Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Ethics Page 7 of 8

How to Be Liked or Even Loved by Blue Collar and Service Workers

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On May 27, 2015

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Be friendly, interested, and acknowledge their existence.

You will be amazed how soon they think you’re a wonderful person.

What I find amazing is how little it takes: make eye contact, smile, ask a question or two. They’re in a near complete drought for people who treat them with even a smidgen of kindness, respect, and interest.

If you need a self-interested angle: Once you’ve established this relationship (shallow as it is), you will be astounded at what they will be willing to do for you, often without you even asking.

File this post in “absolutely obvious things most people don’t do.”

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Noam Chomsky Owns Sam Harris and Indicts Bill Clinton

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On May 2, 2015

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Picture of Noam Chomsky

Picture of Noam Chomsky

Noam Chomsky had a private email session with Sam Harris about Clinton’s bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory which Clinton allegedly believed was also manufacturing a nerve agent. I really recommend reading the entire exchange, which is hilarious and horrifying on multiple levels. First, because Harris just doesn’t get that Chomsky is smashing him flat and asks for permission to publish it. Second, because the sort of ethical reasoning Chomsky uses is so alien to so many people in the world (and, sadly, especially to Americans).

To put it simply, Clinton’s destruction of that factory meant that many people didn’t get the drugs they needed to survive. So they died. The number of people who died was much larger than the number of people who died in 9/11. Harris just doesn’t seem to get it, he thinks “intent” matters more and that Clinton deserves the benefit of the doubt. Chomsky points out that any intelligent person would have predicted the effects of bombing that factory and Clinton did it anyway.

If he did it without malice, well, that means he felt nothing even though he had to know he was killing all those people. Feeling nothing about mass murder–and that’s what it was–is arguably worse than murdering someone you acknowledge as human, as having worth.

(There is also a a brief discussion of the Iraq sanctions of the 1990s, which were a terrible crime, as well.)

The point I want to emphasize is this: If you knowingly do something which a reasonable person knows will lead to large numbers of deaths, you are on the hook for those deaths. It may be the “least worst option” in some cases (though not, I think, in either of these cases), but you are still responsible.

A reasonable man (and Clinton is a brilliant man, famed for staying up all night doing research, right down to reading all the appendices and footnotes, unlike many executives), is responsible for the effects of his actions that a reasonable man forsee.

This is Ethics 101—it is also Democracy 101. If you cannot understand this, you cannot hold your legislators and executives responsible.

Chomsky also dismisses questions of motives as irrelevant; virtually everyone says they have great motives, including the Japanese during their mid-20th century wars. At the end of the day, you can only judge with reasonable expectations and by results. Everything else is BS.

I will finally note something a lot of people don’t seem to understand, because they have been exposed more to propaganda about Chomsky rather than his own writings or his seminal work in Linguistics and Cognitive Science. Like him or hate him, Chomsky is one of the great geniuses of the 20th century. Even at age 86 and slowing down, getting into the intellectual ring with him is like trying to bear hug a grizzly. It is unlikely to end well for you

It sure didn’t for Sam Harris.

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Is Violence Ever Justified? Does Violence Ever Solve Anything?

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On April 28, 2015

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Painting: Washington Crossing the Delaware

Painting: Washington Crossing the Delaware

I notice a fair number of sweet, well-meaning people saying “violence is never justified.”

This is a position I have a lot of respect for, though it’s not my position. The hard-core pacifist, who always opposes violence, is a person of great bravery.

But to say NEVER is a strong statement. In the US, if you are saying “violence is never justified” with respect to the Baltimore riots, for example, you must also oppose all the wars and killing the US is involved in.

In practical terms, that must mean that you believe that every politician who voted for war is more unethical than any rioter. You must believe that George W. Bush and Barack Obama are far fouler individuals than any rioter.

Ethical outrage must be proportionate to the violence and the violence in Baltimore is nothing compared to the scale of the Iraq War, or Afghanistan, or drone murders. Nor is it anything compared to the scale of police violence against Americans, especially African-Americans.

NEVER is a big word.

What most people really mean is that they condemn non-state sanctioned violence, except sometimes, like, say, in the American Revolution, or the Maidan protests.

In fact, they approve of some violence and not of other violence. Most such people, were you to dig down hard enough, are hypocrites, but some aren’t, even if one disagrees with them. If you were to allow the USSR the right to crush revolutions along with the US, and condemn the American revolution, you wouldn’t be a hypocrite, just not a very nice person.

Trying to argue about popular will and/or democracy is a slippery road, mind. For example, the numbers on the American revolution with which I’m familiar don’t show the majority of the population being for leaving British rule. Maidan overthrew a democratically elected government in the Ukraine and the French revolution was made by the Paris mob, while most people living in rural areas of France (the vast majority of the population) would have preferred to keep the Ancien Regime.

Relatedly, violence often does solve problems. The Native Americans cleansed from North America were “problems” to the settlers, and violence dealt with that problem just fine. Fascist Germany was a problem to most non-German countries, Jews, Gypsies, Socialists, Gays, and many others and violence solved that problem. Carthage was a problem to Republican Rome and violence solved that problem.

And riots, rather better organized than the Baltimore ones, granted, solved the Parisian problem with the old Regime, while the Terror, terrible as it was, did make sure that there was to be no going back–even if France was to alternate between Republics and Empires for some time.

Violence often solves problems and it often does so rather permanently.

Here is what history actually teaches us about violence: People who are better at violence than those they fight get the spoils and often keep them for a long time. You do know that the Angles and Saxons invaded Britain, yes? Then the Normans? Those people did very well out of killing the locals and wiped them almost entirely from the most fertile parts of what is today England.

Europeans conquered most of the world and Europeans today (and their descendants) are powerful and relatively rich compared to almost everyone they conquered. Many economic historians believe that imperialism and colonialism were required for the industrial revolution to really take off; and definitely for capitalism to find sufficient markets. Violence worked very nicely for Europe and especially for England and the United States.

Of course, history marches on, and eventually everyone will get their turn at the curb, their face stomped on. But history can take a long time, and multiple generations can enjoy the fruits of violence–theirs or their ancestors. Violence only doesn’t solve anything in the sense that nothing solves anything—extend history enough in any direction and all peoples eventually have a really bad day (or really bad hundreds of years or millennia). Heck, eventually, all species will go extinct.

I don’t know if violence is ever justified. But I do know that violence often does “solve” problems and I do know that peoples who insist on being entirely non-violent or bad at violence eventually discover that everything they have they hold at the sufferance of those who are good at violence.

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Circles of Belonging

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On March 23, 2015

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Fractals and CirclesI’ve recently been reading about some Hollywood folks who are very concerned with how women are treated.  One of them, the director Lexi Alexander, tweeted the following:

A crew guy just said that he follows me on Twitter & wanted to thank me because he has 2 daughters. Will it always take daughters to care?

This is the fundamental problem suggested by my article on ethics vs. morals, and discussed by more philosopher and social scientists than one could possibly list. What does it take to care about people we don’t and will never know?

I care about how women are treated because they’re humans.  Why wouldn’t I care?

But why stop there? The murder of dolphins and whales, who are sentient, offends me greatly as well. Why prioritize human intelligence?

Where does the circle of belonging, of inclusion, stop?  Where do we say “That person’s problems are not my problem?”

It’s perfectly natural to care about our families, our loved ones, and especially our children, more than we care for others.  We are responsible to them to an extent we aren’t responsible to someone who lives half the world away—responsible for feeding them, housing them, clothing them, and indeed providing love to them, a need that virtually all sentient creatures have. (Remove whales or dolphins from their mothers and they are profoundly effected; while elephants clearly mourn their dead.)

At the same time, to overly prioritize those we know is to become monsters.  To say “my child is worth a hundred other children’s lives” is to have crossed over the abyss and descended into hell. The hells created by those in the “I’ve got mine, screw you, Mack” crowd are legion.

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The history of human civilization can be read as expanded circles of belonging—from bands (not families, bands) to tribes, to kingdoms and empires and on to nations.  The national impulse, responsible for so much evil, also saw the rise of benefits like pensions and unemployment insurance and universal healthcare.  Those who belonged to my nation deserved such things.  They were “one of us.”

For the longest time much of this was done through religion: The Zeus cult allowed those who belonged to it to not be strangers. People who belonged to the cult, even if of different polis or tribe, could trade together, because they were members of the same cult. If they did not treat each other properly, they believed Zeus would punish them.

Powerful, self-identifying groups of this nature, from followers of Confucius to Christians, from secular humanists to enlightenment thinkers, have brought people together and forged bonds of trust, duty, and belonging that crossed barriers of tribal, local, or even other religious circles.  The humanist claims a duty to all of humanity, believing that everyone has certain rights, including to food, shelter and fair law (justice).

There are those who go further, giving rights to non-human sentients and even animals that are traditionally our food animals.

One can make a full ethical case for all of this, but one can also make a pragmatic argument. Healthy, happy people are better to live around. Economic cripples don’t contribute to civic or economic life nearly as much as they could; the poverty of others, whether material, spiritual, or ethical impoverishes me, because I lack whatever they could have given to the world, were they able.

The same is true of the larger web of life. As animals and plants die, what they contributed to the ecosphere is lost and that loss diminishes the world in ways that will effect me, whether through loss of seafood, loss of oxygen, loss of key nutrients, or loss of potential scientific discoveries, now impossible. Every dead species is lost genetic code, code which may have held secrets to make us much richer: medicines, chemicals, genetic modifications, and so on.  We are killing the web of life which supports us and killing the wealth that nature has created for us.

The pragmatic argument is important, but pragmatics alone are never enough: Without an ethical argument, many people will violate the norms as soon as it is convenient to them; while without the pragmatic argument others will violate the norm because it makes no sense to them. (Why not kill if it’s in my interest?  Sure as heck the people who lead us have no qualms about doing so.)

To manage an ecosphere, and to manage a world full of sentients, requires valuing them intrinsically, as well as functionally—both for what they do for us and for themselves, irrespective of their utilitarian value. Until we create an ethics which does this, not only will we be far less happy and prosperous than we could be, but we will lurch from ecological disaster to ecological disaster.

The creation of an ethics of inclusion, a broad circle including all life and much that is not alive, is one of the key tasks before us.

How We Can Change Our Destiny As A Society

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On March 5, 2015

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Globe on FireI have written in the past of how the nature of everyday life creates the character of commoners and elites.  What we do, the habits we lay down, is our character.

Now our everyday life is created by our technology, where we live (geography), and our culture—how we choose to use our technology and interact with our environment.

A Russian in one of Lee Blessing’s plays once said “History is Geography Over Time.”  This is a near pure form of 19th century romantic nationalism.

Assume that humans are basically the same.  Go to different countries, or even different locales within a large country.  Notice that they are different from other people in ways which are similar—southerners have characteristics in common, bedouin have characteristics in common, Italians have characteristics in common, but within Italy where they come from also changes their character.

This is a common-sense observation, and before the modern era it was even more true: people were very different depending on where they lived.

Why?

Well, the simplest explanation is geography: to live in the tropics is to live a different type of life than to live in cold climes.  To live a rain forest is a different type of life than to live in a desert.

This is a hard argument for rich moderns to entirely understand: with our air conditioning and heating: with food delivered from all over the world to our supermarkets; with our travel being almost entirely inside mobile boxes; with almost everyone now wearing western style clothes; with every office looking more or less alike and everyone using the same few word-processing programs;, we can drop half the world away and feel somewhat at home in many of the essentials.  A certain type of life has been exported to as much of the world as can afford it, and most of the rest of the world, familiar with western media, aspires to that life.

But it was not always thus.  To live in Bengal was to live a vastly different life than to live in London. Heck, to live in northern Scotland was to live vastly different from living in London.  To live in the country vastly different from living in a city, but to live in Canton was massively different than in Tenochtitlán (one of the largest cities of its day.)  Being a rice farmer in southern China was much different from being an Iroqois farmer in the Great Lakes area.

What you did, each day, was very different.  Much of this difference was based on the simple requirements of making a living from that type of land.  Much of the rest was the difference in technology: the tools you had available to work with.  Some would include social organization in that toolkit, but let’s spin that off to culture.

Culture: the catch-all for the rest of it.  But how does culture arise?  Given the same pre-modern technology, and dropped on the Pacific Northwest or into Great Plains or into the Russian Taiga, you will live differently.  Start off with people with the exact same culture, give it a few generations and you will be different people, because you will have grown up doing different things.  And your technology will have changed, because what works best in each of those place is different.

Those differing lives become character, character is reified into culture, and soon you have tradition.

(And all this is before discussing the role of geography on such things as warfare, access to key resources like iron and copper, the role of geography in encouraging or discouraging diseases, natural trade routes, the difference between ocean and land transport, and so on.)

So, Geography is a big deal. It’s a big deal even today: Saudi Arabia cannot be understood without understanding its geography, including the (happy?) coincidence of vast oil reserves.  Canada’s population clusters along the southern border, with spars out into areas with resources worth exploiting.  Siberia is vast—and underpopulated, for good reasons based on its soil, climate and resources.

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But it’s also true because of the way cultural drift works: culture is not a completely dependent variable.  Drop different people with different cultures into the same approximate geography and they will develop differently: there will be clear similarities (intensive rice agriculture in multiple SE Asian societies), yet the cultures will not be identical.

So, even in the modern world, with our ability to denature the environment, there are geographical effects: but there are also the more than residual effects of culture developed in the pre-modern era.  These all swirl about to create our daily lives, and that forms the character of the commons, that point about which, despite our individuality, we coalesce.  That mass-character determines how we react to the events of our lives: to how active or passive we are, what we’ll fight for, and how we’ll fight.  Change is constrained and channeled by character, by who we are.

Character is destiny, both personally and en-masse.

Does that means some warped form of Panglossianism? Our character is our destiny, and we cannot escape our destiny because our character is formed by forces beyond our control (usually when we are children, and under the control of others similarly formed)?

I would suggest this is not the case.  Oh, it’s hard to change character and destiny, but it can be done, especially for the future.  We need to decide what destiny we prefer, what character is required and work to change our every day lives to create that character.

This is possible.  Huge swathes of the population despise their own characters: guilt and regret and self-contempt are part of humanity as much as smug self-regard.  We look on these things ill, but a better way to look on them is as fuel for change: if we do not like who we are, we can change.  And we can change as societies. If we don’t want to live in vastly unequal societies, we can change that: it has been done before. If we want to live in a way that doesn’t destroy the environment, we can do that.  And if want to live in actually free societies (i.e. not police and surveillance states), we can do that as well.

Within the matrix of what is made possible by technology and geography are vast social universes.  What is required to seize them is not despair at how we are conditioned by our lives, but an understanding that that conditioning can work for us as much as against us.

In Light of Charlie Hebdo, are some lives worth more than others?

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On January 8, 2015

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One of the most important ethical questions is what the value of life is.  Are all lives equal, or are some lives worth more?

This seems like an airy-fairy question, but it’s not.  It under-girds how we dole out punishments for crime, how we spend money on healthcare and public services and when and how we go to war.  It is at the heart of the NYPD turning their back on New York’s mayor and in their reaction to the killing of two police officers.

And it is at the heart of our societies reaction to the murders at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

If you haven’t seen any of the Charlie cartoons in question, take a moment to do so.  Or see this cover, if you’re Christian. 

What Charlie was doing was clearly political commentary.  It was also clearly intended to be offensive.

As a result three young Muslims killed twelve people.  And we are having a collective freakout over it.

I note that during the 90s hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died, and we did not freak out this much.

More people die in car accidents, electrocution or by falling from ladders than die due to “terrorism” in Western nations.  Certainly more people die of the flu.  Police kill far far more Americans than are killed by terrorists.  (Though French policemen are far less trigger happy.)  The French led invasion of Libya killed many, and the deaths are ongoing, deaths which quite likely would not have occurred without that invasion.  In Syria the insurrection against Assad led to far more deaths than would have occurred otherwise, and that insurrection was supported materially by many Western nations.

9/11 was a huge tragedy, but the western blockade of Iraq in the 90s had killed far, far more people without anyone in the West getting nearly as worked up over it.

Some lives are clearly worth more than others.  Our lives, the lives of those we identify with are worth more than their lives, the lives of those we don’t identify with.

So one American life is worth, what, fifty Iraqi lives?  A hundred.  What’s the metric?

To the police, and most Americans, a police life is worth more than a civilian life.  Certainly a police life is worth more than an African-American’s life.  And I think it’s clear that to most whites a white life is worth more than a black one.

We are intensely tribal, and we care far more about the deaths of people “like us” than the deaths of people “not like us.”

So, in part, the deaths of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists and other workers cause so much outrage because they were white and European.

We spend our time killing brown people and black people and Muslims in large numbers, using paramilitary weapons domestically, and military weapons and economic warfare internationally, killing far more of them than us, then act surprised when, deeply offended, they strike back.  (Yes, yes, this was a symbolic target and they really should have killed French politicians or military, but it’s not like we are discriminate (don’t even pretend we are.))  Somehow our outrage is valid, but we don’t grant them the right to theirs, including their vengeance.  We attacked Afghanistan and Iraq for 9/11, but bin Laden explicitly said that he attacked the US because of American killings of Muslims, including all those dead Iraqi children.

His vengeance is evil.  (It is, actually.)  Ours, not so much apparently.

So let us be clear “our lives are worth more than theirs”.  A lot more.

If you die a “wrongful death”, and the time comes for monetary compensation, how much your relatives receive will be based on what your income was.  The more you made made, the more your relatives have lost in monetary terms, and they will receive more.

People who earn more, are worth more to us, in hard monetary terms.  The life of a minimum wage worker just isn’t as big a deal as the death of someone who makes a lot of money.  This is based on our actions, not our words.

That doesn’t have anything to do with the Charlie dead, they earned virtually nothing.  Apparently the French didn’t feel like paying for the sort of satire they engaged in.  Nonetheless, the lives of those who make more money are worth more to us.

In the old days there used to be the idea of “woman and children first” — that their lives were worth more than male lives.  That may have been honored more in the breach, as with the Titanic, but one can also find occasions where captains of ships did insist that women and children went on the lifeboats first.

We see children as innocent, and we calculate that they lose more years than adults, so we value their lives more highly.  And, perhaps, it also has to do with a parental instinct which most of us have.  As for women, the biological “realists” would claim that those who can create new humans are more valuable, but whatever the reason most societies hate the idea of them being killed in war or raped far more than they dislike the idea of either of those fates happening to men.

Many feminists would argue that there are many ways we show that we value women’s lives less than mens—we certainly pay them less and for most of history we gave them less rights.

But tribalism trumps the women and children exception.  Half a million dead Iraqi children speak loud and clear on this.

Our children are precious and worth anything.  Their children.  Whatever.

Is the value of someone’s life based on what they do?  Or what they were doing?  We would certainly feel more outraged at the death of a search and rescue worker than a gangster.  Large parts of our society value police lives over civilian lives, and certainly our legal system, which almost never tries police for killing civilians does.

The Charlie Hebdo victims were engaged in “free speech”.  Satire.  They were mocking those who values they disagreed with, and doing so in a way intended to offend them as much as possible.  (Take a look at those cartoons and try and argue otherwise.)

We claim to value free speech greatly, and since the Charlie victims were engaged in mocking people who didn’t appreciate it, and since that’s “a fundamental value of Western society” we class their deaths and more tragic than those of Iraqi children who died due to lack of medicine they would have had if the West hadn’t been sanctioning and blockading their country.

One might, however, question our commitment to freedom of speech. Oh, the French themselves are pretty good on free speech these days, but Americans with their Free Speech zones and punitive whistleblower prosecutions; the British with their draconian libel law, Official Secrets Act and anti-terrorism legislation; and Australians with their obscene internet censorship laws (to highlight just a few) seem hardly to be icons of “free speech”.

So, are some lives worth more depending on what people are doing?  To be sure.  But, the French themselves aside, perhaps what the Charlie writers were doing that makes them martyrs wasn’t just “free speech” but the target of their free speech, some of whose members responded violently to the insults: Ilsam.  And that isn’t “free speech”, it is “Us vs. Them.”

And, as wonderful as France is on free speech these days, one remembers the Evo Morales incident, when France denied the Bolivian President’s plane right of way because of suspicion that Edward Snowden might be on board, so that the plane was forced down in Austria in an attempt to apprehend the famous whistleblower.

Some free speech is more important than others.  Cartoons mocking Islam and Christianity are far more important to protect than a man who has revealed wholesale spying on the citizens of
Western nations.

But perhaps it is more simple, Snowden was only going to be locked up in a maximum security American prison after a trial whose result we all know, in effective isolation, till that drove him insane.  The Charlie victims were killed.

And that leads to the final category: are some deaths worse just because of how they happen?  Is being beheaded worse than dying in a car accident? Is being shot by terrorists worse than being shot by police?  Is death from starvation worse than—oh why bother.

Yes, some deaths are clearly worse than others.  I’d rather be shot than tortured to death, or die of starvation.  But really what we mean are “deaths out of their time” or perhaps “deaths by violence”.  The Charlie victims weren’t “due” to die yet.  But then, neither were those Iraqi children, or all the Irakis who died of being shot in a war based lies (no WMD, no ties to 9/11).

But many deaths are preventable: easily preventable, and we fail to do so.  Effective public transportation in the US, reducing the use of cars, would prevent a lot of deaths. But Americans like cars, or something, and so those deaths are considered acceptable.  More effective restrictions on guns meant for killing people (as opposed to hunting rifles, say) and on ammunition would save a lot of American lives, but many Americans value their guns highly and think the deaths are a worthwhile price to pay.

All of this has been about what lives we, demonstrably, value more than others.  It hasn’t been about what lives we should value more.

Perhaps the answer is simple.  All lives have equal value, and in the event we are forced to choose between lives in a situation which doesn’t involve self-defense, we should indeed choose the young over the old.  Or maybe not even that, the old perhaps not being willing to volunteer.

I, myself, don’t know.  But I do know this.  As long as Western lives are valued at something approaching infinity to one versus Muslim lives, Muslims are going to continue to be radicalized.  John Paul VI once said that those who value peace should work for justice.  I believe that.  The Charlie killers appear to have been radicalized by the Iraq war.  No Iraq war, no radicalization, no Charlie victims.

But that’s a pragmatic argument.  The human argument is simpler: those Iraqi children’s lives were worth as much as any white child’s life.  Anyone who believes otherwise is a monster acting on tribalism.  And one day your tribe will be the weak one, because all Empires fall.  And when that day comes, members of your tribe will rail at those who kill your children and don’t care, because your skin is white and theirs isn’t, and they can and you can’t do anything about it.

The only clear justification for killing is self-defense.  More on that, perhaps, in another article.  But if you must kill, let me suggest some old-fashioned mores: kill military not civilians, kill adults not children; kill those who have actually harmed you (politicians who decided on wars which devastated your country), not those who haven’t.

If you want vengeance, shoot at the guilty and shoot at those who can shoot back.

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Ethical Priorities: frack, kill, keep people homeless

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On February 27, 2014

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In the US there are five times more houses sitting empty than there are homeless people.  In the EU there are twice as many empty houses as homeless.  In the US, the EPA’s budget has been cut 25% since 2010.

To say that having houses sitting empty while people have no shelter is an ethical abomination is an understatement.

To cut the EPA while the Oceans are acidifying, fish stocks are collapsing, climate change is continuing and will wipe hundreds of millions of poeople minimum, and while the world is in the middle of a human caused great die-off of species is an ethical abomination.

Meanwhile there is plenty of money for drones and for spying.  And even more money for the bankers who are sitting on empty homes.

This is deliberate government policy.  Be clear, the government effectively owns those homes, since it underwrites almost the entire mortgage market.  It could do something other than just leave them empty, but its first priority is to artificially keep housing prices high by keeping supply off the market, and to slowly transfer those houses to private investors so they can use them as rental property.

Likewise, Obama talks a good game on the environment,  but actual government policy under his administration has been to increase domestic hydrocarbon production as fast as possible: which means fracking and unconventional oil, both of which are vastly harmful to the climate and the environment, and which poison water supplies.  Destroying your own country’s water supply in exchange for a short term boost in oil production is the very definition of short sighted, crazy and evil: the number of people who will die because of poisoned water supplies, and because that water can’t (or shouldn’t) be used to grow crops is immense.

Watch the hand: actual government policy is to impoverish you, destroy the land, air and sea, and to make you sick.

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Mandela Was a Terrorist

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On December 6, 2013

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That’s just a fact.  He was also the father of his country, and I believe he was a great man and a good man.  In 1985 he was offered release from jail if he would unconditionally renounce violence, he refused.

One might want to think about the fact that a great man and a good man was a terrorist.

Today, Emptywheel asked:

what leader currently considered a terrorist will be globally celebrated upon her death 50 years form now?

The obvious answer will be environmental “terrorists.”

The problem here is the word terrorist is meaningless.  A word we use to demonize others.

  • George W. Bush, probably responsible for 500,000 Iraqi deaths and a pile more Afghani deaths is not a terrorist despite what he did to, say, Fallujah.
  • George H. Bush, his father, who bombed Iraq’s infrastructure into smithereens (sewers are not a military target), is not a terrorist.  Sanctions intended to break the will of a people, that cost the lives of tens to hundreds of thousands of children, are not terrorism.
  • The firestorm of Tokyo, meant to break the will of the Japanese people… was not terrorism.

The founders of Israel were mostly terrorists.  Many American patriots in the Revolutionary War certainly committed acts of straight up terrorism.

Terrorism seems to be different from what governments do only in that it is not sanctioned by government and kills a lot less people.

One could say “only political violence sanctioned by a State is legitimate” and that would be far closer to the real meaning of “terrorism” as we use the word.  A terrorist is someone who does, less effectively, what the State does, without a State saying “this is ok”

Legitimacy is a larger question.  When someone commits political violence without State sanction they usually believe the State is illegitimate. Few people would, today, say that the Apartheid State was legitimate, and thus we slide on the fact that Mandela committed “terrorism”.  But he was on the State Department Terrorist list till 2008.

During the Vietnam War, when the US was killing Vietnamese in droves, was the US government legitimate? Was violence against Americans legitimate?  What about during the Iraq War?  What about today, as Obama drone murders children, and goes back for a double tap precisely to kill “first responders” (a war crime.)

When is violence legitimate?  Who is a terrorist?  If we want to keep the word terrorist as something more than a propaganda tool, do we have to acknowledge that sometimes terrorism is legitimate? If not, can we pretend that what States do that is no different except that it is sanctioned by a State?  Where do we change from Terrorist to War Criminal?  Mandela was a terrorist, George W. Bush and Barack Obama are War Criminals?  The difference being that Bush and Obama killed a ton more people without nearly as legitimate a reason as opposition to Apartheid?

Mandela committed terrorism, by any reasonable understanding of the word. He was also a great, good man.

We might want to think about that.

 

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