What is “Collective Punishment”, and why do states use it?

States engaged in asymmetric warfare with rebel groups know that it is very difficult to fight dispersed paramilitary forces with traditional means of combat. Except for the IRA of the Border Campaign, I know of no rebel paramilitary group which has made attempts to obey the Geneva convention – so state armies are in a position of being held to international law, while fighting groups which choose to disregard international law. The simple solution to the problem is – states simply ignore international legislation, and use whatever works to fight the enemy, which means adopting terrorist tactics.

I use “terrorist” in a technical sense – the use of violence against civilians towards political ends. Yesterday and today’s attacks on targets in Gaza in response to yesterday’s terror attack in the south of Israel are terrorist attacks because their goal is to frighten the leaders of resistance not to attack in fear of reprisals against their own people. This is called “collective punishment”, because the collective (the people) who the resistance wishes to represent is punished rather than the resistance itself (the legality of resistance is a separate issue, if you’re interested in the legal basis of revolutionary violence you might want to read this essay).

Collective punishment is the exception rather than the rule for populations that engage in resistance. Norman Finkelstein explained this quite well in an interview he gave on Lebanese television. You should watch the interview, but basically he points out that we honour resistance against occupation even when, as in Nazi occupied France, 400 people were killed for every 1 person killed by the resistance. I’m not comparing the occupation of Palestine to the occupation of France, but there is a relevant point to be made here (which isn’t in Finkelstein’s explanation, but I think it is an logical implication of it): if you consider a resistance movement valid, then by extension you have to blame the oppressors, not the oppressed, for the collective punishment imposed in reaction to the oppression.

Collective punishment is used by occupying forces because it works, or at least they think it will work. It certainly worked in Nazi Germany – the resistance was never more than a tiny proportion, and co-operation nearly total. Most everyone says (to quote Finkelstein), “we want to live”, hardly anyone says “we would rather die on our feet than live crawling on our knees”.

Collective punishment was used by the British forces, in conjunction with the loyalist paramilitaries, during the troubles in Northern Ireland – and increasingly so leading up to the last IRA ceasefires and the incorporation of Sinn Fein in all party talks. The collective punishment took two forms – the large scale killing of republican suspects by loyalist paramilitary units, with the intelligence supplied by the British, as well as the more traditional attacks on Catholic civilians in response to IRA activities.  Prominent Loyalist activists (in this case “activist” means paramilitary) strongly believe that their actions, more than anything done by the British Army itself, brought Sinn Fein to the negotiating table. I’m not in a position to evaluate the correctness of their claims. Even if they are true, this doesn’t justify the extra-judicial executions, or the killing of civilians – both of these tactics undermine the rule of law, the basic social contract which states use to justify their monopoly on violence.

The major problem with collective punishment, however, is the same problem as rebel groups encounter when they try to use terrorism for political aims – the use of violence against civilian populations can tend to radicalize them along in-group lines, and solidify their support for harsh responses to the violence used against them. Collective punishment creates an oppressed group which can define itself clearly against the agressor in an “us and them” relation. This is why, in the occupied territories, in a sense things are much simpler than they are here. Here I’m expected to care about everybody’s feelings on both sides, I’m meant to make sure I don’t offend anyone. But when “zionism” means the soldiers coming into the camp and shooting at kids throwing rocks, or having water supplied only one day per week, or white phosphorus falling from the sky – then there is no room to care for the conflicted feelings of those carrying out or supporting the daily reality of violence.

I do not believe, personally, that the use of collective punishment against a population – even when that population gives popular support to terrorist attacks against civilians, can be justified by any moral precept or idea in natural law. And yes, that means I disagree with the rights of rebel groups to use collective punishment against civilians who support an illegal occupation. Two unjustifiable sets  of acts can’t be justified co-extensively, without functionally approving of armed struggle as a legitimate way for grievances to be settled.

 

Nelson Mandela’s support for Armed Struggle

When I think of Nelson Mandela I think of a man of peace who spent decades in prison due to his opposition to Apartheid in South Africa. I think of peaceful resolution of a longstanding racial conflict that resulted from worldwide popular opposition, and I think of Mandela’s imprisonment as a beacon point for that opposition.

I’d be surprised if this wasn’t a very common view of Nelson Mandela – I remember distinctly a grade 6 classroom in my elementary school featuring a large poster of the man, and I doubt this poster could have been in such a location if his legacy was not seen as one of peaceful resistance against oppression.

The problem with this view, however, is that it is utterly wrong. Nelson Mandela was in prison not for passive or peaceful resistance, but for his leadership role in the ANC, a terrorist group involved in an armed conflict against Apartheid South Africa. He was tried along with 9 other ANC leaders in the 1963/64 Rivonia trial, where the arrested were tried for 221 acts of political violence against the state.

It is true that the ANC had a long history of non-violent struggle, but in the 1950s Mandela saw that “fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights”. Moreover, the Apartheid state had begun to use political violence as a normal tactic to suppress Africans protesting their second class status. Mandela and a few colleagues came in june 1961 to the conclusion that “as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the Government met our peaceful demands with force”. Therefore, far from being a man of non-violence, Mandela was instrumental in the ANC leadership that saw the opening up of a front of violence against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Mandela was more the Rory O’Brody than Gerry Adams of the ANC.

Nelson Mandela continued to support armed struggle throughout his prison term. He was offered conditional release in 1985 if he agreed to sign a document condemning terrorism, and he refused, insisting that he had turned to armed struggle only when “all other forms of resistance were no longer open”, and demanding that the president of South Africa unban the ANC and “guarantee free political activity”. Reading his statement, one imagines he might have appealed to the 2nd article of the French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen”:

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

This, I believe, is really the principle that articulates the natural law right to engaged in armed struggle against oppression when other forms of resistance are no longer available. And, perhaps more importantly, to support publicly the rights of others to engage in armed struggle against state ideology which condemns all political violence as “terrorism”, and therefore de-facto illegitimate.

Thinking seriously and honestly about conflicts in the world today means not ignoring the potential legitimacy of armed struggle, and not white-washing revolutionary leaders in the past in order to put up their posters in public schools whilst no one is offended.

Note – Nelson Mandela’s quotations are taken from “I am Prepared to Die”, the statement given at the opening of the defence case at the Rivonia trial.

 

How should we understand ‘violence’ in a cyberworld?

It is easy to stress the differences between societies in which significant proportions of the public support violent insurrection against the state, and societies where the mainstream supports police brutality and the largest attack on civil rights in Canadian history because they saw a police car burning on TV. But, perhaps this way of conceptualizing violence – as people beaten with sticks, windows smashing, and cars burning, conceals a new way in which people are willing to support attacks on powerful social institutions.

What I’m talking about is the cyberwar against and in defence of wikileaks. A lot if going on here – above the cyberlevel there are the withdrawal of services to wikileaks by Amazon, paypal and mastercard. These services have in turn been attacked by hackers, slowing down or even crashing their websites. Personally I would have supported a boycott against firms which act concientiously to marginalize wikileaks, but these direct cyber attacks probably have a much greater effect, and if they are supported by the general public, might suggest what kind of broad based support for informational attacks against power structures exists in our current day.

I don’t hardly even have to mention the many attacks on the wikileaks servers themselves, presumably made both by loyalist hackers and employees of embarrassed governments – perhaps with some cooperation, I don’t know. Also, websites which merely publish or report on wikileaks’ leaked cables have been attacked by hackers, including the website of the swedish government. Again, these are all interesting phenomena in themselves, but what’s more interesting to me is how people stand in solidarity with wikileaks, and to some extent the hackers, against those forces which would shut information down.

Should we take this opportunity to radically re-conceive how we think of insurrectionist violence? Many activists who support diversity-of-tactics stress that violence against property should not be confused with violence against persons – that the police commit violence against persons, and the black bloc only attacks property – and these are not the same things. The problem with this argument is that while it may be convincing at a meeting of differently minded dissidents, it does not work with the general public’s intuitive sense of violence. However, the general public appears much more likely to see the difference between physical attacks on people’s persons and cyber attacks on capitalist and state institutions. No individual person appears to be harmed in a cyberwar, although I’m sure we will soon be seeing television advertisements portraying the lowly Mastercard employees who lost their jobs and are waiting in unemployment lines because Mastercard was attacked by hackers.

Open letter to the Prime Minister

Motivated by a plea in Catherine Porter’s report on the current G20 hearings by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and National Union of Public and General Employees, I decided to write to Stephen Harper on the issue of police abuses of power at the G20 summit in Toronto. I encourage anyone who is upset about what happened to do the same. He can be reached at pm@pm.gc.ca.

Dear Stephen,
I’m sure we have many differences – but one thing we share is a belief in freedom, and the importance of a country where individuals can exercise their creative freedom without undue interference by the state. In fact, although you would probably call me evidence that “satan has his hand in the works of men” because I support the NDP, or rather don’t even support the NDP because they tend far too much to the right, we in fact share beliefs in liberty. I understand you have libertarian tendencies, and these motivated your changes to the census regarding the obligatory long form.

Not to say we are the same kind of libertarians. I don’t know for certain, certainly, but considering your political affiliations I would not be surprised if you think of yourself as an Ayn Rand style libertarian. Like the members of Rush. Do you listen to Rush? You would probably like “2112″, “Farewell to Kings”, and “Hemispheres” – these albums, along with being excellent musical achievements, are philosophical works (penned mostly by the drummer Neil Peart) on the place of the individual within the Mass in modern society. More specifically, they concern the ability of an individual to remain free, on the edge between love and reason, when their right to determine their own path is at risk of being swallowed up by the nanny state.
Myself, on the other hand, identify as an anarcho-socialist or libertarian-communist. That means I emphasize, with John Rawls incidentally, the importance of primary goods allotted to all individuals such that they can pursue their individual projects. This requires strong programs of wealth re-distribution. I think this is required in order to have a society where people are genuinely free – one can not be free if one is so poor one must sell oneself into tyrannical wage-slavery just to make ends meet.

But, while we may have different ideas of how freedom for individuals can best be enabled or promoted within contemporary society, one place we should share both values and practices concern the use of police force without warrant against individuals. For instance, my house was raided by the police during the G20 without a warrant, and people’s bags were illegally searched while I was forced to prove to the police I had a right to be in my own home and invite guests into that home. Although our manners of owning property are different – I own my property collectively as part of a housing cooperative – I’m sure you agree that people have a right to the quiet enjoyment of their property, and protection against warrentless searches.

There are many more instances of police use of force and breach of protocol that bother me. The use of the “breech of peace” charge to detain large numbers of individuals who were not charged suggests our police force is willing to use mass arrest as a means of politically motivated crowd control, rather than as a means of putting criminals in prison. The many reported instances of police abuse of detainees, including sexual abuse, are not acceptable and do not appear to be simply the effects of a few “bad apples”. It appears rather that the police were given free reign, and that the violent tendencies already present in a portion of the police officers were used to intimidate protestors – especially nonviolent ones. Many videos demonstrate that much greater violence was used against non-violent protestors than was used against people actually engaged in vandalism – this is not acceptable to me, and neither should it be to you.

It may be true that the large majority of those who gathered on the Saturday to protest the positions you took up in discussions with other G20 leaders did not vote for you, and will not vote for you. Regardless, as a person who values freedom and liberty, you have a duty to allow individuals to express themselves freely without undue intimidation or force being used against them.

Sincerely,

Tristan Laing

Sanity Restored?

This past weekend I travelled with 20 new friends, mostly from my housemate’s NGO “Operation Groundswell“, to the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in Washington DC. You can see my photos here. The trip itself was quite an adventure – friday morning we left, were interrogated at the border, went to a new england bluegrass festival in Maryland on Friday night, and I think I slept a few hours on an easy chair. Saturday we put together our costumes and drove from Betertton to the Suburbs of DC, where we caught the overcrowded metro into downtown. We arrived quite late – about 2pm, and it wasn’t until about 2:30 that we (after almost completely losing each other), found a place where we could both hear the rally and see a screen. The only part of the rally I really cognized was the closing speech, which I highly recommend you watch, or at least read these excerpts from wikipedia. To me, the most moving lines of that speech were these:

This was not a rally to ridicule people of faith, or people of activism, or look down our noses at the heartland, or passionate argument, or to suggest that times are not difficult and that we have nothing to fear–they are, and we do.

But we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus, and not be enemies. But unfortunately, one of our main tools in delineating the two broke.

Zizek and the paradoxical position of activism today

Activism today seems caught in a stalemate with itself. While the Battle of Seattle founded a generation of direct-action, anti-organizational chaotic intervention against neo-liberal world government meetings, they’ve failed to gain mass public support. For reasons which have been understood for decades, the media is excellent at not getting messages through which are damaging to corporate power in general, media organizations themselves being private tyrannies. And since liberals are scared to death of any acts which might provoke disorder (they are followers of Burke rather than Rousseau), there is little hope in convincing them through rational argument (although I’ll continue to try). But on the other hand, purely peaceful protests seem increasingly ineffective, and geared towards the personal satisfaction of those involved, rather than social or political transformation. Zizek holds something like this position with regards the 2003 anti-war in iraq rallies:

The massive demonstrations against the US attack on Iraq back in 2003 were exemplary of a strange symbiotic relationship, parasitism even, between power and the anti-war protesters. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protestors saved their beautiful souls – they had made it clear that they did not agree with the government’s policy on Iraq – while those in power could calmly accept it, even profit from it: not only did the protests do nothing to prevent the (already decided upon) attack on Iraq, paradoxically, they even provided additional legitimaization for it, best rendered by none of than George Bush, whose reaction to the mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London was: “You see, this is what we are fighting for: so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!”

Who Stands with the Roma?

France is currently deporting hundreds of Roma because their presence in France is “illegal”. The question of the legality of the deportation is actually quite interesting, because of the way the law in its current state privileges non-nomadic life, but that is not the issue I wish to address here. Rather, I want to discuss which groups are coming out in support of the Roma, or in support of Sarkozy’s deportations – and the rational behind this support.

The prominent figures in the Catholic Church have come out against the deportations:

In the document the Bishops say they deplore the way the Roma and Gitane people are being scapegoated by society. New legislation being introduced by Sarkozy is stirring up prejudice, they said.

Questions about whether the support for the Roma come from figures in the Church or from the Church itself were settled when the Pope made this announcement on August 22nd:

The Pope urged French pilgrims to welcome people of all origins, saying that the scriptures were “an invitation to know how to accept legitimate differences among humans, just like Jesus came to pull men together from every nation, speaking every language.”

The Vatican repeated its opposition on August 27th. They have, however, been in no way the only voice come out in opposition of these deportations which single out the Roma. A UN human rights body, various rights groups, trade unions, and even George Sorros have come out against the deportations.

A group conspicuously absent from voices of support for the Roma in France is CRIF, an umbrella organization which represents many Jewish organizations in France. In fact, while technically the CRIF have remained neutral, a statement made by their president Richard Prasquier closely reminds me of the way American Republicans speak about illegal Mexican immigrants in southern American states:

CRIF President Richard Prasquier said he supports the idea of expelling illegal Roma from the country and that the idea of denaturalizing certain foreign-born criminals is “understandable” if they are guilty of attacking officers.

Implying that the deportations concern primarily immigrants who are guilty of some offences is not neutral. In fact, it conceals the reality of the situation, and repeats xenophobic stereotypes of the Roma as a criminal people. It is extremely worrying to hear this neutrality from France’s Jewish community – logically one would expect European Jews to feel solidarity with the oppressed Roma; they were after all both subjects of the Nazi genocide:

It is not known precisely how many Roma were killed in theHolocaust. While exact figures or percentages cannot be ascertained, historians estimate that the Germans and their allies killed around 25 percent of all European Roma. Of slightly less than one million Roma believed to have been living in Europe before the war, the Germans and their Axis partners killed up to 220,000.

To the extent that anti-semitism persists in Europe, I sincerely doubt it to be more prominent than anti-Roma sentiment. While I have never personally met someone openly anti-Semitic, the vast majority of Eastern Europeans I have casually encountered (none of which became my friends) have openly expressed hatred for Gypsies. Therefore I take seriously accusations that this racist policy is an attempt to garner votes support from National Front supporters in an upcoming election.

Not all French Jews, of course, support the CRIF problematic neutrality. Patrick Klugman, a member of CRIF director’s committee is upset at CRIF’s position, stating: ”I think it’s the role of the Jewish community to be heard”. Klugman is a dedicated anti-racist, and the founder of JCALL, the European Jewish Call for Reason (worth a look). I doubt that it is random that Klugman both opposes the Occupation of the occupied territories, and the silence of CRIF on the racist deportation of the Roma – both immoral realities ignored in the name of a group’s self-preservation. We can see this logic of careful respect for violent oppresion in statements made by France’s chief Rabbi, Gilles Bernheim:

“This affair is not easy,” he said last week. “It requires both moderation and firmness.”

While Bernheim said he hoped decisions on security “are made case by case, and that we never stigmatize a community,” he also voiced support for Sarkozy’s tough-cop proposals.

“I haven’t forgotten that there’s a real war that has been established against the police, against the forces of order, and when I see the violence that is exercised against the representatives of public order, I tell myself that we also need firmness to react to that,” he said.

The reality, of course, is that stigmatizing a community due to a few alleged incidents is exactly what is happening. Hundreds of Roma have already been deported with no alleged charges.

The failure of France’s Jewish community to come out en masse against the deportations reminds me of what Chomsky has been saying since the 70s about those who claim to “support Israel”: ”supporters of Israel are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration.” One wonders how far this moral degeneration has spread.

The Killing of Oscar Grant: this is what racist police brutality looks like

If anyone hasn’t heard about the police execution of Oscar Grant, please read up on the facebook page. In short, white officer Johannes Mehserle shot Oscar Grant, a black man, in the back of the head while Grant was handcuffed and lying facedown on a train platform. The murder occured on the early morning hours of New Years Day, 2009. The killing is a good example of how youtube video can greatly increase the public awareness of an incident of police brutality. If you can stomach it, watch some video here. Even Bill O’Reilly reported it, along with the assertion that protests are useless and that he was certain that heavy criminal charges would fall upon the officer.

In fact, the officer has been convicted of relatively light criminal charges, involuntary manslaughter rather than second degree murder. The mandatory sentence is two to four years, but a sentencing enhancement of up to ten years many be added because the crime was committed with a gun. The lack of conviction on the second degree murder charge, coupled with the total absence of african american jurors deciding on the case, motivated riots in downtown Oakland.

There are two things here which I think are key. First, that the statement of the defense lawyer was actually much more optimistic the statement from Oscar Grant’s mother. This is not to say that he thought what has happened was not a miscarriage of justice, but that this is the first time he’s seen a police officer found guilty of any crime committed against a minority in his experience working as a lawyer. So, we can probably be assured that the youtube footage contributed to a higher degree of justice than is usual in Oakland.

The second thing, however, is that this remains an injustice – and one in plain sight. Everyone with a computer can see that Grant was killed execution style by a police officer, and everyone knows that this constitutes murder. In fact, it probably constitutes some kind of hate crime - since it’s unthinkable that a similar amount of violence would have been used against white partiers on new years eve who had allegedly gotten into a fight on public transit.

Heidegger on Americanism and Democracy: in what way might the G20 exemplify our lack of a homeland?

The public hatred of Martin Heidegger after the Second World War is more due to his lack of condemnation of the Nazi regime, and his silence on the subject of concentration camps, than to his own involvement with the party in 1933-34. So I think it’s pretty important to understand why this response is absent from Heidegger’s later work. From whither Heidegger’s silence on the Nazis and the Holocaust?

Firstly, we might look at the fact that Heidegger’s silence on the Holocaust was only partial. He in fact did, in a 1949 presentation state

“Agriculture is now a motorized food industry – in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations, the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.”

What is Anarchism Part 2: “Democracy” and the State?

In this follow-up post, I will reflect on the question of whether the State can be legitimate at all, and why anarchists refuse to use the word “police” to describe the legitimate authoritative forces they would support. In essence, anarchists believe that power must justify itself, and that the power must come from the people. In other words, they are radical democrats – they believe that the people must organize itself such that it can make decisions for itself, rather than passing off this responsibility to a tiny elite which in every case co-opts power for a small aristocratic-esq interest group.  The reasons why mass elections in a state would always lead to the dominance of a tiny, anti-democratic elite, have been understood since Hegel:

As for mass elections, it may be noted that, in large states in particular, the electorate inevitably becomes indifference in view of the fact that a single vote has little effect when numbers are so large; and however highly they are urged to value the right to vote, those who enjoy this right will simply fail to make use of it. As a result, an institution of this kind achieves the opposite of its intended purpose, and the election comes under control of a few people, of a faction, and hence of that particular and contingent interest which it was designed specifically to neutralize.

So what should we do?  Right Hegelianism seeks, rather than change the structure of society to overcome the problems of elections, to instead construct a bureaucracy headed by a sovereign monarch which through its organization can assure that the universal interest of the state be advanced. Edward Bernays, although not a personal fan of Hegel, can be seen as a culmination of this tradition in the early 20th century. Bernays understood that

If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, is it not possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it? The recent practice of propagandahas proved that it is possible, at least up to a certain point and within certain limits.”[5]

In other words, public relations can be used to produce the consent of the masse, so that they can be governed by the “small faction” which Hegel spoke about.