Is it always Ethically Unjustified to Target Civilians? — Regarding Self-Serving Propaganda

© 2016 Peter Free

 

28 March 2016

 

 

Political correctness gets in (practically applied) morality’s way

 

Glenn Greenwald apparently felt obligated to make a politically correct point in his otherwise soundly reasoned essay about biased Western media:

 

 

It is always morally unjustified to deliberately target civilians with violence . . . .

 

© 2016 Glenn Greenwald, Highlighting Western Victims While Ignoring Victims of Western Violence, The Intercept (25 March 2016)

 

 

Let’s put his statement into the context that he intended

 

Extracts from the same Greenwald essay:

 

 

U.S. media outlets love to dramatize and endlessly highlight Western victims of violence, while rendering almost completely invisible the victims of their own side’s violence.

 

[T]he impression is continually bolstered that only They, but not We, engage in violence that kills innocent people.

 

Because I was traveling in the U.S. this week, I was subjected to literally dozens of hours of cable and network news coverage of the Brussels attacks.

 

[T]here was not one moment devoted to the question of why Belgium — and the U.S., France, and Russia before it — were targeted by ISIS (as opposed to a whole slew of non-Muslim, democratic countries around the world that ISIS doesn’t target), even though ISIS explicitly stated the reason and it is . . . self-evident:

 

because those countries have been bombing ISIS in Syria and Iraq and these bombings were intended as retaliation and vengeance.

 

The point, as always, isn’t justification: It is always morally unjustified to deliberately target civilians with violence (see the update here on that point).

 

The ultimate media taboo is self-examination: the question of whether there are actions we take that exacerbate the problem we say we are trying to resolve.

 

© 2016 Glenn Greenwald, Highlighting Western Victims While Ignoring Victims of Western Violence, The Intercept (25 March 2016) (extracts)

 

 

Is targeting civilians with violence always morally unjustified?

 

Hardly.

 

Civilian support for (or lack of resistance to) societally distributed “evil” abroad legitimately makes them subject to violent retaliation. Arguing any other way tacitly cedes the attacked entities’ survival to economically and militarily stronger peoples.

 

For example, no one is going to successfully persuade the majority of thoughtfully knowledgeable folk that civilians in Nazi Germany were not (at least somewhat) complicit in the Holocaust or with regard to Hitler’s murderous aggression into other lands.

 

The Germans themselves reportedly (but reluctantly) thought that Allied civilian centered bombing was a form of grudgingly understandable punishment for their involvement in the Holocaust. [See page 548 of Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939-1945 (Basic Books, 2015)]

 

Similarly, no one is going to successfully convince pragmatically minded moralists that American citizens were not arguably complicit in furthering the evils of slavery, Native American genocide, or waging murderously unnecessary wars from Vietnam on.

 

 

Realistically speaking

 

Without civilian economic and tacit political support, societies would not have the material reach to reap the havoc that they do. Ergo, the self-defensive targeting of an aggressive adversary’s civilians is mechanistically and morally legitimate under some circumstances.

 

Arguing otherwise constrains the right to self-defense to only taking on (a) the person (or machine) that is about to kill us and not (b) the culture that is sending unending streams of both our way.

 

This becomes a question of realistically applied international morality. The key issue is the difference between personal morality, in which everyone is considered to be a knowing and self-contained actor, and national morality, in which we take on the distinguishing (usually majority) characteristics attributable to our populace, whether we agree with those or not.

 

In this latter category, personal blame is not a necessarily deciding element. Nor is the personal power to have militated in favor of a different and less aggressive national regime. We are, instead, interchangeable cogs that amorphously comprise an accountable people-hood.

 

Without this mass apportionment of guilt to the entire population, one could not hold aggressing nations accountable for the harms that they do while the “battle” is in progress. (It is important to recognize that we are not here addressing what happens judicially after peace between the affected adversaries is restored. At which time, presumably, a more personally just apportionment of blame can be individually imposed.)

 

 

Consider this hypothetical

 

If the United States adds soldier robots to the aerial drone force that we already use to execute people abroad — including many innocents — what recourse will our technologically unequal adversaries have to defend themselves?

 

Are we contending that technologically less capable nations cannot attack the civilians that manufacture and aim these machines at them?

 

 

Are we arguing that someone in Yemen — who objects to the drone slaughter of her family — must aim her countervailing force at only military targets, the most responsible of which are located an unreachable thousands of kilometers away?

 

Really?

 

Pseudo-logic like this is a prescription for world domination by the nastiest and most powerful peoples at the expense of everyone else.

 

 

The moral? — If we are going to act like oppressors, our adversaries are (often legitimately) going to fight back with whatever means they have

 

Why, our Islamic terror-dispensing foes can argue, is it okay for y’all to kill our families, but not for us to kill yours?

 

Especially so, when we have no other means with which to focus your attention on the evils that you (so demonstrably) do?

 

Reflexive self-righteousness on our part usually combines a lack of self-awareness with ethical stupidity and illogic.

 

In the U.S. case, it is apparently acceptable for us to invade and occupy other nations — and/or drone murder many of their innocents from the sky — but it is not acceptable for these assaulted populations to indulge in a little tit for tat payback.

 

The one-sided lunacy of the politically correct “no civilians” proposition is obvious. The formulation simply highlights our moral hypocrisy, as well as our penchant for elevating ourselves above others. Traits that, I imagine, further infuriate America’s alleged adversaries.

 

 

Notice that the above mass accountability logic is identical to the rationale that those Americans — who favor holding all of Islam responsible for a comparatively few terrorists’ actions — would use to justify their own murderous retaliation.

 

This explains why morally sound people oppose violence against innocents. Which is sometimes different than violence against civilians.

 

The distinction is important.

 

How much ability people(s) have to honor that difference depends upon their relative ability to project power compared to their adversaries. The weak often do not have the capacity to strike only at the culpable among their attackers.

 

For the most part, we Americans do. And that is something else that probably sticks in our adversaries' craws when we wax self-righteous about who did what to whom.