During the WWII, partisans killed Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command of the SS. This took place outside of a small Czech town called Lidice. The Nazis slaughtered almost everyone who lived in the town, referring to it as collective punishment. The Nuremburg tribunal determined it was a war crime.
In the occupied territories (West Bank and Gaza), the occupying power (Israel) employs collective punishment by destroying the homes of the families of Palestinians accused of using force to oppose the occupation. This has been widely denounced as a war crime. (Please note, I am not saying that the Israeli actions are identical to Nazi actions, there is a profound difference between murdering people and demolishing their homes - but the underlying concept, that it is not necessarily the immediate perpetrator of a crime that is punished, but those geographically or otherwise associated with him or her, spring from the same logic.)
Tuesday, some fanatics killed thousands of people in the United States. In their warped minds they probably justified this as collective punishment, most probably for American support for Israel.
Very outraged people, here on the SD boards, and some in positions of power and authority, are calling for retaliatory strikes - against Kabul and Baghdad in most cases. How is this any different from any other form of collective punishment?
Tuesday’s fanatics may have been more successful in attacking democracy than many of us realize. A basic part of democracy as most of us understand it is the rule of law. Punishment is only to be meted out to the guilty, to those who perpetrated a criminal act and their co-conspirators. Hiding behind the doublespeak of “collateral damage” does nothing to diminish the nature of the crime of collective punishment. Any attack that kills innocent civilians is a war crime.
If those who are calling for revenge and a massive military response against targets in the Middle East do not start tempering their demands with an insistence that only the guilty are to be targetted, and that “collateral damage” is not acceptable, they are revealing themselves as enemies of democracy. The fanatics will have won.