TimBurke1: There’s never any justification for killing civilians deliberately.
TimBurke2: What’s a civilian? Is a slave-owner who lives on the plantation a civilian? Is the family of the slave-owner a civilian? Is the sheriff or judge in the parish who enforces slave-holding rights a civilian? If a system is violently oppressing you, your family, your community, then who is a ‘combatant’ and who is a ‘civilian’?
T1: If we’re going to expand out the historical scale and consider premodern and early modern examples, then the terms of reference are going to be hard to keep in the frame—”civilian” as such is a modern concept, and the entire discourse we’re referencing has an intrinsically national framing that is hard to leave behind even if we’re talking about non-state actors. In that frame, deliberately targeting civilians is never justified, even if you can find examples of revolts or uprisings in other contexts where the distinction between bystanders and oppressors is complicated at intimate scales of everyday life within an oppressive system. A slave-holder’s family living on a plantation is one thing, but in a slave society, nobody is wholly without responsibility for and connection to slavery as an institution, and a slave uprising that went on to demand the deaths of everyone except for the slaves wouldn’t be justified.
T2: Why not?
T1: Think about the scale of death that implies, if there was somehow a magical weapon placed in the hands of righteous slaves in the Atlantic world in the 18th Century that could kill all the people everywhere who were tied to slavery. It would start with the owners and the traders, the overseers, the slave-catchers and the legal authorities who enforced slavery, the crews on the ships, the rulers and soldiers who participated in the trade, the craftspeople who made the ships and the irons and the whips, the merchants who trafficked in the goods made by slaves, the bankers who financed slavery and looked after the money made through it, the people who consumed the goods they knew were made by slaves, the people whose jobs or properties were secured via the financing that slavery made available, the people who in a democracy didn’t act forcefully enough to end slavery when they could have, the half-hearted abolitionists who made excuses or looked for compromises, the slaves who betrayed others or sided with owners when they could have joined the revolt. There would be hardly anyone left alive anywhere in the Atlantic world when that scourge finally ran out of targets.
T2: There are other contexts where there’s support for retribution as the best way to teach people not to do something wrong. It’s practically a mainstream moral proposition when it comes to certain criminal offenses: punish people harshly enough and that will teach everyone a lesson. The God of the Bible and the Qu’ran did exactly that once: killed everyone except Noah and his family. If slaves could wipe the world clean of everyone with even the least association with slavery, wouldn’t that teach the world not to enslave people? I mean, you may not think this is what Fanon’s point about violence really was, but it has a certain logic to it.
T1: You don’t support retributive justice in those cases either: you don’t think it works and you think it’s a moral failure whether you’re prosecuting a criminal or fighting a war. So pointing out other people’s hypocrisy is a distraction from thinking clearly on your own. You don’t think that guilt by association, guilt by proximity, guilt as a spreading stain, justify punishment and retribution. Self-defense is a right only against direct harm being done to you by specific individuals in the moment of doing harm. A slave-owner, an overseer with a whip, the crew of a slave ship: they’re doing harm right there. Rising up and killing them is righteous self-defense. Murdering a laborer in a tavern in revolutionary-era Boston because he was drinking a hot buttered rum isn’t. Associational responsibility is real: everybody involved in a profoundly unjust society needs to work to make things right, to redeem history, to heal the world. That’s different.
T2: So ok. So when someone says “I don’t support the policies of the Israeli government, I believe there should be a sovereign state for the Palestinians, but that doesn’t justify October 7th,” what does that acknowledgement of a need for change amount to? Because a lot of people say things like that but seemingly just to criticize people who are actually already protesting against what’s happening in Gaza. They seem to be saying, “I’ll eventually get around to doing something, but only when you stop protesting in a way that I don’t like.” It feels like inoculation from being criticized, not a genuine promise of future solidarity.
T1: Because what they want is that the current protesters should be against injustice generally, be against Hamas and the Israeli government in the same way, at the same time, with the same demands for respecting lives and protecting innocents. They want an unhesitating acceptance of the existence of Israel alongside an acceptance of the need for a Palestinian state.