Good and Evil in War

Here’s my video for SouthFront yesterday, which ties in nicely to yesterday’s article on Ukraine.

As I was reviewing this today, I began thinking about last night’s article on Moon of Alabama. I don’t always agree with b. — but I always pay attention — he is a superb analyst —yes, the real deal! Right or wrong, he does his homework and connects the dots.

His current article is not actually about morality — more correctly, it is about “political rules” which usually have nothing to do with morality at all.

Blinding Morality In International Relations

MoA bases the article on the work of two Canadian scholars, Paul Robinson and Patrick Armstrong. Robinson is an orthodox international affairs academic who writes a lot about “civilizationism”. Armstrong?

Patrick Armstrong served in the Canadian Department of National Defence from 1984, specializing in the USSR and Russia and was a Counsellor at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow from 1993 to 1996. You should follow him.

B. begins by quoting Robinson:

Russia believes in a traditional, Westphalian, order in which states are equal sovereign entities. The rules apply equally to all of them, regardless of who they are or what they do. States may only take action against other states with the permission of a superior court, in other words the United Nations Security Council. Of course, Russia doesn’t 100% abide by the rules of its own model, but its preferred option remains one of legal symmetry – the same rules apply to all.

Ummm… “Westphalia”?

Modern rules root back to the Peace of Westphalia treaty in 1648 which ended the 30 year war, a war without rules, just savagery.

I guess not much has changed.

Basics:

• Each state rules a fixed geographic area.

• Governments hold supreme power inside their borders.

• Outside nations must not meddle in internal politics.

• All states have equal standing under international law, regardless of size

Nothing about “morality” here. And these rules seem to have been made to be broken.

But….Robinson clarifies:

By contrast, human rights reasoning has pushed the West in an opposite direction, towards a preference for legal asymmetry. In this model, the just and the unjust, those who respect and those who don’t respect human rights, are not legally or morally equal.

Huh…. The West? The defender of human rights? Moral? Tell that to the dead children of Gaza or the victims of Ukrainian terrorism. The West is certainly moralistic, which is a very American thing probably rooted in Calvinist hypocrisy.

Just for clarity let me define the difference between morality and moralism.

Morality is a system of internal values and principles that helps individuals distinguish right from wrong to guide their own behavior. In contrast, moralism is an ideology or behavioral habit of overemphasizing rules, judging others, and imposing a specific moral code onto society.

Key Differences

• Morality is inward looking, demanding self-examination of conscience, thoughts, and actions.

• Moralism looks outward assumes a superior position, always looking downward, policing and judging the behavior of other people as lessers.

• Morality treats rules as pragmatic guides to support human relationships, empathy, and community well being.

• Moralism elevates rules as absolutes, regardless of the well-being of actual people.

• A moral person seeks positive action.

• A moralistic person assumes self-righteousness or moral superiority, and acts negatively , finger-pointing and restricting others

• Morality relies on personal accountability and shared values\

• Moralism uses social shaming, institutional pressure, or legal mandates, including violence and shrugs off responsibility.

Armstrong ties the issue of amoral national behavior to notions of national, ethnic, or racial superiority — the myth of “chosen people”. Sorry to tell you that you are at the bottom of America’s Great Chain of Being. (Or is it “Non-Being”)

When moral superiority becomes entrenched, other superiorities soon take root.

We’re morally better and everything we do is better too. Evil fails across the board, in war and in peace.

Our tools work better and we use them better. The morally inferior are worse at war too. And so we come, to quote a certain Austrian watercolourist, to the expectation that “one good kick at the door and the whole rotten edifice will collapse”.

But the USSR did not collapse in 1941 and neither did Iran in 2026.

B. sums up:

It is astonishing that nearly 25 years after George W. Bush declared some countries to be an ‘axis of evil’ the West is still holds to this Manichean or Zoroastrian view of ‘good’ versus ‘evil’

I don’t quite agree with B. here.The West is not concerned with Good or Evil or moral issues. Certainly Bush never was. Only profit and loss. The rest is moralistic hypocrisy.

Tokyo

March 9 to 10th. The US firebombed Tokyo killing 100,000 civilians. August 6. The US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. August 9, it dropped the second. By the end of 1945 150,000 to 245,000 people had died because of these bombs. Altogether as many as 345,000 people.

But the US was just getting started.

In the Korean War, about a million North Korean civilians died.

Nagasaki

By contrast, both Russian and Iran are guided by moral values.

Despite the terror bombings, Russia still focuses on military infrastructure. In response to Ukrainian attacks on civilian infrastructure, the Russians struck at warehouses in the Kyiv region, aware that the Ukrainian in civilian areas.

Andrei Martyanov put it nicely:

Civilian Warehouses In 404 have this funny propensity--each time they are hit, they begin to detonate. What a mystery!

I am wrecking my brain here trying to figure out why West-supplied baby food, diapers, toys are so violently explosive. Obviously a low quality product, right? I would be also very cautious around toilet paper from Germany or France--keep an eye (if you can--you are a superman) on your ass. In both senses, it may explode and not from the toilet paper only, if you know what I mean.

Kiev is not upset, not at civilian deaths, of course, but at losing components for drones, explosives and munitions hidden in those warehouses.

The US doesn’t care. The worst kind of evil is when you simply don’t care.

Support New Forensics

There is no morality without empathy. Animals have it. We can too. Help Chappy and Ichi teach me to be a better person.

Please donate by clicking on the graphic or the url below.

I would really like to get to 5000 subscribers. If you like my work, share the urls on other blogs and sites and in comments on podcasts.

Show us you care by buying us coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/julicow