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Post 0

Thursday, May 19 - 6:48pm

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On Collective Guilt and Collateral Damage

In the SOLO article In Defense of Dresden, the author wrote:

http://solohq.com/Articles/Davison/In_Defense_of_Dresden.shtml

Objectivists dismiss concerns over collateral damage during wartime, considering such damage as a ‘cost of doing business’ issue, going so far as to consider it even desirable as a way of demoralizing the enemy and foreshortening a war.

There is collateral damage and there is collateral damage. There is no rational or ethical justification for UNLIMITED force based upon a justified use of SOME force.

Those who rationalize unlimited force, say shooting a tresspasser who poses no serious threat, are likely to find themselves, in much of the civilized world, on the losing end of a criminal prosecution. Rightly so, in my view.

They rightly argue that attempts to shield civilians unnecessarily cost American lives

Minimizing risk to one's own life is not a license to wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands, though. There is such a thing as appropriate, commensurate force.

and that the civilian population of the enemy is not necessarily innocent. They are guilty in their support an immoral government and proffer their labor to the enemy’s war effort. But, while this is generally true...

That is a collectivist argument. I cannot imagine anyone who values individual human life succumbing to this line of thinking.

Even in Nazi Germany, many Germans were opposed to Hitler and his policies. Some, even some in the military, lost their lives heroically trying to assassinate him. Are we to believe that the families of those men, including innocent children, are somehow stained with a collective German bloodguilt? That they deserved to die in a Dresden holocaust?

Many German citizens did not wish to be at war. Nazi Germany was a dictatorship, and imperialist policies were forced upon ALL Germans, even those who hated Hitler. They did not "support" his brutal regime, but to openly defy or oppose it was often tantamount to a death sentence, not just for them but often for their whole family.

It is altogether too easy for armchair moralists to proclaim what decent Germans in the 1930s and 1940s "should" have done--when the Gestapo was arresting people in their neighborhoods on a daily basis, many never to be seen again--and in the apparent absense of that action proclaim them all collectively guilty. Old men and women, children, babies in the cradle, the ill, people without the skill or strength to participate in a resistance to a brutal dictatorship, these would be among those condemned, worthy of incineration, with a collective wave of the hand.

That's just wrong.

One can make a case that in war, which is sometimes morally necessary, collateral damage and deaths are unavoidable and thus not ethically reprehensible, but not of the basis of a collective guilt argument.

Nathan Hawking

(Edited by Nathan Hawking on 5/19, 7:15pm)

Post 1

Thursday, May 19 - 7:52pm

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Nathan Hawking wrote: "... many Germans were opposed to Hitler and ... when the Gestapo was arresting people ... Old men and women, children, babies in the cradle, ...

SOLOists have had this discussion before. Sometimes, the people were Japanese; other people were Muslim. Basically, the enemy is dehumanized and collectivized ("Islamic medievalists"), and then their extermination is called for.

I have made the case for peace before. (See: http://solohq.com/Forum/GeneralForum/0337.shtml) For that, I collect an Atlas click here and there, showing me that others here have similar views.

Post 2

Thursday, May 19 - 9:17pm

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Michael M:

Nathan Hawking wrote: "... many Germans were opposed to Hitler and ... when the Gestapo was arresting people ... Old men and women, children, babies in the cradle, ...

SOLOists have had this discussion before.

Why am I not surprised?

Sometimes, the people were Japanese; other people were Muslim. Basically, the enemy is dehumanized and collectivized ("Islamic medievalists"), and then their extermination is called for.

I nearly used the example of Iran, where many citizens are pro-Western and pro-secular modernists in view. But I snipped tha paragraph as belaboring the point.

I have made the case for peace before.

I'm for advocating peace, but I have a suggestion: temper your rhetoric with reason. I note that in the In Defense of Dresden you say that "All wars are crimes."

That simply is not true.

Some wars arise because people defend themselves against aggression. If these capitulated, simply surrendering to enslavement, there would be no war. The war results as a legitimate response to the immoral initiation of force--the crime is the initiation of violence, not the war.

If you label all violent conflicts as "crimes," then you would have to label a police response to a gang of robbers a crime. The crime is the act of the criminals, not the act of police defending citizens from criminals.

War is not inherently a crime. It can be a moral response to a crime.

Nathan Hawking

Post 3

Friday, May 20 - 5:39pm

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Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. Sometimes, we find ourselves without the time to think through a rational response to an aggression. You are walking down the street when... A nation is suddenly invaded...
A policeman sees a robbery in progress ...

Rewind. Get real.

Sometimes those things do happen. Our response, however, "moral" is still incompetent. Had we been competetent, we would have avoided the situation. Why are you walking down the street? Why is this nation invaded? Where did these robbers come from?

Store owners have no incentive to prevent robbery if they believe they have paid into the social pool for the common good of law enforcement -- which (for almost no money at all) will risk their lives to protect property that is not theirs. Of course, many of the police believe that good acts coupled with faith will assure them a place in heaven. That reinforces their mandate to die for someone else's property. If that seems irrational, it is because it is.

In my training as a security guard, I learned that conflict avoidance is the key to conflict resolution. Most often conflicts begin not because someone confronts a rent-a-cop, but because someone who is already in conflict with himself is confronted by a guard. The burden is on the guard to manage the situation.

Store owners need to protect their own goods. Alarms, etc., guards, etc., prevent crime. Then, the police can avoid earning weepy epitaphs for fighting crime.

As for nations and their wars, the matter is more complex, and yet, simpler. Hitler and World War II are easy to toss around. You have to stop and rewind. Where did Hitler come from? What made the Germans aggressors? These situations have antecedents.

Seen another way, suppose Hitler had been completely unopposed. Would the world today really be worse off? Would 6 million Jews have died? Would millions more people have died? You know, the extermination camps were the final solution. The first solution was the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. Go figure. The victors write the history books. We say it, but we do not understand what it means because we were raised to believe that "we" "won" the war.

It does happen -- as in the case of the American Revolution or Switzerland's Henri Guisan (http://www.generalguisan.ch/) -- that armed resistence seems to have won the day for freedom. Perhaps the exceptions test the rule. Perhaps a broader truth explains more. Saying that capitalism works, but sometimes we have to defend ourselves against aggression may be like saying that free enterrpise is all right, but sometimes the government needs to regulate businesses for the common good.

Violence is the last resort of the incompetent.

Post 4

Friday, May 20 - 6:11pm

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Michael M:

You appear to be responding to my statement that war (or any violent response to violence) is not inherently a crime by saying that if it is not a crime then it is an indication of stupidity.

I disagree.

Violence is the last resort of the incompetent. Sometimes, we find ourselves without the time to think through a rational response to an aggression.

Rewind. Get real.

Sometimes those things do happen. Our response, however, "moral" is still incompetent. Had we been competetent, we would have avoided the situation. ...

Once again you diminish the credibility of your position with wild overstatement: "Violence is the last resort of the incompetent." This is beyond hyperbole--it is simply untrue.

As you say, get real.

Acting wisely can diminish the risk, even remove it in some cases, but no amount of wisdom on our part can completely control the behavior of others. Acts of aggression happen, sometime through absolutely no fault of our own.

Seen another way, suppose Hitler had been completely unopposed. Would the world today really be worse off? Would 6 million Jews have died? Would millions more people have died?

You answer that. Stalin went militarily unopposed. How many did he slaughter? By some accounts it reached into the many millions. How would our "competent" and nonviolent behavior have prevented him from doing that?

The answer: We can be completely competent, and we still do not control the behavior of others.

I won't respond further, except to repeat what I suggested in my last post: You'll be taken more seriously as an advocate of peace if you refrain from wild overstatements and disjointed rhetoric.

Nathan Hawking

Post 5

Monday, May 23 - 2:59am

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I am for sanity and sense and against warmongering. Still and though I am no great friend of Schopenhauer I adhere to what he said about the death penalty: “I will be fully against the death penalty… as soon as murderers stop murdering.”

May I, thus, I remind those who profess to be Objectivists yet defend peace at all costs and don’t consider civilians (apart from young people up to the time when they are legally considered to be full adults – around age 21) to be responsible for some wars, etc. of some of Rand’s own words? I think this will clear the issue:

From “Collectivized Rights” (1963) (See. “The Virtue of Selfishness):

“There are four characteristics which brand a country unmistakably as a dictatorship: one-party rule – executions without trial or with a mock trial, for political offenses – the nationalization or expropriation of private property – and censorship. A country guilty of these outrages forfeits any moral prerogatives, any claim to national rights or sovereignty, and becomes an outlaw.”

“Dictatorship nations are outlaws. Any free nation had the right to invade Nazi Germany and, today, has the right to invade Soviet Russia (Reminder: This was written in 1963), Cuba or any other slave pen. Whether a free nation chooses to do so or not is a matter of its own self-interest, not of respect for the nonexisting “rights” of gang rulers. It is not a free nation’s duty to liberate other nations at the price of self-sacrifice, but a free nation has the right to do it, when and if it so chooses.”

Oh, and by the way, for those interested in the purely technical detail of carpet and pinpoint bombing: Bombers during WWII were already very able to accomplish these pinpoint bombings. There is a scale model in Frankfurt am Main showing the total destruction of the city… excepting one solitary building standing in the middle of the whole devastation. It had been selected by the American Task Force as the place for their Headquarters, and they used it as such after invading Germany!

Post 6

Tuesday, May 24 - 7:33am

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I think it's wrong to fight someone else war, but not your own!