On Sun, 27 Jan 2002, Gautam Mukunda wrote: > > Me: > First - you're confusing legality and morality. The rebellion was a "just > war" because of the ends for which it was fought.
And because we won and proved that those ends could be met (in part) with a new and untried system of government. I'm pointing out that morals, especially in war, are highly conditional and dependent upon the course of events. I'm also pointing out the truism that "the victor gets to write the history books" -- and the historians get to use history to justify the moral theories. Suppose for a moment that we had lost the war, remained part of the British empire, and later peacefully achieved an independence that resembles Australia's, say. We would very likely look back and think, "Well, our ends were good, and we now know the value of democratic-republican government, but attempting an actual rebellion was shown to be a gross overreaction to circumstances; more of a landholders' grab for power than a true citizen's revolt, and ultimately unjustified." Whether it was legal or > not is largely irrelevant in considering its moral position. Second - read > the Declaration of Independence. One of the chief complaints of the authors > was the use of mercenaries in this conflict, which they thought profoundly > immoral. You might look at the speeches of a fair number of British > Parliamentarians, too, for example (including Edmund Burke, I believe), as > they harshly criticized the King for using mercenaries to fight the > rebellion, something that was considered highly dubious by most European > powers. Dubious because immoral or dubious because unwise, perhaps because the king was as much German as British (IIRC), and because British parlimentarians didn't like the part-German king using German (or Prussion, or Hessian, or whatever) troops? I'll be surprised to learn that the British government thought the colonies were doing the right thing at the time. > More broadly, I don't understand why you feel (in the case of the > handling of the prisoners in Guantanamo) that the requirements of morality > exceed those of the law, while in this situation the law and morality are > apparently synonymous to you. Pick one. Did I make that argument about Guantanamo? I thought I argued that America was basically doing an acceptable thing under the circumstance, bending perhaps but not breaking the spirit of our understanding of human rights for "war" prisoners. I don't think I follow you. W/respect to Israel vs. Palestine, I'm arguing that the west tends to alter its moral stance according to circumstances in a way that strikes me as extremely disingenuous. We help create a highly unstable situation, knowing full well that we can't expect things to work out neatly and peacefully according to Western notions of the rules of war, and then act all shocked and surprised if Israel uses what the think to be too much force in one case, or if the Palestinians, never having subscribed to Western social norms or concepts of warlike propriety, suddenly start ignoring the rules of war. "Oh my goodness! They're not following the law that we declare for our own convenience and hadhazardly apply to ourselves and our allies! How dare they!" In short, the Western stance towards the Middle East is largely grounded in stupidity, hypocrisy, and good intentions gone awry. Arguing about who deserves blame for what in the middle of a multifaceted clusterf*ck like this gets really silly, really fast, and only servers the narrowest of viewpoints, it seems to me. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
