Humane War feat. Samuel Moyn

Summary

War tends to bring out the human propensity for atrocity. Nobody likes indiscriminate killing, torture and so on. What to do about it? One response is to avoid war altogether. According to Yale prof Samuel Moyn, that’s what most people wanted after World War II and after Vietnam. But more recently, he’s noticed a shift. Now, politicians, especially in America, are focussing on making more humane. Leaders like Obama say they’ll make war as ‘clean’ as possible by using drone strikes and special forces and minimizing civilian deaths and secret torture programs. That’s all well and good but Moyn sees a danger: making war more humane makes it easier to justify. If war is ‘clean’, why not wage it forever?

Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented WarMoyn’s podcast about legal theory Digging a Hole

Transcript

Note: this is transcribed using an online transcription service so it’s probably going to have a lot of errors. We don’t have time to go through these all carefully but still thought that it would be more helpful than having no transcript at all.

[00:00:00] Clif Mark: Today on good. In theory, we have Samuel Moyn who is a professor of law and history at Yale, and also a host of digging a hole, which is a podcast about legal theory. Is that, is that right? Correct. Why is it, why is it called digging a hole? Is there a story about,

[00:00:15] Samuel Moyn: well, it's, there's a children's book that's uh, about, uh, these two characters, Sam and Dave, and it just so happens that those are the names of the two people who run this podcast at Yale law.

[00:00:29] So we, we, we kind of did a shout out to those children's characters. That's really sweet. I

[00:00:36] Clif Mark: like that. um, also Sam is the author of several books, including the last utopia human rights in history, not enough human rights in an unequal world and, uh, your most recent book, which is called humane how the United States abandoned peace and reinvented war.

[00:00:56] And that's, uh, what I'd like to talk about today. So the book, as I understand it is about how American efforts to make war more humane, uh, and get rid of all the atrocities and bad things, which we hate actually has made America more okay. With going to war and has kind of enabled this ongoing forever war dynamic that we have going today.

[00:01:22] Uh, and that's kind of the catchy thesis of the book that humanitarian efforts have actually

[00:01:29] made

[00:01:30] war longer and more possible and maybe even worse. Um, and I wanna get into that, but let's start by just laying the conceptual groundwork that you're working with. So your book begins by talking about a couple of different approaches to war pacifism humanitarianism.

[00:01:51] Um, can you tell us a bit about those. And what the differences, conceptually, maybe we can start

[00:01:58] with, uh, pacifism.

[00:02:00] Samuel Moyn: Sure. Thanks for having me first off. So, you know, different people. Yeah. Different, you know, proposals to constrain war, you know, are, are, go way back. I mean, you find them in, in Deuteronomy, for example, and in the middle ages, there's feudalism and you know, many other examples I'm interested in modern times.

[00:02:25] And in the 19th century you get these kind of competing agendas. Um, and the first sign of this one in which I'm really interested, kind of humanizing war making, uh, it, it less full of suffering for combatants and civilians affected by war, but there was also this other agenda, um, that has had a, a kind of, you know, spotty record lately.

[00:02:54] Which is not having war. And, you know, it's kind of amazing that that appeared because for most of history, uh, there was, there was no belief that you could end things like, you know, poverty, slavery war, but in the 19th century, all of those became kind of credible possibilities. So I'm interested in how, um, the anti-war perspective, you know, sometimes which was like outright condemnation of all wars, um, kind of, kind of where it came from, you know, how it gained traction and what happened to it in our time, which I think was to get pushed to the margins.

[00:03:39] Clif Mark: Interesting. Okay. So tell us a little bit about then the birth of pacifism. So you're saying that before the 19th century people thought, you know, war is bad, but. it's just part

[00:03:52] Samuel Moyn: of life, essentially. Um,

[00:03:55] Clif Mark: but then what gave people the idea that, Hey, you know what, let's just let's trust, try not doing it.

[00:03:59] Samuel Moyn: So, I mean, a, a lot of people all along and even today have thought some wars are good

[00:04:05] and in the 19th century, there was this other group of people, which you could call and like, in contrast to the humanizes and pacifiers, the intensifiers who actually like thought war was essential for renewing, you know, masculinity and making civilization, you know? Great. but there were some, all along, like going back centuries, who kind of thought war was an, an evil that, you know, you couldn't get rid of, because of, you know, various reasons.

[00:04:38] So, uh, and it, I think it was like poverty and slavery. In that regard, you have people complain about those things, but it, it wasn't worth kind of opposing on principle because it, it wasn't, it, it wasn't believed that you could eradicate these things. So

[00:04:55] Clif Mark: it's like bad weather.

[00:04:56] Samuel Moyn: Yeah. 19th century, you, you get more optimism.

[00:04:59] And, you know, one reason is new interpretations of Christianity, but also I think the French revolution and the rise of, you know, commerce and certain progressive secular views also kind of, you know, play into this. And the idea is, um, we could edit war out. Um, and given that it is evil, not just in, in like its costs for how it's fought, but just having it at all.

[00:05:30] Why not try. And so, um, you, you get some people mobilizing and in a way they, you know, they failed in, in some kind of absolute sense. There's a war in Ukraine right now, but. In, in a broader sense they've they have had a, a, a, a kind of tremendous effect on our assumptions on what statesmen and, and women today kind of say about, um, cross border conflict, and even, you know, some argue on the fact that we just have fewer international wars since the middle of the 20th century.

[00:06:11] Clif Mark: Well, we can't, I mean, we wouldn't necessarily credit the 19th century reformers

[00:06:14] with the change of war since the middle of

[00:06:17] the 20th century.

[00:06:18] Samuel Moyn: Well, I, I think, you know, it was a long term project that got, okay, that started in the 19th century. And, you know, after world war, I, it becomes hugely, you know, popular because that one was just so bad and trans-Atlantic citizens sort of mobilized and unprecedented numbers.

[00:06:37] And you know, it takes world war II, ironically and American hegemony, but in a way, you know, the, the, those old peace mongers kind of like set some things in motion that mm-hmm, , uh, like got institutionalized in the middle of the 20th century. Now we can still argue that the real reason there's no, you know, war across the Atlantic until, you know, Ukraine or, you know, few other events is nuclear weapons took it off the table, but the, the, these, these peace mongers argued that we could, we could restrain states and we could have treaties and international bodies and things that would keep war from happening at least some of the time. And it seems like their plan comes to fruition in the middle of the 20th century. Even if there are a lot of other factors in explaining, you know, Pax Americana.

[00:07:36] Clif Mark: I want, I wanna come back to that. Sure. So the, the let's not do it. The pacifism viewpoint are these peace mongers they say don't do war it's bad, bad things happen.

[00:07:48] Then there's another approach to war, which is, I don't know, what would you call it?

[00:07:51] Humanitarianism.

[00:07:52] Samuel Moyn: Yeah, I, I call it humanizing war, you know, which I, by which I just mean reducing the suffering in war, once it starts for soldiers and civilians.

[00:08:03] Clif Mark: And so what is, what is that viewpoint and who are some of, kind of like the signal, uh, advocates of it?

[00:08:11] Where do we see it in history as compared to the peace mongers?

[00:08:15] Samuel Moyn: So I think it's, it's, it's in a sense, new, you know, the peace view is old in the sense that there were like profits and visionaries, like in the you know, in the Bible who dream of like lions lying down with lambs and, you know, they just think it can't happen until the end of days.

[00:08:36] And, and, and modern times changes that and brings it down to earth as like a real possibility. But I don't think there were folks before modern times who said, we should reduce the suffering in war if we can. And you start getting that in the middle of the 19th century, with the founding of what we now call the international red cross.

[00:08:59] And it really comes from the, the response of one man, a Swiss, you know, gentleman named Henri Dunant, um, to like a, a battlefield he ran across in the 1860s and he was so horrified that he decided to see if he could get states to agree, to let, like, do gooders like him help soldiers bleeding out on battlefields.

[00:09:28] And from that first, you know, you know, like, uh, treaty that he, he imagined and got kind of, um, written down in the 1860s, the red cross was born. He won the Nobel peace prize, uh, the first one in 1901. And actually, I, I kind of, um, am interested in the fact that Barack Obama, when he won the Nobel peace prize in 2009, he like name checked Dunant.

[00:10:00] Uh, okay. And so from the 1860s to the present, you have this let's say com competing or, you know, supplementary goal to not having war, which is make it more humane if you have to have it. Mm-hmm . And so that's, that's this other impulse, and I'm trying to raise the question of whether. It actually is kind of a competing agenda and not just a nice thing to have around if you have to have war.

[00:10:32] Clif Mark: Right. Okay. So on DOK, he's a, I don't know, what

[00:10:37] Samuel Moyn: does he do for he like a lawyer or a doctor or something? Uh, he doesn't really matter. He's like a businessman and he actually first, um, travels to, um, kind of, and, and happens across this battlefield in Italy, in to the battle of Solferino, because he's on a mission to find the French emperor who at that time is Napoleon the third to get permission to run his business in Algeria

[00:11:06] Uh, and so it just happens that he sees this battlefield and he throws himself into the cause of, of trying to make war more humane. So

[00:11:16] Clif Mark: he turns up, he sees this battlefield, there's people bleeding out, you know, uh, their arms off and he's like, Ew, Yeah, this is awful. Yeah. It's supposed to be, you know, this Marshall, uh, virile activity, but actually this is

[00:11:28] Samuel Moyn: pretty gross, very gross in a civilized.

[00:11:31] Can we get these guys some bandaids and stuff? Absolutely. And, and it, you know, you might say, well, why not get armies to take care of their own soldiers? Uh, it's just that, you know, Dunant thought that if they wouldn't do it, there should be states agreeing to let neutral private actors, citizens like him and eventually his buddies in the red cross do that work when armies failed to take care of their own.

[00:12:00] Clif Mark: And so the whole, I mean, one of the key elements of him being able to get this treaty done is that it's neutral, right? He's like, I'm not judging you guys for doing more. I'm not taking sides. I'm. I'm only against the suffering of the wounded.

[00:12:17] Samuel Moyn: Yeah. I mean, I talk in the book about this. He, in the 1860s, he, he's not a pacifist. He's not, you know, he's against war in the same way you or I might oppose some war or other, but he's not joining the anti-war cause he accepts the inevitability maybe of war and says, well, if it happens, then we ought to make it less brutal for all concerned.

[00:12:41] Now, when he wins the Nobel peace prize, one of the organizers of, of the, of kind of the peace movement gets really upset because she says this prize wasn't for humanizing, it was for pacifying. And so she seeks him out and makes him announce that he's for peace too. But you know, for many in the anti-war camp, this humanizing project is kind of threatening because,

[00:13:12] you know, it seems like it concedes the inevitability of war, which they want to challenge and maybe it does.

[00:13:21] Clif Mark: Right. I like, like, I like that. That's a sort of

[00:13:23] earlier, um, clash of these two viewpoints. Exactly. So we have the people who are saying, oh, you know, we just need to not have war. And most people, I think today are against war.

[00:13:34] I don't know many people who are arguing for the marshal, you know, like the renewal of the spirit that, uh, martial activity gives. but most people also think Hey, the red cross is great. We should humanize war it shouldn. There shouldn't be that much suffering. But you're saying at this early point, the first Nobel peace prize, the red cross, which is, you know, a lot of people like that organization, uh, people are like, no, all they're doing is almost PR for war.

[00:14:00] They're just like making it, making it easier to do this is supposed to be about peace and. Humanizing war is not at all the same as arguing for peace.

[00:14:10] Samuel Moyn: Exactly. And you know, one reason I start with the 19th and early 20th centuries is that there was a much more open debate about this because first there was a bigger peace movement.

[00:14:21] And then mm-hmm, in part for that reason, there was a lot more skepticism about the project of merely making war humane. Now, I don't want to take things too far. There are a lot of people who said, of course we aim for peace, but if we don't get it, we, you know, still think making it what results humane is, is worth striving for.

[00:14:47] Now. That's actually my view too, but it's just interesting that some of the earliest, um, advocates of peace, uh, and I do a lot with this, you know, Russian novelist, Leo Toto in this regard, um, kind of raise these concerns. About the humanizing project. Mm-hmm , you know, it's not that it wasn't a good thing, but what if there were kind of kind of unanticipated risks or unintended consequences that went along with it.

[00:15:17] And I think they were right in those kind of qualms about the humanizing project.

[00:15:26] Clif Mark: Great. So let's then outline a couple of other positions. There's Tolstoy who, you know, as you outline, he becomes very extreme mm-hmm, , he's a absolute pacifist. So he thinks that any humanization of war you're just making it more okay. What we need to do is abolish the thing in the same way he takes, uh, he takes a similar attitude towards slavery,

[00:15:46] Samuel Moyn: right? Like all

[00:15:48] Clif Mark: these regulations for making slavery more humane, he says, no, just get rid of it. It's wrong.

[00:15:53] Then you have the humanizing aspects. Like we it's inevitable. We are gonna have war.

[00:15:58] let's humanize it. Then there's another position that we haven't mentioned that you mentioned in the books where you have Clausewitz talking about it and, um, you know, some American air force guys talking about, Hey, if you, if you want wars to be short, don't worry about making them humane. You can make them as brutal as you want, because the more brutal, the more killing you have in a shorter time, the more humane it is gonna be in the long run, because that's how to make peace is to do maximum brutality in a short period of time. Is that, is that right?

[00:16:34] Samuel Moyn: Yeah. Yeah. So I would put it as slightly differently that that's right that there was that other camp. I, I mentioned it before, when I said there were people who actually wanted to like lean into war and intensify it Uhhuh now almost no one in that camp was, was really wanting not to have war.

[00:16:55] Um, actually they loved war, but they, they would say as like part of their PR that actually, if you care about cruelty and peace, you should want no holds barred war Uhhuh. Um, because there would be a fringe benefit in allowing intense war that it would break out less frequently, or it would, you know, last shorter, a shorter amount of time when it came so Clausewitz it says this Tolstoy, when he writes War and Peace, he isn't yet a Christian pacifist.

[00:17:31] He puts in the mouth of one of his characters, the position that he would leave war brutal so that we know what we're doing when we embark on it. And therefore we would fight it less frequently. Um, mm-hmm and an American who actually writes the first national code for an army in modern times named Francis Lieber.

[00:17:55] He says that if we have brutal intense war, it will be short. So the, all of those folks loved war and they weren't trying to get rid of it, but they would kind of like, you know, to say, well, if you're a pacifist, you should still side with me. Or if you're a humanitarian, you should still side with me because, you know, not only are my wars great, but they're, they lead to in enduring peace and they're less cruel in the long run even if they're cruel in the short run.

[00:18:29] Clif Mark: Is there, is there any reason to believe them?

[00:18:32] Samuel Moyn: I don't think so, but I, I, I think what's happened is that that position of loving war has just gone underground. Uh, and a lot of people, you know, Harbor that view, it's kind of amazing. You said that you don't know anyone.

[00:18:48] Who just embraces war, but if that's true, it's kind of bizarre that we have so, so many wars that, you know, for which they're such a flimsy basis. Um, true. It seems like George W. Bush liked war and some of the neocons who gave him the idea of invading Iraq, uh, you know, flat movie, what what's he doing? So there, you know, there are, if you, if you start out with the view that, well, a lot of wars don't need to happen, but happen anyway.

[00:19:19] Well, someone wanted them and maybe they,

[00:19:22] Clif Mark: I guess what I mean is I don't hear people. Exactly. Yeah. It's like you said, is underground. People are not out, um, making the case, but yeah, clearly it's doing something for someone.

[00:19:31] Samuel Moyn: Yeah. Uh, I mean, some people say, well, look, what happened in the 20th century is that rhetoric changed in all wars became defensive.

[00:19:40] Um, and maybe that's true. Um, I think there are fewer wars, but it's also true that the way statesmen talk about them is in terms of defensive war rather than saying openly, right? There's no more, there's no more departments of war industries. Exactly. Right. Um,

[00:20:00] Clif Mark: so we, we talked a little bit about the 19th century and how world war I was so bad that that brought back some pacifism. Uh, another one of the big watershed moments in your story is world war iI, particularly the Nuremberg trials and what happened after it. So how does that work as a node for the story about pacifism and humanizing war?

[00:20:24] Samuel Moyn: Well, just to go back, I, I, we talked about the 19th century peace movement, which basically was about transatlantic peace. And, you know, that meant really what you could call a, a, a Christian White peace.

[00:20:41] Clif Mark: uh, and out in the colonies, you can still go bananas.

[00:20:43] Samuel Moyn: Absolutely. And, and it was the age of empires, obviously where these ideas gain traction and mm-hmm . So what, what a lot of people, not everyone, but a lot of people want is an end to inter Imperial wars. Um, and in a sense, they get it at the end of world war II, uh, a transatlantic peace you know, basically is it is created and remains under American auspices. What I think changes then in real terms is that while America had fought a lot of wars in, uh, the Western hemisphere and in, on its own territory and in the Philippines, at the beginning of the 20th century, in and through world war II, it becomes the global hegemon and European empire start disappearing.

[00:21:35] And America starts fighting a lot of wars, a lot of places. In the name of the transatlantic, you know, free, free world and those wars, like the old Imperial wars around the world remain brutal. You know, the end of world war two and the Pacific Korea, Vietnam, what I think is significant about the end of world war II then is not that war becomes more humane.

[00:22:01] It's it's really two other things. One is that America takes charge definitively through today. The other is that there was an agreement that at least, you know, for lip service purposes, that what, what was worst about war was having it? Not that it was fought brutally and so the United nations charter of 1945, I mean the world still only 50 states then, but they say war is off the table.

[00:22:32] Unless it's defensive or the UN sanctions it and at Nuremberg starting the same year as the UN charter and going into the next one, 1945-6, they say the worst crime is starting an aggressive war mm-hmm . And there's so many good reasons for, for making that the, the kind of main concern.

[00:22:56] Let me just mention them: first, if you start an illegal war, you're much more likely to, you know commit war crimes in the course of that war, but then so much becomes legal once you're at war killing soldiers in any number, which is not a war crime killing civilians in large numbers, which only becomes, you know, a war crime later.

[00:23:22] And even today killing civilians is legal up to a point. All the money that's spent on, on war, especially misbegotten wars and could have been spent on something else. All the destabilization that's caused. I mean, in our time, the war on terror in places like the Iraq theater or take the case of Libya, uh, after 2011, you know, more people died, not because Americans and their allies shot at them, but because the places were destabilized and there was just enormous violence that ensued and all of that is the result of, you know, wars not worth having, but they weren't war crimes.

[00:24:11] Mm-hmm , there were war crimes, but only a small percentage of the death. Um, and so for all those reasons, I think people used to say, Let's just like the most important thing is not to have wars it, unless it's absolutely necessary not to purify them, not to humanize them.

[00:24:28] Clif Mark: Right. So war as a whole just has inevitably a ton of terrible consequences.

[00:24:31] Correct. And the war crimes are just kind of like the ones that make the best headlines.

[00:24:36] Samuel Moyn: Yeah. I think that's, that's that's right. And, and, you know, we can go back and say, oh no, Nuremberg, it omitted the Holocaust, which is true by and large. And that's a shame, but it included a lot of concerns that in a sense we lost after the 1960s and seventies and kind of, um, changing our priorities and focusing on how war is fought and especially on atrocities and not having them or punishing them after the fact.

[00:25:06] Clif Mark: So that's interesting. Cause I wanna bring that up because as you know, a elementary and high school student, when you're learning about the second world war and why it's so bad, of course you just get the idea that war is bad, but there's also a lot of focus on the Holocaust and atrocities, right.

[00:25:25] Those, you know, like I said, they make the best headlines and they're also how, at least in my Canadian public education, it was explained to me why war is so bad. And so I, you know, the, one of the general positions is just believing that this view arose in response to world war II and the Holocaust.

[00:25:49] But you're telling me that actually, that wasn't the mainstream view in the fifties or the, at the end of the second world war in the forties. It was that actually just war is bad- correct- it's not just the atrocities.

[00:26:01] Samuel Moyn: Correct. I mean, now it took a war to stop Adolph Hitler. So it's not like everyone converted to pacifism, but especially in a nuclear environment, um, people had learned from the world wars that

[00:26:16] that war is hell and it's hell, not just for the, the civilians who are killed illegally but for all of these multifarious consequences. And so you can go back and it is amazing how little attention there is to the death of the Jews in world War II not just at the time, but in the years after at, at marquee events like Nuremberg and, and in part that's because of just a lapse that people didn't know or didn't care about what we now think was the worst thing that went down in that period, um, alongside Hiroshima and Nagasaki-

[00:26:59] Clif Mark: tough competition-

[00:26:59] Samuel Moyn: which people knew about, but it, it was more that like, they, they had a sense that, well, th the, those in power across the transatlantic, they had lost, you know, sons, brothers, husband, In the millions, tens of millions.

[00:27:16] Mm-hmm, not once, but twice. And their states had kind of lost their global hegemony. You know, as a result of these world wars, Europe had to kind of seek shelter under America's wing against the threat of communism. So I think people back then sort of thought the worst thing that happened was that we had these world wars, not just the atrocities that took place in the course of them, therefore looking forward, we organize ourselves to kind of, you know, start with not having wars, unless it's absolutely necessary.

[00:27:54] Mm-hmm and not merely care about the innocent who died in them.

[00:28:00] Clif Mark: Right? So world war II, total catastrophe going forward, let's not have any wars, at least not between empires, not transatlantic wars, but we'll continue to have this form of brutal warfare sort of in the periphery. Um, and then, and then at some point, this changes and we start to have a more like humane view of war. When, when does this start changing?

[00:28:28] Samuel Moyn: I think it's really the sixties and seventies for a few different reasons. One is decolonization. So the number of states quadruples and the, the, the subjects of the most brutal war, the victims, you know, now have states of their own. Yeah. And they, they, they can get rowdy and they can try to change, uh, kind of international affairs themselves.

[00:28:55] And one thing they do is say, could we actually have a, a law that makes war humane because clearly it hadn't happened so far, especially for global war, but then the west Europeans, second, have given up empire over those same people. And so they can, you know, pose as moral and there are all these like middle and lesser powers where you have many more people than before in a new world, a new decolonized world who, you know, don't want to have the, the racialized world order of the past and, and they wanna take the moral high ground.

[00:29:36] And then finally Americans are shamed by Vietnam briefly. And even in the military, they, there it's My Lai, the, you know, massacre revealed in 1970 has been such a, a public relations disaster that the military says we can't fight the way we did in the Pacific and world war II. Or Korea, Vietnam, where it was just assumed that Asian life was cheap.

[00:30:05] I mean, you find people just saying that in the same way that native American life had been cheap or Filipino life had been cheap in prior American wars. So, you know, there there's, I think ultimately the big explanation is that like there's a cultural transformation.

[00:30:22] <affirmative>

[00:30:23] Clif Mark: So to recap a little bit, you have one more two, and then. All the Western powers say no more war, no more war with each other. But obviously we still have empires, so we have to. Use brutal violence to rule them. But then you get decolonization and all the victims. Of colonialism kind of say.

[00:30:44] A new rule. How about we stop with the atrocities and massacres and brutal war. And European power since they no longer have colonies to dominate. They're like, of course let's stop that we would never. Wanna do something like that. Um, Is that right?

[00:31:01] Samuel Moyn: Absolutely. I mean, it's so much easier to take the moral high ground after centuries when you, you didn't, uh, and you know, the, the people who were once ruling the world and treating it, you know, VI it very violently, uh, you know, becomes some of the big backers of more humanity and warfare, even when you know, it's Americans are fighting it to protect, you know, the European peace, which is ironic.

[00:31:34] <affirmative> so now that the formal colonial states. They want more humanity and more the European powers. They want your more humanity, more. And America is kind of the odd man out. Because they're still out there maintaining Western supremacy, trying to, you know, protect the world from communism and stuff like that.

[00:31:54] And they're still waging brutal wars on the periphery in places like Vietnam, for example. Uh, so is, is that just, it it's that america kind of steps up to rule the world and they're doing. The same kind of thing Europeans were doing in Imperial wars or. Is it different? What's the, what's the distinction there is, is it the same thing or, or what.

[00:32:21] Samuel Moyn: Yeah. I mean, a lot's changing in weaponry and, you know, the Europeans don't have napalm, uh, when they're, you know, fighting.

[00:32:28] In mole or wherever. So the, a lot changes and, you know, the death toll in, in a sense becomes worse. Um, in part cuz the weapon reinvolved, I mean four to 6 million die in the Vietnamese. Uh, it's astonishing. It's amazing how, yeah, what we hear about that you don't, you don't really get death totals of that kind in, in, you know, Imperial war.

[00:32:53] Um, but it's, it's in a sense the, the, the pattern is established and Imperial war where, you know, so-called Savage peoples are treated mercilessly, uh, and of course, Ariel bombardment, which, you know, continues through Vietnam. And it, it is, is really, you know, invented by mm-hmm um, Imperial states of Europe for, for.

[00:33:24] to kind of pacify subject peoples, and there are no limits in the law. Uh, and of course you see that in Europe, in world war II, but especially in, in, in the end of the Pacific war, uh, in, like I was gonna say in world

[00:33:40] Clif Mark: war I Europeans famously early bombed each other, correct? Correct.

[00:33:45] Samuel Moyn: It wasn't, it wasn't strictly

[00:33:46] Clif Mark: reserved for correct colonized.

[00:33:47] People's correct.

[00:33:48] <affirmative> so with this backlash against me lie and the atrocities in Vietnam. This is when even America starts to get the idea that maybe they want to move towards a more humane form of war to cool it with the atrocities and stuff. Right. And. I guess the next moment. I I would wanna go to is the first time I remember in my own personal memory that I heard this kind of thing.

[00:34:13] Was the first Gulf war. And that's when I started hearing about surgical strikes and precision warfare.

[00:34:20] The ideas seem to be that this is going to be a clean more. There wasn't gonna be big disasters in atrocities. Uh, the damage was gonna be minimized.

[00:34:30] <affirmative>. So is this a big moment in the shift towards humane warfare?

[00:34:34] Samuel Moyn: The first Gulf war is great because, you know, we haven't talked about these new groups, human rights groups that emerge on the ruins of the anti-war movement, but commit never to taking sides in a war, kind of like the red cross only to monitoring whether they're brutal and yeah, the, the human rights watch the lead such organization, um, monitors.

[00:34:59] it's first war in history. When it comes to the Gulf war, the first Gulf war, that's also the war, which is the first one in which us military lawyers help pick targets to make sure that the air campaign is not as brutal as prior American wars. So it's, it is a pivotal moment, right after the cold war when there's like a new consensus among reformers and within the state to push war in a new direction.

[00:35:31] Clif Mark: Nice.

[00:35:31] And then, well, but it really comes to fruition, according to your book yeah. With the war on terror. Yeah. Right. So as I understand it, there's nine 11. Then Bush comes in and says, you know what, forget humanity. These are unlawful competes. We're gonna do, we're gonna do whatever we want.

[00:35:47] Guantanamo bay, torture, whatever. And then there's a backlash against that. Right. um, so what happens, what happens

[00:35:56] Samuel Moyn: there? Yeah, so I mean, a lot of people's, you know, enduring view of the war on terror is that it's brutal and illegal. And of course, I'm not gonna say that it wasn't, but to me, the, the essential thing was how briefly George W.

[00:36:16] Bush and his servants kind of make that move of re trying to return to before humane war. Because by the end of Bush's two terms in office he's returned to the pale, uh, without ending the war on terror. And then Barack Obama comes into office and says far from ending the war on terror, I'm gonna reinvent it.

[00:36:43] My war on terror is going to be torture free. Uh, I'm gonna take care when I transform the war. With drones and special forces that they be deployed consistently with the Geneva conventions and with applicable constraints. So it's, it's like a reversal, not just from Nuremberg, but from the moment after Meli, because atrocity, you know, could remind us why we're we shouldn't have war.

[00:37:14] And the fact that there was a big anti-war movement when MI Eli was revealed, um, kind of threw fuel onto the fire and ended the Vietnam war. But the reverse happened after Abu Ghraib was revealed in 2004. The war on terror continued with the bug in the program of torture and in humanity removed and permanent war remains.

[00:37:40] Like, I, I

[00:37:41] Clif Mark: think this contrast is so interesting in the book between, you know, for throughout history, the pacifists has been, have been using atrocities as a reason to say, look, this is why war is so bad. And then you have Abu grave and all these torture photos and Obama, and, you know, a lot of Americans are like, you know, uh, war is good.

[00:38:01] Could we just do it without this? Could we just have like this sugar free version? Maybe. Yeah. Um, and, and why do you think, why do you think that is why this

[00:38:11] time it was different?

[00:38:12] Samuel Moyn: Well, I think it's a complex moment, so you're absolutely right. And it's essential to say that there's a large number of people who were offended by the conduct of the war on terror, but not the thing itself.

[00:38:23] And they, they like a permissive environment for at least their great power. Then they get angry when Putin, uh, breaks the same rules. Um, but I, I, I, I think it's only fair to, to say that there, there was a coalition around torture and, and, and other infractions because I. , you know, some people just had been trained morally to think that torture was this unique, evil, and it was noble of them to say that has horrified us, not the war, not all the bad things, you know, involved in war in general, but this particular thing.

[00:39:08] Um, and then there were maybe the most interesting kind of part of the coalition. It's it's those people who think that the best way to undermine the war is by making hay of war crimes. That kind of worked after My Lai. So why not try it again after Abu Ghraib? But I think what we learned is that that group made a bet that kind of didn't pay off because they had the reverse effect.

[00:39:41] They kind of helped the state eliminate the stigma around the war and it ended up going on rather than stopping.

[00:39:52] Clif Mark: So could you, could you then describe, um, so the, the hinge in the story is that Obama says, oh, you know what? You're right. Atrocities are bad. Let's humanize it. So what does humane war look like?

[00:40:06] You mentioned. So it's, it's drones from Unhi there's secret strikes by special forces, but no boots on the ground. Very few civilian casualties, no

[00:40:17] atrocity is that

[00:40:19] Samuel Moyn: well, I, I ideally, I mean, I would never say war can be humane or that American war is humane now, but it's more humane than its historical forms.

[00:40:32] Like if you compare Vietnam and the war on terror in terms of combatant and civilian death, um, but more important is that actors like. reformers outside the state human rights wa watch and actors within the state within the military are applying these constraining laws. Um, and th there is an effect. I mean, certainly there's a rhetoric.

[00:40:59] So you look at Obama's main two speeches around the war on terror. First, the, uh, still utterly amazing Nobel peace prize address in late 2009. And then his drones address once they became known in 2013. And in both cases, he says, you elected me. I can't give up war. I never said I would. Um, but I, I will be different than Bush was, and I'm gonna put a stop to the inhumanity and the illegality and the conduct of the war on terror.

[00:41:41] And it's in that. You know, context that he cites all, he do know the founder of the red cross and, you know, the person who convened states to make the first Geneva convention. So it's, it, it, it's, it's kind of fascinating that Obama understood after Abu grave. That one way to legitimate war is, is to say, well, at least it's not brutal anymore.

[00:42:10] Clif Mark: So great. Because a lot of people I think, would say, well, isn't that, isn't that fabulous for Obama? You know, isn't he isn't it, isn't it so great that he is taking responsibility for this foul conduct of war and ending atrocities. Yeah. But in your book, he's kind of the villain. So can you tell me why this move was?

[00:42:32] So, uh, maybe it ended up being

[00:42:35] Samuel Moyn: nefarious. well, I first I try I'm ambivalent about Obama. I mean, I do think of course, if the choices between brutal and humane war would choose the latter and to the extent he understood, you know, the moral principle that should lead us to do so then I celebrate the man.

[00:42:58] And again, it's, it's, you know, whatever your view, it's just amazing that he placed this concern at the center of his presidential rhetoric. If I, if I get tough on him, it's because I think that he could have gone further. He could have stopped the war on terror, especially after the, you know, the capture and, and, and killing of Osama bin Laden.

[00:43:26] And there were a lot of other wars that he initiated most notably, the Libyan regime change. And so. You know, my, my bigger concern is that Obama far from stopping intensified, this dynamic of America, pushing the boundaries of permission to go to war when it wants. And then you get this compensation of promises to do it humanely, uh, to, to make the fight humane.

[00:44:00] And I just think as, as Americans or citizens of the world, we look out and we should not rest content with politicians who, you know, embrace in effect the right to go to war when they please and promise us in compensation that the results will be less brutal than before. And so a lot of this kind of then turns on, you know, well, which wars actually made the world a better place were defensible were worth fighting.

[00:44:28] And I can't come up with a list that has. You know, any American war since world war II on it. And so the fact that America has made those wars more humane, it's not nothing, but it's not enough either.

[00:44:45] Clif Mark: Right. So, okay.

[00:44:46] It's one thing to say, yes, it's not enough. He could have gone, he could have gone further, but I, I thought that at least a lot of the controversy surrounding the book and a lot of the discussion is that it sounds like you are saying that the humanity of, of, of war, the new, like sanitization of war has actually made it easier for America to like, do more, fight more wars, fight them for longer, fight them over

[00:45:15] unbounded territory.

[00:45:16] Yeah. So what I'm reading when I

[00:45:18] read it is that it's. it's that the limitations on the conduct of war yeah have served as a pretext or at least an excuse for the massive

[00:45:29] expansion yeah. Of the scope of war over time and space, uh, is that

[00:45:35] Samuel Moyn: it's, that's accurate, but let me, let me just, you know, let me make that argument in a, in a way that disarms some obvious, you know, responses because, you know, I, I wanna make the argument carefully.

[00:45:49] First, it's just the case that whenever we make something less objectionable to some people, we make it more tolerable to them. Mm-hmm and Obama would never have placed the alleged hum humanity of ongoing war central to the, his major speeches on foreign policy. if, if it didn't matter to someone. It wasn't just him saying it was morally the right thing to do, although that may have been true, he's a politician.

[00:46:22] And I think it mattered to a lot of people. And we know that because the biggest debates to this day around American war in the past quarter century are around its brutality, not its existence, the Abu grave debate, the, the, you know, the critical journalism around drone strikes, which complain about, you know, excess civilian death.

[00:46:46] So that's one set of arguments. And, you know, if you look at death penalty activists, they embrace the idea that there's a risk when you, um, even if you hate the death penalty, if you decide to struggle against the cruelty of how it's administered, you're taking a risk that it'll be harder to end after because mm-hmm, , it it'll have been made.

[00:47:13] You know, less offensive at least to some number of people. Now that's the main argument. And then I'll just add that. I'm not saying it's that the humanization of American war is the only let alone the primary reason these wars continue. Of course, it's nowhere near the top of the list. But what I think is important is that it's a new thing in the world that, um, we have the possibility and, and the attempt to, to make war less offensively brutal.

[00:47:50] And I just don't see that happening before the last few decades and Uhhuh. That's why I wanted in a sense, give it some attention so that it's not it's, it's on the list. And we think critically about, you know, how much of our time and energy we put into, you know, making violence more palatable.

[00:48:13] Clif Mark: great. I love that because this is a, you know, since it's new, it kind of points forward, conceptually in a new world.

[00:48:21] And as a theory guy, I like to speculate a bit. Yeah. So, yeah. Um, we imagine in your book, you imagine, okay, what if there is the technology gets so good that you can have almost completely humane war, you might even have war without killing, and you talk a lot about how looking into the idea of humane war has made it apparent to you that atrocity is not the essential evil of war.

[00:48:47] It's something else. So a lot of people would say, look, if we purge war of violence and atrocity, that's fabulous. Um, you think that doesn't get to the core evil of war,

[00:48:59] which is, which is what?

[00:49:02] Samuel Moyn: Well domination and subjugation. I mean, I'll just use an analogy, uh, you know, in my country, Th there was this horrendous example of police brutality when George Floyd was killed.

[00:49:15] Mm-hmm , uh, and you know, we're, we're still, we haven't kind of yet processed that event, which has caused so much up upheaval. Um, but you could imagine to reform projects in response. One is to make policing less brutal and, or even violent. Um, another is to have less policing because you know, the, the most, you know, troubling fact about American policing is that it's not universal it's, it's principally a way in which one group of people rules over another group of people on the basis of race.

[00:50:00] uh, and that's why policing is intense in some places and not others. And to me, it would be chilling to preserve that relationship, but to edit the violence out. And I'm just wondering if the rise of more humane war is in a sense, a global version of the same trend. And I closed the book, you know, not just, um, reminding people about, you know, how, how chilling it would be to have, um, you know, endless global policing, even if civilian death was edited out.

[00:50:40] But imagining that we work on the protection of combatants too, because a lot of humanitarians want to make war safer for combatants. Um, and. If they get their way without ever focusing on the larger kind of relationships, um, cuz some countries, police others and the reverse isn't true. Then I think we'll have made a mistake.

[00:51:11] Clif Mark: So the problem with American humane war, if, even if it's like, if we get to a point where it's not violent, is it still like America acting as a

[00:51:22] undemocratic police force for everyone in the world

[00:51:26] Samuel Moyn: essentially. And, and you know, it's not reciprocal so that right. You know, people in, in, you know, Yemen don't police, Americans, uh, don't have any way of Uhhuh, uh, don't have any way of objecting or let alone pushing back if they decide that well, they didn't choose to have drones striking, uh, their country.

[00:51:50] Uh, now, you know, may maybe you say, well, we need a, a fairer global policing system and I'm not gonna deny that there aren't threats. But of course, you know, the fact is that for centuries and now most people die, um, in, in uses of force that, you know, work over long distances, including, you know, terrorist organizations when great power strike back.

[00:52:18] and so like, you know, terrorists killed a lot of people on Manhattan on September 11th, 2001, but how many globally have died in the response to those events? You know, tens, hundreds of times more. And so, you know, let's, I'm for a peaceful world and you know, it, it seems as if we, we want to have, um, some system that's not just reflecting.

[00:52:46] That the powerful get to protect some themselves and the weak who are not innocent, always, uh, suffer the consequences.

[00:52:55] Clif Mark: Right? So one, I mean, there's a suffering, the consequences and the, uh, hundreds of thousands of people dying millions. Um, but looking even

[00:53:06] more speculatively towards this idea of like a humane world police force.

[00:53:11] Right. And that, how, how that might still be a problem. Yeah.

[00:53:17] Is okay. So if the wrong of war

[00:53:20] is domination, I think it's very dramatic

[00:53:23] in your book. You're about, well, what is it like to, you know, live under drones, even if you're not being hit by them, if they're perfectly

[00:53:30] targeting only the bad guys. Yeah.

[00:53:33] Uh, just the

[00:53:35] fact that you're

[00:53:36] living under this police force from America in the sky that could blow anyone, you know, up at any, any time is. A shitty way to live. And that is

[00:53:46] kind of the evil of domination that you're being controlled. Your actions are being constrained by someone, by someone else. Yeah.

[00:53:53] Samuel Moyn: Um, yeah, I mean, and so I'd say what's, what's the wrong in the PO you know, the, the policing of undesirable urban populations, you know, from, you know, for when suburbs aren't policed the same way. Well, it's the same, I mean, I it's, it's unfair, uh, hierarchy.

[00:54:13] Clif Mark: Well, right. And it's not reciprocal. Yeah. I mean, the people in Yemen cannot police the people in the United States.

[00:54:18] They have no say in this policing, but what I'm trying to move towards is if the evil of, of war is domination and that's this kind of undemocratic exercise of power, there's lots of ways to do domination. Yeah. Right. Absolutely. If what are the other there's we mentioned policing, but. Even internationally, what are the other ways that the power powerful,

[00:54:45] uh, actors dominate the less powerful?

[00:54:48] Samuel Moyn: Well, it, you know, this book is in a sense narrow and obtuse because it's just about the organization of that form of violence we call war. And yet of course the, the main way that global hierarchy is, is institutionalized and preserved is through nonviolent means like economics. Um, or, you know, if we are looking beyond just the kind of direct interventionist war that I write about, you know, the arms trade or proxy wars, uh, would have to be taken into consideration.

[00:55:27] So, um, you know, the important thing to notice that one reason. uh, as we discussed, people became more permissive towards wars is that they understood that there was domination within states. Um, and you know, rulers are not good people by, you know, by and large in world history and they have, have the ability to harm and even kill their populations with impunity.

[00:55:57] And of course that's not, that's not good. And it's an intolerable form of domination. It's just that our answer to it has been to kind of ratify and intensify, the domination that exists among states and mm-hmm, allowing, you know, powerful states to do what they want and the rest to live with the consequences.

[00:56:23] And again, Ukraine is a great example because. Uh, amazingly the day before he invaded Putin gives this irate rant. When he says, look, you know, the west has fought all these illegal wars. The trouble is not that they're brutal, it's that they happened. And of course, then he goes on to, you know, add insult to injury as if two wrongs could make a right.

[00:56:50] Um, right. But it's just true that we're living in this permissive environment where states, if they're powerful, can fight worse, if they think they can get away with, you know, fighting. Um, and that's true, whether they're made more humane or not.

[00:57:07] Clif Mark: I wonder

[00:57:08] if, If you are taking like an anti-war position in the basis, then I ask you what's wrong with war.

[00:57:14] You say domination. Um, not so much atrocity. I am fully with this. I like this. I like that idea of freedom. But how is this for a reason to focus on atrocity, which is that because as we've established domination happens in many different ways, and especially within states with rulers vis a VI, the ruled, um, doesn't fighting domination become even more of a potential pretext for making more war than fighting human rights atrocities.

[00:57:53] Samuel Moyn: Um, like it could, I mean, of course that's true. I mean, I, so it, you know, it's, it's really important to kind of go back and see that the reason why people have been concerned about atrocity is that it's one, you know, disgusting form of domination, which people oppose. And of course you could say, well, it's, it's the trouble is that it ended up

[00:58:20] you know, perpetuating or even creating more domination, especially in the relation of powerful to weak states. Um, and it, as you suggest, um, it, it, even if we agree to think in these terms, you could fight wars against domination, contextually, and, you know, in some alternative universe, Putin could be saying, not that he's trying to stop a genocide, but he's trying to emancipate, you know, people.

[00:58:54] And then, then we're, we we're, we're not in a, a, I'm not proposing that we have some easy exit from a world of, in which politicians lie. Yeah. But I am suggesting that if we don't work within the domination framework, we, we will miss how the concern about atrocity, which can be understood as a concern about dominat.

[00:59:20] Fits together with, you know, a, a credible view about how you reduce domination overall. And there, it just doesn't make sense to me that we would want to accept a world in which there's a lot more war, uh, in the name of having a little less brutality in the course of it, but that's not utopia it's.

[00:59:44] Clif Mark: Yeah. So you're

[00:59:44] saying do a big atrocity

[00:59:46] so we can get rid of domination

[00:59:48] Samuel Moyn: well, you know, that was told story one atrocity to at all, that was that old view. And, and, and it's just that it doesn't seem empirically very credible to me that it would, would work. But if it, if you could prove, uh, yeah, that it would then would have to have a different conversation a as far as I can tell,

[01:00:07] Clif Mark: let, lemme ask you, what do you,

[01:00:08] what do you think is, you know, pick one, you can get rid of atrocity, or you can get rid of

[01:00:14] domination.

[01:00:15] Samuel Moyn: Right. Like, do you, do

[01:00:16] Clif Mark: you, do you, uh, die in her feet or live in your knees? Because sure. If you, if you ask me, I don't know, it depends on the day to be

[01:00:24] Samuel Moyn: honest. Well, I'm assuming you mean that, that if you got rid of domination, that it would, it might require violence to do so. Um, be, but because otherwise I don't see that there are aims in conflict because it just seems that atrocity is one form of domination amongst others.

[01:00:43] Okay. Because there's nonviolent domination. That's the principle form of domination right. In the world, nonviolent domination. And so presumably, you know, if you could, you could oppose both consistently. Um, the hard thing becomes if you have to, you know, just begin trading off, um, mm-hmm , you know, and say, oh no, we have to incur one form of domination atrocity in order to advance, you know, non domination generally.

[01:01:13] And. you probably would, but it, you know, I, I'm not gonna go so far as to argue for that. I do think that in as far as I can tell from history, having fewer wars yeah. In general is best for freedom. and it's not a perfect picture in which freedom wins comprehensively. And finally, all we know is that having as many wars as we've had lately has increased rather than decreased domination.

[01:01:47] Clif Mark: good. I like that. I think that's actually a pretty good place to, to start to wrap up. So I just want to thank you for being on, it's been a really interesting talk. And, um, do you have anything, anything else to add? Maybe for, for the people who still think, gosh, Sam Moyn hates human rights.

[01:02:09] Samuel Moyn: Oh, well, so I, I, I don't hate human rights or humanizing war. I just think that, you know, this book, which is mainly storytelling about various wars and people, you know, trying to engage in some kind of in attempt to make the world a better place. I, I just wanna raise a question about the humanizing, uh, because of the risks I think we've seen are, are, are possible, um, that come along with it.

[01:02:39] And then, you know, my own answer, if you accept that, that there are, these risks is not to drop the project. I think we should have more humane war and more constraining rules about how wars are fought, but we'd also just don't drop rule or manage the risk. That comes along and don't forget that, you know, it'd be better not to have the war if it wasn't worth having than just concern oneself with its conduct.

[01:03:11] So more anti-war movements to go alongside our humanizing human rights movements,

[01:03:17] Clif Mark: any ideas on how to make peace. Cool again,

[01:03:20] Samuel Moyn: uh, well I think we need a 1960s where, you know, all the songs were about it and, you know, culture became a, a, a, it became imperative and culture. And like on, on, you know, the old equivalence of cell phones and TikTok and all of that, mm-hmm to advance piece.

[01:03:44] And I actually think there are signs that that's that's coming. Uh, uh, and, uh, the question is how far it can go. And on what time. Line.

[01:03:55] Clif Mark: Great. Well, I like that note of optimism and yeah, I hope it's soon. Okay.

[01:04:02] Samuel Moyn: Appreciate it. So

[01:04:02] Clif Mark: yeah, appreciate it. Thanks a lot for coming on. I appreciate it.