International Violence
International Violence
by
Stephen B. Waters
September 1, 1983
Now that the Soviets have gotten your attention by shooting down a Korean airliner, let's reflect a moment on the status of international law. There is none. A law is not a law unless there is a penalty for violating it. Robert Adams, in Decadent Societies contends that nobody even pretends that we live under the rule of law in international relations:
We have treaties and conventions of many different sorts, to which the signatories adhere as long as they see fit; meanwhile nations great and small continue to accumulate weapons in quantities far greater than they can afford for a purpose hardly anyone dares contemplate. The United Nations is a debating society, helpless to overcome the least petulance or recalcitrance by the least of its members. He continues later on, "There should be a law on which governments could rely. Its establishment and acceptance should be the special concern of a government like that of the United States. . .."
The rule of law is like a protective umbrella to those who choose to live under it. It offers them a process of peaceful problem resolution. It protects them from having to resort to violence. Violence--from individual gunshots through destroying civilian airliners, to full-scale war--is the law of the jungle; the law outside the protective umbrella. In war there is no guarantee that the righteous will win, that the strongest will win, that the first striker will win, that anybody will win.
Some Americans have difficulty wrapping their moral minds around the concept that some nations play by different rules. As Adams continues:
Does America have any deadly enemies? Maybe yes, maybe no. But where the possibility exists, one form of decadence may well consist of being too nice to envisage the possibility. In [America, today,] -- disdainful of the few constraints in the least constrained society on earth, unable even to conceive of societies based on class struggle, class dictatorship, and the systemic reign of terror -- I sense a willful naivete, a deliberate effort at a second political virginity, that even in the early stages smells rotten. It would be dangerous for all of us for the Soviet Union to mistake as weakness and impotence our moral desire for peaceful problem resolution and the rule of law. We reserve our morality for those who choose to abide by it. As the "mad" colonel in Apocalypse Now admired in the Viet Cong, these loving fathers and family men could set aside their morality to fight with unrelenting tenacity in the sickening jungle of No Rules. In that dismal animal world no weapon is illegal: deceit, terrorism, assassination, nuclear war, conventional war, abrogation of treaties, starvation, anything the dark side of your mind can think of we may use. The Soviet Union thinks us incapable of such action or paralyzed by the prospect of such action.
It is precisely our abhorrence of having to set aside our morality that hardens our resolve in two ways: 1) We will not be intimidated by violence or the prospect of it, and 2) we will try to convince as many nations as we can that it is in their long term best interest to join us under the protective umbrella of the rule of law as it is undoubtedly in their long-term best interest.
We must clearly convey to all nations that they are either under the protective umbrella or not; that with weaponry as sophisticated as it is today they can no longer afford violence; and that if they choose to act violently and rambunctiously outside the protective umbrella of peaceful problem resolution we will treat them accordingly.
We are in a race with the end of the world to convince those outside this umbrella to join us inside before we all go down in a deadly embrace.
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Copyright 1998 by Stephen B. Waters. This page was last built on 11/25/98; 4:18:07 PM. sbwaters@rny.com At the moment I am using Macintosh OS to work on this website. |