I’d say that he also had the advantage that the British wanted to think of themselves as the civilized ones, the “good guys”. Strike at them and they could convince themselves that they were imposing order or defending themselves against the barbarians; passive resistance rubbed it into their faces that they were the aggressors. Rather like MLK and the American Civil Rights movement; the pro-segregationists like the Imperial British were bad guys who desperately wanted to believe that they were the good guys. In both cases, MLK and Gandhi with their chosen tactics were striking blows at the self image, the ego of their enemies.
Which is why such tactics would have been terrible ones to try against the Nazis. The Nazis were not only cruel and ruthless, they liked the thought of being cruel and ruthless. Refusing to resist them would just stoke their bloodlust, help feed their fantasies about how they had the will and strength to achieve victory and their victims didn’t.
That’s not the same thing and you damn well know it. Gandhi came from an upper class Indian background and no matter what happened in Africa, he could always go back to his own homeland. A people without a homeland to go to doesn’t have that privilege.
Gandhian pacifism makes sense in the context of Gandhi’s religious views: to him, the renunciation of pacifism created spiritual force, which would not fail to prevail over tyranny. Thus it makes perfect sense to bare one’s breast to the assassin or tyrant; as, with God (or the Truth with capital “T”) on your side, your cause cannot fail. Victory is a historical inevitability. As for tyhe Indians, so with the Jews.
Absent religious faith, this conclusion becomes less easy to sustain. That’s why Gandhi’s own “rules” for those embracing Satyagraha (loosely, “soul force”, or nonviolent resitance) sometimes emphasized “living belief in God” as rule #1.
However … for those who do not believe in mystical powers or gods of any kind, true pacifism holds no such guarantee of victory.
Well, there’s Gandhi the politician and there’s Gandhi the philosopher. To some extent it seems evident that his philosophy served his politics. However, I think he would deny that. So, if one is to discuss the Gandhian philosophy seriously, I think we should take it at face value.
And if we are to take his words at face value, he was quite specific in saying that every Hindu and Sikh should allow themselves to be killed by the Muslims, without any thought of revenge or retribution. So, his philosophy, as it is, doesn’t depend on any reliance on there being a homeland or people for him to take refuge in.
I think this is absolutely true. You have to believe in the whole god thing for it to work out. I don’t believe in it either. However, I always bring this up whenever someone takes the position that X has “no choice” but do to Y when Z takes nefarious action A. There is always a choice. And while I don’t believe in pacifism, I also don’t believe that self-preservation or self-defense automatically makes murder suddenly non-bad.
I believe that sometimes evil acts might be necessary in order to preserve oneself, but that such acts remain evil, and people should not expect their consciences to be soothed by the fact that it was perceived as necessary. Evil remains evil, even if it is perceived as necessary. This is something I believe we get wrong with our military. Our soldiers are taught that they are doing something noble. I don’t believe that. They might be doing something necessary, and I might want them to do it, but it’s still murder, and they should be made aware by society that it is still murder. No one should be honored for killing, regardless of the motive.
And I believe that sometimes people should be punished for taking such acts, even if they sincerely believed that what they were doing was necessary, if for no other reason than to maintain a high wall of deterrence for others.
Assassination in and of itself is usually insufficient to destroy a government’s ability to conduct military operations. It’s primary purpose is political. Assassination is today mainly used in asymmetric wars between occupiers and insurgents; the occupiers target the leadership of the rebellion (because the alternative, mass slaughter, isn’t currently considered politic), or the insurgents target the occupier’s puppet government officials to try to hamper the government’s ability to maintain civil rule. It’s very seldom that sovereign governments at war target each other’s officials except simply as targets of opportunity.
Another limitation of assassination is that even when successful it doesn’t usually impose defeat on another nation. If a nation is at war and enemy agents or commandos manage to assassinate the nation’s leader or a top general, all that proves is that the assassins got lucky or that the leader needed better bodyguards. War on the other hand proves that one nation has the power to overwhelm and crush the other.
Thanks folks, sorry I’ve not checked back in on the thread today, I’ve been in and out of the house all day and this isn’t the sort of thread that it’s a good idea to use my phone to post to.
I have been reading it, however, and I’d request that discussions on pacifism, and similar spin-offs, be taken to a different tread. This one is about how to prosecute a war. Obviously ‘not fighting’ is outside the scope of that specific subject.
Hopefully I can weigh back in tomorrow when I’ve got some free time.
Cheers.
I disagree. If the purpose of war is to is for one group of people to impose their will on another, fighting is only one option.
If you plan ahead enough, you might be able to change the other group’s mind enough to make them agree with your goals, and then fighting is not necessary. This method is cheaper, but requires more lead time and a completely different set of skills. The disadvantage is that you then need a staff with two very different sets of skills: diplomatic and cultural on one hand (soft skills), and military on the other hand (hard skills). The more tools you have to accomplish your goals, the better your chances of success.
So when we were invading Iraq it would’ve been OK if they had started to assassinate key decision makers here? I don’t think that would even do much. They’d have to kill all the Congress critters, the Pentagon and all the military leadership, everyone in the executive branch, probably all the governors…but all these would be quickly replaced and wouldn’t stop our war aims. So hmm.
Our “war aims” were driven by the selfish desires of those people; if they thought there was a chance they’d pay a price for it I doubt there’d have been a war at all. And even if it didn’t stop the war it would have been simple justice, since we’ve made it quite clear that they are all above the law, much less mere moral considerations and will pay no price for their atrocities.
No. I brought up pacifism specifically as a counter to your argument that assassins are no worse than regular soldiers. It was to point out that they may be, but that that is no moral absolution.
Absolution’s a rare thing. But as a pacifist, wouldn’t you agree that less violence is better than more violence? And therefore, killing a dozen politicians and generals is better than killing a million soldiers and sailors?
Yes. Rather obviously “Don’t fight wars at all” is not an answer to the question “how can we most humanely fight wars?” At least, not any more than “Abstinance only!” is an effective means of answering “how should we educate our children so that they’re best able to minimize the risks of sexual activity?”
(Good lord, I’ve opened myself up to a nitpicking hijack on sex ed, haven’t I? Nitpickers, please substitute an analogy that you like, instead.)
It’s a silly hijack and one that I’d prefer not be fed. Let those who want to argue that we should never fight any wars, ever, start a separate thread to discuss that point of view.
Sure it does. A targeted killing of a specific individual for strategic/tactical considerations is an assassination. And had we managed to sneak an assassin into the Wolf’s Lair and then struck a deal with the remaining Nazi leadership to get them to stand down, that would’ve been an assassination in the context of a just war.
No, it is not. The point of some wars are to impose your will on another group of people. Defensive wars, on the other hand, are not to impose your will on anybody. As stated, the point of war is to kill people and break things. What you are doing that in order to accomplish varies by the war.
Correct.
This may be true, in certain circumstances. Certainly killing Jesus did nothing to tamp down the fervor of his followers. However, I do not maintain that assassination is (no pun intended) a magic bullet. There are situations in which the use of lethal force accomplishes nothing, or actively retards progress. In those situations, perhaps no military solution at all will work. Likewise, in the rare cases where assassination will not avoid/shorten/ameliorate the impact of a conflict, it is no longer the best option.
This certainly can be the case. Then again, if Sadaam had managed to have the entire US military leadership taken out, the war might have gone somewhat differently. But yes, while that’s clearly pie in the sky, assassination does not guarantee victory. In Sadaam’s case, military force itself was doomed to fail for him, and the only option would have been surrender or, better yet, not to initiate hostilities in the first place.
Once Japan decided to initiate hostilities, FDR was not the only potential target. If, from Japan’s point of view, they’d eliminated most of the US admiralty board, they may have been able to prosecute their war with greatly reduced loss of life and/or concluded it much more quickly. While it’s ideal to just take out an enemy’s upper echelons, doing that may not guarantee a total cessation of war, but may allow you to overwhelm your enemy quickly enough that they sue for peace before you’ve done the full amount of damage that a protracted campaign of total war would see. Of course, as Japan’s war was an inherently unjust war, limiting the war with America would most likely only have prolonged the brutalization of the Chinese, so it wouldn’t have held any particular benefit in terms of ameliorating the horrors of war.
Likewise, I don’t have a detailed understanding of the Vietnam war. It may very well be the case that assassination was not a viable tactic for that time. But that only means that a more-moral course of action was not open to us. Not that, had it been available and viable, it wouldn’t have been more moral.
You don’t have to totally destroy a nation’s ability to wage war in order to significantly degrade it to the point that the actual conflict is ameliorated and human suffering is minimized. Additionally, if pressure can be brought to bear on leaders directly, they may be less willing to initiate war. If United States President Hypotheticoptimus knew that waging war on Smallistan would definitely result in his death, he might be less likely to authorize that war.
Likewise, the type of asymmetric conflicts you talk about highlight another means of limiting the damages of war. If one can kill the enemy’s leadership/logstics/communications capabilities, they may be able to inflict less harm on the general populace and you, in turn, may not be forced into the hell that is urban combat. Similarly, even if it may be an unjust war, targeting “puppet” leaders instead of exploding car bombs in the marketplace will, at least, somewhat minimize casualties.
Of course though, as stated, assassination is not a magic bullet and does not guarantee that the ends will be just. If the “puppets” are removed and then the insurgents execute everybody in the nation whose faith isn’t proper in their eyes, than some horror was avoided in the short time in order to replace it with hell on Earth in the long term.
Additionally, yes, assassination may not completely avert a war. But by the same token, in the right circumstances it can significantly ameliorate it. Assassination is a tool like any other. GPS guided smart munitions are a much more humane way to to attack a target, but if the target you’re bombing is an orphanage is still wrong, and even though you’re limiting collateral damage that doesn’t mean that an entire war won’t have to be fought just because you have smartbombs.
In the second Gulf War, the US not Saddam initiated hostilities, and we would have attacked regardless of whether or not he’d surrendered or died. We wanted Iraq, and we wanted bloody revenge for 9-11 (and didn’t particularly care that Iraq had nothing to do with it; we just wanted to spill random Muslim blood).
I see no moral difference. Killing is killing. What matters is the morality of the goals and whether or not you are killing more innocent people than necessary (and most of the time for the aggressor, the latter number is “zero” since they morally shouldn’t be attacking at all).
These statements are mutually exclusive.
If the metric to be used is whether or not you’re killing more people than ‘necessary’ (however that’s defined), then a method which reduces the overall duration, intensity and scope of a war, or even totally averts it in the best of cases, will be better than one that doesn’t.
No, it’s special pleading. Nazis (and not every German was a Nazi) were no more evil than anyone else. The British, or the Americans, say, were *just *as capable of unthinking *and *calculated evils as the Nazis.
“Lesser of two evils” is moral capitulation. It’s how you end up greasing your cornhole for Stalin just because you hate Hitler. It doesn’t work - Law of Unintended Consequences is a bitch that way. Sure, this week they’re killing their politicians and generals. Next week, the local Democrat leaders.
