I've probably said this before but ... I'll go over it again to justify this neat drawing of a medieval siege engine.
it seems to me a key point in the political/military history of Europe in particular in the last several centuries that the whole issue of civilizing war by de-civilian-izing it.
The whole issue of who are the permissible victims of combat has turned around. In medieval times, the idea that attacking civilians was a bad thing would have seemed very odd. Attacking civilians was pretty much the key tactic of every army. Surrounding cities and starving them out was standard practice.
Indeed, in the high middle ages in Europe, attacking the other side’s army was something to be avoided if possible. You wanted to sneak around their army to get at their civilians. After all, their army was made up largely of noblemen, knights, who were worth a damned sight more than peasants and city rabble.
Only very slowly has the philosophy of war moved in the direction of seeing war as a slaughter that armies do TO EACH OTHER, and that they generally try to keep the civilians out of.
The reasons for this change are complicated and the newer view is not as obviously valid as we like to think.
General Sherman infamously took the war to the civilian population of the confederacy, avoiding contact with the grey uniforms where possible. He justified this on the ground that making war more obviously hell would mean ... fewer wars.
I would not go Sherman's route. Nor do I want to see a return to medievalism -- which has alas never completed its path out the door anyway. But I'm not sure the newer attitudes have finally got thinhgs right.
Suppose I embrace the premises, at least provisionally, that (1) wars between nation-states are going to continue for some time yet and (2) good people should try to make them a little less hellish, not more hellish, while they remain a fact of life, and (3) making them less hellish might mean having such institutions as the court in The Hague and punishing people for being "war criminals." Doing THAT means having a narrow definition of a war criminal so that it isn't just the label that is used to punishing prominent soldiers on the losing side of wars.
Even short of proceedings at The Hague, I suppose it is the case that anyone whom we would call a war criminal would be the lawful target of violence by the opposing side during that war.
Presuming all of that: do we have to say that war criminals have to be military? Even including the small number of civilians atop the chain of command that includes the military? What of someone who performs the role of a William Randolph Hearst in 1898. Promoting an aggressive war chiefly in order to sell some newspapers? Suppose the Spanish Empire had formed a covert unit to 'take him out.' Would the covert agents be war criminals because they were targeting a civilian? Or would he be the war criminal in a philosophically legitimate sense, making their mission a matter of a sovereign's self defense? (Abstracting again from the obvious fact that being on the winning side works like Clorox.)
It seems to me that all the following propositions are reasonable: Hearst should reasonably be regarded as the criminal; he was a legitimate target in the course of a war which he did much to initiate; and the hypothetical agents would be soldiers not criminals. Thus, the military/civilian distinction is not an absolute one.
General Sherman infamously took the war to the civilian population of the confederacy, avoiding contact with the grey uniforms where possible. He justified this on the ground that making war more obviously hell would mean ... fewer wars.
I would not go Sherman's route. Nor do I want to see a return to medievalism -- which has alas never completed its path out the door anyway. But I'm not sure the newer attitudes have finally got thinhgs right.
Suppose I embrace the premises, at least provisionally, that (1) wars between nation-states are going to continue for some time yet and (2) good people should try to make them a little less hellish, not more hellish, while they remain a fact of life, and (3) making them less hellish might mean having such institutions as the court in The Hague and punishing people for being "war criminals." Doing THAT means having a narrow definition of a war criminal so that it isn't just the label that is used to punishing prominent soldiers on the losing side of wars.
Even short of proceedings at The Hague, I suppose it is the case that anyone whom we would call a war criminal would be the lawful target of violence by the opposing side during that war.
Presuming all of that: do we have to say that war criminals have to be military? Even including the small number of civilians atop the chain of command that includes the military? What of someone who performs the role of a William Randolph Hearst in 1898. Promoting an aggressive war chiefly in order to sell some newspapers? Suppose the Spanish Empire had formed a covert unit to 'take him out.' Would the covert agents be war criminals because they were targeting a civilian? Or would he be the war criminal in a philosophically legitimate sense, making their mission a matter of a sovereign's self defense? (Abstracting again from the obvious fact that being on the winning side works like Clorox.)
It seems to me that all the following propositions are reasonable: Hearst should reasonably be regarded as the criminal; he was a legitimate target in the course of a war which he did much to initiate; and the hypothetical agents would be soldiers not criminals. Thus, the military/civilian distinction is not an absolute one.
Christopher,
ReplyDeleteYou're right that Sherman took the war to the civilian population, but he authorized his men only to take or destroy their property, and not to enter their homes. One would normally read "took the war to the civilian population" to include killing civilians, but that was not the case with Sherman.
The greatest killing of civilians in war, which you don't mention, resulted from the bombing of London, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in World War II.
We've got no quarrel on either point.
ReplyDeleteThat's too bad. I'll try to say something more controversial next time.
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