EricMacKnight.com

This week Amnesty International published a report criticizing Ukraine for putting soldiers in residential areas. The report begins, 

Ukrainian forces have put civilians in harm’s way by establishing bases and operating weapons systems in populated residential areas, including in schools and hospitals, as they repelled the Russian invasion that began in February, Amnesty International said today.

Such tactics violate international humanitarian law and endanger civilians, as they turn civilian objects into military targets. The ensuing Russian strikes in populated areas have killed civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure.

“We have documented a pattern of Ukrainian forces putting civilians at risk and violating the laws of war when they operate in populated areas,” said Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General.

“Being in a defensive position does not exempt the Ukrainian military from respecting international humanitarian law.”

Not every Russian attack documented by Amnesty International followed this pattern, however. In certain other locations in which Amnesty International concluded that Russia had committed war crimes, including in some areas of the city of Kharkiv, the organization did not find evidence of Ukrainian forces located in the civilian areas unlawfully targeted by the Russian military.

Despite the last paragraph and the many preceding Amnesty reports that have identified Russia as the perpetrator of war crimes in its invasion of Ukraine, this report produced outrage among supporters of Ukraine. Yaroslav Trofimov of the Wall Street Journal:

The head of @Amnesty Ukraine @OPokalchuk resigns, saying that the organization created an “instrument of Russian propaganda” with a report accusing Ukrainian forces of breaking int’l law that ignored local researchers concerns and gave too little time for Ukrainian MOD response.

This controversy invites reconsideration of the whole notion of “war crimes” and the question of whether the moral standards that we at least attempt to uphold in peacetime can be applied as well in wartime. At one end of this debate one might argue that war is itself a crime, just as murder is a crime. If war is a crime then trying to regulate its conduct by “humanitarian” rules reminds one of the British army in the American colonies, outraged by the colonists’ habit of hiding behind trees instead of fighting out in the open. If the aim in a war is to win by any means, it might seem that no wartime conduct—including rape, torture, and wholesale slaughter of unarmed civilians—can be rationally condemned.

However, if we want to consider war as a crime, let’s compare it with something we all agree is a crime: murder. We don’t condemn people who defend themselves against attempted murder, even if that defence results in the death of the attacker. We don’t condemn a police officer for shooting in self-defence or to protect civilians from a murderous attack. Can we condemn a country like Ukraine, defending itself from an unprovoked invasion, for any tactic it uses in that defence? If we stay with the analogy, the answer must be . . . yes. Someone who successfully disarms and immobilizes an attacker, for example, acts within the law; but if he goes on to torture his attacker, he becomes guilty of a crime. Likewise, a police officer who subdues an attacker and subsequently abuses or murders the suspect is subject to prosecution.

If we carry that logic to Amnesty’s criticism of Ukraine for, in some instances, stationing troops and weapons in residential areas, what judgment do we reach? The key idea would seem to be necessity: an action that is necessary to self-defence is justifiable. If Ukrainians were to torture and summarily execute Russian soldiers they have taken prisoner, for example, these would be acts of gratuitous cruelty, unnecessary for self-defence, and therefore unjustifiable, criminal acts. The question, then, would seem to be whether putting troops and weapons in residential areas is, in some cases at least, necessary to Ukraine’s self-defence. Without access to detailed information we can only speculate. On the face of it, however, we can see that Russia is a much larger country, with a much larger army and many more weapons than Ukraine. In such circumstances, one is inclined to give Ukraine the benefit of any doubt. If such tactics are the only way to preserve the few soldiers and weapons that one has to defend oneself, how can they be condemned? In addition, the Ukrainian army and government clearly have overwhelming popular support: the people in residential areas used in this way either support these tactics, or are freely allowed to protect themselves by leaving for safer refuges. Certainly I have seen no reports of Ukrainian civilians protesting against their army’s tactics—whereas there have been reports of Ukrainian civilians protesting against the Russian invaders. 

The insistence by Amnesty that both sides conform to the same humanitarian standards seems to be an arbitrary adherence to rules, regardless of real-world circumstances. It’s as if someone faced with an attacker intent on murder is criticized for pulling out a switchblade or throwing acid in the attacker’s eyes. Circumstances matter. Soldiers who kill enemy combatants are not considered to be murderers, even though they kill people just as murderers do. This distinction seems obvious to most people. Responding to critics, Amnesty’s Secretary General, Agnes Callamard, writes on Twitter,

@amnesty has documented tirelessly Russia aggression, war crimes in Ukraine: https://amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/03/latest-news-on-russias-war-on-ukraine/… Today we report on Ukraine tactics endangering civilians. To those who attack us alleging biases against Ukraine, I say: check our work. We stand by all victims. Impartially.

Callamard’s failure to recognize the difference between behaviour under one set of circumstances and the same behaviour under very different circumstances is confounding. If she were in charge of the Emergency department of a hospital, she would by this standard insist that patients be treated in the order of their arrival, regardless of how urgently they need care. This would be “impartial,” and it would also be grossly wrong.

In addition, as Amnesty’s critics point out, Russian propagandists will seize on this report to justify Russia’s bombing of residential areas, schools, and hospitals.

We must resist our natural tendency toward binary thinking, which would invite us to consider Russia and Russians as villains, Ukraine and Ukrainians as heroes (or vice versa). But without condemning all Russians, we can still conclude on the evidence that the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine is a crime. And without concluding that all Ukrainians are noble, brave, and honest, we can still judge that Ukraine is the victim of unprovoked aggression by a much larger country. And those judgments cannot be ignored when assessing the wartime behaviour on either side.

Amnesty’s misstep here, whatever its origins, undermines its credibility, if not fatally, then at least profoundly. It would be wiser, perhaps, for AI and similar organizations to restrict their work to peacetime violations of human rights, leaving war crimes to the press and to organizations like the International Criminal Court. I have in the past sponsored Amnesty International activities among high school students, organizing letter-writing campaigns on behalf of political prisoners. At least until there is a clear repudiation of this Amnesty report on Ukraine, I will have to think carefully about any further involvement with them.

Garry Kasparov:

“What Orban has most in common with Trumpists is they view democracy only as a vehicle to its destruction. The demagoguery, nationalism, racism, are means. Win, then undermine and control the institutions for perpetual power and with it, money.

“In stable democracies, rich people often get into politics. In corrupt democracies, politics are a means of enrichment. Not mere lobbying and kickbacks, but wielding power directly to shake down companies, to loot the state and the people.

“Demagogues can be terrible for many reasons, but pull back the curtain and you always find them and their followers filling their pockets. It’s banal, pathetic, and not as interesting as grand ideological and psychological analyses, but mostly they’re just thieves.”

—4 August 2020, on Twitter

Those republics . . . that started without having a perfect constitution . . . may perfect themselves by the aid of events. It is very true, however, that such reforms are never effected without danger, for the majority of men never willingly adopt any new law tending to change the constitution of the state, unless the necessity of the change is clearly demonstrated; and as such a necessity cannot make itself felt without being accompanied with danger, the republic may easily be destroyed before having perfected its constitution.

—Niccoló Machiavelli (1469-1527), Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius. Tr. C. E. Detmold

Headline in The Guardian:

Fox and friends confront billion-dollar US lawsuits over election fraud claim. Rightwing networks Fox News, OAN and Newsmax could be found liable in cases brought by voting machine company Dominion.

So, apparently you can lie about guns, you can lie about abortion, you can lie about immigrants, you can lie about refugees, you can lie about women, you can lie about racism, you can lie about foreigners of all sorts, you can lie about history, you can lie about COVID, you can lie about terrorism, you can lie about the economy, you can lie about your political opponents, including the President of the United States. You can lie about all these things and much more, without suffering in the least. On the contrary, these lies can bring you millions of fans and huge profits.

But if you lie about a corporation, they will sue you into bankruptcy and destroy you.

Which says something about what we value, eh?

These are the actual words spoken by the Governor of Tennessee yesterday:

“We’re not looking at gun restriction laws in my administration right now. There’s one thing to remember, criminals don’t follow the laws. Criminals break laws,” Lee told reporters. “We can’t control what we can’t control.”

—Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, June 5, 2022

Oddly, the governor did not announce that he will be repealing Tennessee’s laws against murder, robbery, and assault, on the grounds that law-abiding citizens don’t need such laws and criminals won’t obey them anyway.

Observing woman’s agency, devotion, and efficiency in pleading the cause of the slave, gratitude for this high service early moved me to give favorable attention to the subject of what is called “woman’s rights” and caused me to be denominated a woman’s-rights man. I am glad to say that I have never been ashamed to be thus designated. Recognizing not sex nor physical strength, but moral intelligence and the ability to discern right from wrong, good from evil, and the power to choose between them, as the true basis of republican government, to which all are alike subject and all bound alike to obey, I was not long in reaching the conclusion that there was no foundation in reason or justice for woman’s exclusion from the right of choice in the selection of the persons who should frame the laws, and thus shape the destiny of all the people, irrespective of sex.

In a conversation with Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton when she was yet a young lady and an earnest abolitionist, she was at the pains of setting before me in a very strong light the wrong and injustice of this exclusion. I could not meet her arguments except with the shallow plea of “custom,” “natural division of duties,” “indelicacy of woman’s taking part in politics,” the common talk of “woman’s sphere,” and the like, all of which that able woman, who was then no less logical than now, brushed away by those arguments which she has so often and effectively used since, and which no man has yet successfully refuted. If intelligence is the only true and rational basis of government, it follows that that is the best government which draws its life and power from the largest sources of wisdom, energy, and goodness at its command. The force of this reasoning would be easily comprehended and readily assented to in any case involving the employment of physical strength. We should all see the folly and madness of attempting to accomplish with a part what could only be done with the united strength of the whole. Though his folly may be less apparent, it is just as real when one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the world is excluded from any voice or vote in civil government. In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world. Thus far all human governments have been failures, for none have secured, except in a partial degree, the ends for which governments are instituted.

War, slavery, injustice and oppression, and the idea that might makes right have been uppermost in all such governments, and the weak, for whose protection governments are ostensibly created, have had practically no rights which the strong have felt bound to respect. The slayers of thousands have been exalted into heroes, and the worship of mere physical force has been considered glorious. Nations have been and still are but armed camps, expending their wealth and strength and ingenuity in forging weapons of destruction against each other; and while it may not be contended that the introduction of the feminine element in government would entirely cure this tendency to exalt might over right, many reasons can be given to show that woman’s influence would greatly tend to check and modify this barbarous and destructive tendency. At any rate, seeing that the male governments of the world have failed, it can do no harm to try the experiment of a government by man and woman united. But it is not my purpose to argue the question here, but simply to state in a brief way the ground of my espousal of the cause of woman’s suffrage. I believe that the exclusion of my race from participation in government was not only a wrong, but a great mistake, because it took from that race motives for high thought and endeavor and degraded them in the eyes of the world around them. Man derives a sense of his consequence in the world not merely subjectively, but objectively. If from the cradle through life the outside world brands a class as unfit for this or that work, the character of the class will come to resemble and conform to the character described. To find valuable qualities in our fellows, such qualities must be presumed and expected. I would give woman a vote, give her a motive to qualify herself to vote, precisely as I insisted upon giving the colored man the right to vote; in order that she shall have the same motives for making herself a useful citizen as those in force in the case of other citizens. In a word, I have never yet been able to find one consideration, one argument, or suggestion in favor of man’s right to participate in civil government which did not equally apply to the right of woman.

—The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Part Two, Chapter XVIII. 1891

In the 1850s the southern, slaveholding states realized that they were losing, demographically. The U.S. was expanding westward, its population growing, and most of the growth was in non-slave or anti-slavery states. As this trend continued, the slaveholding states would be outnumbered in the Senate, and the slaveholding voters would be outnumbered by those opposed to slavery on economic grounds or (less often) on moral grounds. The clock was ticking. How long would it take for the new majority to impose its will and outlaw slavery altogether?

The demographic reality provoked fears that festered into paranoia and then hysteria in the South. Lincoln’s election convinced the slaveholders that it was now or never, and the Confederacy was born. Four bloody years later, the Confederacy was dead and the Old South lived under federal occupation for more than a decade. In 1877, as part of a back-room deal to resolve a deadlocked presidential election, Rutherford B. Hayes got the White House in return for the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederate states. Thus Reconstruction ended and ninety years of anti-black terrorism and Jim Crow laws began.

In 1965, a century after the Civil War, the federal Voting Rights Act finally ensured voting rights for all citizens. This triumph of the Civil Rights Movement, like the military victory a hundred years earlier, provoked a backlash among the white Christian nationalists who had fought to preserve Jim Crow, and lost. The Democratic Party, which for most of its history had been, in the South, the party of slavery and white supremacy, became the party of civil rights and social justice. The Republicans, originally the “party of Lincoln,” now became the last bastion of conservatives. GOP leaders welcomed disillusioned white Southerners and other conservative former Democrats into their ranks, thinking that they could control the more unsavoury elements among them, i.e., the most outspokenly racist and vicious. 

Once again, however, demographics began to tell against white supremacy. The nation became increasingly non-white, non-Christian, and multicultural. Once again, white Christian conservatives began to feel their “way of life” being threatened. Now, however, the divisions were not primarily geographic—the Old South vs. the northern and western states. Instead, the new divide was urban vs. rural. 

And that’s where we are today. A minority of mostly white, mostly Christian conservatives is using every anti-majoritarian tool it can find to resist the liberalizing tendencies of a growing majority of urban Americans who are more diverse, less religious, less prejudiced against racialized people, and better educated. These more liberal urban voters support abortion rights, support gay marriage, support voting rights for all citizens, and are not terribly alarmed by immigrants or Muslims or transgender people. To the white Christian, “pro-life,” anti-immigrant minority, such attitudes seem to signal the end of their “way of life” in the same way that the election of Abraham Lincoln was seen by whites in the slaveholding South as a mortal threat. 

The Republican Party, instead of using and controlling its most extreme members, has been taken over by them. The Democratic Party, with former Republicans and quasi-Republicans like West Virginia’s Senator Joe Manchin at one end, and activist progressives at the other end, constitutes a large but divided and perhaps irreconcilable majority. The outnumbered Republicans, using gerrymandered House districts, the anti-democratic Senate, and the anti-democratic Electoral College, hope to regain control of the Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024. If even those methods do not suffice, they will use dark-money funding and lies spread by right-wing media to finance and justify the invalidation of elections that don’t go their way.

The Confederacy may be dead, but the Old South, with its white supremacy and religious bigotry and appalling ignorance, is like a virulent bacillus that can be suppressed but never completely eradicated. When conditions are right, as they are today, it breaks out again. Buckle up!

In his last autobiography, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, the great orator and abolitionist recalls the months that followed Lincoln’s election in 1860. Many in the North were desperate to do whatever they could to appease the Southern secessionists and persuade them to return to the Union.

During all the intervening months, from November to the ensuing March, the drift of Northern sentiment was towards compromise. To smooth the way for this, most of the Northern legislatures repealed their personal liberty bills, as they were supposed to embarrass the surrender of fugitive slaves to their claimants. The feeling everywhere seemed to be that something must be done to convince the South that the election of Mr. Lincoln meant no harm to slavery or the slave power, and that the North was sound on the question of the right of the master to hold and hunt his slave as long as he pleased, and that even the right to hold slaves in the Territories should be submitted to the Supreme Court, which would probably decide in favor of the most extravagant demands of the slave States. The Northern press took on a more conservative tone towards the slavery propagandists, and a corresponding tone of bitterness towards anti-slavery men and measures. It came to be a no uncommon thing to hear men denouncing South Carolina and Massachusetts in the same breath, and in the same measure of disapproval. The old pro-slavery spirit which, in 1835, mobbed anti-slavery prayer-meetings, and dragged William Lloyd Garrison through the streets of Boston with a halter about his neck, was revived. From Massachusetts to Missouri, anti-slavery meetings were ruthlessly assailed and broken up. With others, I was roughly handled in Tremont Temple, Boston, by a mob headed by one of the wealthiest men of that city. The talk was that the blood of some abolitionist must be shed to appease the wrath of the offended South, and to restore peaceful relations between the two sections of the country. A howling mob followed Wendell Phillips for three days whenever he appeared on the pavements of his native city, because of his ability and prominence in the propagation of anti-slavery opinions.

While this humiliating reaction was going on at the North, various devices to bring about peace and reconciliation were suggested and pressed at Washington. Committees were appointed to listen to southern grievances, and, if possible, devise means of redress for such as might be alleged. Some of these peace propositions would have been shocking to the last degree to the moral sense of the North, had not fear for the safety of the Union overwhelmed all moral conviction. Such men as William H. Seward, Charles Francis Adams, Henry B. Anthony, Joshua R. Giddings, and others—men whose courage had been equal to all other emergencies—bent before this southern storm, and were ready to purchase peace at any price. Those who had stimulated the courage of the North before the election, and had shouted “Who’s afraid?” were now shaking in their shoes with apprehension and dread. One was for passing laws in the northern States for the better protection of slave-hunters, and for the greater efficiency of the fugitive-slave bill. Another was for enacting laws to punish the invasion of the slave States, and others were for so altering the Constitution of the United States that the federal government should never abolish slavery while any one State should object to such a measure. Everything that could be demanded by insatiable pride and selfishness on the part of the slave-holding South, or could be surrendered by abject fear and servility on the part of the North, had able and eloquent advocates.

Happily for the cause of human freedom, and for the final unity of the American nation, the South was mad, and would listen to no concessions. It would neither accept the terms offered, nor offer others to be accepted. It had made up its mind that under a given contingency it would secede from the Union and thus dismember the Republic. That contingency had happened, and it should execute its threat. Mr. Ireson [?] of Georgia, expressed the ruling sentiment of his section when he told the northern peacemakers that if the people of the South were given a blank sheet of paper upon which to write their own terms on which they would remain in the Union, they would not stay. They had come to hate everything which had the prefix “Free”–free soil, free States, free territories, free schools, free speech, and freedom generally, and they would have no more such prefixes. This haughty and unreasonable and unreasoning attitude of the imperious South saved the slave and saved the nation. Had the South accepted our concessions and remained in the Union, the slave power would in all probability have continued to rule; the North would have become utterly demoralized; the hands on the dial-plate of American civilization would have been reversed, and the slave would have been dragging his hateful chains to-day wherever the American flag floats to the breeze. Those who may wish to see to what depths of humility and self-abasement a noble people can be brought under the sentiment of fear, will find no chapter of history more instructive than that which treats of the events in official circles in Washington during the space between the months of November, 1860, and March, 1861.

—The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Part Two, Chapter X. 1891.

Bigotry cannot be appeased: it is unappeasable. It must be denounced, opposed, and defeated. Otherwise, it never ends.