Musings on History, War, and Human Beings

It is worth noting, historically speaking, that war has been around since the rise of expansionist civilisations in large scale agricultural societies in China and the Near East. It is worth pointing out the empirical fact that war has, since the rise of those civilisations, been a constant and has often been regarded as a form of diplomacy by the elites who guide and direct political policy. And while a minority of humans have opposed war--the Anabaptists since the 16th century and the Quakers since the 17th--and worked to end it particularly since the 19th century, those few who oppose wars have not been successful as history shows. Wars continue whether among the great powers, the minor powers, and almost everyone with a military. Finally, it is worth pointing up what Buddhism and Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer have preached, that you can only do something about what you can do something about.

Humans, of course, empirically speaking, have been characterised by pettiness, silliness, narcissism, emotionalism, gullibility, moronicity, an obsession with money, an obsession with power, and war, to name a few human characteristics. And while It is true that humans can also be compassionate, human compassion is generally selective in its application. Human compassion, in other words, is generally applied selectively and situationally by the very humans who claim to be compassionate. That such a form of situational or selective ethics is not respectful of the human rights of all humans should be obvious even to those blinded by the ethnocentric and nationalistic light.

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.

Musings on Due Process and Human Rights Violators

Hello Dear unreaders. I know that by calling for the immediate firing of the police officers who perpetrated a violent crime against a number of students protesting wealth inequality and the cuts in education that America's most recent economic bust has brought about nonviolently at the University of California, Davis will be met by cries of what about due process and what about union and management agreements and process from my critics.

Let me say straight off that I fully understand the concerns of my critics. I am a member of a proud union, United University Professors, and am normally in favour of due process in such matters. However, in the case of the cops at UC Davis who perpetrated this violent act against students and in the case of a professor of law at UC Berkeley who was complicit in the torture of human beings I am not sure I am in favour of union due process within, and this is an important distinction, academic institutions.

Academic institutions should be places where freedom of speech is cherished, within limits, and where freedom to protest is cherished, again within limits. I do, by the way realise that historically academic institutions have often cherished neither. Academic institutions, however, should not be places where violence perpetrated against students for no good reason is acceptable. And this is why I strongly believe that the cops who violated the human and civil, rights of students at Davis, and the chancellor, who set in motion the events which violated the human rights of Davis students, should immediately be fired and stripped of all benefits they have accrued at the university over the years. Violent violations of the human and civil rights of others by those who have an obligation to protect them (in loco parentis) are simply beyond, or should be, the pale of civilised behaviour. As a result their presence on college campuses should not be tolerated. By firing those who violate human rights, even if the dismissal is purely symbolic, the university is making a statement about the importance of protecting human rights. They are making a statement that the violation of human rights on college campuses is simply unacceptable.

While some may regard this as a violation of due process I don't. It is not that the cops and the chancellor have no other recourse to challenge their dismissals. They can go to the union if they are part of a union. They can go to the courts to challenge their dismissal. They can, in other words, get their due process.

I recognise that what I am calling for raises a number of issues. I recognise that protecting freedom of speech requires protecting the freedom of speech of those who verbally express the worst form of speech, the White Supremacist speech of Nazis, for instance. In the past I have actually argued that freedom of speech is a zero plus game and that as a community we must protect the speech even of racists because if we don't we could be on the slippery slope toward criminalising other less offensive forms of speech. 1984. However, and this in my mind is an important thing to realise, protecting freedom of speech doesn't require that we protect those racists whose speech and ideologies lead them to attack those who they categorise as subhumans. For me firing those who physically violate the human rights of others by pepper spraying them fall into the same category. They have engaged in violent acts and, in my mind, have abrogated, in the process, their right to due process at a university and to hold a job at an institution that should appreciate and vouchsafe freedom of speech and freedom of protest.

As I said, the perpetrators of such violence still have the option of going to the unions, if they are in a union and I recommend that all Americans join a union if they can. If the unions want to fight for the civil rights of the perpetrators of human rights violators, fine. I would just say, however, that fighting for the rights of violent "perps", to use a term the cops and the media love to throw around, may give and probably will give unions even more of a bad name than they already have. It is important to recognise, as much as I like and appreciate what unions do (and there are limits to what unions can do given inequalities of power as I well know), that unions, particularly police unions, sometimes do things to protect workers at the expense of justice and what is right. In the case of the cops at Davis who perpetrated violence on peaceful students, what is right is that they lose their jobs. In the case of John Yoo, official in the Department of Justice during the Bush pere years who gave his approval to the violations of the human rights of others and now law professor at Berkeley, what is right is that this massive human rights abuser should not be allowed to teach students about the law, the very law he so blatantly and violently violated.

Alternatively, perhaps we can make the punishment fit the crime. Perhaps we can let the students, with the agreement of the cop perps, pepper spray the cops in the same way the cops pepper sprayed them. And perhaps we can let those tortured on the basis of judgments given by a John Yoo, again with the perps permission, torture him in the same way that they were tortured thanks to him. But that would be eye for an eye justice, wouldn't it? And we can't have that in an increasingly dixiefornicated America, can we?.