War, crime
In this episode, we explore the social, political and global implications of reframing war itself as crime.
All around the globe, at present and seemingly throughout history, there are all manner of conflicts occurring. And within those conflicts, there were, are, and seemingly always will be, all too many incidents that would be classed as a ‘war-crime’.
War-crime takes so, so many different forms: direct attacks against individuals, particularly civilians; use of certain weapons; attacks against hospitals; mistreatment of prisoners of war, and so on, and so on, and so on. It’s a long, long, long, long list…
As is war itself, of course: no-one ever wins from war; and in the longer-term especially, everyone loses.
And the concept of ‘war-crime’ might sort-of make something resembling sense if the would-be-warriors actually acknowledged the ‘rule of law’ in that bleak context. In most cases it’s the self-styled ‘victors’ who declare what is or is not a ‘war-crime’: always and only the crimes committed by others, never the crimes committed by themselves. Some countries will even go to war against the law itself to protect a questionable claim that their citizens alone have a ‘right’ to immunity from the ‘laws of war’.
Which kind of renders the whole ‘war-crime’ thing a bit moot.
So let’s not even bother. Let’s just scrap ‘the laws of war’. No such thing as ‘war-crime’ any more.
Instead, let’s just do the one really, really obvious thing that should have always have applied right from the start: insist that ‘war’ is subject to the same laws as for everything else.
Make it such that there are no ‘laws of war’: instead, there is only ‘the law’.
And in that law - so-called ‘civil law’ - just about everything related to war would, by definition, be some kind of crime.
War itself is a crime.
Let’s look at some examples.
You want to join the army? If you do that, you’ve just committed a crime: ‘conspiracy to breach the peace’. Here in Australia, the court-recommended penalty for that crime would be 12 months in jail and/or a fine of 200 ‘penalty units’ ($44,400 at the present rate of $222 per unit).
You want to carry a military weapon? That’d be a crime too: ‘possession of illegal firearm’ or suchlike. Here in Australia, that’s a jail-sentence of four to ten years.
(Don’t worry, there are legitimate civil uses for firearms: farmers, hunters, veterinarians, sports-clubs and so on. In Australian civil law:
Licence holders must demonstrate a "genuine reason" (which does not include self-defence) for holding a firearm licence and must not be a "prohibited person”.
But if you’ve just become a criminal by joining that ‘conspiracy to breach the peace’, you’d automatically be a ‘prohibited person’, of course…)
Okay, so you’ve joined this illegal organisation called ‘the army’, you have your illegal gun, and you’ve just aimed it at someone. In civil law, that’s another crime: ‘threatening behaviour’ or suchlike. Probably several years in jail, just for that one.
You pulled the trigger. In civil law, that’s another crime: ‘attempted murder’. Ten to twenty years in jail, probably.
Your bullet hit and killed this other person. In civil law, that’s the crime of murder, of course. Lifetime in jail. Or execution, in some countries.
What about if you’re not carrying a gun? Well, in civil law. pretty much everything else to do with war also turns out to be a crime.
You’re in artillery; you fire your howitzer or whatever. Plenty of crimes there: ‘discharge of dangerous weapon’, for example. ‘Property damage’, almost certainly. ‘Attempted-murder’, again, or actual murder. Plenty of jail-time on any of those.
You don’t do any fighting, you just make the stuff that the soldiers use:
— nope, all of that is still a crime: the same ‘conspiracy to breach the peace’, plus ‘conspiracy to commit murder’, plus some variant on a general theme of ‘manufacture of deadly weapon’. And even if you were just an administrator and you didn’t actually make anything, you just told people what to do, you’re still likely to fall under some kind of organised-crime rules such as the local equivalent of RICO, ‘Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organization’.
Oh, and refusing to face judgement on any of this? Well, that’d be just another crime too: ‘obstructing justice’, amongst many other things.
(And that law of yours that says you’ll even go to war to protect any of your citizens from having to face a war-crime charge? - well, that’s another crime too. A literal whole-of-nation crime, even before you start. Not A Good Idea…?)
That’s all it is: crime after crime after crime.
But wait, you didn’t want to do any of this! - you were just defending yourself! Nope: all the same points still apply (you did notice that point above about “(which does not include self-defence)”, yes?). Still a crime.
Or you were forced to do it, you’re just a conscript, you were just following orders! Okay, there are some crimes by others there - coercion and all that - but the Nuremberg rules on ‘superior orders’ would probably still apply:
“the defense of superior orders was no longer enough to escape punishment”
So no: it’s still crime after crime after crime.
In which case, what this really tells us is that war is a means to give certain people an excuse to commit insane levels of crime, and claim that it isn’t actually a crime at all.
That’s about it, really.
What do we do about it?
Well, one place we could start would be to take a good long look at the causes of war - and we’d already made a solid start on that here, in the previous episode ‘The real cause of war’. What we’d found back there was that there are basically just four main excuses: emotion, religion, ego and theft. And ultimately these all end up as a craving for some form of possession over others: possessing revenge; possessing others’ beliefs; possessing some short-term ego-satisfaction; possessing other people’s lands, lives, resources or hope. So if we can kill off possessionism in our world, we would also kill off pretty much every excuse for war as well.
Yet another really good reason why we need to eradicate the endemic possessionism in our world.
That covers the why and the how, so to speak; we also need to tackle the who. And as we saw back in ‘The real cause of war’, there are really only just two types, with one common thread between them. The common thread is that both types will benefit from war, without ever taking any of the risks or facing any pain; and they also have some means of entrapping others into facing the dangers for them, by playing the age-old Game of “Let’s you and him fight”.
The first type are just devious, hiding out in some space that shields them from any direct risk: the arms-dealer, the politician, the war-profiteer. (“For I sutler to the camp shall be, and profits will accrue”, says ever-cynical and self-centred Pistol in Shakespeare’s Henry V.) And the second type, of course, is our much-unloved covert-crybabies, with their cults used as clueless cannon-fodder to be fed into the fight, in the unfounded faith that this sacrifice might at last satisfy their crybaby’s insatiable commands. Criminals all, without any shadow of doubt…
War, crime; war itself is crime. If we frame it like that, we might at last be able to find a way out of that literally-lethal mess.