Contra MacLeod

So, a couple of months ago, Ken MacLeod posted this on his blog, during the Israel/Lebanon hostilities.

Now, as I may have mentioned before, I have some sympathy for the viewpoint that the idea of 'civilized warfare', that there is any signficant state between 'peace' and 'total war', that that idea is illusory and false. But while I find it a useful illusion, he finds it a pernicious one.

The problem, though, is that while his views on jus in bellum are in my view quite wrong, his views on jus ad bellum are, frankly, outright evil: the idea that it is possible to simultaneously reject self-defense as a just reason for warfare and accept the genocidally racist arab irredentism as a perfectly fine casus belli is so profoundly wrong that one can hardly help but look for alternate, sinister personal motives. One does find traces of a particularly rabid anti-colonialism, but it is one that is premised on the bizarre unspoken contentions that Jewish culture is utterly alien to the Middle East, there were never any indigenous Jews anywhere in the region, and that Arabs are either historically incapable of imperialism and colonialism or that they must, uniquely, be forgiven for it.