Yes, that’s what I’m saying – there’s no factual answer to this question, because (a) “unacceptable” or “acceptable” are vague words, (b) prevailing views on civilian deaths will obviously change in different circumstances (e.g., WWIII would be viewed differently than a limited war), (c) the technology to ensure proportionality and discrimination changes a lot over time, and without a doubt (d) there isn’t a date where society changed its mind as if it was acceptable before 1939 (or whatever) and unacceptable afterwards and forevermore.
However, I think can all acknowledge that more modern, liberal (as in embracing representative democracy, strong belief on limits of government power, etc, not liberal as in left wing) societies have less tolerance for civilian casualties as a general principle.
Not necessarily and in fact it might be an incentive, for the wrong reason. The burning of Miletus only led to greater opposition from Athens. Which led to Marathon. It can easily lead to the next city thinking “these fuckers are crazy, fight to the death”.
And generally, the capacity to endure is greater than the capacity to inflict.
Yeah which is why area bombing of cities, firebombing, dropping A bombs etc was pioneered by the dictators sides and the democrats eschewed such acts, oh no wait!
You really should not start to believe your own propaganda.
Well, it goes back to Augustine of Hippo, for that matter. But I think the Western legal tradition which condemns the targetting of civilians can be traced, through Grotius, to Aquinas. You can find other thinkers before Aquinas who expressed similar views, but it’s not clear that we can trace our current thinking on this to them.
If the major powers do it, but feel the need to deny that they do it/pretend that they don’t do it, then surely that’s evidence that there is at least one sense in which it’s unacceptable?
Take the bombing of Hiroshima, for example. This was plainly the targetting of noncombatants, but at the time there were international treaties in force which prohibited the targetting of noncombatants. Plus, the US felt constrained to assert that Hiroshima had been chosen because of its military significance, which was not in fact the case.
QFT. It’s hard to argue that deliberately targeting civilians to be killed in war has become unacceptable while countries are still pointing enough ICBMs at each others cities to obliterate each other. Its total war theory taken to its logical conclusion and it’s still with us today.
I don’t mean when was it first written that civilians should not be deliberately targeted, I mean when did public opinion shift and say they should not be deliberately targeted? (in the west)
If you have any facts to contribute to this discussion, I’m all ears.
The fact is, as I related earlier, the development of international laws regarding the protection of civilians in war was led by modern, liberal governments.
No that “fact” is that the FIrst Geneva Convention was signed by such liberal and high minded governments such as the French Empire, Italy and the various German states.
The First Hague Convention was called by…Tsarit Russia. Now unless you are going to call the Romanovs modern and liberal (a claim which will shock many inhabitants of C Asia and the Far East), your position is completely untenable.
:rolleyes: There should be a Godwin’s law for countries.
The Lieber code was in turn based upon the well trodden principle of “don’t practice cruelty for the sake of it as that tends to backfire”, which has been followed by successful conquerers’ for millenia.
What is your point here? So both the 19th-century United States and, later, Tsarist Russia espoused lofty ideals that they have not, in fact, followed, already articulated centuries before anyway.
The United States clearly did not follow this code in the Indian Wars following the Civil War, nor with its bombing in World War II, nor with its support of military operations around the globe in the 20th century, nor with the drone controversy with us today. “150 years of hypocrisy!” is hardly a ringing endorsement.
Perhaps hypocrisy is what the road to change is paved with.
Or to put the point slightly differently: the drafting of earnest treaties and codes, which are not in fact followed by the powerful and are at best enforced post facto on the losers of wars, at least demonstrates an evolving consensus as to what is and is not moral. Although there is no actual way to enforce such codes against the powerful, gradually “compliance pull” will convince them to enforce them on themselves.
This is pretty well the best (and I think only realistic) argument for the worth of “international law” in matters of war and peace, in an anarchic world of nation-states that lacks a sovereign authority.
Oh yeah, shooting a 14-year old child in the head because she wants an education is such a noble and courageous act. Such is their bravery that they are not afraid to defy the Geneva Conventions, garb themselves as civilians, and use their relatives as human shields, and manipulate the obvious and predictable consequences of their actions for propaganda purposes. Truly, these must be peace-loving and God-fearing warriors of righteousness.
</sarcasm>
What a crock. It’s a war. This is what war is, and anybody who thinks it could ever be anything else is naive. If the inevitable civilian suffering of a war bothers you, you need to wise up and take a long look at what human history actually is.
And by the way, “there is no standard definiton so it all comes down to definition” has absolutely zero actual meaning and is one of the more bizarre tautologies I’ve ever read.
If we understand “public opinion” in a democratic sense, then since public opinion largely represents the views and interests of noncombatant civilians, my guess is that public opinion was always predominantly of the view that massacring noncombatant civilians was Not A Good Thing. This might only shift where you have a huge disparity of power; the citizens of an enormously powerful state waging war with a tiny country might not object to the massacre of civilians, because they themselves are not at risk of massacre. But for most of the time, in the west, these conditions did not prevail; if the ruler went to war, his people were at risk of the conflict moving in their direction.
If by “public opinion” you mean the opinions of people who expected to be listened to, and sometimes were, then as pointed out the view that targetting the innocent was wrong and should not be practised goes back a long way. And even rulers who were guilty of this - and that’s probably most of them - would tend to pay at least lip service to the idea. There are plenty of writers and speakers denouncing the practice from the middle ages onwards, and indeed from before, but I think you’ll work hard to find someone who says no, it’s fine. Even those who defend particular instances of it will usually express their defence as an exception to an acknowledged general rule deploring the practice.
So when they did target civilians on purpose, what was their excuse? I suppose you could say that they in some way they support the war effort, but many people have jobs that don’t support the war effort and their is of course the innocent children who don’t even know what war is, let alone support the cause. Their are also many people living in the enemy country who object to their war and don’t support their country, those people are killed anyway. You could say they are giving silent approval, but what are these people supposed to do , take over their government with a revolution every time their leaders talk of war? Most people wouldn’t even have the reasorces to do that.
Various excuses might be offered, depending on circumstances and context.
There seems to have been a convention in medieval and early modern times that, if you besieged a castle or a fortified city and the they surrendered to you, you had to spare them – you might loot, but you mustn’t kill – whereas if they held out against you and had to be taken by force, they you could put them all to the sword. The argument, presumably, was that all those within were joined the common enterprise of resisting your advance, and so lost noncombatant status. Alternatively, people would reason that their own troops had been outraged by the recalcitrance of the besieged, and by the needless bloodshed and suffering caused by their holding out, and could not be restrained from exacting revenge when the besieged city finally fell, and this was regrettable but what could you do?
In the wars of religion actions against civilians were common because what you were really fighting against was heresy, and when it comes to fighting against abstract ideas, well, you didn’t have to carry a pike to be a heretic. (Echoes here of The War On Terror, but the less said about that the better.)
It’s only much later that you have the concepts of economic war and total war, and the notion – much employed in the twentieth century to justify all kinds of horrible things – that pretty well everybody is supporting the enemies’ war effort, one way or another. This is of course an excuse claimed by terrorist groups, but not just by terrorist groups.
My wild guess is that the best time to be a civilian in wartime was probably the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. By this time armies are becoming increasingly professional and disciplined, and military strategy is being approach scientifically. Civilians might suffer looting and they might suffer the depredations of undisciplined or demoralised troops or deserters and of course they could have the enemy billeted on them, and they might be killed if they resisted any of these thing, but I suspect focussed strategies directed at terrorising or slaughtering largely noncombatant populations were comparatively rare – certainly compared with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
