Just War: some new munchies for the brain
Oct. 29th, 2007 10:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseFirst, an unrelated and minor gripe. I have currently loaned out all my Heather Dale Cds to three different friends, except for Call the Names, early and rather rough versions of SCA songs, and This Endris Night. And I got a craving. So currently I'm going through Christmas music even though I don't traditionally play Christmas music (at least as Christmas music) before December First.
And I just discovered the big scratch on it makes the Huron Carol skip. Waaah! (I do have a copy of it in my Christmas mixed CD, but still.)
_________________________________
I've been having some wholly navel-related thinking going on about the direction of my life lately. Today, thank God, that's not the fodder I want to talk about.
For various reasons, James Loney ended up speaking at my church yesterday after the service, in a hastily set up replacement for his planned appearance at a Catholic-based human rights conference from which he was disinvited.
James Loney, for those who don't know and don't feel like clicking the link, was one of four members of Project Peacemakers captured and held hostage in Iraq. One of the others, Tom Fox, was murdered before the three survivors were rescued. The survivors then made a point of publicly forgiving their captors, because the only sentence for kidnapping and hostage taking in the Iraqi court would be death, and as pacifists, they opposed this -- even for their immediate enemy.
The first thing about this, for Colin and I, was that this was the first time ever that the balcony has had to be cleared of the boxes and lumber usually stored there, and opened to public use; even with the short notice, so many people from so many different human rights groups and religious groups came to listen. We went up there, naturally, to get the new perspective on our home church. I've only seen the main floor that full on Christmas Eve, or Easter Sunday, and the useable parts of the balconies (Some areas along the side were still full of lumber, old piano parts, etc.) were likewise stuffed to the point where a few people chose to stand.
The talk itself gave me much fodder to think on. For one thing, Jim Loney is very critical of the Just War attitude, which I believe; that there are, in fact, times when one must fight. He's not blindly or stupidly critical of it; he agrees that situations like the Rwandan Genocide, where the fact that military was blocked from action may well have led to the slaughter (or the old Chestnut of World War Two, which wasn't brought up, but which I've heard raised before) are complicated situations, and that thus far, humans haven't come up with a response to such things that isn't violent in its turn. What he refuses to believe is that humans can't *develop* a new response that would work, if they stop looking to violence as the answer and start trying to commit money, time, science, and general thinking to coming up with a new answer.
That being said, I found myself agreeing with him more often than I disagreed; because some basic facts he has right:
- Violence does beget violence. Self-defence and just war may be justifiable, and restrained, but they are violence nonetheless, and violence that happens because of prior violence. And all too easy to turn into violence for its own sake, because there is a justification behind it, and knowing when to quit isn't exactly humanity's strong suit.
- We are as a species too quick to say "There is no answer besides fighting back physically." (Except in those circumstances where we are too quick to say, "I can't do anything at all, so why bother?" But that's another conversation.) We find it too easy to say, "Here, now, I must hit back."
And his prime example of how violence begets violence is exactly how his captors - ordinary, non-evil people - got into a mindset where taking peace-makers and pacifists hostage and murdering one of them seemed eminently justifiable and reasonable a course of action. How it could look like self-defence for them. How before the invasion they were considerably more ordinary people, who had now lost kin, friends, lovers, to various military actions.
Jim showed great sympathy for them. Not Stockholm Syndrome sympathy; he was not won to their cause, nor willing to agree that they were justified in their actions against him and his fellows, or their attitudes of extremism. But he could, in fact, describe them as humans, see their motives, and what made them turn to what he feels is terrible wrong and terrible violence.
And the thing which struck me most was his description of a movie night.
As he tells it, the captors sometimes got bored, sitting and guarding prisoners all day and night. The youngest, called Junior by the captives, would go out and buy whatever movies could be found in the black market. Especially action movies. And sometimes, for a change of pace, or someone new to talk to, they would allow the captives to watch with them.
One such movie was Transporter 2. Which, quick plot summary, involves the Transporter trying to rescue the kidnapped child of a US official from some drug cartel.
What Jim noticed - couldn't help noticing - was that his own captors, the people who had kidnapped him, who hated the US and the rest of North America, were cheering for the hero, the good guy. Against the kidnappers.
As cognitive dissonance goes -- actually, I wasn't surprised. It's too human. Too real. That, actually, was the detail that made these captors the most human, and the most frightening to me. That and the phrase where one in fact expressed respect for their mission: "I love a peaceful man." And he didn't, from the context James Loney gave, mean "Because he's easier to cow/destroy/beat up." he meant it as it was said; he liked, and wanted peace.
We writers talk a lot about how "Everyone is the hero of their own story." But this was the real world. A man died because these people were the hero in their own story. Three others were held in captivity, kept chained up, kept in conditions where an empty bottle to urinate in when the captors were disinclined to let one go to the real bathroom, and a rag to clean oneself with were important and desired items. Because they were the heroes in the story. Because their war was just and justified, in their own head. Because the violence they had seen bred violence inside them, and they couldn't stop to look for another, better way.
I still believe in a just war. I still think that as long as someone out there is willing to use force to get their way, regardless of the innocents in the way, then someone, somewhere, must be willing to use enough force to deflect that off the innocents, to put a stop to it. But I also think, and have thought, that there are other things to try first, and that once someone lifts a hand, they must aways, always, before every single shot, decide within themselves if that shot is still justified, or if it's the one that tips them over the edge, turns the protective warrior into the torturer.
And I just discovered the big scratch on it makes the Huron Carol skip. Waaah! (I do have a copy of it in my Christmas mixed CD, but still.)
_________________________________
I've been having some wholly navel-related thinking going on about the direction of my life lately. Today, thank God, that's not the fodder I want to talk about.
For various reasons, James Loney ended up speaking at my church yesterday after the service, in a hastily set up replacement for his planned appearance at a Catholic-based human rights conference from which he was disinvited.
James Loney, for those who don't know and don't feel like clicking the link, was one of four members of Project Peacemakers captured and held hostage in Iraq. One of the others, Tom Fox, was murdered before the three survivors were rescued. The survivors then made a point of publicly forgiving their captors, because the only sentence for kidnapping and hostage taking in the Iraqi court would be death, and as pacifists, they opposed this -- even for their immediate enemy.
The first thing about this, for Colin and I, was that this was the first time ever that the balcony has had to be cleared of the boxes and lumber usually stored there, and opened to public use; even with the short notice, so many people from so many different human rights groups and religious groups came to listen. We went up there, naturally, to get the new perspective on our home church. I've only seen the main floor that full on Christmas Eve, or Easter Sunday, and the useable parts of the balconies (Some areas along the side were still full of lumber, old piano parts, etc.) were likewise stuffed to the point where a few people chose to stand.
The talk itself gave me much fodder to think on. For one thing, Jim Loney is very critical of the Just War attitude, which I believe; that there are, in fact, times when one must fight. He's not blindly or stupidly critical of it; he agrees that situations like the Rwandan Genocide, where the fact that military was blocked from action may well have led to the slaughter (or the old Chestnut of World War Two, which wasn't brought up, but which I've heard raised before) are complicated situations, and that thus far, humans haven't come up with a response to such things that isn't violent in its turn. What he refuses to believe is that humans can't *develop* a new response that would work, if they stop looking to violence as the answer and start trying to commit money, time, science, and general thinking to coming up with a new answer.
That being said, I found myself agreeing with him more often than I disagreed; because some basic facts he has right:
- Violence does beget violence. Self-defence and just war may be justifiable, and restrained, but they are violence nonetheless, and violence that happens because of prior violence. And all too easy to turn into violence for its own sake, because there is a justification behind it, and knowing when to quit isn't exactly humanity's strong suit.
- We are as a species too quick to say "There is no answer besides fighting back physically." (Except in those circumstances where we are too quick to say, "I can't do anything at all, so why bother?" But that's another conversation.) We find it too easy to say, "Here, now, I must hit back."
And his prime example of how violence begets violence is exactly how his captors - ordinary, non-evil people - got into a mindset where taking peace-makers and pacifists hostage and murdering one of them seemed eminently justifiable and reasonable a course of action. How it could look like self-defence for them. How before the invasion they were considerably more ordinary people, who had now lost kin, friends, lovers, to various military actions.
Jim showed great sympathy for them. Not Stockholm Syndrome sympathy; he was not won to their cause, nor willing to agree that they were justified in their actions against him and his fellows, or their attitudes of extremism. But he could, in fact, describe them as humans, see their motives, and what made them turn to what he feels is terrible wrong and terrible violence.
And the thing which struck me most was his description of a movie night.
As he tells it, the captors sometimes got bored, sitting and guarding prisoners all day and night. The youngest, called Junior by the captives, would go out and buy whatever movies could be found in the black market. Especially action movies. And sometimes, for a change of pace, or someone new to talk to, they would allow the captives to watch with them.
One such movie was Transporter 2. Which, quick plot summary, involves the Transporter trying to rescue the kidnapped child of a US official from some drug cartel.
What Jim noticed - couldn't help noticing - was that his own captors, the people who had kidnapped him, who hated the US and the rest of North America, were cheering for the hero, the good guy. Against the kidnappers.
As cognitive dissonance goes -- actually, I wasn't surprised. It's too human. Too real. That, actually, was the detail that made these captors the most human, and the most frightening to me. That and the phrase where one in fact expressed respect for their mission: "I love a peaceful man." And he didn't, from the context James Loney gave, mean "Because he's easier to cow/destroy/beat up." he meant it as it was said; he liked, and wanted peace.
We writers talk a lot about how "Everyone is the hero of their own story." But this was the real world. A man died because these people were the hero in their own story. Three others were held in captivity, kept chained up, kept in conditions where an empty bottle to urinate in when the captors were disinclined to let one go to the real bathroom, and a rag to clean oneself with were important and desired items. Because they were the heroes in the story. Because their war was just and justified, in their own head. Because the violence they had seen bred violence inside them, and they couldn't stop to look for another, better way.
I still believe in a just war. I still think that as long as someone out there is willing to use force to get their way, regardless of the innocents in the way, then someone, somewhere, must be willing to use enough force to deflect that off the innocents, to put a stop to it. But I also think, and have thought, that there are other things to try first, and that once someone lifts a hand, they must aways, always, before every single shot, decide within themselves if that shot is still justified, or if it's the one that tips them over the edge, turns the protective warrior into the torturer.
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no subject
Date: 2007-10-30 10:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-11-01 04:31 pm (UTC)An odd statistic, on just that front: Men are far more likely, if they have a weapon around, to go for the weapon, and to posture and threaten. However, if acting tough doesn't work, they tend to hesitate before going on to the next step and actually using the weapon. Women rarely go for a real weapon, but are statistically far less likely to bluff or hesitate when they do, and far more likely to take a swing or pull the trigger.
Bottom Line
Date: 2007-10-31 07:42 pm (UTC)We need a common sense pill that we can give to these radical extremist to calm them down...LOL like that could ever happen.
Ultimate power corrupts...causing Wars.
Re: Bottom Line
Date: 2007-11-01 04:58 pm (UTC)It is true that, as someone said, if civil society does not occasionally use force to defend itself, it's civil society that goes away, not force.
But how do you control the politics/religion which teaches all of this hate.
That's actually the thing James Loney and other pacifists I've talked to are getting at. The war solves the immediate problem (If it even does that), but not the long-term issue that created the immediate problem.
They want to figure out if there's a response that defuses the need for the war, by hitting the long term issue. By helping to build infrastructure, education, and alleviate poverty. They're not wrong in these aspects. Better educated and better fed people with more opportunities in a society with more order and less immediate violence are in fact less likely to pick up a gun or fall into extremist rhetoric. This is not supposition; it's fact.
So people like James Loney and HMM (another pacifist), asky why they didn't send fewer soldiers, and those few behind a cadre of Islamic North Americans to act as go betweens, leading a pile of teachers, construction workers and their supplies, and a huge lot of grain and seed corn?
However, education takes decades, and has to not be undermined by other factors in the society (Like the Taliban keeping women locked away in their homes). Infrastructure likewise can't be forced in from outside right away. It either takes time and effort to be built up from what people know already, or it has to be imposed in a way that brings resentment, or leads to misuse. Food production and distribution are already thorny questions worldwide, and if you send the food to the government in a place without the infrastructure, it doesn't even get to the people who need it. And the frequent argument that we did rebuild Germany and Japan, so we could do it, ignores that fact that the people in Germany and Japan had the infrastructure and lost it due to physical damage, rather than lacking it as Afghanistan has; the people had education already in place inside their brains, and didn't have a religion that would make inviting more education look threatening.
If every country around the world actually followed the violence as a true last resort logic -- or if there really were an enforceable international court of law that could try torturers and war crime perpetrators from *any* country -- pacifist responses would be easier, because we'd have the time to attempt them.
The other appeal of violence is, it's fast. It hits the symptoms hard and right away.
Of course, that's the same way that some people are drawn to the idea of dictatorship over democracy because a dictator can get things done Now, and efficiently, while a democracy is required to take the time to debate and revise and vote. The benefits to a non-violent response might, in time, outweigh the slowness of same.
It comes down to this
Date: 2007-11-01 02:42 pm (UTC)But always finish one.
Of course, sometimes you have to start a fight. People will always 'be the hero of their own stories' but sometimes those stories are pretty nasty.
It doesn't mean those people do not believe in the rightness of their cause - but sometimes the cause is so foul that it cannot be tolerated.
As long as we're human, and don't know how to fix people's brains, there will be wars, nastiness and unpleasantness. That's reality. You cannot spend your way out of it and you cannot philosophize your way out of it.
It sucks, but it's true.
And oh, I should mention that Erec is actually wrong about the 'oil' motivation for the Iraq war. It's a common saw, but an inaccurate one put out by some very loud spin doctors. I have a friend (his name's Tom and he's a high flying international lawyer in New York City) who was working for a major petroleum conglomerate at the time just before the war and they advocated and lobbied energetically AGAINST the invasion. They were making more money with Saddam running things. I'm sure there are some profiting from the existing situation. In any volatile economic climate there will always be those that do, but that doesn't mean that they were behind the act, just that they took advantage of what they were handed.
Bush's real reasons are simpler. Ill advised, but simpler. He believed in what he was doing. Stupidly so - but there you go. I could go into the details for that belief, and they're many, but that'd be threadjacking.
Re: It comes down to this
Date: 2007-11-01 05:13 pm (UTC)However, the few rich tend to be richer, so from their point of view, if they try to change things, or someone outside comes in and changes things, they lose status and standards. So they fight back, even if they aren't scum, or deliberately milking those people for self aggrandizement.
Bush's reasons include everything from Millenial Dispensationalism (Which is a truly terrifying misreading of Christianity) to daddy issues. His beliefs may be scary, but what is truly scary is that even on those rare occasions he meets people with dissenting opinions (And he and his government seem to be working hard to avoid that happening) he never seems to let it affect what he's thinking in the slightest. He still believes not only that he was right before, but that he's right now, and that things are going exactly how he wants them. The fact that some things that others protest, like the suspension of civil rights, like wiretapping, he believes are good things at all doesn't exactly help in trying to get through to him about the ones that are simply altogether bad, like the fact that New Orleans should have been considerably more rebuilt by now than it has been, and that in America a mere decade before Katrina, it probably would have been.
Well as you know
Date: 2007-11-01 07:27 pm (UTC)The thing is - the society has to be ready for it or it won't work. At least not well. Marshall's plan worked for Europe because it was designed for Europe. Pakistan, for all its problems, still has a relatively robust and modern economy in the major cities - but this didn't stop the Red Mosque incident.
It's just not an easy thing to fix.
As to Bush - let's just say that I'm DEFINITELY not a fan of the man. Not even a little tiny bit.
Re: Well as you know
Date: 2007-11-02 10:20 pm (UTC)I'm particularly fond of the bumper sticker, "Will someone give Bush a blowjob so we can impeach him?" Of course, he's already done Nixon one better and isn't out.
So far as I'm concerned, the only issue with impeaching Bush is that you *have* to hit Cheney at the same time, because I want him as president less.