Friday, August 30, 2013

States are not people

It seems that we cannot go a day without someone, somewhere, talking about sending a message or punishment to some country. They talk about it as if the country is a person. Even if you pretend that punishment is an effective way to guide the behavior of individuals, does that translate to punishment affecting states?

In the case of a representative government it is conceivable that a punishment actually hits the wrongdoers. If the majority voted fora  particular policy or representative, then the punishment, usually in the form of bombing, would then seem to be hitting those responsible: the people themselves. In other words, a representative state may not truly have civilians, because the civilians are the ones who decide to commit the crimes.

This is obviously ridiculous. Even in a perfectly ideal representative system there will be dissenters, yet bombs do not distinguish. Therefore the punishment is harming the innocent.

If the system is imperfectly representative, perhaps with some members holding more power than others, then the problem of innocents being harmed is increased further. Then there is the issue of the unknowable. While representatives can be elected or voted out, they have a great deal of freedom of action. Some actions may not be noticed, or even actively covered up (such as the time-capsuled tax recommendations). Representatives may act in ways that we not expected. For example, even those who opposed the selection of President Bush wouldn't have known that the US would be attacked on such a larger scale that a large war became inevitable. No one voted for his war or human rights record, yet as a representative of the people, he was allowed to do so.

Moving along this continuum of representation, we eventually get to the dictator. He dictates, as the name implies. While he may have some support, it would be absurd to suggest that his actions are sanctioned by even a plurality of citizens. In this context, punishment that does not directly target the dictator, or rogue elements (as I suspect are part of the cause of the brutality in the Syrian crisis), will be targeted.

There is no state to punish. There are instead individuals. Yet we somehow never manage to go after them. We instead cling to the notion that leaders are to be revered, held above the masses, even as those masses are slaughtered in their name. This isn't to suggest that something like the Syrian crisis could be resolved by killing Assad & Co. There are wider forces at play and a few deaths won't fix that. Yet killing even more people, civilians or military, won't fix it either.

It often feels as if we're living in some sort of awful Bond parody, where the villain is displeased with a subordinate and expresses it by glaring at him until he quakes in fear, and then kills someone else. Terrifying...

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