Musings on War, Human Rights, and Pacifism

On the theological and social ethical level, it is clear that pacifism is the only perspective that fully respects all human rights and doesn't make them captive to a partisan nationalist and hence ethnocentric ideology. Second, pacifists recognise that there is no war in the era of total war, the fundamental reason just war theory and its secular variants are problematic to say the least, that is moral or just. Everyone involved in war commits human rights violations. Total war itself is thus inherently a violator of human rights. A true pacifism, thus, recognises that things are generally muddier than Reinhold Niebuhr argued when he distinguished between better and least better options during war and argued that the moral person had to make a choice for the least worst option. How such a choice escapes the prison house of ideology, however, the hermeneutic circle, remains for me a mystery. Additionally, by supporting one side in a war, one undermines a neutral and hence fair and judicious pacifism and one undermines a pacifism that stands for the human rights of all. By choosing sides one undermines a pacifism that is truly non-partisan as it must be if it is to mean anything and if human rights are to mean anything. By choosing sides one sacrifices not only fairness but justice since justice requires dispassion and fairness rather than partisan passion. 

It is fine if one wants to choose sides. But when one chooses sides, and this is often done under the influence of selective manichean and melodramatic cultural formations, one has to recognise that one is choosing sides and hence one is no longer able to analyse what is happening with an air of dispassion and one is no longer a proponent of the human rights of all. Selectivity and human rights do not go together. 

On the social scientific level, it is clear that the Annales School is spot on. The Annales historians of the twentieth century noted that history must be conceptualised in terms of long term factors and causes and short term factors and causes (though one might add mid term causes as well). When understood in this sensible way it is clear that what is happening now in the Ukraine is the product of great power struggles that go back at least to the eighteenth century, the same long term factors that were responsible for World War I and World War II. It is also the product of short term factors. In the case of the current war in Eastern Europe the short term factors igniting that war include NATO expansion clashing with Russian ideologies associated with the near beyond, itself very much related to the dominant twentieth century great power struggle, Russian and Ukrainian tensions in the multicultural state that is the Ukraine, itself tied to struggles over nationalism, power, and identity, and Ukraine's and the West's refusal to engage with Russian concerns for economic, political, and ideological reasons, also related to great power tensions of long standing.