GS English: Ukraine, Gaza — The wars of 2023
Von webmaster • Jan. 14th, 2024 • Kategorie: InternationalUkraine, Gaza — The wars of 2023
Bloody lessons on the fruits of national sovereignty — and the terrible way popular opinion about it is formed
[Translated from Gegenstandpunkt: Politische Vierteljahreszeitschrift 4-2023, Gegenstandpunkt Verlag, Munich]
In wartime, the morality of bourgeois society is turned upside down. What people must never do in peacetime — kill other people —- they are now ordered to do. The right to life, one of the inalienable rights protected by basic law, now gives way to the duty to sacrifice one’s life for the state. This revaluation of values makes war the ultimate moral challenge. It provokes the need for justification, of all things. Opinion holders, both important and less important ones, actually start answering the question of whether all the butchery is okay, for this or that warring party or from this or that point of view. The big mistake starts before those in the NATO West unconditionally take sides and place blame for the current wars, saying who is right or wrong to bomb. It starts when you even ask if those people are entitled to go to war or which warring party is entitled to do what, which not everyone takes the official side on.
The sides waging war are in fact entitled; or rather, “entitled” is the wrong yardstick for judging the actions of supreme powers. They recognize no higher law above themselves, and demonstrate this clearly enough when using war to fight out between each other which side can dominate the other and which side has to give in. Even when they negotiate a peace after the war is over and it is clear who is on top, they do not abide by any law but impose their own. When people play the judge over the force-wielding actors, as they are welcome to, giving them good or bad grades or even disapproving equally of either side, this does not in any way alter the war, its course or its outcome. These judgments do not reach those being judged at all. But they do make a difference when it comes to the lay judges themselves. Even in war, they insist on being the real controlling authorities and somehow having the last word on the military actions of the state powers that are busy wearing each other down big time. In some cases, they are making themselves partisans of one side. But in all cases, their armchair involvement in the war gives them a very constructive standpoint for telling right killing and dying from wrong.
I. Never is the conflict between people and the state so obvious and brutal as in war — and never is there more insistence that the two are inseparably one
II. This madness of state life is the object of very understanding and constructive opinions, both critical and uncritical, in Germany. Appropriate questions are asked to arrive at a sympathetic view of the carnage and the right attitude to it
Confronted with the absolute opposition between state and people in war, those forming an opinion proceed on the assumption that the two are absolutely identical when they try to find out how the historical mishap could happen, or why it just has to be the way it is once it has happened.
“Who started it?”
“What else were they supposed to do but defend themselves?”
“Look at Hamas’s bestial killings, Bucha, the Bakhmut meat grinder!”[*] — The victims of war are the best reason for it
“Is the person commanding the war really representing the people — or misusing them for his own power ambitions?”
https://en.gegenstandpunkt.com/article/sovereignty-and-morality
Ukraine, Gaza – die Kriege des Jahres 2023 (GS 4-23)
Blutige Lektionen über den Segen staatlicher Souveränität – und über die bodenlose populäre Meinungsbildung darüber
https://de.gegenstandpunkt.com/artikel/blutige-lektionen-ueber-den-segen-staatlicher-souveraenitaet
