Russo-Ukrainian War Thread - Page 510

On August 01 2023 02:31 KwarK wrote:
International law, and for that matter the rules of war, aren’t divinely inspired and enforced. They’re a worthy goal that civilized nations aspire to in order to place limits on something that is fundamentally abhorrent. A lot of them are extremely silly or arbitrary. We decide that low yield tactical nukes are a step too far and so we spend billions of dollars on material research trying to find the exact chemical composition to achieve the same amount of human suffering and destruction. Then we launch our thermobaric warheads and it looks just like the nuke would have but we stayed within the arbitrary rules of the game. The US bombs a village and then when counting the innocents killed will designate the men as combatants and the women as collateral, regardless of whether the women were part of insurgent activity and the men innocent.

None of these rules stand up to basic scrutiny but we believe in them because it is necessary to believe in them. We need them to cope with the horrors that we inflict upon each other. And not just in the context of war, we need them for resource allocation, we need them for justice, we need them to make it okay for us to live in luxury while children starve abroad. We need there to be a guiding principle or philosophy that says “these men may be burned alive because they were wearing the special green costume that makes it okay but it would be wrong to burn these other men alive”. As if it’s not all fundamentally criminal. These ships may be sunk because they carry weapons but these other ships carrying grain to be sold for money to buy weapons, those must not be sunk. It would be wrong to poison the crops of a village in Africa but it’s fine to pump thousands of tons of excess CO2 into the air and let a drought do it. The rules are the hypocrisy we need to forgive ourselves for the world. They’re what we need to live on soil that we know was won through genocide.

This is not to say that there shouldn’t be rules and that everyone should just nuke everyone else. Obviously there should be rules that we should aspire to. I’m very pro rule. There should be a lot more rules than there currently are and they should be enforced more strictly. Minimum prices paid for goods exported from the developing world. Child and forced labour rules (with teeth). But it is important to recognize that these rules are things that we imagined into existence to make human interactions more palatable. They serve us, we don’t serve them. The rules are a means to an end, a more humane and civilized society.

There are cases in which strict adherence to those rules fail to achieve the noble aims of the rules. A simple example is the rule against extrajudicial executions. Agents of the state should not be killing citizens, regardless of what they’re accused of. That prerogative is reserved for a jury of their peers presided over by a judge. It’s a great rule. But sometimes dangerous criminals are armed and unwilling to submit to a jury of their peers and when it is not possible to peacefully disarm them they may be killed by law enforcement. We’re all basically on board with that, the rule is noble and aspirational but reality requires exceptions. The nuclear bombings in WW2 were another example of actions that were contrary to the noble aspirations of our current rules but were, unfortunately, judged to be necessary to prevent even greater suffering. They were atrocities, but sometimes the world is atrocious.

Ultimately all war is criminal. We shouldn’t do it. If we must do it we should absolutely aspire to make it as palatable as possible. But these are just aspirations, not absolutes, and they must be examined within the context of a wider framework of aspirations. None of them hold up to absolute scrutiny. The objective isn’t the strictest possible compliance with the wording of the rules, it’s a better world in which humans are less awful to each other. When the goal of the rule and the wording of the rule come into conflict I support the goal.