Pacifism and Genocide

My sister and I have both been reading War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. I'm not done with it yet, and I'm not usually ready to write about a book before I've finished it, but I thought I would post this here, basically because I would put it on Facebook for my sister, but I talk way too much for that to be practical. Here's what my sister said that got me thinking about this:

S., Mom, and I actually had a little debate/discussion about war and pacifism the other night. S. is a straight up pacifist, because he doesn't think Jesus would ever have killed someone. Idealistically I would be a pacifist, but the world's not that perfect, you know? Sometimes you have to intervene, or choose a lesser evil, so to speak. In the book, and in some of my econ stuff this quarter, it talked about all the times peacekeeping troops could have intervened and didn't, and how they could have saved lives and all.

My view on the morality of war has changed a bit since I joined the Army. I used to think that fighting a war after another country attacks your country is fine; wars of aggression are generally immoral, but the one exception would be when you start a war in order to prevent a greater atrocity, for example if a country had intervened in early Nazi Germany, or Rwanda.

From a utilitarian moral viewpoint (which, while we might disagree on its applicability to ‘victimless’ crimes, I think is uncontroversial here), in a situation where war might break out, one ought to act in a way that will minimize human suffering. Generally this means doing what you can to see that a war isn’t begun, but if you know that the alternative to war will produce more suffering than the war would, then you ought to choose war as the most moral thing to do.

In theory I still agree with this view. War is a horrible thing, but it’s not the only horrible thing. However, one of the lessons I’ve learned from the fiasco in Iraq is that, as an outsider looking into a foreign situation, I know a great deal less about what’s going on than I think I do. A situation might look like the beginnings of a genocide, or like a mad dictator loose with nuclear weapons, or like the end of the world in fire, and then turn out to be something completely different. Even as an insider in a volatile situation, I don’t think it’s possible to have the kind of complete information that the utilitarian choice for war requires. No one can tell the future, or read the minds of the other people involved. Theoretically, I could see a situation where choosing to start a war, or intervene militarily in a conflict, would be the moral choice, but practically it’s wiser to just not start wars.

A good metaphor would be my view on capital punishment. I have no problem in theory with executing a murderer. I think there are crimes for which the only truly just punishment is death. However, I don’t have faith that our judicial system is able to determine guilt or innocence with perfect accuracy, so I think it’s wiser to only impose punishments that are more or less reversible. It’s a problem of information.

That doesn’t mean accepting no action at all in the face of genocide, though. If you take Rwanda as an example, one of the major factors that led to the genocide was the radio stations that broadcast racist programs urging people to kill their neighbors. The United States could have exerted political and economic pressure to shut down those radio stations, and replaced them with different programs. There are often political and economic steps that can be taken to improve a situation.

In Iraq, over the past couple of years, there has been a slow ethnic cleansing in some areas, so that neighborhoods that used to be mixed Sunni-Shi’a are now only Sunni or only Shi’a. The US military presence hasn’t been able to stop this. From what I know (although again, as an outsider looking in my knowledge is incomplete) it would probably be more effective if the US withdrew our military forces while at the same time offering refuge to anyone who would be the victim of ethnic cleansing or genocide. So if you’re wanting to prevent genocide, which is a good goal, military intervention may not even be the most effective way to do that.

I guess what I would advocate is practical pacifism, through the adoption of a different paradigm for international intervention. Here in the US, we tend to think of our options as either a) do nothing and pretend that everything is fine, or b) storm in with guns blazing. We see our role in the international community as that of a police officer. I think what we ought to do is acknowledge our inability to be effective police officers, and instead take on the role of the battered women's shelter: we can't arrest the abusers and put them in prison, we can't put them up against a wall and shoot them for their crimes, but we can shelter their victims and do our best to mitigate the damage that has been done. This is a lot more complicated, and time-consuming, and requires a greater commitment to long-term, practical action that isn't flashy and doesn't get the adrenaline pumping, but I think it's more moral.

A Little Story about Occupation

Suppose for a minute that you're living in an anarchist society, with no central governing authority. You have your family and hangers-on in a compound with barbed wire and dogs and so on, and then on down the street there are other people in their compounds and generally things are moderately peaceful because this is an old anarchy and people have realized that starting fights is a dumb idea when the other person is as heavily armed as you are. Most fights, in fact, are inside of compounds, which are mostly run in an autocratic manner by the head of household, when some youngling decides they don't want to obey anymore.

Now, imagine that you hear of a compound a ways away from yours, small and poor and run by a real asshole. And the rumor is, this guy is a real piece of work, abusing everyone he can get his paws on, from his own children to the beggars outside the back door of his kitchen. This guy is so bad that he rapes his daughters, castrates his servants' children, tortures his wives and slices the toes off his nieces and nephews. Being a wise, kind and good anarchist, this bothers you, and on top of that you think this guy might secretly support your worst enemy.

So you take your homies and go down the road a ways, climb their wall and drag their leader from his bed and put him up against the wall and shoot him. His kids and wives and servants are just as mean and shifty as he is, but you figure you really shouldn't shoot them because it wasn't their fault their leader was an asshole, and anyway you want to put them to work, for you. Because after all, someone has to pay for their liberation.

What you didn't count on was the fact that the old geezer kept control by turning everyone in his household against each other, which makes people real hostile once the controlling force is gone. So they fight amongst each other, and things get nasty and you kill a great number of them, feeling guilty all the while. But somehow killing more people never makes the rest of them like each other any better, and while they'll act properly cowed in front of you as soon as you turn your back they're at it again, and on top of that the neighbors are all really pissed off at you for turning the view from their bedroom windows into a messy war zone. You've got yourself into a position where you can't stay; it's expensive and not working and making everyone mad at you and anyway, being wise and kind and good, you don't really want to kill everyone in the house, which is what its going to take to make them stop fighting. You also can't leave; these people demonstrably will kill each other if you do, and you can't in good conscience allow it; anyway if you did allow it your reputation would suffer miserably and you'd lose a lot of money in all your other endeavours. You're stuck.

So lets back up. Instead of breaking into this place and shooting it up, you stand outside it, with lots of guns and a bullhorn. And you announce, everyone in this situation that we find so horrible: if you'd like to leave and become a part of our peaceful and prosperous commune, come along and commit to being peaceful and prosperous and we here with our guns will make sure you get out OK. We'll escort you back to our place and get you settled in, but be warned- if you fight among yourselves or with us, we'll kick you back out again.

Once you announce this, and all of your enemy's people have abandoned him, the situation still isn't perfect. But you've gained a collection of very grateful and enthusiastic new commune members, and your enemy has lost his infrastructure base, and you're not pouring your money into buying more guns to kill more people way down the street somewhere. Your liberal bleeding heart is satisfied and you haven't actually had to kill anyone, let alone get stuck in a situation you can't improve and can't end and can't leave.

This is why people who say we should stay in Iraq for the sake of the children, like this guy, quoting Ambassador Crocker (via Digby):

"How will we feel if the movie doesn't stop, even though we've pressed the 'stop' button? What if the movie just goes on? And gets even uglier? And even uglier after that? .... We're talking here about the possibility of thousands of deaths, about religious cleansing operations, we're talking here about the possibility that there could be no Sunnis left in Baghdad because they'll all have been murdered, driven out or expelled. Is this what we want? And who will explain that to Americans?"

are totally wrong. I guess my point is, we can't stop ethnic cleansing if a community is determined enough to want it in the first place. All we can do is try our best to get people out of the way of the beast. Occupation is a very bad way to accomplish this; so bad, that I don't think it will even allow us to accomplish anything.