My Monday posts are, first and foremost, about historical memory. I conceived of them originally as an opportunity to knock knuckle-headed mythistory in a way that would be useful for the web community, because part of bringing our shared history into our living memory is a struggle against forgetting, especially in the form of covering over memory with comfortable falsehoods. Last week, though, I took a bit of a break in order to say some things about Martin Luther King Jr. and a history that most of us do know, even if only through a glass, darkly. This week, too, I’m changing the plan a bit; not to say anything, but to commemorate something that I have nothing to say about, because there are are no words.

This week, January 27, will mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army.

Alberto Gonzales testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 6 January 2005:

While I look forward to answering your specific questions concerning my actions and my views, I think it is important to stress at the outset that I am and will remain deeply committed to ensuring that the United States government complies with all of its legal obligations as it fights the war on terror, whether those obligations arise from domestic or international law.

These obligations include, of course, honoring Geneva Conventions whenever they apply. Honoring our Geneva obligations provide critical protection for our fighting men and women and advances norms for the community of nations to follow in times of conflict. Contrary to reports, I consider the Geneva Conventions neither obsolete nor quaint.

Alberto Gonzales reports to George W. Bush on the legal obligations imposed by the Geneva Conventions, 25 January 2002:

The consequences of a decision to adhere to what I understood to be your earlier determination that the GPW does not apply to the Taliban include the following:

Positives

• Preserves flexibility
  • As you have said, the war against terrorism is a new kind of war. It is not the traditional clash between nations adhering to the laws of war that formed the backdrop for GPW. The nature of the new war places a high premium on other factors, such as the ability to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American civilians, and the need to try terrorists for war crimes such as wantonly killing civilians. In my judgment, this new paradigm renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions requiring that captured enemy be afforded such things as commissary privileges, scrip (i.e., advances of monthly pay), athletic uniforms, and scientific instruments. …
• Substantially reduces the threat of domestic criminal prosecution under the the War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441).
  • That statute, enacted in 1996 prohibits the commission of a war crime by or against a U.S. person, including U.S. officials. War crime for these purposes is defined to include any grave breach of GPW or any violation of common Article 3 thereof (such as outrages against personal dignity). Some of these provisions apply (if the GPW applies) regardless of whether the individual being detained qualifies as a POW. Punishments for violations of Section 2441 include the death penalty. A determination that the GPW is not applicable to the Taliban would mean that Section 2441 would not apply to actins taken with respect to the Taliban.
  • Adhering to your determination that GPW does not apply would guard effectively against misconstruction or misapplication of Section 2441 for several reasons.
    • First, some of the language of GPW is undefined (it prohibits, for example, outrages upon personal dignity and inhuman treatment), and it is difficult to predict with confidence what actions might be deemed to constitute violations of the relevant provisions of GPW.
    • Second, it is difficult to predict the needs and circumstances that could arise in the course of the war on terrorism.
    • Third, it is difficult to predict the motives of prosecutors and independent counsels who may in the future decide to pursue unwarranted charges based on Section 2441. Your determination would create a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply, which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution.

…

On balance, I believe that the arguments for reconsideration and reversal are unpersuasive.

Jed Babbin in National Review Online 25 February 2004:

If wars are too important to be trusted to the generals, they are far too important to be trusted to a bunch of lawyers.

George W. Bush, Collinsville, Illinois, 5 January 2005:

I think we’re sent to Washington to solve problems, not to pass them on to future Congresses. I believe we are called to do the hard work to make our communities and quality of life a better place. And it’s hard work for some in Congress to stand up to the trial lawyers. I understand that. But all we’re asking for is fairness.

On 6 December 1989, fifteen years ago today, Marc Lepine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. He killed them because they were women; Lepine told men to leave and shot at women as he screamed I hate feminists.

6 December is a day of remembrance for the women who were killed. They were:

• Geneviève Bergeron, aged 21
• Hélène Colgan, 23
• Nathalie Croteau, 23
• Barbara Daigneault, 22
• Anne-Marie Edward, 21
• Maud Haviernick, 29
• Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31
• Maryse Leclair, 23
• Annie St.-Arneault, 23
• Michèle Richard, 21
• Maryse Laganière, 25
• Anne-Marie Lemay, 22
• Sonia Pelletier, 28; and
• Annie Turcotte, aged 21

The Montreal Massacre was horrifying and shocking. But we also have to remember that it’s less unusual than we all think. Yes, it’s a terrible freak event that some madman massacred women he had never even met because of his sociopathic hatred. But every day women are raped, beaten, and killed by men–and it’s usually not by strangers, but by men they know and thought they could trust. They are attacked just because they are women–because the men who assault them believe that they have the right to control women’s lives and their sexual choices, and to hurt them or force them if they don’t agree. By conservative estimates, one out of every four women is raped or beaten by an intimate partner sometime in her life. Take a moment to think about that. How much it is. What it means for the women who are attacked. What it means for all women who live in the shadow of that threat.

To be serious about creating a free and just society, we have to be serious about ending violence against women. As Andrea Dworkin puts it (speaking about sexual assault), I want to see this men’s movement make a commitment to ending rape because that is the only meaningful commitment to equality. It is astonishing that in all our worlds of feminism and antisexism we never talk seriously about ending rape. Ending it. Stopping it. No more. No more rape. In the back of our minds, are we holding on to its inevitability as the last preserve of the biological? Do we think that it is always going to exist no matter what we do? All of our political actions are lies if we don’t make a commitment to ending the practice of rape. This commitment has to be political. It has to be serious. It has to be systematic. It has to be public. It can’t be self-indulgent. And the same is true of every form of everyday gender terrorism–stalking, battery, rape, murder. How could we face Geneviève Bergeron, Hélène Colgan, Nathalie Croteau, Barbara Daigneault, Anne-Marie Edward, Maud Haviernick, Barbara Maria Klucznik, Maryse Leclair, Annie St.-Arneault, Michèle Richard, Maryse Laganière, Anne-Marie Lemay, Sonia Pelletier, and Annie Turcotte, and tell them we did anything less?

Take some time to keep the 14 women who were killed in the Montreal massacre in your thoughts. If you have the money to give, make a contribution to your local battered women’s shelter. And, as Jennifer Barrigar writes:

Every year I make a point of explaining that I’m pointing the finger at a sexist patriarchal misogynist society rather than individual men. This year I choose not to do that. The time for assigning blame is so far in the past (if indeed there ever was such a time), and that conversation takes us nowhere. This is the time for action, for change. Remember Parliament’s 1991 enactment of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women — the glorious moment when every single womyn in the House stood together and claimed this Day of Remembrance. Remember what we can and do accomplish — all of us — when we work together. It is time to demand change, and to act on that demand. Let’s break the cycle of violence, and let’s do it now.

Remember. Mourn. Act.

(Links thanks to the lovely folks at No Treason.)

From the paleo-deviationists to the neo-deviationists, let’s now consider the recent fuss over the latest incisive moral theorizing from Humane Studies wunderkind Vlad Dracula:

If boiling people alive best served the interests of the Wallachian people, then it would neither be moral or immoral.

Since Vlad has since complained that the infidel are distorting what he said (and playing dirty pool, too!), let’s make sure we have it all in its proper context. Vlad has argued at length in several places that the notion of universal human rights is ultimately nonsensical: rights are, on his account, political artifacts, not natural facts, and so claims of rights only make sense within the context of a constitutional order. He argues, further, that because rights are not natural facts, the citizens of one country have no objectively binding obligations to respect the lives, dignity, or autonomy of people in other countries. He cavils that gratuitous cruelty might not be justified; but that this is merely a matter of a sentimental, not a normative should. One of his infidel challengers had the temerity to point out:

His position on the moral significance of foreigners is also incoherent. If they do not have rights, why should we treat them with decency? Can’t we just smash their heads in with hammers, or nuke them, or boil them alive? What is a sentimental should and where does it come from?

To which Vlad replied:

If boiling people alive best served the interests of the Wallachian people, then it would neither be moral or immoral. It would just be grotesque, or indecent, or harsh. But since it doesn’t have any strategic value, we don’t boil people or nuke them. A sentimental should means that most of us find such behavior unsavory, even barbaric–but it doesn’t match up against any grand moral standard etched into a Libertarian Rosetta Stone. To momentarily digress into pop-philosophical obscurantism, it’s intersubjectively wrong, not objectively wrong (i.e. politically circumscribed).

Prince Dracula is well within his prerogatives to demand some direct approach to addressing this more nuanced perspective. So let’s see what we can do by way of a logical response to the argument.

1. If you can’t make significant rights claims independently of a constitutional order, then there is nothing wrong with boiling innocent foreigners alive to serve Wallachian interests, as long as you don’t mind it.

2. But there is something wrong with boiling innocent foreigners alive to serve Wallachian interests, even if you don’t mind it.

3. Therefore, you can make significant rights claims independently of a constitutional order. (M.T. 1, 2)

Thus, Prince Dracula is wrong, and Bargainer and Logan are right. Q.E.D.

You might claim that I have dealt with the Impaler’s (subtle! nuanced!) position in far too short a space; you might even go so far as to claim that I have begged the question against him. No, I haven’t. In fact, he has begged the question. Just as there are no non-question-begging arguments for terrorism, there are no non-question-begging arguments for the permissibility of boiling innocent foreigners alive in order to further Wallachian interests. If Vlad’s argument is valid, the most that he has shown is that his premises are, in fact, incompatible with points of human decency far more clear than any murky Hobbesian musing about the contextuality of rights claims or an alleged state of nature–and having shown that the Hobbesian argument is incompatible with such a plainly obvious point of human decency is as good a reason as any to deny at least one of the Hobbesian premises. It’s certainly not any reason whatever to dismiss human decency. (For more on the nature of proof and the issue of question-begging, see footnote 2 on my argument against Honderich.)

That it is wrong to boil innocent foreigners alive, and that it is wrong because you are doing something wrong to them is blindingly obvious. In fact, it’s so blindingly obvious that even Dracul admits that it is true; his problem is that he cannot live up to his own moral decency intellectually, and so he invents the weasel category of a sentimental should in order to sidestep the dilemma. (It’s worth pausing to note that this is exactly the same move that is made by some who claim that we have no direct moral obligations towards animals–in order to weasel around the fact that they know perfectly well that it’s wrong to inflict gratuitous cruelty on animals. That Vlad’s argument uses the same tactic towards human beings from outside of your own state is telling. And not in a good way.)

The problem here is trying to make sense of the notion of a sentimental should—why is it that we feel horror at contemplating pitching innocent foreigners into the cauldron and boiling them alive? It seems that the sentiment of horror is either a rational or an irrational reaction to the situation. If it’s an irrational response to the situation, then clearly there are no grounds at all to pay the sentiment any heed in making decisions about what we ought or ought not to do; an irrational feeling as such cannot weigh against a course of action. If it’s a rational response to the situation, on the other hand, what would it be that makes it an apt response to the situation? That the deed being done is in fact a ghastly thing to do to another human being no matter what his or her nationality? But Vlad cannot take this stance and still hold onto his Hobbesian argument.

Is the feeling of gut-wrenching horror justified by something else? If so, what? Rule-utilitarians might claim that it’s justified by the fact that cultivating feelings of horror at such human suffering is conducive to respecting the rights of those who Vlad would allow to have legitimate rights-claims (fellow citizens and parties to relevant treaties). But that would make the feeling of horror at boiling foreigners alive into nothing more than a projective error–useful, perhaps, for people who can’t compartmentalize their feelings for foreigners from their feelings for fellow citizens; but the emotional constitution that would be most reflective of the actual state of affairs would be one that sharply distinguishes between the real obligations not to torture fellow citizens and the free-for-all that is (according to Vlad’s argument) permitted against aliens.

Or you might, instead, claim that, because we’re talking about sentimental attachments here, questions of justification by some state of affairs outside of the sentiment don’t even make sense–it’s just part of being a human being that a horror at torturing other human beings is part of your emotional frame. But this won’t do, either: the sentimental should that Vlad wants to invoke is supposed to be something that enters into our reasons for action; that is, it is something that forms a part of why we do or do not act in a particular way. Emotions are not bludgeons that blindly knock us in one direction or another; they express reasons for or against actions, and as such have to stand or fall as reasons for action, justified or unjustified by how accurately they express the real fact of the matter.

The fact of the matter is that when you throw someone into the cauldron and fill it with boiling water while they scream in agony until they die, you have done something wrong–even if they are not subject to the same state as you are, and even if the state you are subject to is in a state of war with the state that they are subject to. You have done something wrong because you did something wrong to the poor fellow you just boiled alive. If Vlad thinks he has an argument against that, let him bring it out–but he shouldn’t be surprised when it receives nothing more than a certain gesture of the hands.

Update 2004-12-05: Sorry, I got things mixed up a bit. Turns out this was actually about Max Borders writing about the interests of the American people, not about Vlad the Impaler and the Wallachian people. My bad.

Here’s something that you may have thought you’d never see in the pages of the Rad Geek People’s Daily: Condoleezza Rice is absolutely right.

Over at Stone Court (thanks again, Feminist Blogs!), Fred Vincy’s pointed out Condoleezza Rice’s stance on gun control, offered up by The Times (2004-11-21):

Violence was turning her hometown into Bombingham as Alabama’s governor George Wallace fought a federal court order to integrate the city’s schools. The Ku Klux Klan bombed the homes of blacks who were beginning to move into white neighbourhoods. Among the targets was the home of Arthur Shores, a veteran civil rights lawyer and friend of the Rices. Condi and her parents took food and clothes over to his family.

With the bombings came marauding groups of armed white vigilantes called nightriders who drove through black neighbourhoods shooting and starting fires. John Rice and his neighbours guarded the streets at night with shotguns.

The memory of her father out on patrol lies behind Rice’s opposition to gun control today. Had those guns been registered, she argues, Bull Connor would have had a legal right to take them away, thereby removing one of the black community’s only means of defence. I have a sort of pure second amendment view of the right to bear arms, she said in 2001.

— The Times 2004-11-21: Condi: The girl who cracked the ice

Condi’s experience wasn’t out of the ordinary. During the hardest fights of the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Alabama, ordinary Black families and civil rights activists defended themselves against the Klan terror by arming themselves. (Yes, organizers who were passionately committed to the principles nonviolent civil disobedience did too–nonviolent demonstrations don’t mean letting the night-riders burn or bomb your house. When they asked Fannie Lou Hamer why her house in Sunflower County never was dynamited, her answer was I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom.)

And I think they were right to do so. So I can’t agree with Fred when he objects:

My initial, flip reaction, was — well, that’s not the lesson I would have drawn. Vigilantes make a practice of driving through your neighborhood shooting, and you conclude that making guns more available is a good thing?

Yes, it is–because the night riders wouldn’t have any trouble getting guns even with stringent gun control laws. Stricter gun control in Bombingham would have only meant fewer Black families able to defend themselves against the night riders. And what would they have done? Called the cops? Bull Connor’s cops? Condi is right to point out that what gun control means is that somebody in the government–usually the sheriff or the police commissioner–has the power to decide who can arm himself or herself and who can’t. It means that the government prohibits some substantial portion of the population from buying the weapons that they can use to defend themselves, in the expectation that they will depend on the Authorities for the protection of their lives. But for a Black woman in Bull Connor’s Birmingham, depending on the Authorities to defend your life was a sucker’s bet. Depending on Bull Connor to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous white supremacist terrorists was a sucker’s bet. And the fact is that, for all the progress we’ve made, it’s still far from clear that relying on the cops is a good bet for Black people–or for that matter, for women, for Muslims, for any number of people who have historically had the boots on their necks (see, for example, GT 2004-11-14, GT 2002-02-13, GT 2001-10-25, GT 2001-04-21, and GT 2001-04-04).

You might be inclined to say: look, Jim Crow is over; things got better, and they still can get better. (I think this is the take that Fred’s suggesting when he says for Rice, the deeper lesson of growing up in Birmingham in the early 60s was that government is fundamentally corrupt and untrustworthy.) Yes, gun control now wouldn’t be as bad as it would have been in Bull Connor’s day. But it will still be bad. The answer is not to throw the wankers out and find the right people to head up the gun control regime in their place. There’s a strong historical argument against that suggestion: the first gun control legislation in American history were laws to ban free blacks from owning guns in the South; later efforts were driven by fear-mongering against the alleged criminal (or revolutionary) tendencies of labor leaders, Slavic and Italian immigrants, and urban Blacks. And I can’t see any good reason to set the history of gun control aside when we consider what it means for real people in the present world.

Even setting the historical arguments, though, I still can’t find a good reason to trust the right people to manage a gun control regime. In fact, I’d argue that there aren’t any right people to find: the power to disarm a whole class of people is inevitably a corrosive power. There is no way to do it without creating a class of people who are completely dependent on the ruling class and their agents for the defense of their very lives and livelihoods: that’s what gun control means. As Leftists–opponents of unjust and arbitrary power–it should be very troubling to those of us on the Left when the powerful have all the weapons and the people over whom they have power have none to defend themselves. That’s absolute power, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. You see it today in the professional paramilitary police forces that occupy most major cities today; and it’s important to see how it’s a power that can’t help but corrupt any class that seizes it.

Écrasez l’inf?@c3;a2;me.

Further reading

• Rad Geek People’s Daily Political Programme FAQ: Gun control
• Aptenobytes 2004/11/07: Anarchists and guns