill "innocent civilians." Firstly, because those who use the term "innocent civilians" seldom provide a clear and consistent definition of who counts as "innocent" or "civilian," to say nothing of the definition of "innocent civilian." Secondly, because the idea that it is wrong to kill "innocent civilians" implicitly suggests the idea that it is right to kill "guilty civilians" as well as all combatants. Thirdly, in the most prevalent forms of conflicts in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries -- state and non-state terrors and guerrilla insurgencies and state counter-insurgencies -- the idea that it is wrong to kill "innocent civilians" is only a feeble protest, as there exists no clear front line in such a conflict and those who order killings as well as those who commit them of course believe that most of the civilians who are killed are not "innocent."
Carrol wrote:
>The real puzzle is why anyone should think there is any difficulty
>at all in arriving at a judgment of Dresden.
That is because the bombings of Dresden were committed by states, rather than non-state actors; because the states in question are perceived to be on the good side in a just war; and because the states in question actually won the war. None of the reasons withstands close philosophical scrutiny, though, and one may make a very good case that state terrorism is morally worse than non-state terrorism, as, for instance, Igor Primoratz (cf. <http://www.philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/cappe/staffandvisitors/primoratz.php>) does below:
<blockquote>4. State Terrorism Is Morally Worse than Non-State Terrorism
All terrorism is prima facie extremely morally wrong. But not everything that is extremely morally wrong is wrong in the same degree. State terrorism can be said to be morally worse than terrorism by non-state agencies for at least four reasons.
(1) Although unwilling to extend the scope of his discussion of terrorism to include state terrorism, Walter Laqueur remarks that "acts of terror carried out by police states and tyrannical governments, in general, have been responsible for a thousand times more victims and more misery than all actions of individual terrorism taken together."9 He could also have mentioned terrorism employed by democracies (mostly, but not exclusively, in wartime), although that would not have affected the striking asymmetry very much. Now this asymmetry is not just another statistical fact; it follows from the nature of the state and the amount and variety of resources that even a small state has at its disposal. No matter how much non-state terrorists manage to enrich their equipment and improve their organization, planning, and methods of action, they stand no chance of ever significantly changing the score. No insurgent, no matter how well funded, organized, determined, and experienced in the methods of terrorism, can hope to come close to the killing, maiming, and overall destruction on the scale the RAF and US Air Force visited on German and Japanese cities in World War II, or to the psychological devastation and subsequent physical liquidation of millions in Soviet and Nazi camps.
The terrorist attacks in the US carried out on September 11 were in some respects rather unlike what we had come to expect from non-state terrorism. The number of victims, in particular, was unprecedented. Mostly because of that, I suspect, the media have highlighted these attacks as "the worst case of terrorism ever." So have quite a few public intellectuals. Thus Salman Rushdie, in his monthly column in the Melbourne daily The Age, wrote of "the most devastating terrorist attack in history."10 The number of people killed, believed to be approaching seven thousand at the time, was indeed staggering. Yet "the worst case of terrorism ever" mantra is but another instance of the tendency of the media to equate terrorism with non-state terrorism. When we discard the assumption that only insurgents engage in terrorism -- as I submit we should -- the overall picture changes significantly. Let me give just one example from the Allies' terror bombing campaign against Germany. In the night of July 27, 1943, the RAF carried out the second of its four raids on Hamburg, known as the "Firestorm Raid." In the morning, when both the attack itself and the gigantic firestorm it had created were over, some forty thousand civilians were dead.11
(2) In one way or another, state terrorism is bound to be compounded by secrecy, deception, and hypocrisy. When involved in terrorism -- whether perpetrated by its own agencies or by proxy -- a state will be acting clandestinely, disclaiming any involvement, and declaring its adherence to values and principles that rule it out. Or, if it is impractical and perhaps even counterproductive to deny involvement, it will do its best to present its actions to at least some audiences in a different light: as legitimate acts of war, or acts done in defense of state security. It will normally be able to do that without much difficulty, given the tendencies of common usage mentioned in Section 1 above.
Those engaging in non-state terrorism, on the other hand, need not be secretive, need not deceive the public about their involvement in terrorism (except, of course, at the operational level), and need not hypocritically proclaim their allegiance to moral principles that prohibit it. Some of them are amoralists, possibly of the sort exemplified by the notorious declaration of the nineteenth-century anarchist writer Laurent Tailhade: "What do the victims matter if the gesture is beautiful!" Others exhibit what Aurel Kolnai has called "overlain conscience":12 conscience completely subjected to a non-moral absolute (the Leader, the Party, the Nation), which will permit and indeed enjoin all manner of actions incompatible with mainstream moral views, including terrorism. Still others adhere to some version of consequentialist moral theory, which will readily justify terrorism under appropriate circumstances.13 In none of these cases will there be a need for deception and hypocrisy concerning the performance of specific terrorist acts or the adoption of policies of terrorism.
(3) Virtually all actions that constitute terrorism are prohibited by one or another of the various international human rights declarations or conventions and agreements that make up the laws and customs of war. The latter provide for immunity of civilians in armed conflict and thus prohibit terrorism by belligerent sides. Most, if not all, remaining types of terrorism -- terrorism in wartime perpetrated by groups not recognized as belligerent parties, and terrorism in time of peace perpetrated by anyone at all -- are covered by declarations of human rights. Now those engaging in non-state terrorism are not signatories to these declarations and conventions, while virtually all states today are signatories to most if not all of them. Therefore, when a state is involved in terrorism, it acts in breach of its own solemn international commitments. This particular charge cannot be brought against those resorting to non-state terrorism.
(4) Non-state terrorism is often said to be justified, or at least that its wrongness is mitigated, by the argument of no alternative. In a case where, for instance, a people is subjected to foreign rule with the usual attendant evils of oppression, humiliation, and exploitation, which is utterly unyielding and deploys overwhelming power, a liberation movement may claim that the only effective method of struggle at its disposal is terrorism. To refrain from using terrorism in such circumstances would be tantamount to giving up the prospect of liberation altogether. Now this argument is often met with criticism. First, since terrorism is extremely morally wrong, the evils of foreign rule, grave as they may be, may not be enough to justify, or even mitigate, resort to it. After all, its victims would by definition be innocent people, rather than those responsible for these evils. Second, one can hardly ever be confident that terrorism will indeed achieve the aims adduced as its justification or mitigation. What people has ever succeeded in liberating itself by terrorism?
These objections are weighty, and may be enough to dispose of most attempts at justifying particular cases and policies of terrorism; but they do not show that the "No alternative" argument will never work. Persecution and oppression of an ethnic, racial, or religious group can reach such an extreme point that even terrorism may properly be considered. And the question of its efficiency, being an empirical one, cannot be settled once and for all. So it is possible that a liberation movement should be facing such circumstances where resort to terrorism is indeed the only feasible alternative to the continuation of persecution and oppression so extreme as to amount to an intolerable moral disaster. In such a situation, the "No alternative" argument would provide moral justification for terrorism, or at least somewhat mitigate our moral condemnation of its use. On the other hand, it seems virtually impossible that a state should find itself in such circumstances where it has no alternative to resorting to terrorism.
The only counterexample that comes to mind is the terror bombing campaign of the RAF against the civilian population of Germany in World War II, inasmuch as it can be seen as a case of "supreme emergency" allowing one to set aside even an extremely grave moral prohibition in order to prevent an imminent moral catastrophe.14 Yet even this example is of a very limited value. The supreme emergency argument may have been valid only during the first year of the campaign: in 1942, the victory of Nazi Germany in Europe -- a major moral disaster by any standard -- did appear imminent. However, after German defeats at El Alamein (November 6, 1942) and at Stalingrad (February 2, 1943), that was clearly no longer the case. But the campaign went on almost to the very end of the war. As Michael Walzer says, "the truth is that the supreme emergency passed long before the British bombing reached its crescendo. The greater number by far of the German civilians killed by terror bombing were killed without moral (and probably also without military) reason."15 (Igor Primoratz, "State Terrorism and Counterterrorism," Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics Working Paper Number 2002/3, <http://www.cappe.edu.au/PDF%20Files/Primoratz1.pdf>)</blockquote> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>