One is not required to bomb hospitals, to torture, or to engage in mass killing of civilians when one is a chief of state. “My favorite war criminal did less war crimes than your war criminal,” is not a defense.
That people feel the need to defend those who do such things when in power is why we live in Hell.
The pathetic need of people to identify with a leader to the extent where they apologize for their war crimes is a sign of ethical illness, and when a plurality or majority do so, it is a sign of a sick society.
You who do, deserve your leaders. They reflect you and your ethics, and they have created the world you actually want, whatever you may say. You cannot commit war crimes as state policy and expect the evil you do not to eventually reflect in your own society. The best you can hope is to be a lord of hell, living on the suffering of others, but insulated from it, or to die before the worst comes home.
This is as true as, “bad people often have virtues.” Putin is not all bad; he has done good. Trump is not all bad; he has done some good. Obama was not all bad; he did some good. Blair was not all bad; he did some good. Etc…
The good does not wipe out the war crimes. Both must be acknowledged. But the war crimes remain real, and the people who ordered them are still war criminals; these men (and a few women) have done far more harm and evil than any serial killer who has ever lived.
If you believe that torture, mass killings, destroying civilian infrastructures, and so on is required of leaders in order to do their jobs, then you have acquiesced to live in Hell and all you are quibbling over is the details of Hell’s hierarchy, hoping you and your preferred people can avoid the Hell you inflict on others.
Update. Apparently a 101 on when civilian casualties are a war crime and when they aren’t is required.
When the POLICY is to mass kill civilians that is unacceptable. That was the POLICY in Chechnya.
Why is this hard for people to understand?
Civilians die in war, that is why the bar for war is high. Same with insurrection.
There are quantitative and qualitative differences between “civilians die in war” (collateral damage) and deliberately killing civilians.
This should not be hard to understand, and I am dismayed that I have to explain it, and related issues, over and over and over again.
You can kill criminals if your society allows it. You can kill soldiers when at war. Some civilian casualties will happen in war, and while that’s not good, it isn’t a war crime unless your war itself is a war crime (like Iraq, the Nazi invasions, Libya, the fire bombings of Tokyo and Dresden, and both nuclear bomb attacks on Japan).
Perhaps we need a war crimes 101 post, but I don’t have the heart to write it.
As for insurrections, these questions become blurred, but, even during the Terror, an attempt at at least pro-forma trials was maintained.
When you start killing civilians to create terror to break your opponents will as a government, you are worse than a terrorist, because you have the weight of a state behind you.
If you enjoyed this article, and want me to write more, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Mark Pontin
Ian wrote: ‘The pathetic need of people to identify with a leader to the extent where they apologize for their war crimes is a sign of ethical illness and when a plurality or majority do so, it is a sign of a sick society.’
Agreed. I find that part as tiresome as you do. Beyond that, though, the world is what it is. Sometimes it really *is* kill or be killed. And indeed …
In your post ‘Being Held Hostage by the Cost of Insurrection’ from June 29, you write: ‘People will be hurt and killed … some of it will be done by those rising. People will be hurt or killed who don’t deserve it … That’s a given. An insurrection is like war: Bad shit will happen to innocents.’
If not advocating that ‘people will be killed who don’t deserve it,’ you’re clearly countenancing it on the basis that — I take it — such murderous violence is unfortunately but inescapably part of self-defense against the murderous offensives and depredations of capital and ruling elites.
Fine. It happens I can buy that theoretically. (It becomes a lot less theoretical, and much more horrible and unbearable once one actually sees someone taking a bullet through their head.)
Still, why do you sanction one kind of organized murder as unfortunately inescapable but necessary and another kind — Russia’s against the Chechens — as war crimes?
Because in both cases, as you say, the innocent are murdered. So what’s the difference, Ian? What’s the difference?
Ian Welsh
When the POLICY is to mass kill civilians that is unacceptable. That was the POLICY in Chechnya.
Why is this hard for people to understand?
Civilians die in war, that is why the bar for war is high. Same with insurrection.
There is a quantative and qualitative difference between “civilians die in war” and deliberately killing civilians.
This should not be hard to understand and I am dismayed that I have to explain it, and related issues, over and over and over again.
You can kill criminals if your society allows it. You can kill soldiers when at war. Some civilian casualties will happen in war, and while that’s not good, it isn’t a war crime unless your war itself is a war crime (like Iraq, the Nazi invasions and Libya).
Perhaps we need a war crimes 101 post, but I don’t have the heart to write it.
Dan
So, sometimes it’s official policy to kill civilians, and sometimes it’s merely the happenstance of war, whose bar is high.
Sigh.
krake
There are no civilians. The collapse of the Westphalian order guarantees this, both as fact and as sad, tired truism.
Ché Pasa
The rules hardly apply any more thanks in part to the United States dispensing with the ‘quaint’ notions of appropriate civilized behavior in war. It wasn’t solely a matter of the US doing/not doing thus and so. It was also a matter of most if not all Western nations going along with it for the ride, for profit, for sport.
Now we’re in a situation where pretty much anything can be both a war crime and be “justified” by circumstances, events, or a leader’s desire. There’s practically no substantive opposition. It’s devolution into chaos. Once on that path it is devilishly hard to get off it — which “we” are not even trying to do in any case.
You can trace this situation back as far as you like placing blame on this or that act of this or that ruler or political party or parliament or congress, and all of it will be true, and none of it will matter because we are where we are and rehashing how we got here and who to blame for it doesn’t correct or change in any way what we’re facing now.
DMC
As Ian says this is NOT that complicated. It’s the difference between premeditated murder and negligent homicide. It’s all about the intent. Civilians die in wartime due to happenstance: Not a war crime. Civilians are DELIBERATELY targeted, as a matter of policy:WAR CRIME.
krake
“Intent” is a liberal (the whole Enlightenment project, not post-war cheerleading for the fungible commodity of tolerance) fiction. It makes complacency palatable. It makes for myopia.
coloradoblue
As General Curtis LeMay said on the firebombing of Japan, which he led:
“I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal. Fortunately, we were on the winning side.”
S Brennan
Okay Ian, if it’s POLICY, then, it’s a war crime, no POLICY no crime, fine. That’s well below the standard employed by the Nuremberg tribunal* but okay, that’s the standard you want to employ.
It is as you say, that being the case, Brother, could you please produce the Russian policy statement that corresponds to your accusation? Can you do it Ian? I very much doubt it, because by employing that standard, you ensure it’ll never have a corresponding proof, only the accusers word.
Whoever has the biggest megaphone, whoever is writing the “history” is sure to make the determination of whether a war crime happened…eh? It’s a standard that can be used without proof, on those you wish to excoriate, it’s a standard more commonly referred to as “might makes right”..eh?
Oh, wait a minute, my bad, I get it now, the standard is, if Oceania kills civilians, it’s not policy but…if Eastasia kills civilians then it must be policy. The Party officials at the Ministry of Truth make the final determination. Please pardon my thoughtcrime.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I must begin preparations for Hate Week and I hear there is to be a great celebration for Oceania’s massive victory over Eurasian armies. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia…and if it takes an eternity, we shall have the final victory
*[most convicted Nazis would have gotten off under Ian’s judicial dictate]
Tom
Well in regards to Japan, after Saipan, we could have ended the war right there. We could presented terms that in exchange for the entire Militarist Wing committing suicide, couched in diplomatic language tailored to Japanese Culture, and the Emperor appointing a US General Shogun and ceding executive power to him while keeping his throne. With that done, the Japanese save face, the Pacific War ends a year earlier and 2 to 3 million lives are saved.
As for Europe, a direct invasion of the Cotentin Pennisula in 1942 with the same forces that invaded North Africa, would have gained a secure lodgement at the absolute worse time for the Nazis and forced them into an impossible choice. This would have sheered a year and a half off the European War as well and save millions of lives.
Racism prevented the former, Churchill’s desire to preserve the Empire caused the latter. Both decisions led to the brutal actions later.
GlassHammer
“They reflect you and your ethics and they have created the world you actually want, whatever you may say.” – Ian
I think a great many are totally unaware of their “true” ethics due to their over developed ability to fabricate an “intent” narrative.
I have to admit that as I get older I am finding it harder to give a Damn about anyone’s “intent” narrative regardless of how well crafted it is. Most of the time I am just validating the other person’s self deception which is unkind to them and unhelpful to me.
Astrid
War crimes and innocence are not bright lines, they are defined by the norms of the times. But let’s be clear, war is hell. Anyone who is willing to participate in any war is willfully signing up for horrible deaths on both sides. Whether it’s worth it depends on a clear eyed understanding of what at risk with either course of action. But anyone who is other than an outspoken pacifist is not innocent and we’re just quibbling over gradients of culpability.
You win a war by making the cost of continuing so high to the other side that they are forced to submit. Sometimes you get lucky and you don’t need to dirty your hands too much to get there, other times your enemies are able to fight on indefinitely. Yet other times your soldiers are crueler than necessary for their objective and it can even backfire. But in all cases, participation in war is the crime and we’re just quibbling on superficial niceties after that.
Specific to Russia and China, I will say that Euro and Anglosphere tsk tsking is particularly irritating. Why do people who have peace through 100 percent completion of their national ethnic cleansing projects think they deserve a say in how other countries handle this. I’m sure the Chinese and Russians would preferred small pox and measles to have killed off all the Chechens and Uighurs without dirtying their hands, but is the annihilation any less complete and devastating on the displaced prior inhabitants?
Most nation states aren’t lucky enough to have disease do most of the work of the work of annihilating the other for them, letting them keep their conscience relatively clear. Ethnic cleansing is ugly, but every nation does it again and again. Don’t want that? Kill all humans before they do it again. There may be different ways to go about it, but the logic of what the Chinese and Russians are doing with their border areas is clear. Pacification of borderlands is an inevitable task for any empire. The choices of not being an empire means submitting to other empires. They made their choices.
Intent isn’t meaningful when there’s a willful ignorance of history. In the US, intent becomes a veil behind which they do bad things again and again, without every having to change their ways no matter how it turned out last time. Their intentions are pure so they can’t be war criminals…
Donald
I understand the distinction Ian outlines. And I won’t talk about the ethics of insurrections.
The problem in the case of the US and Israel and presumably other Western powers is that they always claim to be taking care to avoid civilian deaths. Sometimes it might be true. But it also serves as a fig leaf to do whatever they want and as long as they could have killed more civilians than they actually did, it is supposed to prove their good intentions.
One also finds that the Pentagon and the IDF generally understate the number of civilians they kill. There was a good piece on this in the NYT Sunday Magazine a few years ago. The reporters examined the air strikes the US had launched in a portion of Iraq in a given region and counted up how many had caused civilian casualties and compared this to what the Pentagon claimed. The Pentagon’s numbers were 31 times smaller. That is, their number of air strikes that had killed civilians was 31 times smaller than what the reporters had found.
This kind of discrepancy shows the military is not serious about avoiding civilian deaths. So that, I think, would be negligent homicide in civilian terms.
But it doesn’t matter much anyway because the wars are unjust and if I understand what Ian says, in that case the deaths are all war crimes
Tom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbfvEKE3vKk
Further confirmation of what I suspected. Herd Immunity is not a thing and a vaccine is simply not in the cards. Fauci’s head needs to roll and he needs to spend time in prison for Gain of Function Research and all labs doing that recklessly irresponsible research needs to be shut down and the researchers and funders thrown in prison.
Zachary Smith
Torture is a crime too. In the US of A, it is generally an unpunished one. Often the “Liberal Media” won’t touch the topic with a ten foot pole. Unless of course Saddam or Putin are the perpetrators.
UN Reporting on Torture of Assange Banned from Corporate Media
S Brennan
Tom,
I agree with your vid’s virologist Birger Sorenson, Covid-19 almost certainly came from a lab, in spite of the US’s 3-letter agencies declaring such a thing “IMPOSSIBLE”. It strains credulity that the Fauci*, who, funded the Wuhan Lab’s gain of function research into bat coronaviruses is…in charge of handling our response to Wuhan’s gain of function bat coronavirus…but I note in his defence:
While we know Fauci would have known from reports he received in 2018-19 that the release of an enhanced man-altered virus from the lab was very likely. Fauci could claim that he never “intended” to release the deadly disease even though his actions made that the most likely outcome. And under the “policy”concept outlined above…that there is no crime without a corresponding “policy”. So, Fauci needn’t worry that the millions of people he is responsible for killing could ever convict him of mass murder. BTW, Fauci’s killing streak will, within weeks, place him in the ranks of Pol Pot.
* https://www.newsweek.com/dr-fauci-backed-controversial-wuhan-lab-millions-us-dollars-risky-coronavirus-research-1500741
Stirling S Newberry
Going over the “ooooooo-owwww-ooooo” barrier. They don’t have a lab that can do that in Wuhan. Facts, they are such pesky things. Sorenson’s problem is that he works on HIV, which doesn’t infect very well. If every disease was like that when we never find a polio vaccine. COVID-19 is a different animal – which is why we saw HIV nonsense from the beginning. It’s not a virus problem, it’s an ultra-neoliberal problem.
He is right about herd immunity, however, because it is novel.
Zinsky
I rarely post here but I wanted to submit that war is the illusion that I can kill you into seeing things my way. It is a fraud and an illusion from its inception, to paraphrase David Swanson. It is therefore wrong and immoral in all cases. In relative terms, Trump has used the force of the state very few times to commit criminal acts of war (except for the early MOAB incident in Afghanistan and General Suleimani assassination). Obama droned more people to death. Bush Jr. caused hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis to die. I oppose state killing in all of its forms and manifestations.
Zachary Smith
https://www.ianwelsh.net/war-crime-apologia/#comment-115376
I don’t believe you gave this issue nearly enough thought. May I ask if you considered the events described in the Bible book “Exodus” when you wrote that?
Or in a more recent example, what would your reaction have been when Nazi armies invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941?
S Brennan
Stirling you’ve offered up yet another fact free comment, but this…this is just utter nonsense, “They don’t have a lab that can do that in Wuhan”. Fauci himself, I say again, Fauci himself, has said otherwise and he convinced US taxpayers to support the “gain of function” project. That is established fact, which trumps Stirling’s self-aggrandizing conjecture. How can you misrepresent that inconvenient fact? It’s been a long time since you’ve written anything worth reading.
And I’d add Stirling, the presumption, by you, that only Europeans can achieve “gain of function” is just another verse in the “white man’s burden” tale…give it up…Stirling, as long as your pompous attitude represents the face of “liberals” to the world, the road to genuine progress is closed.
Mark Pontin
‘When a father named Ruslan Betrozov stood to calm people and repeat the rules in the local language, Ossetic, a gunman approached him, asked Betrozov if he was done, and then shot him in the head.
‘Another father named Vadim Bolloyev, who refused to kneel, was also shot by a captor and then bled to death.[32] Their bodies were dragged from the sports hall, leaving a trail of blood later visible in the video made by the hostage-takers.
‘After gathering the hostages in the gym, the attackers singled out 15–20 of whom they thought were the strongest adults among the male teachers, school employees, and fathers, and took them into a corridor next to the cafeteria on the second floor, where a deadly blast soon took place. … The hostages from this group who were still alive were then ordered to lie down and shot with an automatic rifle by another gunman; all but one of them were killed … The militants then forced other hostages to throw the bodies out of the building and to wash the blood off the floor.’
And so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beslan_school_siege
bruce wilder
A remarkable aspect of Russian politics that I do not fully understand is the symbiosis between seemingly compulsive official lying and slanders in the form of paranoid speculation. I read about the horror of the Beslan school siege and followed the story down many paths and all the stories about that incident and ones related to it were alike in having layers of more-or-less false official accounts later superseded or sometimes never resolved, complemented by counter-narratives spun up in part out of the contradictions among official accounts.
Benjamin
@Zinsky
“I rarely post here but I wanted to submit that war is the illusion that I can kill you into seeing things my way.”
What a bizarrely naive idea. War is about achieving some desired end, usually acquisition of land or resources, that can’t be achieved through peaceful means. It has absolutely nothing to do with convincing anyone else of anything. In fact ideally there’s no one left to convince, because you killed them all and they’re no long an issue.
@Zachary Smith
The events in Exodus never happened, so not sure why you’re bringing them up as an example.
Zachary Smith
https://www.ianwelsh.net/war-crime-apologia/#comment-115398
What you say here is quite correct, but a very large number of people in the US believe it is a true story. The apologists for the Apartheid state use the genocidal fairy tale as a justification for their ongoing thefts of other people’s lands. Of the casual murders of those other people. 3,000 year old Land Deed!
Quite a few “Christians” are shocked when the Exodus story is turned from an ancient tale of Hebrew heroes finding a new home to one where some settled peoples are invaded by a Jehova-Assisted army seeking to exterminate them. Most become a bit rattled when asked if they’d like to be on the receiving end of this search for a “new home”. And they often squirm when asked about the morality of the God they worship in their church. They can be reminded of Mark Twain’s caustic remark about Jesus being the way Jehovah turned out after he “Got Religion”. In the end I sometimes find my reminder that the story of Joshua’s rampaging army isn’t a true one turns out to be almost comforting to them.
Benjamin
Most Christians never read the Bible. They just listen to whatever isolated passages their Pastor teaches them each week and that’s it.