I mentioned to a different commenter, but I’ll copy here. I guess justified might be stretching it, since some people were saying morality and justice were useless to try and apply to nations. I guess that would be defending the amorality of Russia?
I think morality is just not a very useful metric for discussing what states do because none of them are moral, ever. “We’re doing [thing] for justice!” is 100% propaganda 100% of the time. It was propaganda when the US said it about invading Iraq and it’s propaganda when warhawks say it about Ukraine defending itself. Their real motivations of american policy makers are throwing ukrainian people into a meat grinder because they want to see russia harmed for global competition reasons.
If we want to talk morality. The only moral thing to advocate for is the shortest possible path to the lowest possible number of lives lost. The quickest end to the war. The liberals claim Russia want to genocide all of ukraine because they know that if they drop this claim they have no way to continue the war, because continuing the war by keeping them armed only costs lives for an unwinnable meatgrinder.
Advocating for the continuation of the war is immoral. It will cost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands more lives, will not be won, and for what? Lines on a map? We’re socialists, we don’t care about which bourgeoise state exploits the people, we care about the people. Choosing to advocate for an action that continues the war is just nationalism, the act of defending a bourgeois-state at the cost of lives. We don’t want to spend those lives. We’re not cheerleaders for one group of billionaires (the west) or another group of billionaire capitalists (russia) having their rule over the ukrainian people or russian people. We ultimately want them both gone and want the people to no longer be exploited. In the meantime we want the least harm. The least harm in a war is the shortest end to that war, not dragging it out as long as possible for the highest number of deaths possible.
And that’s it really. That’s what I think about any argument over “morality” in this war. I think we have the morality position, liberals and fascists advocate for a nationalist position, they care about states and lines on maps more than people. We are going over exactly the same moral contradictions that the internationalists vs the nationalists of the late 1800s and early 1900s went over. The nationalist position led to ww1 and ww2, then everyone lost their taste for nationalism, until now a few generations later the cultural scars caused by nationalism have waned, particularly in america where they’ve never had scars from nationalism.
I think the moral position is to advocate to minimize the number of lives lost and injustice done over all, not just the number of lives lost during the war. But I agree all other things being equal, a less life costly war is better.
Russia does pretty aggressive demographic reshaping to areas they’ve conquered. Like in Crimea, they moved much of the local population and replaced them with people more loyal to Russia. It isn’t just to move people around like that, uprooting peoples lives for more favorable demographics. Plus the stress of being forced to move to somewhere unfamiliar is also quite difficult, causing some shorter lifespan. If Russia conquers more territory, they’ll likely do the same there. That will lead to increased distress and death. So that needs to be weighed against the cost of war.
The bigger concern though is the longer term outlook of Russia. If Russia is able to start more wars, that will kill many many people. So we do not want an outcome of this war that will permit more wars to result. If Russia is right and Western support for Ukraine just dries up and they can take territory and people, Russia will be more inclined to try it again other places in the future. This invasion was based off of their successful invasions of Crimea and Georgia (sorry brain slip) for example.
I would like a quick end to the war, but not one that sacrifices many civilians or leads to more war in the future. So I support giving Ukraine as much aid as is reasonable to quickly win the war to minimize loss of life.
Why just war theory matters is because the public still influences policy in democratic countries. If a war is unjust, the public is more likely to be against it, which is bad for reelection chances of those involved. I agree we shouldn’t take the government’s justification at face value, but instead form an opinion based on our moral framework. So it’s still useful to critique the government since they need to listen at least a bit.
Edit: also, the death of civilization, especially children is usually more unjust than the death of willing combatants. This effect isn’t huge, but minimizing civilian casualties is better than minimizing military casualties.
I mentioned to a different commenter, but I’ll copy here. I guess justified might be stretching it, since some people were saying morality and justice were useless to try and apply to nations. I guess that would be defending the amorality of Russia?
I think morality is just not a very useful metric for discussing what states do because none of them are moral, ever. “We’re doing [thing] for justice!” is 100% propaganda 100% of the time. It was propaganda when the US said it about invading Iraq and it’s propaganda when warhawks say it about Ukraine defending itself. Their real motivations of american policy makers are throwing ukrainian people into a meat grinder because they want to see russia harmed for global competition reasons.
If we want to talk morality. The only moral thing to advocate for is the shortest possible path to the lowest possible number of lives lost. The quickest end to the war. The liberals claim Russia want to genocide all of ukraine because they know that if they drop this claim they have no way to continue the war, because continuing the war by keeping them armed only costs lives for an unwinnable meatgrinder.
Advocating for the continuation of the war is immoral. It will cost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands more lives, will not be won, and for what? Lines on a map? We’re socialists, we don’t care about which bourgeoise state exploits the people, we care about the people. Choosing to advocate for an action that continues the war is just nationalism, the act of defending a bourgeois-state at the cost of lives. We don’t want to spend those lives. We’re not cheerleaders for one group of billionaires (the west) or another group of billionaire capitalists (russia) having their rule over the ukrainian people or russian people. We ultimately want them both gone and want the people to no longer be exploited. In the meantime we want the least harm. The least harm in a war is the shortest end to that war, not dragging it out as long as possible for the highest number of deaths possible.
And that’s it really. That’s what I think about any argument over “morality” in this war. I think we have the morality position, liberals and fascists advocate for a nationalist position, they care about states and lines on maps more than people. We are going over exactly the same moral contradictions that the internationalists vs the nationalists of the late 1800s and early 1900s went over. The nationalist position led to ww1 and ww2, then everyone lost their taste for nationalism, until now a few generations later the cultural scars caused by nationalism have waned, particularly in america where they’ve never had scars from nationalism.
I think the moral position is to advocate to minimize the number of lives lost and injustice done over all, not just the number of lives lost during the war. But I agree all other things being equal, a less life costly war is better.
Russia does pretty aggressive demographic reshaping to areas they’ve conquered. Like in Crimea, they moved much of the local population and replaced them with people more loyal to Russia. It isn’t just to move people around like that, uprooting peoples lives for more favorable demographics. Plus the stress of being forced to move to somewhere unfamiliar is also quite difficult, causing some shorter lifespan. If Russia conquers more territory, they’ll likely do the same there. That will lead to increased distress and death. So that needs to be weighed against the cost of war.
The bigger concern though is the longer term outlook of Russia. If Russia is able to start more wars, that will kill many many people. So we do not want an outcome of this war that will permit more wars to result. If Russia is right and Western support for Ukraine just dries up and they can take territory and people, Russia will be more inclined to try it again other places in the future. This invasion was based off of their successful invasions of Crimea and Georgia (sorry brain slip) for example.
I would like a quick end to the war, but not one that sacrifices many civilians or leads to more war in the future. So I support giving Ukraine as much aid as is reasonable to quickly win the war to minimize loss of life.
Why just war theory matters is because the public still influences policy in democratic countries. If a war is unjust, the public is more likely to be against it, which is bad for reelection chances of those involved. I agree we shouldn’t take the government’s justification at face value, but instead form an opinion based on our moral framework. So it’s still useful to critique the government since they need to listen at least a bit.
Edit: also, the death of civilization, especially children is usually more unjust than the death of willing combatants. This effect isn’t huge, but minimizing civilian casualties is better than minimizing military casualties.