John Feffer: Governments Kill

Governments Kill
By John Feffer
Institute for Policy Studies

We make a bargain with our governments. We pay taxes and expect a set of government services in return. And in return for a guarantee of some measure of security, we grant the government a monopoly on legitimate violence. In theory, then, we forswear mob rule and paramilitary organizations, we occasionally accept the death penalty as an appropriate punishment, we delegate the responsibility to declare and prosecute war to our legislative and executive branches, and we put guns into the hands of the army and the police.

Governments, in other words, kill on our behalf. This arrangement is a form of social contract, which means that governments are basically contract killers. Some states, like Nazi Germany, use the tremendous power of arms and bureaucracy to transform their territories into slaughterhouses. Regimes that are merely authoritarian can be equally brutal but display a greater selectivity in their tyranny. In our more decorous democracies, meanwhile, we perfume our conversations with words like "justice" and "national security" to mask the odor of death.

Americans have never been entirely comfortable with this bargain. We have a long tradition of taking the law into our own hands, beginning with our own hallowed revolution. During the Reconstruction period, lynch mobs were a continuation of the Civil War by other means. More recently, a variety of paramilitary organizations have flourished, from the racist Posse Comitatus chapters that sprang up in the late 1960s to more recent anti-immigrant militias like the Minutemen. Even suburban soccer moms have zealously defended their "right" to bear arms. On the other side of the spectrum, meanwhile, a broad-based coalition has challenged the government's "right" to kill citizens through the death penalty. And an equally diverse movement has protested the government's waging of wars overseas.

It would perhaps be naïve to expect that a government, invested with the exclusive legal power to kill people, would use that power only within the borders of the country that it administrates. At some point in the distant future, a world government might assume the privilege of the monopoly on legitimate violence and discipline individual countries for their violent outbursts -- in the same way that individual governments currently sanction their citizens if they fire off submachine guns in malls. For the time being, however, we live in a semi-regulated environment in which governments use violence to secure their borders and, occasionally, territories that lie beyond.

States committing acts of violence were much in the news this week, particularly in the Middle East. Turkish forces have been bombing targets in northern Iraq for a week after a series of attacks by Kurdish rebels in southeastern Turkey. Israeli aircraft launched raids in Gaza after coordinated attacks along the Israeli-Egypt border left eight Israelis dead. The Syrian government continues to crack down on protesters, with a death toll passing 2,200 after several months of resistance. And NATO forces bombed selected targets around Tripoli as rebel forces streamed into the Libyan capital for a final assault on Moammar Gaddafi's stronghold.

Quick test: which of these uses of violence are legitimate?

Some people treat the issue as they would a sports game, always rooting for the home team no matter how dirty they might play. If you support Israel, then Israeli actions are by definition right. Pacifists also have a simple answer: there are no legitimate uses of state violence. But states are unlikely to adopt pacifism unless forced to (as the United States forced Japan after World War II). Aside from the partisan and the pacifist arguments, those who support the legitimate use of state violence will claim self-defense or promise the prevention of a greater violence like genocide. But these, too, are tricky justifications. Turkey believes that it is acting in self-defense, but so do the Libyan and Syrian governments. And military intervention to stop genocide – the stated purpose of NATO's action against Libya – can have mixed motives, and it is not easy to define genocide before the fact.

One popular way of determining the legitimacy of these exercises of violence is to invoke democracy. Democratic governments, as opposed to authoritarian regimes, legitimately use violence because there has been an opportunity for citizens to freely form a social contract with the government. Turkey and Israel are democratic countries, and thus their use of force is legitimate. Ditto with NATO’s attack on Libyan targets. Democratic countries use violence in a self-limited way. As political philosopher John Keane writes in Violence and Democracy, "Ideally conceived, democracies understand themselves as systems of lawful power-sharing, whose actors are attuned to the dangers of violence – and to the mutual benefits of non-violence." As such, Keane argues, democracies progressively "democratize violence" by subjecting it to rules, procedures, consent. When democracies use violence overseas, they only do so against undemocratic forces such as tyrants or terrorist groups. Democracies, according to one of the few postulates of international relations, don't go to war with one another.

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