In the last week, for obvious reasons, there has been a lot of discussion using words like “war”, “terrorism”, “war crimes”, “human shields”, etc.
This is good and appropriate for the time. The problem I wish to highlight right now is that words matter and, when discussing those topics, the vocabulary many of us have has been bent, twisted, and manipulated by various forces for their own benefit. I’ll explain how in a bit – the why should be obvious.
Let me start by asking you to purify your vocabulary when it comes to conflict and its effects. I’d like you to stop using fungible terms like “war crime”, “ethnic cleansing”, “collateral damage”, etc., and stick strictly to the vocabulary used in International Humanitarian Law (IHL). There’s a simple reason for that: the vocabulary of IHL is extremely clear and deliberately freed of nuance and gray areas. The people out there, and you may know who they are, who wish to minimize crimes against humanity, will often prefer terms that add nuance to a topic that is generally pretty free of nuance. Here, I quote from [icrc]
What is international humanitarian law?
International humanitarian law is a set of rules which seek, for humanitarian reasons, to limit the effects of armed conflict. It protects persons who are not or are no longer participating in the hostilities and restricts the means and methods of warfare. International humanitarian law is also known as the law of war or the law of armed conflict.
Personally, I wish they had left the last sentence off, since it dilutes their own message. But, a lot people are still looking for “the law of war” – still – and a few are looking for St Augustine’s “Just War Theory”, etc. Mostly, when people are opining about this topic on the internet, they are using a confused amalgam of Just War Theory, Westphalian theory, and (of course!) the Geneva Conventions. But, if you dig deeper you’ll find that the Geneva Conventions are not what many think they are – a post World War I set of rules – they have been updated. But there’s still the notion of “a state of war” between nations being somehow important to the commission of a crime against humanity. That’s inaccurate under IHL, and the notion of “state of war” should be removed from our consciousness, especially since it serves to minimize crimes against humanity committed against a noncombatant population in a “police action” or some other minimizing term. In the case of the current conflict in Israel and Gaza, you can immediately see how getting your interlocutor to conceptualize someone bombing a city full of noncombatants as either “terrorism” or “police action” when under IHL it’s all “armed conflict” and there are “combatants” and “noncombatants” and there are no manufactured gray areas. It is these gray areas in which the perpetrators of crimes against humanity seek to hide.
So, I urge you, as strongly as I possibly can, to sit down and read IHL critically and think carefully about how the language of war/atrocity/terrorism is being used, and to examine how it is being used to manipulate you.
When does international humanitarian law apply?
International humanitarian law applies only to armed conflict; it does not cover internal tensions or disturbances such as isolated acts of violence. The law applies only once a conflict has begun, and then equally to all sides regardless of who started the fighting.
This wording is extremely carefully made. There is no reference to “aggressor” or “invader” or any of the terms that might indicate who started it. Because “who started it” is invariably a topic of discussion when someone is trying to minimize their side’s crimes against humanity, i.e.: those noncombatants wouldn’t have gotten hurt if we hadn’t had to do this awful thing. By the way, that sort of reasoning is ancient and is embedded in St Augustine’s Just War Theory. Augustine was not trying to establish a moral system, he was trying to justify one state’s political violence and to answer an irrelevant challenge, namely the challenge to Christians, “if god says ‘thou shalt not kill’, why do you Christians go around killing eachother so enthusiastically?” [Note: god did not actually order “thou shalt not kill” – that was Cecil B. DeMille, the director of the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments, who significantly re-wrote the Leviticus version in order to fit them onto a prop tablet]
The word of the lord is not a moral system, it’s an authoritarian system
Non-international armed conflicts
are those restricted to the territory of a single State, involving either regular armed forces fighting groups of armed dissidents, or armed groups fighting each other. A more limited range of rules apply to internal armed conflicts and are laid down in Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions as well as in Additional Protocol II
That all sounds pretty good, right? It’s carefully crafted to appeal to nationalists, by asserting that there are specific differences between state-on-state warfare and internal conflict, but when push comes to shove, IHL actually doesn’t claim there is much difference between various forms of conflict. For example, under the Geneva Conventions circa World War I, (1907) spies might be shot out of hand (Article 29) but under IHL, they are either noncombatants or combatants; there is no more complex state that any person can be in. And, by the way, a “spy” does not lose their rights even under the 1907 convention – they can be imprisoned and kept incommunicado, but are not to be tortured or killed. That kind of confusing mish-mosh is what I am encouraging you to avoid – because if you talk about “spies” you may as well also consider “terrorists” and you might have to consume an entire law-library to construct an argument that would allow anyone to tell them apart. “Terrorist”, by the way, is another of those fraught value-laden terms that is used to amplify one side or another’s opinion about crimes against humanity – the US talks a great deal about “terrorists” but it changes the definition of the term constantly and at its convenience. The FBI, for example, defines it circularly: [DOJ]
International terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups who are inspired by, or associated with, designated foreign terrorist organizations or nations (state-sponsored).
Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
International terrorism is what “designated foreign terrorist organizations” do. In moments of extreme cynicism, I often think that definition is very carefully crafted to allow the Central Intelligence Agency not to be the world’s largest terrorist organization in history. Because it’s not foreign, and that definition mates with the “domestic terrorism” so as to again exclude the CIA.
The point is that: words matter. And how we use them matters. If they didn’t matter, we wouldn’t use them, right?
Back to IHL:
What restrictions are there on weapons and tactics?
International humanitarian law prohibits all means and methods of warfare which:
- fail to discriminate between those taking part in the fighting and those, such as civilians,
who are not, the purpose being to protect the civilian population, individual civilians and civilian property;- cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering;
- cause severe or long-term damage to the environment.
Humanitarian law has therefore banned the use of many weapons, including exploding bullets, chemical and biological weapons, blinding laser weapons and anti-personnel mines.
Words matter. Are those cluster munitions “war crimes”? You can wander down twisty passages of words until your brain explodes, or you can stick with the clear terms of IHL, using anti-personnel mines is a crime against humanity. Of course it is, it’s impossible to keep noncombatants from being injured by anti-personnel mines. Another related topic is area bombardment. That’s something that powerful states really love doing when they can do it without taking return fire. But the moral dilemma is that often area bombardment is justified because someone bombarded some noncombatants, so then let’s use a thin veneer of “we are trying to hit military targets” to… oh, what a lot of horse poop: bomb the area flat and we’ll call the dead “collateral damage.” In IHL there is no “collateral damage” of course, that’s a term that US policy-makers cooked up to downplay the fact that it was doing World War II style area bombardment in Vietnam and Cambodia. If that wasn’t a crime against humanity, by the way, there is no such thing – yet Henry Kissinger is still lauded as a great statesman and gets public ass kissings from senior members of the US establishment. If one were to describe the accidental dead in the World Trade Center in New York as “collateral damage” I imagine some of you might clench your teeth until your jaw squeaks – but Bin Laden declared war on the US in 1998 [fas] – what if someone gave a war and you didn’t believe in it? Well, of course they are a “terrorist” whereas the CIA and special operators in their black sites were apparently not sneaking about, or something? 9/11 arguably happened in the context of a “declared war”. I am categorically not trying to minimize any of these crimes against humanity; I am trying to illustrate how words are bent and mangled in order to make some things seem more palatable than others, when really none of them should be. I am trying to make the argument that whether a war is “declared” or not is a convenience to the powerful – i.e.: the side most likely to win a war is the side most likely to declare it.
When I speak and write about these issues, I try hard, in my words, to stick to simple concepts. There are no “terrorists”, or “freedom fighters” and I barely acknowledge the existence of states – there are just combatants and noncombatants and their actions are either legal or they are crimes against humanity. Now, some of you are probably thinking “aha! got you! you said ‘legal’!” but I meant legal in the sense of the broader international humanitarian law that was laid down after the Nuremberg Tribunals, in which the nazi brass were variously executed for the crime of “aggressive warfare.” I.e.: “they started it, we finished it.” It’s as close as humanity has come to acknowledging that war is a crime. [For more on this topic I recommend oup Fabre, Lazar et al, The Morality of Defensive Warfare, which makes a good case that using violence to defend oneself is almost as problematic as using violence aggressively] Noncombatants’ actions are always legal, because they are not engaging in violence. Combatants’ actions are extremely problematic, especially when combatants begin killing noncombatants as a matter of operations – then we’re down to arguing whether the death was necessary or justified and that is extremely problematic.
There is also, no “ethnic cleansing.” That’s a term that some US policy-makers cooked up so that they could talk about what was happening in Rwanda without having to invoke the UN Convention on Genocide, which binds signatory nations to do something to stop genocide – so, let’s call it something else. Words matter. It’s why there is lively debate about whether Israel is a democracy, or an apartheid state, or, whatever. That debate serves to make people take a step back and downplay certain actions. Are people being “internally displaced” or maybe “crowd control” or, tant pis, “genocide.” IHL, again seems to be anodyne: there are combatants and there are noncombatants and if combatants are attacking, injuring, killing, dispossessing, and otherwise doing bad stuff to noncombatants, it’s a crime against humanity. That ought to be inarguable, but then we can argue about whether a particular crime against humanity will be punished, or not. That’s another important point because once we start talking about enforcement of crimes against humanity, we have removed our discussion from a moral plane and now we are talking about power. I assume that most of you reading this are aware that the US does not consider itself or its military to be subject to IHL, and has even passed legislation (!) – the American Service Members’ Protection Act [wik] that says the US is authorized to use”
“all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any U.S. or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court”
Whenever an American talks about respecting international law, remember that the US explicitly holds itself apart and above international law. Because we’re the good guys, or something. You have to be impressed that US establishment will decry Putin for committing “war crimes” when they are one of the greatest exporters of military violence in human history. [I give top place to the British] We should sue Putin for committing “war crimes” because that’s a violation of our trademark, or something. Note: Putin is responsible for crimes against humanity, starting with the crime of launching a war of aggression, which is a crime for which nazi leaders were hanged.
That brings me around to the question of jurisdiction. On one hand, we have what are arguably a set of moral precepts, codified as IHL. On the other, is the question of who and how they are enforced. Usually around now, someone must make a reference to Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) but I’d like to side-step that as an exegesis of the political power of state authority. In my world-view, it is the antithesis of a search for morality in politics. But Hobbes got one thing apparently right, which is that states respond to power nearly exclusively, and the only way to hold them to any form of standard of behavior is to have a greater power, still, which can spank them if they get out of line. Unfortunately, those who promote the state have done a good job of shunting the dialogue off onto a dead-end track, because the topic of state legitimacy is difficult and, historically, states like Britain (sort of a monarchy/oligarchy) and the US (a slave state, an apartheid state, built on genocide) have an awkward moment when they try on the mantle of non-violent legitimacy.
It’s 130+ pages: International Humanitarian Law
This is hard stuff. Do you think any of it applies to what is going on in Gaza right now?
The 2013 Arms Trade Treaty prohibits a State from authorizing any transfers of conventional arms, their key components and ammunition if it has knowledge that they would be used in the commission of genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, attacks directed against civilian objects or civilians protected as such, or other war crimes. It also requires an exporting State to conduct a risk assessment as to whether such weapons or items could be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of IHL or international human rights law (IHRL). Some methods of warfare are specifically prohibited under treaty and customary IHL, including:
- denying quarter: an adversary’s forces must be given an opportunity to surrender and be taken prisoner;
- pillaging private property;
- starving the civilian population; and
- resorting to perfidy to kill, injure or capture an adversary. Perfidy is defined in Article 37 of Additional Protocol I as“acts inviting the confidence of an adversary to lead him to believe that he is entitled to, or is obliged to accord, protection under the rules of international law applicable in armed conflict, with intent to betray that confidence”. This includes, for instance feigning injury or sickness in order to attack an enemy.
The US is providing ammunition to Israel, with absolute certainty that that ammunition will be used in area bombardment. In fact, the bombs currently being dropped on Gaza are probably dropping from US-made F-15s, F-16s, and F-35s. It is undeniable that the area bombardment is directed against civilians in spite of the usual “collateral damage” fig-leaf. Of course none of this excuses the other side, which was firing high explosive rockets in area bombardments of its own.
And so, we come full circle and all we’ve got is finger-pointing. Why bother? Apparently it’s “crimes against humanity season” and the devil is paying the piper, or whatever metaphor you prefer.
Words matter. Right now, a lot of people are working very hard to direct the discussion about what is happening, and they’re pushing whatever agenda suits their pre-determined notion of what is right and what is wrong. In other words, they are trying to justify the actions of one group by using minimizing language regarding the impact of that group’s actions on the other. In the current conflict in Gaza, these excuses manifest in complex ways, but they boil down to noncombatants getting blown to bits, or shot, or tortured, by combatants. Whether those combatants feel that what they are doing is justifiable, or not, we should resist using apologetic language that minimizes the moral fact that crimes against humanity are being done. I could say the same about Ukraine. In fact, I just did. What we are seeing in both these conflicts is the failure of nationalism, and the international system. Nationalism tries to teach us “my country, right or wrong” or, more usually, “my country, always right or at least forgiven.”
This year of conflict is a dry run for how the international system is going to cope with the mass migrations, crop failures, fires and floods brought by climate change. In case you haven’t been watching, the prognosis is not good. Humanity is going to need to work together, but instead we have, well, a massive chunk of the taxes I pay going to the US war machine and not so much toward social services. War, after all, is a continuation of national privilege by other means.
I have been watching the tortured intellectualizing of my fellow liberals, as they try to variously justify Israel’s actions, or the actions of Palestinian resistance, or internationally supported resistance, or whatever. It’s sad, really – it’s pretty easy to be liberal about poor peaceful Ukraine getting invaded by big bad Russia, but suddenly it’s really awkward to try to defend the indefensible. It’s easy to say Russia is doing crimes against humanity (they are!) when they do area bombardment in Ukraine, but it’s a bit awkward when Hamas launches area bombardments, and Israel retaliates with area bombardments. My mother used to ask me “if all your friends were jumping off a cliff, would you jump too?” and that’s pretty much the scenario, here. Nationalism leads us inevitably toward “my country, always right or at least forgiven” because that is what nationalism is – that is how nationalism works. We’re not talking about a bunch of sports teams that we’re cheering on because we like the goalie, we’re talking about rooms full of very powerful dishonest men who decide that as a matter of public policy they’re going to get some motherfuckers killed. You’re notice that it’s hardly ever them, or their families in the line of fire. If you want to see the most horrendous violence imaginable, threaten a politician or their family with violence and see what happens. In fact, most politicians seem to be happy to kill you simply for threatening their career.
All war is war crime.
I have to say I am really disappointed. Perhaps my memory is failing but I seemed to recall that IHL was very clear and concise and written in terms of conflict, noncombatants, and combatants. It seemed to draw sharp lines and then said that it’s the responsibility of the combatant to only fight other combatants and to minimize other destruction. But, when I started re-reading the IHL, it was disappointingly full of old world concepts like Jus In Bello, etc. All the Augustinian bullshit. You know, christians talk about how they have all these moral precepts from god, but then cheerfully ignore them as soon as there’s someone that needs a good old-fashioned fucking up. When I was a kid, I don’t recall a particular moment when I realized that religion was bullshit, but I remember when I realized that nationalism was bullshit. It was when the US was flying B-52 loads of bombs and dropping them in Vietnam and Cambodia and complaining that the Vietcong fought like cowards. All I could think was “wait, who are the cowards? Seems like the guys who are struggling to survive arclight strikes are pretty damn brave.”
Mostly, I find I’ve lost whatever respect I might have had for about half of the liberals on Daily Kos. Because there’s a rush to take sides – a rush which ignores the obvious fact that both sides are wrong. Sure, there are a few people who say “it’s all wrong” but then blurt out “… but so and so started it.”
To those who are interested in the conflict in the Levant, I recommend Tim Snyder’s “Bloodlands, Europe between Stalin and Hitler” [amz] which goes into a gruesome amount of the history of how power politics and racism turned Europe into a wasteland for Jews, which led to mass migration. And, Collins and LaPierre’s “O Jerusalem” [amz] which is an eye-opening account of zionism and the founding of Israel. Neither book is fun reading but both are fascinating. Those books together profoundly influenced my formation of my opinion about Israel, which I won’t burden you with.
We don’t even have a word for “criminal against humanity”.
I always find it frustrating in these conflicts that people insist on reducing the situation to “Israelis vs. Palestinians”, when the actual conflict (here, anyhow) is The State of Israel vs. the quasi-state-terrorist organization Hamas.
The Palestinian people are not responsible for the action of Hamas, an organiation that has not allowed elections to take place for over a decade. There is little meaningful way for them to create a legitimate government for themselves, since the state of Israel takes great pains to ensure that no formal government can exist without risk of assassination or destabilization. Hamas is able to exist precisely because it operates as a terrorist/revolutionary organization.
The Israeli people, on the other hand, *do* bear some responsibility for the actions of their national security state. They elected the government that sets the conditions under which their security state operates. The impunity with which the IDF operates in palestinian territory is a serious problem. Just read the ‘knee interview’.
You cannot meaningfully criticize a terrorist organization, because they’re fucking terrorists. Of course they’re doing evil shit. But the people who gleefully take the opportunity presented by that evil shit to go do some evil shit of their own – those are worse people. They could do better, and choose not to. And their cowardly political backers support and protect them.
The whole situation makes me fucking sick. It’s a quagmire created by sociopaths and criminals on both sides of the situation, with the costs born by the children and innocent adults who live under their rule. The nihilistic young Palestinian terrorists are not a lot different than our homegrown north american mass shooters, they just have had their volume turned up to 11. They believe (possibly correctly) that there is no good future for them, only endless hunger need and useless days of wasted time stretching endlessly ahead of them. Is it a shock that evil old men are able to plant burning ideas of vengeance, glory and conquest in their malleable young heads? And when the response is for one of the best-armed states in the world to turn about and blow up the very families that might have offered these men some kind of alternative? To destroy the schools that should have educated them, the hospitals that should have treated them, the businesses that might have given them some kind of useful purpose or occupation?
You cannot fight terrorists with indiscriminate violence against the civilian population to which they belong. It doesn’t work, hasn’t worked for the decades that it has been tried. I am genuinely worried that there are influential people in the Israeli government who might start looking about for a ‘final solution’ to this issue. Naturally, one that doesn’t involve those people giving up a jot of power, influence or territory. I think we all know where this might lead.
So long as the state policy of Israel is to maintain Palestinians in a ghetto, to treat them as non-people with no rights or future, to deny them meaningful chances to govern themselves – there will be terrorists. This is not to excuse the terrorists, merely to accept that there is a process by which young people are warped into the kinds of beings who can commit these terrible crimes. But what process warps a citizen, not deprived of a future, into someone who can boast of crippling half a hundred young people? Who can sleep soundly at night after doing so? Who can brag about his prowess at doing so.
I’ll leave you with this quote:
“Eden clearly recalls his first knee. His target was a demonstrator standing on coils of concertina wire about 20 meters away. “In that period [early during the protests], you were allowed to shoot a major inciter only if he was standing still,” he says. “That means, even if he was walking around calmly, shooting was prohibited, so we wouldn’t miss and waste ammunition. In any event, that inciter is on the barbed wire, I’m with the weapon right at the fence, and there’s still no authorization to open fire. At one stage he stands opposite me, looks at me, provokes me, gives me a look of ‘Let’s see you try.’ Then the authorization comes. Standing above me is the battalion commander, to my left is his deputy, to the right the company commander – soldiers all around me, the whole world and their wives are watching me in my first go. Very stressful. I remember the view of the knee in the crosshairs, bursting open.””
(source: https://imemc.org/article/analysis-42-knees-in-one-day-israeli-snipers-open-up-about-shooting-gaza-protesters/)
This whole thing is sick. The literal worst of himanity.
Which raises the question: Do they count as combatants?
They’re not in uniform and they’re not carrying weapons, but they are effectively part of the chain of command.
I see a lot of people are calling this “Israel’s 9/11”, and I am very worried that they could we be right – but probably not in the way they intend.
Re-reading what I wrote, I am dissatisfied. I had some overarching aim of helping people clarify some of these things to themselves, but I realize that the language-benders’ mission has been accomplished: its not really possible to speak honestly about what is going on there because all of the words have been manipulated carefully.
You can tell right away where a person comes down on the conflict, by whether their language is balanced or tilted. For example, as soon as the term “terrorist” puts in an appearance, you can be pretty sure that the comment is pro-Israel. If you take a vocabulary centric view you can see that the vaguely liberal spectrum is strongly divided into three camps: pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, and anti-war. I might take a step farther and say that anti-war is implicitly pro-Palestinian, although there’s a lot of “Well, of course Hamas is wrong, but…”
I am reminded of a description I once read about Vietnam in which the peasant farmers knew that if VC came through, they’d be killed if they weren’t VC supporters, and then the Americans came through and they were killed if they weren’t obviously anti-VC (in which case when the Americans left, the VC came back and killed them) – it’s worse than a Catch-22. None of this matters to the people trapped in others’ politics – for the situation to continue, they must suffer. For the situation to be resolved, they will suffer. That’s a humanitarian disaster.
Dunc@#4:
I see a lot of people are calling this “Israel’s 9/11”, and I am very worried that they could we be right – but probably not in the way they intend.
I feel likewise. My fear is that Israel is going to use this as an excuse to turn Gaza into a parking lot and push its population out. Everyone knows they have wanted a good excuse to do that, and this may be it.
LykeX@#3:
Which raises the question: Do they count as combatants?
They’re not in uniform and they’re not carrying weapons, but they are effectively part of the chain of command.
It’s an interesting question. The old “kings do not kill kings” notion (invented, coincidentally, by a king) goes back to antiquity. Killing the opposition’s leadership is, of course, a great strategy – one that Israel has pursued with some effect, as has the US – though both would declare piously that “no, we are interested in negotiating with them.” Nonsense.
Imagining killing Hitler during World War II as a means of bringing about policy change is practically a cottage industry. Yes, he would be a legitimate target. Reynhard Heydrich was also a legitimate target, though when he was killed, the nazis carried out some over-the-top reprisals. The US has made mutterings to the effect that killing a US president could trigger a nuclear war.
In my opinion, killing the opposition’s leadership would often amount to doing them a favor.
Pierce R. Butler@#1:
We don’t even have a word for “criminal against humanity”.
Good point. /sigh
snarkhuntr@#2:
You cannot meaningfully criticize a terrorist organization, because they’re fucking terrorists. Of course they’re doing evil shit. But the people who gleefully take the opportunity presented by that evil shit to go do some evil shit of their own – those are worse people. They could do better, and choose not to. And their cowardly political backers support and protect them.
Right, because if they were “freedom fighters” they’d be doing more palatable insurgency things and less counter-noncombatant maximum damage attacks.
Your point that Hamas lacks public support (in the sense that they are not acting like a legitimate government) is a good one. I wonder, though, if it would matter. They’ve already placed themselves on the sidelines with statements like “Israel must be destroyed” (not that democracies don’t say exactly the same thing when they feel they can) but it’s amazing how, when conflict erupts, there are always a few people happy to charge in and say there should be no negotiating with Hamas because they won’t negotiate, etc.
You cannot fight terrorists with indiscriminate violence against the civilian population to which they belong. It doesn’t work, hasn’t worked for the decades that it has been tried. I am genuinely worried that there are influential people in the Israeli government who might start looking about for a ‘final solution’ to this issue. Naturally, one that doesn’t involve those people giving up a jot of power, influence or territory. I think we all know where this might lead.
It’s my opinion that Hamas has painted itself into a corner, and will accomplish nothing but getting its people (and others) killed unless it re-brands and establishes a politically moderate branch that does not have any pledges of absolute destruction built into its founding statements. It’s my opinion that the Palestinians have been maneuvered into being stupid, and kept there. Why not? They’re ineffective, noisy, and a great excuse for any ultra-violence Israel wants to engage in. It’s win/win for Israel because the Palestinians can be counted on to get upset whenever there’s a new settlement, and that can justify more settlements. Of course it’s brutally cynical politics from Israel, but they learned from the best. (I mean the British)
The bit about shooting protesters in the legs is appalling. I’ll go out on a limb and say it’s on the same moral plane as making soap out of corpses – and when you’re in the same moral plane as the nazis, you’re in a bad place.
The link under “International Humanitarian Law” is:
Not useful for anyone without access to your local filesystem
Marcus Ranum @ # 5: … a description I once read about Vietnam in which the peasant farmers knew that if VC came through, they’d be killed if they weren’t VC supporters, and then the Americans came through and they were killed if they weren’t obviously anti-VC
I recall a similar account from the Los Angeles Times, with a bit more detail: Saigon troops &/or the US Army/Marines would come by daylight, assemble all the villagers, and make them sing the South Vietnamese national anthem and other “patriotic” songs. They would be long gone by dark, when the Viet Cong would again round everybody up and make them sing Communist songs. The villager interviewed by the American reporter purportedly said, “We just want not to have to sing any more.”
The formulation that I immediately noticed was “we are at war, they are terrorists” – i.e. our violence is legitimate, theirs is not.
The first thing I said about this situation, once I realised the extent of Hamas’ actions, was “Gaza is going to cease to exist”.
If I may quote the great Volker Pispers:
“However, what I still don’t understand to this day is why a suicide bomber is cowardly and deceitful, and the bomber pilot who throws bombs at innocent people from a height of five kilometers is courageous and brave.”
@13:
The suicide bomber has nothing to worry about after their current job is complete.
The bomber pilot has to face the ongoing fear of a warcrimes trial.
snarkhuntr@#2:
It’s a quagmire created by sociopaths and criminals on both sides of the situation[…]
I take a long view of the blame for the whole mess. The fault is European powers, primarily, and their inability to control or come to grips with their anti-semitism. Theodore Hertzl famously got the idea for a Jewish homeland in France in the 1890s during the Dreyfus Affair. He concluded, probably rightly, that the Jews were never going to be safe in Europe and would be subjected to endless oppression and pogroms, so they should go … someplace. The British appear to have thought “capital idea! at least they won’t be coming here!” and promoted the idea in the Balfour Declaration during the division of the spoils after World War I. The most aggressive and largest waves of colonists came from Poland (one eventual prime minister – Ben Gurion) and Ukraine or Belarus (Golda Meir, Yitzhak Shamir, Menachem Begin) – because they could see the writing on the wall and they did not trust their European neighbors, rightly, as it turned out. But, literally, the strategy for taking over part of the Ottoman Empire and then later the British Empire, was cooked up in Eastern Europe, not the Levant. The British also get a huge amount of the blame for the whole mess, because they promised the Levant to the local arabic population and to the Jews, depending on which day of the week you talked to them. And then they fought and lost an early insurgency, trying to control Jewish immigration and the beginning of what appeared to be a land grab in progress. The other European powers, in the form of the UN, get their share of the blame for attempting a solomonic solution to the property dispute. Sure, there was chicanery and sneaking about on both the Israeli side and Palestinian side, but the locals only got corrupt and sneaky when they realized that they were not going to get what they were promised and were about to get a colonial European style fucking.
In terms of sneakiness and dishonesty, I gotta give the Brits the most blame. They tacitly accepted the mythology-based argument about a 2,000 year old divine title to a piece of real estate. That is simply not a basis for foreign policy, though, to be fair, there were a lot more people at the time who believed that kind of bollocks. From what I read in O Jerusalem it seems to me that the founders of Israel were pretty hard-headed practical people, who probably didn’t believe in the divine real estate grant any more than you or I do – but it was convenient to motivate the troops, and they had to pick somewhere after all. I part ways with Christopher “religion poisons everything” Hitchens on this point, because I don’t think Israel’s founding fathers were a bunch of stupid religious bigots. They were power manipulators and they were trying to get out of a Europe that had overtly tried to kill them all many times before. They don’t appear to have felt that they owed anyone very much consideration and they were methodical and well-organized in their operations. Again, O Jerusalem is an interesting source; it describes how the early colonists purchased ammunition making machines, and large amounts of guns and explosives, using a variety of tricks (which the British turned a blind eye to, because they were just glad they weren’t going to have to deal with them) (until the insurgency at the end of the Mandate started).
British inattention to detail (in the form of not giving a fuck) brought the world some really epic geopolitical disasters, Rhodesia, South Africa, India/Pakistan partition, and the current Middle East. It is my opinion that the US has been characteristically stupid/sloppy and never did a good enough job of tagging the British for the responsibility. We did the same in Indochina, allowing the French to hand off a barbed-wire wrapped baby to us, expecting we could somehow fix that situation. There’s not really enough post-imperial hatred of England, in my opinion.
Interesting essay, thanks Marcus!
Ouch! An atheist should know better! ;-)
The Ten Commandments are not in Leviticus.
@above:
A little known fact: there were in fact only Nine Commandments on those two tablets. The third tablet started “Thou shalt not kill, except…” and Moses replied “I’ll carry *those* two down the mountain, but I’ll be fucked if I’m carrying another 100 tablets down with them.”
TIL “tant pis”. I had not seen or heard this one before in sixty years.
It means “so much the worse” and the “now regrettable beyond retrieval”. Sources I did a little searching on implied there’s a variety of intensity in the statement in the original French depending upon who is saying it and how it is being said.
marcus@15,
I’m going to have to track down that book. I think I have a pretty decent overview of the events during the Mandate, but not any specific detail.
Regarding langage, the Citations Needed podcast reminded me today of the way that language is always used in these conflicts. Israeli children are murdered, Palestinian children ‘are killed’, or ‘die’. When atrocities are commiteed by ourselves, our allies, or against groups we dislike – we remove the agency from the words we use to describe them.
If you take the mainstream media consensus, “Hamas” is responsible for the actions of the baby-killers among their ranks and the Palestinian population deserves collective punishment as a result, because they are responsible for the actions of Hamas. But this standard only ever applies to enemies. They may be collectively guilty, but we and our friends must only ever be judged as individuals – and when we commit actions in a corporate fashion (say, a drone bombing campaign), then blame cannot be applied to anyone.
The kid in a sea-can in utah who pulls the trigger and wipes out most of a family in Kabul (including 7! children), the kid isn’t responsible, he was ‘just following orders’. The guy who gives the orders isn’t responsible, because he was acting in ‘good faith’ on the ‘best intelligence available’. The spooks whose criteria for assigning the death penalty to 7 kids was “near a car that looks like one a terrorist might have been driving” aren’t responsible because “[redacted]”. The generals and politicans who created the loose system with no oversight aren’t responsible because “we trust our personnel to get the job done within acceptable parameters of international law and our rules of engagement”. And nothing changes.
[/RANT]
I’ve got to go do something else. This is messing up my head.
Well… Did they really accept that argument, or was that just a convenient excuse? Sneaky and dishonest, remember? It seems to have been standard policy throught the Empire to forment as much division and conflict amongst the locals as possible, especially anywhere that we were backing off from (or getting kicked out of).
Again, I interpret this rather differently – I think we did give a fuck and paid quite a lot of attention to the detail, it’s just that our objectives were evil and racist. I don’t think those outcomes were unfortunate accidents, I think they were deliberate policy. We may not have anticipated quite how badly those policies would turn out, but I’m pretty certain that we did not intend to leave stable and well-functioning polities behind us.
Looks like Israel is about to use the Hamas attack to advance their territorial agenda. They just told the UN that they are about to displace millions of people. That must mean they plan to absorb Gaza. It’s the worst case I was afraid might happen.
It seems that the USA and Israel consider themselves exempt from adhering to rules or treaties (not that the US have signed many) that bind their ‘allies’.
We were not known as “perfidious Albion” without reason.