The Least of All Possible Evils

A Short History of Humanitarian Violence

Eyal Weizman

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781786632739
• eBook ISBN:
  9781781684320
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The principle of the 'lesser evil'-the acceptability of pursuing one exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater injustice-has long been a cornerstone of Western ethical philosophy. From its roots in classical ethics and Christian theology, to Hannah Arendt's exploration of the work of the Jewish Councils during the Nazi regime, Weizman explores its development in three key transformations of the problem: the defining intervention of M?decins Sans Fronti?res in mid-1980s Ethiopia; the separation wall in Israel-Palestine; and international and human rights law in Bosnia, Gaza and Iraq.

Drawing on a wealth of new research, Weizman charts the latest manifestation of this age-old idea. In doing so he shows how military and political intervention acquired a new 'humanitarian' acceptability and legality in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Itzhak Ben Israel explains to Yotam Feldman his mathematical equation for the destruction of Hamas by eliminating (arresting or killing) its operatives. ‘The Lab’ 2011.

1

The Humanitarian Present

Having survived the butchery of a gruesome battle, Candide escapes the army and comes upon his long-time tutor Pangloss. The two decide to set out on a sea journey. A tempest wrecks their ship, killing almost all aboard. Pangloss and Candide are washed ashore in Lisbon upon a plank. ‘Hardly do they set foot in the city . . . than they feel the earth tremble beneath them; a boiling sea rises in the port and shutters the vessels lying at anchor. Great sheets of flames and ash cover the streets and public squares; houses collapse, roofs topple on to foundations, and foundations are levelled in turn; thirty thousand inhabitants without regards to age or sex are crushed beneath the ruins.’1 But master Pangloss, emerging from under a pile of the city’s rubble – drawings of which later generations will regard as the ‘first media representations of a distant catastrophe’2 – argues that there is no effect without a cause. He explains to Candide that divine calculations, obscure to the human mind, mean that all that happened is ‘for the very best’. For Pangloss, of course, all was always for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire’s grotesque satirical adventure novel continues across seas and continents, witnessing the cruelties, violence and destruction of both the human and divine order: from war in Europe through storms and earthquakes to the colonialism of the eighteenth century in the Americas. Indeed across the Atlantic, our two protagonists observe how the Jesuits in Paraguay, claiming to have arrived there to help and redeem the indigenous peoples, actually abuse and enslave them.

Candide was written in the wake of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, tsunami and fire, and in the middle of the Seven Years’ War, which wreaked havoc across Europe and its American colonies. In the shadow of this catastrophe a new order of urban planning emerged in Lisbon, a gridded geometry that was later exported to the American colonies. The sequence of devastation, described above, prompted Voltaire to challenge and ridicule Leibnizian optimism and with it the concept of ‘necessity,’ which implies that destructive events somehow serve an invisible and mysterious purpose in a world in which the relationship between good and evil is always optimal. Leibniz himself had been buried two decades when the Lisbon earthquake struck, but it was he who had proposed the scheme of ‘the best of all possible worlds’ in order to reconcile all the apparent evils in the world – floods, starvations, wars, storms, tsunamis, epidemics, pandemics, earthquakes, fires and other phenomena we now like to refer to as ‘emergencies’ – with the idea of divine providence, which is necessarily omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent – all-powerful, knowing, and good.3 Leibniz’s attempt to solve this age-old theological aporia involved a conception of God as an economist that managed the world by solving a minimum problem in the calculus of variations. Choosing for the optimum combination of good and evil involves a constant monitoring of the world, a task undertaken by examinining its smallest units – which Leibnitz called monads. These are substances that contain the imprint of all worldly relations, powers and effects. In a process resembling a ‘divine forensics’ God infers from these fragments what is happening everywhere in the universe. The examination is of course not about a crime, or other forms of imperfection, in the present or past – all things that do exist are necessarily the best possible things – but rather is the condition for choosing the best next possible world in the future.4

Divine examination, evaluation, calculation and choice operate thus within a complex economy in which good and bad could be transferred and exchanged. Because in this economy all bad things necessarily appear at their minimum possible level, the world as lived is always necessarily the best of all possible worlds. ‘If a lesser evil is relatively good,’ Leibniz reasoned, ‘so a lesser good is relatively evil . . . to show that an architect could have done better is to find faults in his work.’5

If this description of the economy of divine government is already reminiscent of the logic of contemporary wars, with its own scales of risk and proportionality used to evaluate the desired and undesired consequences of military acts, it is hardly surprising to find in it an early reflection on the concept of ‘collateral damage’. Earlier Christian theology has indeed already described all bad things that take place as ‘the collateral effects of the good’. In this immanent order of human and divine life, the destructive result of floods are nothing but the collateral effect of necessary rain. In both their theological and military contexts, as Giorgio Agamben observed, the collateral effects are structural rather than accidental. It is through the collateral – flood or blood – that a government – divine or human – can demonstrate, indeed exercise, its power. 6

Unlike the calculations of a God, seen by the philosophers and the theologians of the eighteenth century as a perfect mathematician who could under­take instantaneous calculations and immediatly arrive at a precise result, mere humans must of course guess, speculate and hedge their risks as they proceed towards the future as the blind leading the blind. It is for this reason that they ceaselessly seek to develop and perfect all sorts of tech­nologies and techniques that might allow them to calculate the effects of violence and might harness its consequences. It is these techniques and technologies, apparatuses and spatial arrangements, that are at the heart of this book. Through them, Pangloss’s Leibnizian scheme – or is it Leibniz’s Panglossian scheme? – of the ‘best of all possible worlds’ re-emerges in the progressive tradition of liberalism. Here, in its secularized form, political rather than metaphysical, a similar structure of the argument sets up the sphere of morality as a set of calculations aimed to approximate the optimum proportion between common goods and necessary evils.7 But as the general outlook of liberalism shifted from Voltaire’s and indeed Jeremy Bentham’s later focus on the ‘greater good’ and the responsibility of government to increase happiness to the greatest number of people, to the liberal canards of ‘just wars’, and their increasingly sophisticated technologies for minimizing the number of ‘necessary’ corpses, the search for ‘the best of all possible worlds’ started giving ground to the present neo-Panglossian pessimism of the ‘least of all possible evils’.

This book engages with the problem of violence in its moderation and minimization, mostly with state violence that is managed according to a similar economy of calculations and justified as the least possible means. The fundamental point of this book is that the moderation of violence is part of the very logic of violence. Humanitarianism, human rights and interna­tional humanitarian law (IHL), when abused by state, supra-state and military action, have become the crucial means by which the economy of violence is calculated and managed. A close reading of a series of case studies will show how, at present, spatial organizations and physical instruments, technical standards, procedures and systems of monitoring – the complex humanitarian assemblage that philosopher Adi Ophir called ‘moral technologies’ – have become the means for exercising contemporary violence and for governing the displaced, the enemy and the unwanted.8 The condition of collusion of these technologies of humanitarianism, human rights and humanitarian law with military and political powers is referred to in this book as ‘the humanitarian present’. Within this present condition, all political oppositions are replaced by the elasticity of degrees, negotiations, proportions and balances.

It was media scholar Sharon Sliwinski who described the Lisbon disaster as ‘the first modern mass media event to a distant catastrophe’, with its illustrations allowing Europeans across political boundaries to share in the horror of the event. Sliwinski explained that part of what helped eighteenth-century Europe experience the horror of this earthquake were graphic representations of destroyed buildings. These included ‘highly detailed records of the important buildings ruined by the disaster’, adding up to the first ‘patient and careful forensic survey of damages that circulated throughout the rest of Europe as evidence of the event.’9

The chapters that make this book have a similar forensic dimension. They focus on the built environment, on spatial technologies, on scenes of destruction and on their representation and dissemination in photography, film, models and drawings. Each chapter offers a narrative account of a recent or contemporary controversy brought into crisis around problems of space; and each of the chapters engages with questions of a practical nature: what are the technologies, spatial arrangements, artefacts and environments that shape the humanitarian present? How do they function and how were they were developed and transformed over time? Physical structures and spatial techniques are the small units of analysis that compose this investigation. The ‘forensic analysis’ of their characteristics is an attempt to tease out the political forces, cultural habits, forms of knowledge, skills and expertise that were folded into their organization and form. The investigation of spatial reality is accompanied by accounts of the characters that initiated, developed and participated in the making of these technologies or were caught within the complex force-fields of the emergencies in which they were employed. They involve humanitarians, refugee organizations, human rights lawyers and others specializing in the laws of war, military specialists and forensic investigators working for different organizations and in different areas worldwide. The scenes recounted were chosen because each one demonstrates a different way to inhabit the complex conditions of this humanitarian present.

Chapter 2 traces the way in which the recognition that humanitarian relief has the potential to become lethal to the people it came to serve – a reality registered in comparative statistics of epidemeology and mortality rates – structured debates around possible ways to conceive and organize humanitarian spaces. It also examines the process by which these spaces have gradually become instruments for governing the displaced. Chapter 3 analyzes the physical and procedural siege mechanisms applied by Israel in the Gaza Strip, which were governed by the standards of the ‘humanitarian minimum’. They operated by calibrating the level of electric current, calories and other necessities to the minimum possible level in an attempt to govern people by reducing them to the limit of bare physical existence. In Chapter 4, scientific and probabilistic models are examined in the use of forensic methodologies – and in particular the emergent practice of ‘forensic architecture,’ which is employed in the analyzes of the rubble left by war. These are shown to be based on the same lethal technologies they came to monitor in the first case. The book’s epilogue presents an archive of destroyed buildings in Gaza, produced by the Hamas-run Ministry of Public Works and Housing in the wake of Israel’s attack in the winter of 2008–9.

This study of ruins ends a process of transformation that is unfolded in the course of the book: it begins with a reflection on the role of testimony in the reinvention of humanitarianism in the early 1970s and ends with a reflection on its being superseded by forensic science. The shift is more than one which the misanthropic gaze of forensics, as exercised by scientists and former military personnel, replaces the ‘empathic’ attention to the testimony of the people who suffered; it also mirrors the transformation of the focus in the field of humanitarianism and human rights from a form of independent engagement with the pains of this world in the 1970s and 1980s to a political and military force in the 1990s, and finally into a legalistic strategy in the 2000s.

In tracing the way these transformations are registered in the microphysics of different spaces and scenes, the chapters and our protagonists move through Ethiopia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Iraq, Darfur, and Afghanistan. But it is in relation to Israel’s domination of the Gaza Strip that these reflections converge. Gaza – where the system of humanitarian government is now most brutally exercised – is the proper noun for the horror of our humanitarian present.

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If, as a friend recently suggested, we ought to construct a monument to our present political culture as a homage to the principle of the ‘lesser evil’, it should be made in the form of the digits 6-6-5 built of concrete blocks, and installed like the Hollywood sign on hillsides or other high points overlooking city centres. This number, one less than the number of the beast – that of the devil and of total evil – might capture the essence of our humanitarian present obsessed with the calculations and calibrations that seek to moderate, ever so slightly, the evils that it has largely caused itself.

The principle of the lesser evil is often presented as a dilemma between two or more bad choices in situations where available options are, or seem to be, limited. The choice made justifies the pursuit of harmful actions that would be otherwise deemed unacceptable in the hope of averting even greater suffering. Sometimes the principle is presented as the optimal result of a general field of calculations that seeks to compare, measure and evaluate different bad consequences in relation to necessary acts, and then to minimize those consequences. Both aspects of the principle are understood as taking place within a closed system in which those posing the dilemma, the options available for choice, the factors to be calculated and the very parameters of calculation are unchallenged. Each calculation is undertaken anew, as if the previous accumulation of events has not taken place, and the future implications are out of bounds.

Those who seek to justify necessary evils as ‘lesser’ ones, especially when searching for a rationale to explain recent wars and military expeditions, like to appeal to the work of the fourth-century North African philosopher–theologian St Augustine. Augustine’s rejection of the principle of Manichaeism – a world divided into equally powerful good and evil – meant that he no longer saw evil as the perfect mirror image of the good; rather, in platonic terms, as a measure of its absence. Since evil, unlike good, is not perfect and absolute, it is forever measured and calibrated on a differential scale of more and less, greater and lesser. Augustine taught that it is not permissible to practise lesser evils, because to do so violates the Pauline principle ‘do no evil that good may come’. But – and here lies its appeal – lesser evils might be tolerated when they are deemed necessary and unavoidable, or when perpetrating an evil results in the reduction of the overall amount of evil in the world. One of the examples Augustine gives for such an economy of lesser and greater evils is a robbery on a crossroads. It is to this crossroads that other theologists, philosophers and political theorists will return, to this day, when discussing the dilemma. In Augustine’s logic of pre-emption, it is better to kill the would-be assailant before he kills an innocent traveller. A millennium later and the armies of Western Christendom passed through this ethico-theological needle-eye-sized loophole on their way to the catalogue of pillage and destruction that constituted the crusades. More recently, Pope Benedict XVI has appealed to the lesser evil principle in a decree permitting the use of condoms in places inflicted with high rates of HIV. Similar to the latter logic of contraception, some in the Vatican thought that implicit support of the government of Silvio Berlusconi, albeit plagued by sin, ridicule and corruption, might after all be considered as the lesser evil in protecting Christian values. In cases such as these, the economy of the lesser evil is always cited as a justification for breaching rigid rules and entren...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• 1 The Humanitarian Present
• 2 Arendt in Ethiopia
• 3 The Best of All Possible Walls
• 4 Forensic Architecture: Only the Criminal Can Solve the Crime
• Photo Insert
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Index