From the fawning profile of Jake Sullivan in the New Yorker: "But, when it came to the subject of the war itself, and why Biden has staked so much on helping Ukraine fight it, Sullivan struck an unusually impassioned note. “As a child of the eighties and ‘Rocky’ and ‘Red Dawn,’ I believe in freedom fighters and I believe in righteous causes, and I believe the Ukrainians have one,” he said. “There are very few conflicts that I have seen—maybe none—in the post-Cold War era . . . where there’s such a clear good guy and bad guy. And we’re on the side of the good guy, and we have to do a lot for that person.”"
And, this is a man, to support your arguments about the incompetence of the PMC, "During his senior year, [at Yale] he scored a rare trifecta—“the academic equivalent of horse racing’s Triple Crown,” as the Yale Bulletin put it—winning all three of the most prestigious fellowships available to American undergraduates: the Rhodes, the Marshall, and the Truman. Sullivan opted for the Rhodes, earned a master’s in international relations at Oxford, and took time out to compete in the world collegiate debate championships in Sydney, finishing second. He then went to Yale Law School and, after graduating, secured a Supreme Court clerkship with Justice Stephen Breyer."
There you go. One of our Best and Brightest using Rocky and Red Dawn as moral lessons. At least he didn't mention a Marvel character or two, but one wonders what his action figure collection consists of.
Sullivan himself surely knows that what he is saying is bullshit, but like the smirking courtier he is, he also knows what his bosses want him to say in public.
A man named "Machiavelli" caused much outrage at the time when he described how rulers come up with hilariously elaborate justifications for all manner of war, conquest, plunder and rapine, all glibly aided by their fawning courtiers, when the real goal is conquest, plunder, rapine and power.
Machiavelli caused such outrage because, of course, he was correct, in the sense that he accurately described observable reality without all the happy horseshit.
The problem is not that we are governed by muddle-headed sappy idealists, but by cynical full-bore sociopaths.
At least as far as Palestine is concerned, the MSM knows that it is disseminating spin (e.g. Israelis are "killed" while Palestinians "die") and bullshit so ridiculous that a six-week old kitten would see through it, even if accompanied by a liver treat.
They know we know it's bullshit and they don't care. The "journalists" and talking heads know what will advance one's career and what will not.
Inconceivable why anyone would watch/read "mainstream media" other than to mock or ridicule them. They are weapons to harm the masses, like missiles and bombs. Nuremberg II candidates.
The West made the rules so the rest of the world had every right to ask that they're at least followed. Otherwise the West's words are not worth the paper they're written on. And this isn't just rules of war and peace, but trade and exchange, intellectual property and real property. If you want to take it down to everything comes out of the barrel of the gun, then note that the gun may soon be used to dispossess the West of its various property claims and claims of moral authority (including in West Africa and Near East).
The Third Reich hardly innovated the demonization and mass murder of millions for land and slaves. They merely industrialized it and brought it into the heart of Europe. Working the enslaved natives to death and stealing their land and treasure, at the scale of tens and hundreds of millions, while decrying their savagery has been a European tradition for 530 years (longer of we want to mine the crusades). Meanwhile, very few westerners even realize that the vast majority of WWII deaths happened in the USSR and China.
My other complaint is that history and scale does matter. When one side has planes, bunkerbuster bombs, tanks, and American /EU sugardaddies writing blank checks and doing your PR interference, and the other side has homemade rockets and lightly armed young men eager to avenge their friends and family, equating the two in the same conversation is obfuscating to the point of justifying Western settler colonialism as the natural state of things. Plenty of large historic and modern polities haver managed without ever having to systematically oppress and dispossess the native inhabitants to the extent of Europeans and their heirs. Saying now, after 500 years, that the Western rules don't matter after all, well, reap the whirlwind.
I think it was AJP Taylor who opined that the Nazis were tried at Nuremberg not because they were war criminals but because they lost.
My uncle fought through Operation Overlord in 1944-5: he always used to say that snipers were shot out of hand and never taken prisoner. The modern west also seems to think bombing is ok (especially when we do it) but that more direct killing of civilians is less acceptable. In similar vein, I think it was Nimitz who pointed out that prosecuting Raeder and Donitz for waging unrestricted submarine warfare might be ill advised because the US had done precisely that in the Pacific and the British Admiralty realised that they had used blockade as a tool to starve civilians. So the charges against these admirals ended up being contorted.
War is itself an immoral act. To try to draw lines on so called “war crimes” versus “legitimate war making” feels artificial.
One challenge for any "universalist" morality is that they almost invariably produce exceptions that apply to "unbelievers" of all kinds (and various attempts to depict the other as some sort of "unbelievers" to whom alleged universal morality does not apply).
So, the Catholic Church banned, among others, crossbows in the Middle Ages. But it didn't apply to unbelievers (Muslims, pagans), heretics (Albigensians, etc), or schismatics (Greeks, Russians, etc) and fed all manner of attempts to paint the adversaries as somehow unchristian and undeserving of the "Christian morality" (so that you can use crossbows against them) something that very much continues to this day in a not very dramatically different form. In some sense, this was the "rules-based order" instead of "rule of law" centuries before the term became fashionable (we can't define what the tenets of our morality really are, but the bottom line is that they prove that we are better than "them" and "they" don't deserve its benefits although they must be bound by its obligations.).
One underlying problem, of course, is that except in the most minimalist sense, "morality" is not universal, but a projection of a particular society's norms. Only the rise of a dominant society (and at least superficial adherence to its norms by "other tribes" for sake of dealing with them can even give an appearance of something approaching "universal" morality, and within that dominant society (and its adjacents), the allegedly universal morality reflects the norms of the dominant segment (and its adjutants) anyways, being adhered to by others on insofar as they want to "fit in," so to speak. When that social dominance is being undermined, the norms will be violated, especially by the more "barbarian" tribes farther from the dominant society/segment, and the formerly dominant group (that still imagines itself to be arbiter of the universal) can only be shocked by the "immorality" of those who dare challenge them....
As always, I deeply appreciate how much you make me think. It’s utopian to argue that cooperation for mutual benefit is the path out of fear of the Other. It probably is at the level of psychiatry but I’m not sure how it could take root culturally and politically.
Norms are dependent on the people with the power to either adhere to them or ignore them. A Russian commentator had a TG post where he pointed out that the people in Russia who wanted (and want) a much more forceful military solution in Ukraine actually want Russia to behave like Israel has. His point being a thankfulness for Putin’s adherence to norms. It’s an important point, evidenced by the difference in recorded civilian casualties in the two conflicts to date.
A deep and intractable problem we face now is hypocrisy when it comes to those norms, because that hypocrisy undermines them. That’s what the US (though not just the US) has done over the last 30 years. Everybody has always bent the norms, selectively applied them, etc. but the backlash is against preaching them incessantly and ignoring them completely. That dichotomy is another task for psychiatry.
The hypocrisy matters because the Global South now know that even adhering to Western rules (which are already murky and never clearly defined) won't get you anywhere if the West wants to destroy you. Russia worked extremely hard to push for implementation of the Minsk accords and when that failed, worked hard to minimize civilian casualty and treat POWs with dignity. Hamas in their official statement says their fighters were strictly instructed to not harm civilians and treat them well. China picks the most humane approach available to deradicalize Wahhabi extremists and give far greater autonomy to Hong Kongers than the British ever did.
Doesn't matter. The Western media and governments immediately pinned fake stories (even ludicrous stories like the Al Ahli hospital failed rocket/ammo dump/Hamas control center/staged atrocity, the Bucha Massacre happening days after Russians left town, and the Uyghur "genocide" that produced no bodies and no refugees beyond a couple thousand ISIS extremists operating in Syria) fully on the other side. Meanwhile very clear evidence of Israeli crimes against humanity are shrugged off as various degrees of "how dare you support (purportedly LGBTQ+ oppressing) terrorists". As if insisting on full material and PR support for the clearly genocidal terror states of Israel and Ukraine doesn't make them terrorist supporters 1,000,000x over.
As non-Western country including China are learning in real time, you can't argue with the West. You can't win them over with reason or your humanity. You either fully subjugate yourself to their ever more insane demands or you prepare to fight them and treat their shrieks as the shrieks of a terminal psychotic patient holding a gun, and hope you don't get killed when it gets put down.
Everything else, however sophisticated and plausible sounding, are just rationalizations. (Not aimed at you Lex whose comments I greatly respect). Just frustrated at how the conversation here, while dazzling in its sophistication and seemingly plausible within the corners of what's being argued, continues to sidestep the primary contradiction of Western Capitalism/Imperialism and ignores how the West's long history of turning the natives against each other and support of the settler colonists ("won't anyone think of the white babies that I'm accusing them of killing") resulted in the conflicts we see play out today.
Superb commentary with which I am in full and violent agreement although could never relay it with the eloquence and honesty that Aurelien displays.
My biggest concern is that these new Liberal elites and their sycophants are dragging us into continuous war and purposely setting people within nations against each other. They seem to be in control of governments, many modern businesses, schools, universities and major media outlets. Feel like they only way to address their constant moralizing exaggerations and lies will be via pitchforks and torches.
‘Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.’
George Orwell misquoting the Duke of Wellington
I tend to think that the Western Liberal elite are still locked into this fatuous idea. To them, war is a game where the rules are defined by the worldview of games and rules.
I suppose that being an ex-enlisted infantryman, I arrive with a different set of understandings of the nature of conflict. All the rules promulgated by the Etonians and the Yalies don't matter when "Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war."
The Peace and Truce of God (Latin: Pax et treuga Dei) was a movement in the Middle Ages led by the Catholic Church and was one of the most influential mass peace movements in history.[2] The goal of both the Pax Dei and the Treuga Dei was to limit the violence of feuding in the western half of the former Carolingian Empire – following its collapse in the middle of the 9th century – using the threat of spiritual sanctions.[3] The eastern half of the former Carolingian Empire did not experience the same collapse of central authority, and neither did England.[4] This movement was also marked by popular participation, with many commoners supporting the movement as a solution to the famines, violence, and collapse of the social order around them.[5]
The Peace of God was first proclaimed in 989, at the Council of Charroux. It sought to protect ecclesiastical property, agricultural resources and unarmed clerics.[6] The Truce of God, first proclaimed in 1027 at the Council of Toulouges, attempted to limit the days of the week and times of year that the nobility engaged in violence. The movement survived in some form until the thirteenth century. Other strategies to deal with the problem of violence in the western half of the former Carolingian Empire included the code of chivalry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God
The problem with this pessimistic approach is that if you substitute war with slavery it's easy to see the limits of it. Regardless of all its problems (lots of problems, yes), the changes in the way we envisage war could be a progress, no? And, by the way, are you telling us that the countries aren't listening (in the so called Global South, I think) because they still remain in barbaric times? Well, one could argue that your clever approach is also kind of racist, no?
I don't think I was saying either of those things. I was saying that We have managed to impose a hopelessly inaccurate and even dangerous discourse about conflict that combines ignorance with moral superiority and a technocratic mindset. This is objectively misguided, and (I added) it is striking that, for all that we have tried to foist this interpretation on the Global South over Ukraine and Gaza, they aren't buying it.
In some sense, Rwanda (proverbial rather than literal) did need "peacekeepers" (in a more abstract sense), didn't they? That is, if the role of the peacekeepers, as they should be in theory, is to provide equitable and credible security for all. One reason Koreans (at least in the South) liked the Americans was that they were foreigners from far away so that they didn't have any connection to the myriad factions in Korea so they were expected to behave more or less "fairly." And I'd suggest that this is one of the reasons why Americans used to be admired as much everywhere--at least while US remained more or less isolationist and had little contact with (or knowledge of) the outside world. Your morality might be still biased towards your own experience, but, at least, all foreigners are equally foreign and you have no interest in favoring one over the other.
In some sense, Americans trying to get "culturally sensitive" and more "respectful" of foreign tribes has subverted this "fairness of the ignorant." You don't know about all factions and cultural mores equally and, if you are trying to respectful to the foreign tribes, foreign tribes that you deal with more (and the tribes that make stronger appeal to you) invariably wind up being favored and the fairness (even the perception thereof) is destroyed. Thus the very partial treatment of the Israelis over the Palestinians (that goes far beyond the relationship between US/West and Israel in the strategic-political dimension.)
I should have made it clearer, perhaps, that he was talking about Burundi, where the dynamic is essentially the same, but the body-count has been a bit lower. Even there, decades of peacekeeping did n nothing to solve the problem.
PS. "Peacekeepers," not "peacemakers," I should emphasize. The morality enforced should be quite minimal and fairly enforced--you don't kill others; you don't steal form others; anyone committing such basic crimes will be arrested and punished equitably, but you don't go enforcing anything beyond these. Even the people who are totally ignorant of other cultures can do this without incurring (too much) resentment. It is, rather, when people try to enforce some sense of "justice" that leads to problems.
Those rules are sort of universally accepted and expected within and occasionally between individuals groups of people. Not completely, but still. It is simple and one can expand on it to create a spirit of expectation as well. Even the rules of wars that existed in the nineteenth century had some of that as well.
Whatever you thought of the rules, the goal of creating some order and keeping the violence from going maximalist is clear and defensible.
What our modern neoliberal order is trying to do is lawfare under the guise of fairness and allowing them to avoid thinking or feeling anything, righteous aghastitude; this while also smugly believing that they must be right and nothing needs to change.
If nothing needs to change, they can avoid being responsible for anything especially if “the rules” were followed and they felt your pain. Notice how politicians act nowadays? Not only are mostly mediocrities at best, but they have an available ideology that encourages non-think and groupthink, as well as the avoidance of both action and the accompanying responsibility that goes with it. Just follow the rules and it’s all good.
Evil does exist and there are many disasters hitting or about to hit us all, but we are governed by people conditioned to not act, avoid change or responsibility, and to think as shallowly as possible and always on the bright side, meaning it is just going to get worse.
Well, the modern neoliberal order doesn't quite believe that "nothing" needs to change, but only that "the other guys (whoever they are--not just their presumed adversaries, but, often their presumed allies who don't seem to be doing "enough," (like all the Ukrainians who are not killing themselves by millions (as opposed to hundreds of thousands, which is in fact going on) to prove the Western righteousness.) need to change. The problem is usually compounded because they don't take the others' attitude seriously enough and almost underestimate what it would take to change them (if it is at all possible to change them). So they scream and yell and pose and moralize and virtue-signal, but not much beyond it and consider that sufficient to absolve them of any and all responsibility, even though they achieve nothing.
In some sense, there is something to admire, in a highly twisted manner, about the ancient Romans, medieval Mongols, or Zionist Extremists: they take that what they want to do and their adversaries who oppose their goals seriously enough to engage in extreme cruelty, indeed, great evil to get their way, getting their hands dirty along the way (and this was, I imagine, why the likes of Himmler exhorted the twisted morality of the doers of such great evil.). In an odd way, the neoliberal elites do not care to do the hard, dirty, and evil work to get what they supposedly want. Not that what they do doesn't have evil consequences, but it is done at arm's length (sanctions, bombings, and misdeeds by "professionals," whether soldiers or paramilitary of various types who are socially distant from the PMC.) Because posturing about morality does not get their hands dirty, and does not (immediately) cost them anything, they don't care how the world gets smashed up while they moralize blithely (insert F S Fitzgerald's observation about the Buchanans here). In some sense, the PMC morality is worse than the more obvious evildoers: they don't need Himmler's moral exhortation the way SS murderers did: they don't even see or feel how dirty and evil their misdeeds are most of the time.
From the fawning profile of Jake Sullivan in the New Yorker: "But, when it came to the subject of the war itself, and why Biden has staked so much on helping Ukraine fight it, Sullivan struck an unusually impassioned note. “As a child of the eighties and ‘Rocky’ and ‘Red Dawn,’ I believe in freedom fighters and I believe in righteous causes, and I believe the Ukrainians have one,” he said. “There are very few conflicts that I have seen—maybe none—in the post-Cold War era . . . where there’s such a clear good guy and bad guy. And we’re on the side of the good guy, and we have to do a lot for that person.”"
And, this is a man, to support your arguments about the incompetence of the PMC, "During his senior year, [at Yale] he scored a rare trifecta—“the academic equivalent of horse racing’s Triple Crown,” as the Yale Bulletin put it—winning all three of the most prestigious fellowships available to American undergraduates: the Rhodes, the Marshall, and the Truman. Sullivan opted for the Rhodes, earned a master’s in international relations at Oxford, and took time out to compete in the world collegiate debate championships in Sydney, finishing second. He then went to Yale Law School and, after graduating, secured a Supreme Court clerkship with Justice Stephen Breyer."
There you go. One of our Best and Brightest using Rocky and Red Dawn as moral lessons. At least he didn't mention a Marvel character or two, but one wonders what his action figure collection consists of.
Sullivan himself surely knows that what he is saying is bullshit, but like the smirking courtier he is, he also knows what his bosses want him to say in public.
The “good guy” or rules based what have you is neocon dog whistle for empire.
Tired!
Micronauts.
A man named "Machiavelli" caused much outrage at the time when he described how rulers come up with hilariously elaborate justifications for all manner of war, conquest, plunder and rapine, all glibly aided by their fawning courtiers, when the real goal is conquest, plunder, rapine and power.
Machiavelli caused such outrage because, of course, he was correct, in the sense that he accurately described observable reality without all the happy horseshit.
The problem is not that we are governed by muddle-headed sappy idealists, but by cynical full-bore sociopaths.
At least as far as Palestine is concerned, the MSM knows that it is disseminating spin (e.g. Israelis are "killed" while Palestinians "die") and bullshit so ridiculous that a six-week old kitten would see through it, even if accompanied by a liver treat.
They know we know it's bullshit and they don't care. The "journalists" and talking heads know what will advance one's career and what will not.
Inconceivable why anyone would watch/read "mainstream media" other than to mock or ridicule them. They are weapons to harm the masses, like missiles and bombs. Nuremberg II candidates.
The West made the rules so the rest of the world had every right to ask that they're at least followed. Otherwise the West's words are not worth the paper they're written on. And this isn't just rules of war and peace, but trade and exchange, intellectual property and real property. If you want to take it down to everything comes out of the barrel of the gun, then note that the gun may soon be used to dispossess the West of its various property claims and claims of moral authority (including in West Africa and Near East).
The Third Reich hardly innovated the demonization and mass murder of millions for land and slaves. They merely industrialized it and brought it into the heart of Europe. Working the enslaved natives to death and stealing their land and treasure, at the scale of tens and hundreds of millions, while decrying their savagery has been a European tradition for 530 years (longer of we want to mine the crusades). Meanwhile, very few westerners even realize that the vast majority of WWII deaths happened in the USSR and China.
My other complaint is that history and scale does matter. When one side has planes, bunkerbuster bombs, tanks, and American /EU sugardaddies writing blank checks and doing your PR interference, and the other side has homemade rockets and lightly armed young men eager to avenge their friends and family, equating the two in the same conversation is obfuscating to the point of justifying Western settler colonialism as the natural state of things. Plenty of large historic and modern polities haver managed without ever having to systematically oppress and dispossess the native inhabitants to the extent of Europeans and their heirs. Saying now, after 500 years, that the Western rules don't matter after all, well, reap the whirlwind.
I think it was AJP Taylor who opined that the Nazis were tried at Nuremberg not because they were war criminals but because they lost.
My uncle fought through Operation Overlord in 1944-5: he always used to say that snipers were shot out of hand and never taken prisoner. The modern west also seems to think bombing is ok (especially when we do it) but that more direct killing of civilians is less acceptable. In similar vein, I think it was Nimitz who pointed out that prosecuting Raeder and Donitz for waging unrestricted submarine warfare might be ill advised because the US had done precisely that in the Pacific and the British Admiralty realised that they had used blockade as a tool to starve civilians. So the charges against these admirals ended up being contorted.
War is itself an immoral act. To try to draw lines on so called “war crimes” versus “legitimate war making” feels artificial.
Nice skewing of higher angels!
One challenge for any "universalist" morality is that they almost invariably produce exceptions that apply to "unbelievers" of all kinds (and various attempts to depict the other as some sort of "unbelievers" to whom alleged universal morality does not apply).
So, the Catholic Church banned, among others, crossbows in the Middle Ages. But it didn't apply to unbelievers (Muslims, pagans), heretics (Albigensians, etc), or schismatics (Greeks, Russians, etc) and fed all manner of attempts to paint the adversaries as somehow unchristian and undeserving of the "Christian morality" (so that you can use crossbows against them) something that very much continues to this day in a not very dramatically different form. In some sense, this was the "rules-based order" instead of "rule of law" centuries before the term became fashionable (we can't define what the tenets of our morality really are, but the bottom line is that they prove that we are better than "them" and "they" don't deserve its benefits although they must be bound by its obligations.).
One underlying problem, of course, is that except in the most minimalist sense, "morality" is not universal, but a projection of a particular society's norms. Only the rise of a dominant society (and at least superficial adherence to its norms by "other tribes" for sake of dealing with them can even give an appearance of something approaching "universal" morality, and within that dominant society (and its adjacents), the allegedly universal morality reflects the norms of the dominant segment (and its adjutants) anyways, being adhered to by others on insofar as they want to "fit in," so to speak. When that social dominance is being undermined, the norms will be violated, especially by the more "barbarian" tribes farther from the dominant society/segment, and the formerly dominant group (that still imagines itself to be arbiter of the universal) can only be shocked by the "immorality" of those who dare challenge them....
For those (non-sci-fi fans) wondering about the source of the title of Aurélien's post:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream
As always, I deeply appreciate how much you make me think. It’s utopian to argue that cooperation for mutual benefit is the path out of fear of the Other. It probably is at the level of psychiatry but I’m not sure how it could take root culturally and politically.
Norms are dependent on the people with the power to either adhere to them or ignore them. A Russian commentator had a TG post where he pointed out that the people in Russia who wanted (and want) a much more forceful military solution in Ukraine actually want Russia to behave like Israel has. His point being a thankfulness for Putin’s adherence to norms. It’s an important point, evidenced by the difference in recorded civilian casualties in the two conflicts to date.
A deep and intractable problem we face now is hypocrisy when it comes to those norms, because that hypocrisy undermines them. That’s what the US (though not just the US) has done over the last 30 years. Everybody has always bent the norms, selectively applied them, etc. but the backlash is against preaching them incessantly and ignoring them completely. That dichotomy is another task for psychiatry.
The hypocrisy matters because the Global South now know that even adhering to Western rules (which are already murky and never clearly defined) won't get you anywhere if the West wants to destroy you. Russia worked extremely hard to push for implementation of the Minsk accords and when that failed, worked hard to minimize civilian casualty and treat POWs with dignity. Hamas in their official statement says their fighters were strictly instructed to not harm civilians and treat them well. China picks the most humane approach available to deradicalize Wahhabi extremists and give far greater autonomy to Hong Kongers than the British ever did.
Doesn't matter. The Western media and governments immediately pinned fake stories (even ludicrous stories like the Al Ahli hospital failed rocket/ammo dump/Hamas control center/staged atrocity, the Bucha Massacre happening days after Russians left town, and the Uyghur "genocide" that produced no bodies and no refugees beyond a couple thousand ISIS extremists operating in Syria) fully on the other side. Meanwhile very clear evidence of Israeli crimes against humanity are shrugged off as various degrees of "how dare you support (purportedly LGBTQ+ oppressing) terrorists". As if insisting on full material and PR support for the clearly genocidal terror states of Israel and Ukraine doesn't make them terrorist supporters 1,000,000x over.
As non-Western country including China are learning in real time, you can't argue with the West. You can't win them over with reason or your humanity. You either fully subjugate yourself to their ever more insane demands or you prepare to fight them and treat their shrieks as the shrieks of a terminal psychotic patient holding a gun, and hope you don't get killed when it gets put down.
Everything else, however sophisticated and plausible sounding, are just rationalizations. (Not aimed at you Lex whose comments I greatly respect). Just frustrated at how the conversation here, while dazzling in its sophistication and seemingly plausible within the corners of what's being argued, continues to sidestep the primary contradiction of Western Capitalism/Imperialism and ignores how the West's long history of turning the natives against each other and support of the settler colonists ("won't anyone think of the white babies that I'm accusing them of killing") resulted in the conflicts we see play out today.
Superb commentary with which I am in full and violent agreement although could never relay it with the eloquence and honesty that Aurelien displays.
My biggest concern is that these new Liberal elites and their sycophants are dragging us into continuous war and purposely setting people within nations against each other. They seem to be in control of governments, many modern businesses, schools, universities and major media outlets. Feel like they only way to address their constant moralizing exaggerations and lies will be via pitchforks and torches.
‘Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.’
George Orwell misquoting the Duke of Wellington
I tend to think that the Western Liberal elite are still locked into this fatuous idea. To them, war is a game where the rules are defined by the worldview of games and rules.
I suppose that being an ex-enlisted infantryman, I arrive with a different set of understandings of the nature of conflict. All the rules promulgated by the Etonians and the Yalies don't matter when "Cry 'Havoc!', and let slip the dogs of war."
The Peace and Truce of God (Latin: Pax et treuga Dei) was a movement in the Middle Ages led by the Catholic Church and was one of the most influential mass peace movements in history.[2] The goal of both the Pax Dei and the Treuga Dei was to limit the violence of feuding in the western half of the former Carolingian Empire – following its collapse in the middle of the 9th century – using the threat of spiritual sanctions.[3] The eastern half of the former Carolingian Empire did not experience the same collapse of central authority, and neither did England.[4] This movement was also marked by popular participation, with many commoners supporting the movement as a solution to the famines, violence, and collapse of the social order around them.[5]
The Peace of God was first proclaimed in 989, at the Council of Charroux. It sought to protect ecclesiastical property, agricultural resources and unarmed clerics.[6] The Truce of God, first proclaimed in 1027 at the Council of Toulouges, attempted to limit the days of the week and times of year that the nobility engaged in violence. The movement survived in some form until the thirteenth century. Other strategies to deal with the problem of violence in the western half of the former Carolingian Empire included the code of chivalry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_and_Truce_of_God
Thank you Aurelien🙏
The problem with this pessimistic approach is that if you substitute war with slavery it's easy to see the limits of it. Regardless of all its problems (lots of problems, yes), the changes in the way we envisage war could be a progress, no? And, by the way, are you telling us that the countries aren't listening (in the so called Global South, I think) because they still remain in barbaric times? Well, one could argue that your clever approach is also kind of racist, no?
I don't think I was saying either of those things. I was saying that We have managed to impose a hopelessly inaccurate and even dangerous discourse about conflict that combines ignorance with moral superiority and a technocratic mindset. This is objectively misguided, and (I added) it is striking that, for all that we have tried to foist this interpretation on the Global South over Ukraine and Gaza, they aren't buying it.
In some sense, Rwanda (proverbial rather than literal) did need "peacekeepers" (in a more abstract sense), didn't they? That is, if the role of the peacekeepers, as they should be in theory, is to provide equitable and credible security for all. One reason Koreans (at least in the South) liked the Americans was that they were foreigners from far away so that they didn't have any connection to the myriad factions in Korea so they were expected to behave more or less "fairly." And I'd suggest that this is one of the reasons why Americans used to be admired as much everywhere--at least while US remained more or less isolationist and had little contact with (or knowledge of) the outside world. Your morality might be still biased towards your own experience, but, at least, all foreigners are equally foreign and you have no interest in favoring one over the other.
In some sense, Americans trying to get "culturally sensitive" and more "respectful" of foreign tribes has subverted this "fairness of the ignorant." You don't know about all factions and cultural mores equally and, if you are trying to respectful to the foreign tribes, foreign tribes that you deal with more (and the tribes that make stronger appeal to you) invariably wind up being favored and the fairness (even the perception thereof) is destroyed. Thus the very partial treatment of the Israelis over the Palestinians (that goes far beyond the relationship between US/West and Israel in the strategic-political dimension.)
I should have made it clearer, perhaps, that he was talking about Burundi, where the dynamic is essentially the same, but the body-count has been a bit lower. Even there, decades of peacekeeping did n nothing to solve the problem.
PS. "Peacekeepers," not "peacemakers," I should emphasize. The morality enforced should be quite minimal and fairly enforced--you don't kill others; you don't steal form others; anyone committing such basic crimes will be arrested and punished equitably, but you don't go enforcing anything beyond these. Even the people who are totally ignorant of other cultures can do this without incurring (too much) resentment. It is, rather, when people try to enforce some sense of "justice" that leads to problems.
Those rules are sort of universally accepted and expected within and occasionally between individuals groups of people. Not completely, but still. It is simple and one can expand on it to create a spirit of expectation as well. Even the rules of wars that existed in the nineteenth century had some of that as well.
Whatever you thought of the rules, the goal of creating some order and keeping the violence from going maximalist is clear and defensible.
What our modern neoliberal order is trying to do is lawfare under the guise of fairness and allowing them to avoid thinking or feeling anything, righteous aghastitude; this while also smugly believing that they must be right and nothing needs to change.
If nothing needs to change, they can avoid being responsible for anything especially if “the rules” were followed and they felt your pain. Notice how politicians act nowadays? Not only are mostly mediocrities at best, but they have an available ideology that encourages non-think and groupthink, as well as the avoidance of both action and the accompanying responsibility that goes with it. Just follow the rules and it’s all good.
Evil does exist and there are many disasters hitting or about to hit us all, but we are governed by people conditioned to not act, avoid change or responsibility, and to think as shallowly as possible and always on the bright side, meaning it is just going to get worse.
Well, the modern neoliberal order doesn't quite believe that "nothing" needs to change, but only that "the other guys (whoever they are--not just their presumed adversaries, but, often their presumed allies who don't seem to be doing "enough," (like all the Ukrainians who are not killing themselves by millions (as opposed to hundreds of thousands, which is in fact going on) to prove the Western righteousness.) need to change. The problem is usually compounded because they don't take the others' attitude seriously enough and almost underestimate what it would take to change them (if it is at all possible to change them). So they scream and yell and pose and moralize and virtue-signal, but not much beyond it and consider that sufficient to absolve them of any and all responsibility, even though they achieve nothing.
In some sense, there is something to admire, in a highly twisted manner, about the ancient Romans, medieval Mongols, or Zionist Extremists: they take that what they want to do and their adversaries who oppose their goals seriously enough to engage in extreme cruelty, indeed, great evil to get their way, getting their hands dirty along the way (and this was, I imagine, why the likes of Himmler exhorted the twisted morality of the doers of such great evil.). In an odd way, the neoliberal elites do not care to do the hard, dirty, and evil work to get what they supposedly want. Not that what they do doesn't have evil consequences, but it is done at arm's length (sanctions, bombings, and misdeeds by "professionals," whether soldiers or paramilitary of various types who are socially distant from the PMC.) Because posturing about morality does not get their hands dirty, and does not (immediately) cost them anything, they don't care how the world gets smashed up while they moralize blithely (insert F S Fitzgerald's observation about the Buchanans here). In some sense, the PMC morality is worse than the more obvious evildoers: they don't need Himmler's moral exhortation the way SS murderers did: they don't even see or feel how dirty and evil their misdeeds are most of the time.