While self-isolating (Covid contact) I have been watching a Turkish series on Netflix called Resurrection Ertugrul about 12-13th century Oguz Turkish tribesmen and nomads and specifically the father of the person who went on to found the Ottoman Empire. It portrays those who are willing to fight and die for a cause as heroic. Of course they have to kill many, many people in the process. In those times the people they are shown as fighting and killing are usually armed - fellow Muslims, templar knights, Byzantine soldiers, Mongol soldiers - but unarmed people are also executed (beheaded) for their crimes.
In this Netflix series, the most morally dubious people are usually shown to be the scheming leaders who exploit and meddle in people's lives through a divide and conquer strategy, using economic wealth to bribe, poison, deceive and set traps in the pursuit of power. Clearly not a lot has changed over the centuries as different empires and countries compete for control of resources - and this theme has gained even more traction during the current anti-colonialist, Black Lives Matter movements.
Watching this has led me to have a greater understanding of the thinking of those who welcome death as martyrs for a cause. Living in present-day peaceful London, the idea of martyrdom seems crazy, but if I was living in the midst of conflict and what I perceived as tyranny I can see that being willing to kill and being ready to sacrifice your life to overthrow oppression does not seem such an alien idea. Churchill had a lot to say about ending tyranny and never surrendering during WW2.
Which then led me to this interesting question - which seems to apply to many conflicts all around the world, though less so in Britain...for now.
Are all civilians a legitimate target?
I don't mean in some benevolent kinder, gentler world that does not seem to currently exist - this is more of a political question for the world as it is now where people compete for land and resources and where humans seem to have evolved to be willing to be martyrs and die for the survival of their loved ones or possibly for more abstract concepts such as continuation of their "way of life", or some notion of entitlement or superiority, or justice or to oppose tyranny or patriotism or for the promise of religious salvation? Especially in the probably increasingly conflicted world of the future - possibly due to climate change, increased natural disasters, increasing inequalities, alternative facts, fake news etc
https://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/war/just/whom_1.shtmlSome people answer the question: "Is it immoral to kill civilians in war?" with an unequivocal "no". They say that all the citizens of the enemy country should be regarded as combatants.
As modern wars are fought by the resources of a whole country, they argue, it doesn't make sense to distinguish the citizens who contribute directly to the war effort from those who don't. The whole nation is at war, and every citizen is a combatant.
A supporting argument was that if the whole nation was supporting the war effort, then every member of that nation was responsible for the acts carried out by that country's armed forces and could be regarded as a combatant.
These ideas became popular from the writings of Giulio Douhet, an Italian General in the early part of the twentieth century, who was one of the first strategists to understand the true potential of air power.
Douhet thought that all future wars would be total wars and that there should be no distinction between combatants and non-combatants: when a nation is at war, everyone is involved.
Douhet argued that the best way to win a war was to crush the enemy by attacking its weakest points: its cities and civilians. This should be done by air:
"A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a country subjected to this kind of merciless pounding from the air. The time will soon come when, to put an end to the horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war."
During World War 2 the RAF used a mass bombing strategy over Germany for a period, but their aim was not Drouhet's of so distressing the civilian population that they rebelled against their leaders, but to cause so much fear and distress that morale collapsed, and the war effort with it.
I can see evidence of this strategy to cause a collapse in civilian morale in many of the current conflict zones around the world, either though military means or through economic sanctions. Do people think that realistically there is an alternative strategy in order to ....maybe not win outright but at least not to be defeated?
