“One of the most poorly informed debates in the media coverage of war, is the concept of ‘proportionality’. The average person understands it as a kind of transaction. If X kills N citizens of Y, then Y can fairly retaliate by killing N*(1+i) citizens of X, i being a penalty….”
—Conservative commentator Richard Fernandez, tweeting as “wretchedthecat”
Bingo.
This central logical and historical fallacy is central to the pacifist’s unethical delusion. Fernandez explains,
But what it really means according to the Red Cross is it prohibits attacks against military objectives which are “expected to cause incidental loss of … civilian objects … which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” t might be restated this way: disproportionate acts are operations of war that are not worth it. The bombing of Hiroshima is actually held by some, but not all, as justifiably “proportionate” because it averted an even deadlier invasion of Japan and ended WW2. The same argument can be made to justify the Dambuster Raids, Dresden, the firebombing of Tokyo, etc. It is certainly a slippery slope, but it provides one important insight: useless military acts, symbolic bombings, etc., are potentially disproportionate if they intentionally achieve nothing.
Just because a war goes on endlessly doesn’t always make it better. There is a category of conflict called forever wars. “Perpetual war, endless war, or a forever war, is a lasting state of war with no clear conditions that would lead to its conclusion.” Civil or ethnic wars can fall into this category. Other examples are the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the conflict in the Congo, the Ukraine-Russia War, and the wars of Israel. They are not bloodless. “Since 1996, conflict in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo has led to approximately six million deaths,” according to the CFR, making it history’s most deadly since WW2.
We are now on very dangerous moral ground, but let us end on this thought. It is the object of a just war to minimize the total casualties of an unavoidable conflict by restoring peace. Prolonging conflict merely for the sake of it is not necessarily a humanitarian act. Forcing a stalemate is not always the cheapest option in terms of human lives there is….
Another example from U.S. history, not mentioned by Fernandez, was Sherman’s March to the Sea, which earned him permante villain status in the South. Sherman really did bleiev war is hell, and that the ethical way to wage wars is to end them as quickly as possible. The American Civil War easily could have become a “forever war”: all that was needed was for the Confederacy to shift into guerilla mode. Two men were primarily responsible for preventing this: Sherman, who broke the moral and economic back of the Confederate’s civilian population, and Robert E. Lee, who refused to support the strategy and insisted that it was time to surrender.
Ethics Alarms 
When I look at the Middle East, I see the same problem we have in our inner cities. It is reported that 30+ food trucks a day are now going into Gaza. Before October, it was 600+. Gaza is completely supported by Israel and outside aid agencies. It looks like Gaza gets ~$2.5 billion in ‘above board’ foreign aid (roughly $1200 per person or about the average person in Syria). This is a place where people don’t have jobs, they just survive on aid and hatred. You can see the same thing in Iraq. Most of the people in Iraq have been supported by international aid since the 1970’s. There is almost no one left who remembers what it is like to work a job. Hamas and other leadership organizations have no intention of changing that situation. It is difficult to get someone with a career, a family, and a house to buy into the ‘let’s exterminate the Jews’ bandwagon. They are likely to say “Well, that’s nice, but my daughter has a soccer game tonight”. Keep them hungry and hating. We have the same problem in many of our cities and towns. We have subgroups that haven’t had jobs in generations. They subsist on government handouts and are fed a propaganda of hatred their entire lives (1619 Project anyone?).
How do you fix it? How do you solve the problem of the residents of Gaza? They have completely bought into this genocidal philosophy. Israel cannot exist indefinitely surrounded by and supporting people whose only goal in life is the destruction of its people. I am afraid the only way to get rid of the problem is to get rid of them. So, the goals to end the fighting is the extermination of one group or the other. It is hard to define ‘excessive civilian casualties’ in such a case. If Israel is destroyed, however, the Gazans can’t survive since they are purely a parasitic group. Or, since the Gazans insist on living in someone else’s desert ‘promised land’, maybe we can resettle them to Utah.
Ugh, that’s a painful way to look at it, but I really don’t see any other way. The Palestinians don’t want peace, or a two-state solution, or anything like that. They want Israel and a big pile of dead Jews. A lot of the BLM types are just as bad – they don’t want freedom or fairness or whatever. They want this country, and a big pile of dead white people. When someone wants you dead, sometimes the only thing to do is to make him dead first.
When I look at the Middle East, I see the same problem we have in our inner cities. It is reported that 30+ food trucks a day are now going into Gaza. Before October, it was 600+. Gaza is completely supported by Israel and outside aid agencies. It looks like Gaza gets ~$2.5 billion in ‘above board’ foreign aid (roughly $1200 per person or about the average person in Syria). This is a place where people don’t have jobs, they just survive on aid and hatred. You can see the same thing in Iraq. Most of the people in Iraq have been supported by international aid since the 1970’s. There is almost no one left who remembers what it is like to work a job. Hamas and other leadership organizations have no intention of changing that situation. It is difficult to get someone with a career, a family, and a house to buy into the ‘let’s exterminate the Jews’ bandwagon. They are likely to say “Well, that’s nice, but my daughter has a soccer game tonight”. Keep them hungry and hating. We have the same problem in many of our cities and towns. We have subgroups that haven’t had jobs in generations. They subsist on government handouts and are fed a propaganda of hatred their entire lives (1619 Project anyone?).
How do you fix it? How do you solve the problem of the residents of Gaza? They have completely bought into this genocidal philosophy. Israel cannot exist indefinitely surrounded by and supporting people whose only goal in life is the destruction of its people. I am afraid the only way to get rid of the problem is to get rid of them. So, the goals to end the fighting is the extermination of one group or the other. It is hard to define ‘excessive civilian casualties’ in such a case. If Israel is destroyed, however, the Gazans can’t survive since they are purely a parasitic group. Or, since the Gazans insist on living in someone else’s desert ‘promised land’, maybe we can resettle them to Utah.
This is one of the points I have frequently made when discussing Lee. Regardless of what he did prior to April, 1865, he had the power to decide whether the Civil War would end at Appomattox or go on for generations. It would have been easy to yield to his officers calling for him to disperse the army into the hills. Lee had the will and courage to say “Enough, we’ve lost. Let us go home.” The nation he fought against owes him a debt, in my opinion, for making that decision.
I recently came across a song by Bobby Horton, “The Wearing of the Gray” that speaks to this point. You certainly don’t have to agree with the southern cause to appreciate the song.
A bit of plagiarism of the Dubliners “Rising of the Moon”, no?
Oh, that song goes back at least a century more than that.
Yeah, I think the tune has been repurposed for several different songs. I’m partial to the High Kings version of “Rising of the Moon” — I enjoy a lot of their songs many of which have been sung by multiple groups.
I listen a lot to the 2nd South Carolina String Band, who typically perform a lot of Civil War era tunes (including quite a few by Stephen Foster). There is a distinct ‘look and feel’ to many of the songs from that era in our history.