Barbour's Dilemma
Is National Self Defense a War Crime? Asks Alan Dershowitz in a op-ed in Canada’s National Post. The answer says Dershowitz is “yes” if you ask Louise Arbour, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and currently the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, for so long as national self defense entails the risk of inflicting collateral damage. Dershowitz rejects her position and goes on to argue that:
Democracies simply cannot protect their citizens against terrorist attacks of the kind launched by Hezbollah without some foreseeable risk to civilians. There cannot be any absolute prohibition against such self-defensive military actions so long as they are proportional to the dangers and reasonable efforts are made to minimize civilian casualties.
Barbour's thinking has set up a wholly secular equivalent of the Problem of Evil. If we remove the term "God" from the standard proposition and replace it with appropriately secular terms we have this restatement:
Barbour's Dilemma is the problem of reconciling the existence of oppressive regimes, genocide and mass slaughter in a world governed by a wholly benevolent, pacifistic, nonviolent and impotent United Nations.
If the United Nations is benevolent then it cannot tolerate the existence of a Rwanda, Congo, North Korea or a Darfur. But if it attempts to stop these atrocities then inevitably it must inflict some collateral damage which will cause some people to die and that, according to Barbour, is a War Crime. There is no way out of the paradox and the system is in logical self-contradiction. Unlike the real problem of evil, a theodicy is not allowed as a solution to Barbour's Dilemma.because in a secular context, no meta-solutions are allowed by invoking a God who can make amends for everything or whose true nature we cannot completely understand. Those transcendant quantities cannot exist in Barbour's secular universe. They might exist in a religious universe, but not in the United Nations'.
We can either solve Barbour's Dilemma and win philosophical immortality or accept there are some things we cannot completely understand; and simply give thanks for our daily bread and try to make our way as best we can to tomorrow. I vote for going on and letting the deadwood bury the deadwood.
posted by wretchardthecat at 10/17/2006 08:34:00 PM
13 Comments:
Louise Arbour threatened the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten with prosecution for exercising their right to publish the Mohammed cartoons. She left an esteemed court -the Supreme Court of Canada- to join the infamously political United Nations Human Rights Commission. She has all the wisdom of a college freshman. She is an embarrassment to Canada.
For any vicious and brutal organization, busily embezzling, looting, murdering, extorting, thieving, cheating, stealing and otherwise amassing whacking great wodges of cash, there is never any shortage of mouthpieces willing to prostitute themselves and issue any statement that will further their employer's nefarious perversions.
Hey! Even lawyers from socialist countries where it snows a lot have a right to aspire to something beyond the dole queue.
I don't know Ms. Arbour, but her recent work defines her unambiguously and inevitably to be an intellectual slut, beyond the redemption of any antibiotic regime, or the fevered counseling of even the most determined clinical social worker.
O! Canada!
I wonder how folks (mostly, if not entirely, on the Left) can justify that line of thought. Is it delusion, or merely ignorance? I'm not talking about the Turtle Bay Kleptocrats, but rather those Lenin called "Useful Idiots". Your average singularity is less dense than some of these folks...
Louise Arbour threatened the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten with prosecution for exercising their right to publish the Mohammed cartoons.
Meanwhile nobody saw the cartoons in America (outside of blogs), despite a constitutionally protected freedom of the press, because poking fun at Mo' isn't in the script.
This is a special case of a disease the Federal Government is afflicted with: The Search for an Optimum Solution.
When trying to solve a problem in D.C. there are inevitably a wide variety of inputs - including from those who really don't want it solved anyway.
It is impossible to meet all of these requirements and when no solution is found that does so the decision is made to study it some more and come up with better solutions.
So we study, study, study, and the requirements increase in the meantime. Money gets spent on the studies and the illusion of progress is maintained.
But nothing really happens - until someone looks at some of the requirements and says to their owners "Eff' you very much."
Sixth, decide that tyrants and terrorists are not only acting within politico-cultural norms for their regions, they are victims reacting to Yankee-Zionist-Crusader-Capitalist imperialism.
But Yankee-Zionist-Crusader-Capitalist imperialism is within politico-cultural norms for our region.
What a crock! Justice Arbour's position is exactly contrary to reasoned common sense. If her screed were to become settled "law", this point would give extreme comfort to those who now conduct conflict and violence whilst hiding deep within the folds of a civilian populace, thus placing innocents at risk. An exactly opposite result of what a civilized society should intend.
More posted here. Cheers.
I just reported on a panel of Canadian moonbats, one of whom, a law professor, voiced arguments the same as Arbour's. Basically, these people are part of an international media-academic economy that trades in figures of victimhood. And if their "solutions" create more victims, they don't ask why, resting assured that they will be there to wring hands and mediate the ongoing victimization of the weak by the strong for generations to come. They are, after all, "the progressives".
The fact that all real victims and all those who are simply represented as such, might well be better off in a world where the figure of victim was not so widely (ab)used, is the question they will never raise, and so we must find ways to do so.
I disagree with Wretchard that these are people who address the probem of evil without recourse to the transcendent. The figures of victimization they proffer are, in their religion, transcendent figures - at least when the likes of Louis Arbour are finished separating figures of victimhood from actual people, those people, now often dead, are remembered through some sense of a transcendent Being that the figure of the victim engenders in our imagination. In short, people like Arbour are prettified traders in human sacrifice.
C4 probably can't appreciate that people say they hate him "just for what he is"; likewise, he can't understand that if America were full of hatred for Israel, it wouldn't make much difference to any serious Jihadi: America would still be the Christian and free market culture that must be destroyed "just for what it is". Indeed, even if Jew hatred were absolutely pervasive in America and no Jew had any wealth or power, it would still be necessary to construct conspiracies that some secret cabal of "Jews" were pulling the strings of the evil empire, which we hate "just for what it is".
In this respect, c4 is actually a lot like Arbour who sees in every inequitous difference and act of violence the hand of western male patriarchy, or whatever it is she thinks she resents "just for what it is" and which it is her mission to save us from. Both try to rationalize a resentment they don't understand and cannot understand as long as they permit themselves to maintain their sacred objects of resentment as if they exist, pure, unmediated by a complex reality in which, e.g., c4's desire is actually in mimetic interaction with Jewish desire. Basically, he hates "the Jew" for being a lot like him, though he'll convince himself the opposite is true, just as he'll convince himself that Arbour is not his kissing cousin.
People do indeed hate America "just for what it is", but that's to say they don't understand reality very well and it really wouldn't make any difference what America's policy vis a vis Israel was. Since when is hatred rational, free of delusion?
In a nutshell, what this sort of thinker simply cannot wrap his/her head around is the simple notion that:
A government has the right and duty to favor the lives of its own civilians over the lives of an enemy's civilians.
Arbour is one of those that this author warned us about last year.
There are other warnings in her plea to us, to not follow S. Africa into the abyss.
Canada should take a lesson from South Africa, as should we all.
Here is an open letter to us from South Africa. We best read it and learn...fast.
Time is not on our side.
We can't say we have not been warned!
Papa Ray
West Texas
USA
P.S. Israel doesn't make any of our policys under this President.
Through my death cultivation* filter, the sinister support behind an "elect" such as this is striking. (Coulter, Steyn and VDH have noted it too, Hanson just last Sunday).
Arbour displays most of the attributes I listed in Malevolent Misleadership. Perhaps because she seems so stupid she is truly a tool rather than fully misanthropic those who keep her in place. Preventing self defense is nothing new, but I believe its purpose becomes ever more evident as issues like this come to the surface (and are quickly forgotten as Hegel predicted).
And for those who want a handle on why C-4 keeps on using his filter, this may help.
I only just realized that this behavior, demonstrated by Arbour, was described at paragraph 22 of that second link to my site.
The preferred method is the passive aggression typically exemplified by so many world leaders. For instance, look for the U.N. to claim moral authority to be guardian of the lives of the world's downtrodden, and then watch it adopt a non-interference stance toward almost any murdering agent that may arise. Look for them to consistently equate violence initiators with those reacting in their own defense.
Finding excuses to do nothing while at the same time hindering or outright preventing self-defense seems to be the foremost duty of the global "elect."
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