‘Justice’ and war: A conundrum

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself this: How come, in all the long history of warfare, very, very few leaders engaging in a war have ever done so on the basis of a cause that they publicly proclaimed to be any less than perfectly just?
Seems like no ‘unjust war’ has ever been fought. Amazing.
Especially if you consider that any war that has any duration is always engaged in by at least two parties or nations, each of whose leaders is there publicly proclaiming that his cause is perfectly just.
What does this tell us about the nature of war– and about the nature of claims of ‘justice’?

37 thoughts on “‘Justice’ and war: A conundrum”

  1. I’ve thought of this often and concluded that all wars have always been about money, power, and pride, all of which are thoroughly dishonorable motivations. A commmon human denominator is to wish nobility for oneself and therefore activities undertaken for dishonorable reasons must be dressed up with high sounding camouflage.30 years ago as a probation officer I noticed that the meanest criminals tended to blame their victims and portray themselves as the agrieved parties.

  2. This is unfortunately no different from many other team identifications, such as I’m a better than average driver, my party’s or my religion’s fundamental credo is clearly right, and of course, no action ever undertaken by a politician is politically motivated or done for political purposes. Besides, your team’s partisans don’t want to hear how you may be guided by a flawed purpose or the other side may be just as worthy as yourselves.

  3. Meanwhile, back in the academy, have you ever noticed how the high-faluting theorists of ius ad bellum — say a Prof. M. Walzer or a G. Weigel, S.J. — have to keep readjusting their own criteria?
    The whole business looks like an unserious parlor game. Not only will the next war they happen to want to wage be a perfectly just one, it will also almost certainly be perfectly just in an unprecedented way.
    Happy days.

  4. I think a peek at The Prince might be in order. Xenophon too, maybe, and Clausewitz. I doubt if the Pope who called up the first Crusade said anything about justice. Those would not have been the terms he used, I feel safe enough to say. What about Henry the 5th, and all that guff about thinking oneself accursed you were not there on St Crispin’s Day? Is there anything about justice in there? I can’t remember it. I suspect the just war starts with the French Revolution. Even then, it was still clear to all the “interests” were what was really at stake. But the French Revolution started the popular war, the people’s war, and hence the requirement that the war be explainable in general terms. So don’t be ahistorical about this, comrade!

  5. A few days ago I found the entire “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” by Edward Gibbon, on the Internet. It is here:
    http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/home.html
    (I wish I could find a site with a list of all the entire books on the Internet. Does anybody know such a site?)
    I doubt if there is any record of a “just war” claim in the 1500-year span of the “Decline and Fall”, full of wars as it is. If so, it would be the “exception that proves the rule”, surely.
    For us commies, from the practical point of view, the question is whether we are in illegal conditions or not. In illegal conditions, war is being made on us. We strive to get out of that condition. See my URL de jour for some reading about this (e.g. Pomeroy, and Caudwell). The rule in all cases is to stick with the people, with the political, and never to fetishise war. War is a disaster for all and especially for the poor.

  6. No religion or philosophy has ever kept people from going to war. I suggest you read “The Psychology of War,” by Lawrence LeShan, Helios Press. Bill Taylor

  7. When mobilising their people to support war leaders of the warring parties have to summon up a moral justification otherwise their people will not be inspired to fight. Indeed, the leaders generally have to convince themselves of the “higher purpose” for the same reason. It seems to be human nature.
    In fact, the only reason parties go to war against each other is because for whatever reason they perceive it to be in their overwhelming self interest. Just basic psychology.
    What is interesting is that liberal democracies with free press, independent judiciaries, rule of law, universal franchise etc rarely, if ever, have gone to war against each other ever since their emergence in the early 20th century.
    Why is this so? Why is it that liberal deomcracies have never had the self interest to go to war against each other? It’s a curious phenonomen.

  9. liberal democracies with free press, independent judiciaries, rule of law, universal franchise etc rarely, if ever, have gone to war against each other ever since their emergence in the early 20th century. Perhaps… but many of them just LOVE to go to war against much poorer countries peopled by people with darker skin color.

  10. Yes …. the driving self interest being economics dressed up with high minded moral justifications.
    The liberal democracy phenonomen is significant, especially as it also applies to liberal democracies in much poorer, darker skinned countries, India eg.

  11. I have written quite a bit of poetry on this subject of wrongful war and the career leper knights who find so much purpose in “Peace With Horror” (or “Peace Thru War,” as we said in Vietnam) but suffice it here to say in prose that during my almost six years of enlisted indentured servitude in Uncle Sam’s Canoe Club (a.k.a., the United States Navy) ending with a desultory eighteen-month tour of duty in Vietnam, I learned to appreciate Ambrose Bierce’s claim that “Patriot” means “the dupe of statesmen and the tool of conquerors,” and that “Patriotism” means “combustible rubbish ready to the torch of any man ambitious to illuminate his name.” As well, I believe H. G. Wells said that “The first man to raise a fist is the one who has run out of ideas.” America with its permanently raised fist has long since run out of anything remotely resembling “ideas.”
    Certainly these definitions seem applicable today in America when retired Army Colonel W. Patrick Lang insists that our brutalized and brutalizing troops in Iraq sincerely demand that we permit them to continue indefinitely with their fruitless ferocity (financed, of course, not by us but by robbing future generations of our descendents who have absolutely no say in our unconscionaable depredations upon them and their as-yet-unearned income). I quote from a posting of Lang’s on his website entitled “The Constituency that Counts”:
    “Finally, it seems to me that there is a constituency that must be heeded with regard to judgments over success or failure in Iraq. That constituency is made up of the men and women who have fought the war, are fighting the war or will fight the war. So far as I can determine, that constituency is still overwhelmingly of the opinion that they are fighting the good fight, that they will prevail and that their comrades’ blood cries out for vindication through victory.”
    Now, as an ex-enlisted man, I cannot recall any of us ever calling each other “comrades.” We thought only communists and bombastic, armchair-MacArthur romanticists talked like that. We called each other “shipmates,” “buddies,” or just “friends.” And I never knew a fellow enlisted man who thought that their service to country demanded or required any “vindication” through the further unnecessary death and maiming of other Americans or hapless foreign victims. In fact, I just checked my Honorable Discharge certificate which says that my grateful nation thanks me for “Honest and Faithful Service.” It says nothing about me having to wait for an unspecified future date when some scurrillous and thoroughly discredited miscreants like Five Deferment Dick Cheney or AWOL Dubya Bush will pronounce me a “victor” who has “prevailed” over some unspecified somebody in a nebulous and criminal cause for which the American enlisted serviceman has received only lies, deceit, incompetent “leadership” from his own officers, and cruel indifference from his own government as his “reward” for “honest and faithful” service. What complete and utter crap.
    In any event, as ex-Colonel Lang and his ilk seem to conveniently forget, America’s currently pathetic excuse for a “commander in chief” has already proclaimed “victory” and did so years ago on that infamous “Mission Accomplished” day when he cynically misused United States Navy sailors as “patriotic” propaganda-wallpaper background while crowing: “In the battle for Iraq, America and its allies have prevailed.” So, again, since we already “prevailed” years ago, why have an additional 3,000 American “troops” — and even a more horrendous number of Iraqi civilians — had to die to achieve “vindication” for a still-undefined “victory” for which we already paid far less blood and money four years ago? I detect some really bad “reasoning” here, not to mention a condescending view of our enlisted men as fanatical, suicidal dupes too stupid to realize how utterly their own civilian government and “fuck-up-and-move-up” officer corps have betrayed them.
    I don’t know of any enlisted men who want to return to Iraq or Afghanistan for multiple tours only to have their own government keep them there past their agreed-upon rotation dates or refuse to permit them to return to civilian life after they have fulfilled their enlistment contracts so that their exasperated and impoverished wives divorce them and their children turn to other men for father figures in their fatherless lives. “The blood of their comrades” DOES NOT “cry out” for shit, let alone more blood from more of anybody. As we enlisted men said in Vietnam: “We are the unwilling led by the unqualified to do the unnecessary for the ungrateful.” Here we go again. The lifer career military types would answer: “Don’t knock the war, it’s the only one we’ve got.” The drafted and bullied-into-enlisting troops would chant: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” Solipsistic, tautological madness!
    In any event, a truly “professional” military will go where we send them and shoot whom we tell them to shoot. If we don’t tell them precisely whom to shoot, they will find someone to shoot. In worst-case scenarios, they may even think they should shoot a bad idea like “Monolithic World Communism” or “Global Terror” if they think they see it in the sub-human form of a Vietnamese or Iraqi foreigner. They will go when we say “go.” They will return when we say “return.” They have nothing to say in the matter except what tactical and strategic errors they will commit trying to do what doesn’t need doing by them: people completely ill-equipped by training and tempermaent to accomplish anything but the opposite of what they think they intend. If our professional military, as ex-Colonel Lang asserts, really want to die “vindicating” prior meaningless death, that does not mean that we civilians have to allow them to do that, much less pay them to waste our money and national reputation indulging themselves in what would amount to — if actually the case — nothing more than misguided “manly” masochism. Our “professional military” has agreed to let us civilians do their thinking for them so they can achieve some tactical operational efficiencies by not doing any of that intellectual, moral, or ethical stuff themselves. Such people do not form any political “constituency.” Quite to the contrary, they serve as our
    “apolitical” national Foreign Legion (which now includes most of what we used to call a National Guard) and no matter what pompous platitudes we utter about them, we expect them to just shut up and do what we tell them until we stop telling them to do it. We civilians — through our elected representatives in Congress — will determine when the starting and stopping happens. Some mistaken military officers have somehow gotten it into their heads that they get to cut their own orders or determine when they have “won” or “lost” ennough for the nation’s body politic to stomach — or finance — any further. Not true at all and a really dangerous idea, if seriously contemplated.
    So, here we go again. Not even any new bullshit to “justify” it all. Just the same old recycled bullshit from invested stakeholders in the corrupt Regime and its Professional Praetorian Guard too lacking in creativity to even think up some original bullshit. The Lunatic Leviathan has run amok again. Warfare Welfare. Makework Militarism. Manufactured Mendacity. Managed Mystification. Catastrophic Gradualism. Parkinson’s Law meets the Peter Principle. Broken Eggs but No Omelet. Fine for the ticket-punching senior officer corps and career politicians who never met a Race they couldn’t profitably turn into an interminable Journey, but death and disaster for the enlisted men and women who (like so many more Iraqis) wind up dead, crippled-for-life, impoverished or homeless as their “vindication” for “honest and faithful service” from a “grateful nation” that “supports” them. The American Regime under the domineering intimidation of the Republican Party and its handmaiden accomplices in the senior military (and browbeaten Democratic “centrist” and/or “liberal hawk”) ranks has gone completely nuts, if not outright fascist — again. Gore Vidal had it precisely correct when he said that “America doesn’t have two political parties. It has one political party with two right wings.” He also nailed the awful truth when he called Americans “among the most easily frightened people on earth.” How awfully true.
    So, the time for some serious Regime Change in America approaches. I hear rivers and oceans of blood crying out for THAT — not more of the same bullshit from the same invested, bullshitting courtiers who still think the naked “commander in chief” emperor wears visible clothing when his own self-selected Vice President hasn’t seen fit to issue him any.

  12. Dominic
    What about Henry the 5th, and all that guff about thinking oneself accursed you were not there on St Crispin’s Day
    I watched the return to UK of Jackie Mann when he was released after being kidnapped in Lebanon in the 1990s.
    He was an Battle of Britain pilot which is one of the reasons Beruit was turned upside down looking for him.
    As he came down the aircraft steps, he stopped as heard the distinctive engine noise of a Spitfire that flew past with one wing dipped in salute.
    It isn’t quite Guff.
    There is something of self respect about not being in the panic stricken rabble that legs it at the first whiff of lead in the air.

  13. Helena
    What a fascinating question.
    You were looking for books to read on War and Empires
    I find Boney Fuller’s “Great Battles of the Western World” and absolutley riveting read even now thirty years after I first read it.
    He opened up the interaction between developments in society and ideas, developments in technology and developments in warfare to me as the underlying causes of change and evolution in the world and the endless interaction between innovation and inertia.
    It gives an added impulse of delight to the description of the obstrction of the British Admiralty to the introduction of new gun laying technology prior to the first world war, the end result of which was that they went to the Battle of the Skaggerak (also known as Jutland) with Guns that could fire fifteen miles but only reliably hit anything at 1500 metres.
    Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is a glorious piece of work that concludes that whoever climbs to the top of the greasy pole finally wins a poisoned chalice of being global policeman, the costs and burden of which eventually bankrupt and destroy them.

  14. Frank, old boy, my grandfather was not Admiral Beattie, but he was in fact an RN Admiral in command of another of the Approaches during the first world war, or the Great War as he would probably have called it (he died before I had a chance to meet him, me being in the colonies and all).
    So I have had time to reflect on these things. I would be inclined, for example, not to exclude the names of the white members of the old South African Defense Force from the wall of remembrance in Pretoria, unlike my comrades in the African National Congress, who won’t hear of it. If only on the grounds that old soldiers are often wiser about the bullshit of war than others.
    My father, also a Royal Navy officer and ship commander, decorated and wounded in the second world war, did not encourage any of his sons to join up.
    But getting back to Helena’s original idea, I would say that there is a qualitative difference between The Few, on the one hand, up against the Nazis, and the mob that took Agincourt (in France) with Henry V, conquering King of England. The Few had an honourable piece of work to do, and they did it well. Henry V was no better than a gangster. One lot was just and the other not, in my book. I know that Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V was used as patriotic propaganda during the war, but I still say it was guff and not to be confused with the real thing.
    Saying that The Few were justified is not a problem for me. It is only a problem for pacifists. They think that no war is just, not even the kind waged by the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots holding off the Nazi butchers.
    The US now has forces in several countries in Africa and has just set up an “Africa Command”. They have no business to be here. They should get the hell out. They are nothing but a menace. If they stay, they will sooner or later start getting themselves killed, and I will have no sympathy for them in that case.

  15. How come, in all the long history of the law, very, very few leaders engaging in legislation have ever done so on the basis of a cause that they publicly proclaimed to be any less than perfectly just?
    Maybe so few politicians & generals advertise the unjustness of their own ideas because they sincerely believe them to be just. Don’t contradictory ideas of justice inform all political conflict? Isn’t the purpose of this blog to promote conceptions of justice that contradict others (neocons, imperialists, zionists etc)?
    Or is your point that qualifying controversial views as “just” is circular & vacuous — in which case I’d recommend changing the name of the blog (do they allow scare quotes in a domain name?)

  16. Embassy of Cuba in Pretoria, Media Release, 15-Mar-2007:
    “Cuba Backs UN Human Rights Council and claim for South Justice
    “Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque denounced that the US and its allies are plotting to harm the reputation of the Human Rights Council. When speaking at the fourth ordinary period of sessions of that UN instance, the Cuban minister said there are intentions to delay the Council’s institutional structure and return to the practice of punitive resolutions against southern countries.
    “The term to approve mechanisms related to its functioning will expire on June 18, he recalled, warning it should not be postponed. Perez Roque referred to the Cuban statement at the Council’s opening session in favour of creating a proper system for the promotion and protection of human rights for all, not only rich or privileged people.
    “Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque also rejected imposing illegitimate commands on countries of the South, while systematic US human rights violations, under the alleged anti-terror fight go unnoticed…”

  17. How come, in all the long history of warfare, very, very few leaders engaging in a war have ever done so on the basis of a cause that they publicly proclaimed to be any less than perfectly just?
    A surprisingly long list of wars have been fought for causes in which justice figured hardly at all. There were often ex post facto rationalisations but how seriously were they taken? I remember the Gulf of Tonkin news and it struck me, a factory worker in the north of england, that it was utterly implausible. Not unlike the WMD in Iraq, it was fairly obvious that the “attacks” on the US Navy were merely excuses. Surely the point about the Iraq war was that it was carried out because it was believed it would be a cakewalk. And, had it proved to be one, no doubt several others would have followed. This suggests to me that the Resistance in Iraq are owed a considerable debt by those opposed to war for having put a price on aggression. This puts them in the category of Frank’s hallowed Few.
    As to the Second World War, again, did anyone suppose that the Poles really had attacked Germany? Certainly not any who had thought about it. I’m sorry Helena but I think that you are wrong if you are talking about credible invocations of Justice by the aggressors, unless by justice is meant some law of nature’s pitiless rules whereby five hundred nations from Mystic to Baja California are attacked, massacred and driven off their lands and away from their cultures in the name (eventually) of the great god Malthus and Adam Smith, the father. As to the “liberal democracies don’t fight each other” claim, this simply holds no water.

  18. Bevin, I think you’ll find that Hitler did indeed drees up the German invasion of Poland in all sorts of lovely justifications – reuniting the German people, righting historical wrongs etc.
    Hitler didn’t publicly announce that he was about to mount an illegal invasion because he was a power hungry tyrant.
    I think that is Helena’s quite reasonable point. The proclaimations of good intent on the march to war are the norm, and thus are essentially meaningless. And of course it isn’t just good intentions that Helena is referring to with ‘just wars’, but also the claims of valid reasons to go to war, ie, war is terrible but we must do this for reasons x,y,and z.

  19. Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque denounced that the US and its allies are plotting to harm the reputation of the Human Rights Council.
    whose members include Algeria, China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, and Saudi Arabia…all paragons of commitment to the protection of the human rights of their women, dissidents, religious minorities, etc.

  20. Hi Truesdell, thanks for making my point, or the Cubans’ point.
    I suppose from wshat you write that you would accept that a US war on any or all of these countries was just, simply because of what you are convinced is their “poor human rights record”. Cretainly, there are plenty of US people who do accept that. They do solemnly believe that the US is killing people so as to establish “human rights”.
    What about the right to peace? Is that not the greatest human right? What use are the other human rights without peace? How much human rights can you sow with the gatling gun of the AC130 “Puff The Magic Dragon”, like in Somalia a few weeks ago?

  21. The Gleiwitz incident was one of 21 incidents fabricated by Himmler to justify the invasion of Poland. Plenty to let willing germans fool themselves. Rome faked a Carthaginian attack.
    Recent psych experiments have shown the best way to militarize a group is to remind them of their mortality. As Aztecs did by mass sacrifices. People then identify radically with their side/state (even when the state does the sacrificing) and happily embrace brutal destruction of any enemy as just.
    Revenge for martyrs, superiority (being more civilised and/or holy)& the hope of glory here or beyond against a mortal foe are other major ways to sex-up a war. The propaganda mix just varies.
    No-one half-starts a war, they are exhausting & you need a full head of propaganda “steam” to begin and continue. Treasonous doubts are kept individual and silent once war is committed to, unless it is so asymmetrical that if “you” stop “they” must. And/or you obviously can’t win. Such doubt in the army at war is cowardice in the face of the enemy. The winner writes the history. The Nuremberg trails quaintly established countries have an inalienable right to self-defense. Military aggression is a crime. Sadly the “other guy” always starts it. Some people can imagine that their country could start an unjust war, and some cannot.

  22. suppose from wshat you write that you would accept that a US war on any or all of these countries was just, simply because of what you are convinced is their “poor human rights record”.
    Is that what Truesdell wrote? What was it you said about “holding a discussion over a person’s head in the way that you do…on a false basis of presumption?”
    And do you honestly think the Cubans have something other than a dismal human rights record? When Amnesty, Freedom House, Human Rights Watch and dozens of others have said so? (and careless readers shouldn’t read this as an argument to nuke Cuba.)
    They do solemnly believe that the US is killing people so as to establish “human rights”.
    And you solemnly believe Hezbollah/HAMAS is killing people to liberate Palestine. You probably think the truck bombers in Iraq are liberators fighting a just war against the Yanks, even though they’re killing 100 times more Iraqis in the process. You just told us you’d have no sympathy for US soldiers killed in Africa, and that you weren’t a pacifist, and that you thought the fight against Hitler (who never invaded the UK or South Africa) just. So what distinguishes your concept of justice from that of George Bush?

  23. Vadim. Your armed men are not required here in Africa. They should get out. Are you receiving me?
    Armed men are for fighting. The US armed men are already fighting in Africa, and if they continue, some of them are bound to die. What kind of “sorry” do you want me to say? Sorry you came? Exactly.
    Concerning Mr Hitler. His Luftwaffe did invade England. If they had achieved air supremacy the ground troops were ready to invade across the Channel. They failed to achieve air supremacy. This was in the year that Britain stood alone. Have you forgotten? The Lufwaffe was beaten by the fighter pilots in the Battle of Britain, known as The Few. Some of them were South Africans.
    You now want to cook up “human rights” panics and pretexts and falsely put on the clothes of real heros, such as The Few. People are not fools to be taken in by such garbage.
    Peace is the first human right.
    In the Israeli war against Lebanon last year, the Lebanese also had their Few, made up of Hezbollah and the communists. Honour is with them, and not with you.

  24. What can be clearer than the hypocrisy of the UN Human Rights Council members with the most egregious record of protecting human rights at home lecturing democratic states on “human rights”? The above sanctimonious quote from the Cuban foreign minister is beyond shameless.
    As to defending the war in Iraq on human rights grounds, whatever the abuses of the Saddam regime I happen to believe the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath was one of the five dumbest foreign policy iniatives in the history of the republic.
    It should not be America’s role to unilateraly fight injustice in Iraq, Sudan, Rwanda, Bosnia, etc., On the other hand, the war in Afghanistan was a logical reaction to the Taliban stubbornly hosting a group of terrorists who claim to be at war with America and in fact created mayhem on American territory. Similarly, when an impotent Somalian government harbors terrorists implicated in attacks on American ships and embassies, it should not be surprised to see an American military reaction.

  25. “When an impotent Somalian government harbors terrorists implicated in attacks on American ships and embassies”
    When was that, pray tell? On whose evidence? Who decides what is “impotent”?
    What makes you think you can play God?
    Get your lousy goons out of Africa.

  26. If an African country were to turn a blind eye to terrorists taking refuge there that were known to be plotting attacks on America, even a President Michael Moore would respond, altho the use of force would, properly, be the last resort.

  27. You now want to cook up “human rights” panics and pretexts and falsely put on the clothes of real heros, such as The Few.
    More presumption & xenophobia. Thanks (again) for telling me what I secretly think. I can only deny it for the umpteenth time, and add that personally, I think swooning over men in uniform & rhapsodizing about military heroics is creepy. And HRW isn’t an imperialist organization. It advocates on behalf of political prisoners, women’s rights, & the free press. Collateral damage I’m sure in your glorious world war on the US, where you do your part online and leave the actual combat (not to mention the dying) to others.
    his Luftwaffe did invade England
    They launched an extraterritorial air attack in the same manner as Hezbollah attacks on Israel, except unlike Hezbollah they sent no ground troops. Some time afterward the UK (and one or two meddling yanks) invaded Germany by land, which is the only thing that put an end to Nazism. Perhaps in your US-phobic version of world history the war ended with the Battle of Britain.
    made up of Hezbollah and the communists
    And in Iraq, “the communists” collaborate w/the US-backed government forces, so what? Historically sectarian Hezbollah and the LCP have been mortal foes, in fact LCP head George Hawi was killed for criticizing Hezbollah allies in Syria. And the LCP wasn’t invading Israel with rockets and cross border raids — that was Hezbollah. Again, you’re glorifying invaders and aggressors, like any imperialist.
    Get your lousy goons out of Africa.
    So the US has no right to fight terror cells committed to murdering its citizens on any foreign soil. How then should the US fight organizations like Al Qaeda which operate from places like Somalia and Afghanistan and which have killed thousands of US citizens in their own country? “Too bad!” says Dominic the Yank-hater. “Yankee go home!” Right, and we’re supposed to take your US-obsessive rants seriously?

  28. May we look upon our treasures and the furniture of our houses and the garments in which we array ourselves and try whether the seeds of war have any nourishment in these our possessions or not.
    John Woolman, “A Plea for the Poor, or a Word of Remembrance and Caution to the Rich [1793],” in The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman, ed. Phillips P. Moulton (Richmond: Friends United Press, 1971), 255.
    It’s believed “A Plea for the Poor” was written in 1763-1764, but not published until 1793.

  30. For those readers interested in scientific as well as, (or in preference to) political explanations of human behavior:
    Google
    “Terror-Management-Theory” (Sheldon Solomon Tom Pyszczynski and Jeff Greenberg)
    for much more details on the experiments I mentioned above.

  32. John Woolman: “But where that spirit works which loves riches, and in its working gathers wealth and cleaves to customs which have their root in self-pleasing; — this spirit, thus separating from universal love, seeks help from the power which stands in the separation, and whatever name it hath, it still desires to defend the treasures thus gotten”
    “The power which stands in the separation” – that’s our old friend Capital, and no mistake.
    Capital is not a thing, but a relation.

  33. Still a great, un-addressed question by Helena here.
    Say Helena, I think you have the nub of an article for say, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, or one of those many fine British realm IR academic journals that still permit inquiry into ideas as key factors in international relations. (what was for a time called “The English School, a la Bull, Watson, Butterfield, etc.)
    Alas, for the past 70 years, our IR theory academic field, especially in America, has been plagued by generations of realists, neo-realists, regime theorists, game theorists, structuralists, and neo-liberals all proclaiming anything but your simple little observation….
    that rarely does a state go to war, now or ever, without some proclamation of the presumed “justice” of its cause.
    Dale Copeland might have my head over this come July, but “its like” our entire IR industry has been determined to demonstrate that wars have not been fought over ideals and “just causes,” but over crass material factors.
    I reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks — when morning comes. :-}

  35. What is interesting is that liberal democracies with free press, independent judiciaries, rule of law, universal franchise etc rarely, if ever, have gone to war against each other ever since their emergence in the early 20th century.
    Why is this so? Why is it that liberal deomcracies have never had the self interest to go to war against each other? It’s a curious phenonomen.
    Posted by bb
    aren’t Israel and Lebanon democracies?

  36. This topic was actually already covered in a recent “Boy’s Own” magazine Pop quiz: “Just or Not? Is your war cheating on you?”
    Heres the quiz reprinted with kind permission of the author(answers are all Yes/No):
    1. Was the prelude to your war a little “fishy” and do the supposed triggers still stand up to scrutiny?
    2. Was your war undeclared, or if formally declared did you declare war first among the nations involved?
    3. Have you invaded someone elses country at the start of hostilities?
    4. Did combat fail to end or even decrease with any conclusion of hostilities you announced?
    5. Can and would an increasing majority of the invaded countries total population vote your occupying army out?
    6. Do a significant and increasing proportion of your own population disapprove of our involvement in the war?
    7. Is it a little unclear when your war will or could be completely over?
    Your war’s score:
    0 to 2 Yeses: Dulce et Decorous! No war is perfect, but any statue you erect to yourself or your army is likely to last.
    3 0r 4 Yeses: Your OK, but you’ll never be Sparta.
    Is this war really fulfilling your needs? Armistice time, maybe?
    5 or more Yeses: Pop by your local flight center, and check out any available Brazilian one-way fare specials that include free plastic surgery.

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