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Christian Just War Reasoning and Two Cases of Rebellion: Ireland 1916–1921 and Syria 2011–Present

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 December 2013

Nigel Biggar
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Extract

The contemporary West is biased in favor of rebellion. This is attributable in the first place to the dominance of liberal political philosophy, according to which it is the power of the state that always poses the greatest threat to human well-being. But it is also because of consequent anti-imperialism, according to which any nationalist rebellion against imperial power is assumed to be its own justification. Autonomy, whether of the individual or of the nation, is reckoned to be the value that trumps all others. I surmise that it is because in liberal consciousness the word “rebel” connotes a morally heroic stance—because it means the opposite of “tyrant”—that Western media in recent years have preferred to refer to Iraqi opponents of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and Taliban opponents of the ISAF in Afghanistan not as “rebels,” but as “insurgents.”

Type
Roundtable: The Ethics of Rebellion
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 27 , Issue 4 , Winter 2013 , pp. 393 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 2013 

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References

NOTES

1 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, ed. Gilby, Thomas (London: Blackfriars with Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964–81)Google Scholar, 2a 2ae, q. 42.

2 So claimed Kevin Myers in “Never, never, never . . . imagine that our history is now behind us,” Irish Independent, May 31, 2007. For substantiation at the level of local government, see Crossman, Virginia, “Epilogue: Breakdown: 1892–1922,” in Politics, Law and Order in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1996), pp. 182–92Google Scholar; and Dooley, Terence, “Introduction,” in The Plight of Monaghan Protestants, 1912–1926 (Maynooth Studies in Irish Local History; Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), pp. 7–19 Google Scholar. I have not been able to substantiate Mr Myers' claims about senior judges and policemen, but I did refer them to one leading scholar of the history of Ireland in the nineteenth century, who did not think them implausible.

3 See Lee, J. J., Ireland, 1912–1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, p. 513, Table 12.

4 Patrick Pearse's faith in the redemptive power of the blood of nationalist martyrs is famous: see, e.g., Edwards, Ruth Dudley, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1990)Google Scholar, p. 179. For evidence that anxiety about terminal Irish decadence was among the motives that impelled the 1916 rebels, see, e.g., FitzGerald, Desmond, Desmond's Rising: Memoirs 1913 to Easter 1916 (Dublin: Liberties Press, 2nd rev. ed., 2006), pp. 58–59 Google Scholar, 88.

5 The title “Black-and-Tans” refers to two bodies of policemen commonly characterized by their motley uniforms. The first comprised English and Scottish veterans of the First World War, who were recruited into the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) from January 1920; the second was made up of members of the RIC's Auxiliary Division. The latter were responsible for most of the outrages. I thank William Sheehan for alerting me to this distinction. See Hart's, Peter contemporary classic, The I.R.A. and its Enemies: Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)Google Scholar, pp. 4, 81–83, 118.

6 According to English, Richard, in his widely praised Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland (London: Macmillan, 2006)Google Scholar, p. 287: “There is no doubt that republicans were the aggressors in this war [of 1919–1921].”

7 See Hart, The I.R.A. and its Enemies, especially Part IV, “Neighbours and Enemies.”

8 See Sheehan, William, A Hard Local War: The British Army and the Guerrilla War in Ireland, 1919–1922 (Stroud, U.K.: The History Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

9 Most of what I know about the modern history of Syria and its current politics I owe to Lesch, David W., Syria: The Fall of the House of Assad (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. Lesch met regularly with Bashar al-Assad from 2004–2008 and had meetings with high-level Syrian officials until well into 2013 (Syria, p. vii).

10 Lesch, Syria, pp. 55–56.

11 Lesch, Syria, p. 85.

12 Lesch, Syria, p. 93.

13 The Assad regime, backed by its ally, Russia, does not deny that chemical weapons were used, but pins culpability on the rebels. United Nations inspectors, however, have reported that munitions casings found at the scene of the crime point to an origin in the state's forces. For a summary of earlier occasions of the use of chemical weapons, in which the Syrian regime might be implicated, see www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-22557347.

14 Lesch, Syria, pp. 51–52. Given that Lesch updated his 2012 book for republication in paperback, and given the date of his latest references in that second edition, we may take his assessment here to apply at least until May 2013.

15 Lesch, Syria, pp. 167–79.

16 Writing not later than May 2013, Lesch claimed that “most observers believe that the threat of an al-Qaida-type organization gaining control of the rebellion has been blown out of all proportion, particularly in Western circles, which are perhaps using it as a convenient rationale not to arm the opposition. . . . the rebels are, indeed, mostly conservative Sunni Muslims; but that does not make them salafis. . . . most of the rebels are not fighting for the imposition of an Islamic republic; indeed, most want a more democratic, still secular polity—if anything more along the lines of Turkey than Iran” (Syria, pp. 237–38). However, by the time of my writing this in September 2013, news reports have it that the influence of jihadism on the rebels is increasing significantly.