A Proposed War on Proposed Moral Equivalents Of War

Language has dangerous power to reframe a problem in terms that will lend legitimacy to absolutist (or "zero-tolerance") solutions. This is the climate, day, and age of The Moral Equivalent of War.

Now I haven't read the book of the same title (I started it...it's a little dry...), but the idea is clear, and has wide currency. Establishing a problem as a moral equivalent to war is a sort of holy grail for policymakers: to spin the struggle they're selling, to get us to buy it at a level where we accept that "all is fair" in that fight, because it is war - or the moral equivalent of war. And so it cries out for all means necessary.

Once we accept that a thing Not War can be equivalent to the horror, tragedy, degredation and depredations of war, we soon find how easy it is to declare as many as we want to. Any cause at all can be trumped up to this level, if only people are willing to buy the tradeoff that is being sold.

Much is at stake in that tradeoff. Declared wars on drugs, terror, and obesity are far more than rhetorical. The insidious attempt to get people to believe the scale of the problem is one that justifies all means pays off big, for the demagogues and policy jockeys. Once you accept the scale of the problem justifies all means, next you may find that unless you have better means handy, you will have to accept their means.

An atrocity on our side? Ahhh that's justified, because what we're fighting is worse, and we "have to." Liberty? Oh, we needed to curtail liberty, for now, because something more important came up. Nah, those protections against surveillance? You weren't really doing anything with those. We need the latitude - don't you WANT the illusion of safety? No, you can't get the effective over-the-counter cold remedy anymore, people were using it to make drugs. Don't you WANT the appearance of something being done? No, you can't enjoy your favorite meal out anymore - the chef has been legally prohibited from adding salt during the preparation of the meal. PEOPLE ARE DYING OF BAD HEALTH! YOUR YUM is MURDERING THEM! Tighten your belts, buy war bonds and keep the home fires burning. YOU MUST ACCEPT THE MEANS WE PROPOSE. Our means won't achieve the end we say, but they will achieve yours.

The end of your life, maybe. Liberty, definitely. Pursuit of happiness, mostly. Our means will achieve our most cherished ends: to increase our control. To increase the approved uses of power - publicly approved, nothing sneaky! To win acceptance of the idea that we, government, need to be able in a crisis to void any human being necessary, for the greater good. And then, to expand the idea of crisis until it covers...whatever is necessary. Once you've allowed one moral equivalent to war, you'll allow them all.

Or maybe you don't realize the magnitude of this crisis! 250,000 to 300,000 people die every day. Something must be done. Don't worry, we'll tell you what must be done. You signed away your veto power years ago, didn't you? "Greatest good for the greatest people"? As decided by...well, who did you think?

As decided by those in charge. In crisis, we'll decide the greatest good for you. We've all agreed on "whatever is necessary." Never mind your rights, or anyone else's. All tough calls will be made exactly as we please. This is WAR, people.

We know what to do. All you needed to do was consent that the people don't. Don't know what to do. Aren't competent to know what to do. An individual can't control itself. It needs to be controlled. Happy to help.

Oh, we know exactly what to do in every situation: whatever we want. Whatever we say: whatever is necessary. Fire up the Permanent Emergency Code, start prosecuting people for antisocial sex! Okay.

Reality break.

There is no moral equivalent to war.

None. Nothing on earth remotely approaches to that horror. The only way to get something to approach to it is if you can convince people to go along with....whatever is necessary. If you can do that, you will be able to make a very great many things quite as horrific as war itself. You will be able to make pretty much anything as horrific as war, with that kind of support from the public.

Where policymakers ratchet up stakes to the point the public at large abdicates personal responsibility (something all too many of them are all too willing to do), yielding up all the call to authority - you could characterize it as paternalism. To be more precise, call it a demagogracy. To be exact, there's no better term than tyranny.

War, Or Something Like It.

I wonder if all peoples who consider themselves civilized could agree that war is stupid, horrible and to be avoided as it is? Even wars declared by nations, and conducted according to the conventions of war as agreed by the global community of nations - even such war as that is terrible, horrific, disgusting. War is bad enough.

But when someone steps forth to sanction "war" not declared by a nation or against a nation but rather, "war" declared by individuals or groups of activists - I confess I despair. I waver. I begin to consider giving up all my ideals, rather than live in a world where that can be made true.

It can be made true, if we allow war to be redefined in this way: it will be true. Such support, if carried, will make it true.

As a last ditch effort, I feel I'd have to advocate (or at least, sanction) a tyranny. To prevent that worst coming true. Said tyranny should keep every other single one of our rights in place! Including all right to criticize the governments of nations, including one's own. This tyranny would be very focused, targeted: an Amendment would be passed, making it overtly legal for the government to abduct, try, and murder the irresponsible scumbag who supports and justifies terrorism.

Terrorism, put plainly, is to kill a bystander/secondary target in order to make a statement to the primary target. That statement is designed to sow fear in the enemy's populace, and to destabilize the enemy's power structure.

Terrorism's justification could be stated thus:

"A personal act of war is an appropriate response for whatever injustice offends us."

Support for terrorism would be anyone claiming the above.

Under my proposal, people offering such support and justification to terrorism would be eligible for government abduction, prosecution, and public murder. I won't dignify the acts of a tyranny with niceties like "execution." Still it's a small price to pay, to kill those who openly support and offer justification to terrorism. Leave all the rest of free speech in place, just make that one exemption - better that than giving up on the whole thing, right? Because if such justification is countenanced, if such support is carried, is made generally accepted, then an act of personal, political war becomes appropriate response to whatever you like. Whatever you hate.

We can't survive that.

War is bad enough when we restrict it to declaration by nation against nation, and expect that it shall be conducted according to convention - or else violations of convention may be subject to prosecution under legally-convened war crimes tribunals. Even such "civilized" war is horrific. The world can't survive us extending the envelope of war to personal (non-officially-publicly-state-sanctioned) political vendettas.

Mind you, it would be a terrible state of affairs, a tyranny such as the one I propose. It would mean scumbags who justify that maybe terrorists have a good point would have to fear for their lives, if investigators could track them down and tie them to their words (and of course, if their statements could be proven to have been made after the Amendment when through - no retroactive application of penalties to what was then not a crime!). Even with clear limitations laid out, I fear the slippery slope that could take further liberties from us. That slope leads to a nasty cliff.

But at least we'd have the chance of climbing back from it. The slippery slope of allowing private moral justifications as equivalent to war leads to an abyss. There is no bottom, no climbing back.

The Bomb-Throwing Anarchist

I am scared to see this happening again. I always wonder why stuff like this stopped happening, to be honest. At least, stopped happening with regularity.

I mean, it was in the late 1880s and '90s, all the way into and through the early prewar 1900s and '10s, with powerful explosives becoming widely understood and easy to make and use, when bomb outrages first became - well, not common maybe, but common enough to make the hated and feared archetype (stereotype?) of the "bomb-throwing anarchist" as prevalent then as the hated and feared archetypes of "mass-murder-by-any-means-available fanatical terrorist," or "bullet-strewing unhinged troubled youth" are prevalent now.

What scares me is, as far as I can tell, effective measures were never brought to bear to stop the bomb-throwing anarchist. I mean, sure: investigations conducted, culprits identified where possible, books thrown - but there never really seemed to be anything we ever came up with to "make them stop." They just kind of tapered off. My personal theory was, maybe when the Great War and the Spanish Flu Epidemic came along, people got distracted by outrages and tragedies of far huger scale. By the time WWII came and went, most of those then living had experienced an overdose of aggression, and the death of most ideals as things worth killing for. A numbed world, glad just to get through to some kind of peace, was more than ready to sublimate hatreds into playing some role or another in the coming cold war. The bomb-throwing anarchist - pretty stupid-looking, by comparison with pandemic, blitzkreig, systematic genocide and nuclear annihilation - just more or less seems to have...stopped. Stopped being an issue, at least.

As a non-bomb-thrower with some pacifist anarchist sympathies, I'm glad the bomb-throwing anarchist per se pretty much went away. But eventually, anti-established-powers sentiment began welling up in its new guise of "terrorist." Whether Irish, Semetic, Balkan or otherwise, a terrorist is one who attacks a bystander/secondary target to cause fear in and destablize the primary target. You'll note: pretty much the same as what the bomb-throwing anarchist attempted to do. What is the difference, really?

Sadly, as far as I can tell, we have never come up with any really good way to stop it, recently or in past times. We just waited it out, the world went on, other horrible shit happened and it went away. When it came back, we relabeled it "terrorism" and blamed religion. Everyone knows religion is a problem no one wants to try to solve! Blaming something on religion is a get-out-of-solving-the-problem-free card. As if problems in the Middle East (or Ireland) don't have their strong roots in rulership and ownership wrangles - in hard and ugly political and economic realities.

"Wait and see if it goes away" isn't much of an action plan to be comfortable with. Nor is pretending that killing bunches of strangers over claimed reason X is any better than killing bunches of strangers over any claimed reason why.

I don't know what to say, except this was disgusting. The Boston Marathon. Holy hell, why is that even on anyone's list of things to target? What can we do?

Investigate, I guess. Identify culprits where possible. Throw the book. I dearly hope we catch the bastards responsible for this. Whether acting alone or supported by a group, I hope we catch the bastards responsible - and if they weren't acting alone, I hope we go after and get as many of the supporters as we can find additionally responsible, under the law. It's a hard thing to be, legal.

Every bomb-throwing anarchist attempted to terrify. Every death-dealing terrorist attempts to sow anarchy. The goal is always the same: to destabilize and undermine the power structure of the enemy population. To show its people that their power structure is powerless to stop the outrages. To make the people, terrified, clamor for any new power structure that can "protect them." Perhaps a fundamentalist power structure could protect us? Perhaps a fascist power structure can do it?

The only way they win is if we let them change who we are.