As I walked that day, I thought a lot about what we’re doing when we elect a president of the United States. This country is the most powerful and arguably the most violent empire that has ever existed, and to the extent that we have an emperor, it’s the president. Through policy choices at home and military action abroad, every president kills people. It could be thousands of people or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions, depending on circumstance and their inclination. Killing people, choosing who will die both here and abroad is a fundamental part of the job. It is the job. Whatever else the president does, they do on their own time. Is “Emperor of the Violent Hegemony” the kind of job that’s possible to be a good person in? Is it the kind of job where anyone, however well-intentioned, can effect positive change?
Is it possible to be a good person while being a farmer?*
Killing is what happens on farms. Seriously. I'm saying this as a farmer.
City people think that farms are "where life happens." Nonsense. Farming is about killing stuff. I don't even raise livestock or poultry and I have to kill stuff.
I can get crops to grow by simply putting seed in the ground. The rest of my job is to kill, kill, kill. Kill weeds. Kill insect pests. Kill vertebrate pests. Whether by herbicide, pesticides, shooting, trapping, stomping, you name it — I spend far more time killing than I do making something grow. Mother nature takes care of the growing. I have to remove the competition. There have been days when I've trapped 50+ pocket gophers and shot 100 ground squirrels - before lunch. They needed killing, and the next day, more of them were killed because they needed killing. At other times, I've shot dozens of jackrabbits at night and flung them out into the sagebrush for coyotes to eat.
And none of that starts in with helping neighbors slaughter steers, lambs, chickens, etc.
That's farming: killing. Lots of it.
I suppose one could make an argument about the USA being 'the most violent empire that has ever existed,' although one would have to argue both that it was "an empire" and also that it was more violent than some obvious alternative contenders. Still, there is a point to be made that a whole lot of killing is necessary for cultivation -- of a civilization, or a culture, or of a field of crops.
Killing is inevitable for life; that is one of the basic facts of reality. The question isn't whether you kill, but whether what you killed for was worth it.
*The citation on that from 2008 is dubious; Cassandra posted it here and ascribed it to me, but the dead hyperlink points to National Review; I think it sounds like VDH. I've only ever written one thing for National Review, and it was not on this subject; and we don't have jackrabbits or pocket gophers, so I'm sure I didn't write it.
A case could be made that the USA has not had a "Just" (or maybe justifiable) war since 1812.
ReplyDeleteWe are the supreme meddlers.
That’s a much more arguable claim, since you neither have to establish that we are an empire nor our supremacy. You’d just have to go through the wars and test their justification.
DeleteI feel like you could make a pretty good justification case for at least the Pacific theater of WWII. Japan had reasonable cause to resent our tariffs and interference with their empire, and we did run the Flying Tigers as a covert American military operation against them for the Republic of China. Still, Pearl Harbor was executed without a declaration of war, so there’s a good argument that they were the aggressors.
I doubt the Revolution or War of 1812 would be justifiable under the terms necessary to delegitimize all of the other wars.
ReplyDeleteJust War Theory, being Catholic in origin, has room for the revolution. Aquinas endorses the right of revolution under certain circumstances. (ST II-II Q42 r3)
Delete"A tyrannical government is not just, because it is directed, not to the common good, but to the private good of the ruler, as the Philosopher states (Polit. iii, 5; Ethic. viii, 10). Consequently there is no sedition in disturbing a government of this kind, unless indeed the tyrant's rule be disturbed so inordinately, that his subjects suffer greater harm from the consequent disturbance than from the tyrant's government. Indeed it is the tyrant rather that is guilty of sedition, since he encourages discord and sedition among his subjects, that he may lord over them more securely; for this is tyranny, being conducive to the private good of the ruler, and to the injury of the multitude."
Just because some revolutions may be justified doesn't mean ours neccesarily was. The British argument was that Parliament was indeed pursuing the greater good and the colonists were being selfish and ungrateful.
DeleteWell, we've grown a lot of food, so I guess we've done a lot of killing there.
ReplyDeleteThat does sound a bit like VDH. NR to my mind was pretty cagey about their relationship. I don't know if he was ever an employee even if he was published regularly. I do know that in later years they were publishing syndicated columns but acting like he was on staff. I think when he started to refuse to give them items to publish (or vice versa) that they burned all his old articles online (maybe that was contractual, maybe not)
ReplyDeleteThe British argument was that Parliament was indeed pursuing the greater good and the colonists were being selfish and ungrateful.
ReplyDeleteYes, and part of that greater good was forcefully argued by that supposed friend of us colonials, Edmund Burke, who insisted that our rights as Englishmen ought to be respected.
The first of those rights was that of being ruled over by a King. A King, several of whose misbehaviors were delineated in our Declaration of Independence.
Our Revolution was entirely justified, not least by the cynicism of Burke and that Parliament, which ranked with that King's miscreancies.
Eric Hines
Well, my claim, addressing raven's, was that whatever arguments were necessary to show that all of the rest of our wars were unjustified would probably also show the War of 1812 and Revolution to be unjustified as well. Since neither raven nor anyone else here has actually made the argument about the rest of the wars, I can't see whether the arguments would also delegitimize the other two raven seems to think are inarguably justified.
DeleteTom, it's not clear to me what wars Raven thinks were Just or justifiable. The implication there is that the 1812 war was justified, or I've misunderstood altogether. There were other wars between our Revolution and the 1812 one.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, I don't agree that the 1812 war was justifiable in any way--that one seems to me to be a naked land grab aggression by us.
De Vatel held that a war was Just if it was fought in self defense or in defense of another nation unjustly attacked. In that light, our Pacific Theater intervention prior to Pearl Harbor which Grim referenced, for instance, was Just because we were acting in defense of China, which was under Japan's naked aggression. If, that is, that was our motivation.
So much depends on motive, and ours often have been, and are, quite muddled.
Eric Hines
Yes, raven seems to have thrown that out there and then scarpered.
DeleteI think the motives for government action in a republic are often muddled as power is somewhat dispersed. The President may want to do X for one reason, but a bunch of people in Congress want to do X for other reasons, a bunch for yet other reasons, and several for their own individual reasons.
I am reminded of a Pinochet quote: "When the army goes out, it is to kill."
ReplyDeleteI couldn't add anything useful to an argument over the degree to which American policy has confined itself to killing that needed doing. I will say that any nation with an army, and indeed any living organism, that tries to protect itself from the knowledge that it depends on killing to survive is courting a delusion that will undo its ability to harness cognition in the service of either sanity or survival. Even bacteria and plants protect themselves with deadly force.
ReplyDeleteHeaven spare us from woolly-headed pundits who preach peace without examining or reconciling themselves to how they actually live. Sounding peaceful is not the same as being trustworthy companions.
Well said, Tex.
ReplyDeleteI don’t know precisely what Raven intended by his standard, but the usual test of justification is self-defense. Aggression is normally said to be the chief crime in jus ad bellum, or the question of whether the cause of the war was just.
Revolution is a nonstandard case. The War of 1812 was principally about British naval seizure of American shipping and impressment of American citizens into forced service. That seems justifiable to me.