No Duty to Retreat*
by Professor Thomas Naylor, Vermont
Having failed in his bid to take out Osama bin Laden, elimnate the threat
of terrorism, dismantle the Al Qaeda network, spin away the effects of corporate
greed, and turn the ailing economy around, President George W. Bush, like
his father and Bill Clinton, has decided to play the Saddam Hussein card.
Unlike bin Laden, who is a moving target, Hussein is much less illusive,
since he rarely leaves Iraq. Other than the brief period when he was temporarily
upstaged by bin Laden, Saddam has been America’s favorite demon for twelve
years. He has the ability to deflect American public opinion away from virtually
any serious economic, political, or social problem. This is why he has been
such a popular political whipping boy for our last three presidents.
Within a few days after Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, President George
Herbert Walker Bush convinced most of the non-Islamic world that our former
ally, whom he helped create, was the moral equivalent of Adolph Hitler. Ninety-five
percent of the American people supported Bush I’s Persian Gulf policy. And
every time Bill Clinton needed a boost in the polls, which was often, we
bombed Iraq.
Because Iraq may have weapons of mass destruction, which could be used
against Israel or the United States, Bush II must now finish the job begun
by his father in 1991. So we are told. Never mind that the United States
has the largest stockpile of weapons of mass destruction in history and is
the only country to have ever used nuclear weapons during warfare to kill
civilians.
So-called Just War apologists are already lining up in support of Bush
II’s plan to annihilate Iraq as a pre-emptive defensive move. Nuclear weapons
have not yet been ruled out.
But the whole notion of a Just War is an oxymoron. There is no such thing
as a just war. There never has been. And there never will be, including Desert
Storm II. Barbarians, not civilized human beings, kill each other. War is
a form of nihilism, not justice.
Just as participation in the death of a human being through suicide, abortion,
self-defense, murder or euthanasia may be a statement of life’s meaninglessness,
so too is the active or passive approval of state-sponsored executions, wars,
and military adventures. To kill a human being is to deny the possibility
that the life of that person may have meaning. By whose authority other than
the law of the jungle do those who kill or sanction killing set themselves
up as both judge and executioner?
According to Duke Chapel Dean William H. Willimon, ‘Wars and executions
in the name of the state occur when our sense of community gives way to our
pagan lust for revenge, a lust firmly grounded in nihilism.’ Violence begets
more violence, not the other way around.
Although our nation was founded on the principles of life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness, the United States is one of the most violent nations
in the world.
In over two hundred years, the North American continent has never been
attacked nor even seriously threatened with invasion by Japan, Germany, the
Soviet Union, or anyone else. But over a million Americans have been killed
in wars and trillions of dollars have been spent by the military—$13 trillion
on the Cold War alone.
Wars are fought, not to achieve social justice, but to serve the interests
of political elites pretending to be patriots, who manipulate others into
doing their dirty work, including sacrificing their lives for what they believe
to be ideals such as freedom and democracy. Unfortunately, all too often,
these ideals turn out to be euphemisms for money, power, and greed.
‘War is hell,’ said Union Army General William Tecumseh Sherman fifteen
years after inflicting his scorched earth policy on the American South. ‘It
is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans
of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation.’
Unfortunately for the South, he was a little late in figuring this out.
Thomas Naylor is completing a book with Frank Bryan entitled Sustainable Nation-State:
The Second Vermont Republic to be published by Chelsea Green, 2003.
| * Historian Richard Maxwell Brown provides convincing
evidence in his book No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American
History and Society that America’s history of violence has been strongly
influenced by the common law of self-defense, of which the American version
differs significantly from the original English doctrine:
‘At the core of the English common law of self-defense was the concept
of retreat. Thus, in the English common law going back to the middle ages
the first obligation of a threatened individual in a personal dispute—even
an individual without fault in the quarrel—was to flee from the scene. With
one of two antagonistic individuals gone a homicide could not possibly occur.
Should it be impossible, however, to get away, the English common law required
the individual to retreat as far as possible—retreat ”to the wall” was the
legal phrase—before resisting and perhaps killing in an act of lawful self-defense.
In essence, the legal duty to retreat was a command to individuals
to forsake physical combat. To lawyers and judges, this doctrine became known
as the DUTY TO RETREAT, and according to it you had to prove in open court
that you had obeyed the duty to retreat before you could be found not guilty
of committing murder in self-defense.
The colonists brought the English common law with them, but in the
nineteenth century, American courts and judges made mincemeat of the duty
to retreat and replaced it with the American doctrine of NO DUTY TO RETREAT—of
the right to stand one’s ground and, if need be, kill in self-defense.’
|
|
 |
|
