If a regime is committing or contributing to atrocities, we should not be supporting them.
Humans are a social species. We have the capacity for empathy towards each other. This isn’t a section where I particularly need to persuade people to come around to my way of thinking of the subject. Absent of some sort of propagandistic, dissosiative or other external influence or emotional pressure, most people consider the mass slaughter of civillians to be morally abhorrent.
How do we define atrocities? Broadly speaking, in this context I am talking about actions that cause significant death or suffering to a non-combatant population. Here are a few examples:
- Genocide (deliberate wiping out of a culture or population, such as the Holocaust and the ethnic cleansing of the Native Americans)
- Targeted civillian killings to achieve a military aim (such as the bombings of London, Dresden and Hiroshima in WWII)
- Violence against civillians for revenge or personal gain (for example, looting and sacking a city, rape and sexual violence)
- Fighting a war in a way that has little regard for the death toll of non-combatants (such as the carpet bombings of South East Asia by the American military during the Vietnam War)
- Use of torture or sexual violence in order to achieve an objective (frequently reported from the Democratic Republic of Congo)
- Overt slavery (such as the transatlantic slave trade, and the frequently reported victims of human trafficking in the UK, sexual slavery)
This is obviously not an exhaustive list. I am specifically defining an atrocity as something that happens on a large scale here. That is not to dismiss individual killings and so forth, but I am setting boundaries on the definition to make it reasonable to manage. I am also separating this definition from the widespread abuse present in various sectors such as in law enforcement, prisons, the medical system, mainstream culture and corporate practices that blur the line between choice and slavery. Ultimately, atrocity in this context means something that most people would consider an atrocity, and something that happens en mass.
How does the Rebel Warrior Movement’s stance on atrocities relate to our primary objective?
Campaigning against atrocities is of course a worthwhile endeavor in it’s own right, but it has big implications in terms of consent to be governed. Where taxpayers money is used for anything not supported by the population, it clearly breaks meaningful consent. This applies for when money is mismanaged, spent without regard to the needs of the population or spent in the self interest or those who are governing. When that thing is something that most people would find morally grotesque, it crosses an emotional barrier. The mission becomes somewhat more visceral and more urgent.
The strategy of the Rebel Warrior Movement heavily weighs on taking ownership for our actions, how they affect other people and how they affect the world. It is not a case of adopting an anti-authoritarian stance and causing disruption to feel useful. We have a responsibility to look after each other. If our taxpayers money is being used on atrocities without our meaningful consent, the Rebel Warrior Movement has a duty to do what we can to stop this.
What does support for atrocities mean?
- A regime directly enacting it using their military
- A corporation directly financially gaining from an atrocity in a sizable and meaningful way (for example, selling weapons and military equipment to the regime committing the atrocities, or profiteering from slavery). *
- Providing financial, military or logistical aid to the regime committing the atrocities
- Providing support in the form of loans
- Contributing punitive measures on the victims, (for example, food blockades, refusing to trade, targeted bias against the victim population regarding visa entry)
- Propagandist support (broadcasting information about the atrocity that is demonstrably false on a large scale, stigmatising of correct information, censorship regarding the atrocity)
- Aggression towards activists using reasonable means to try to help the situation (restricting travel to the country where the atrocity is taking place, violence, arrest, imprisonment, excessive surveillance)
* Just to clarify, I am not talking about selling something that will also be used by the civilian population, for example, selling oil or food exports to a country committing atrocities. The civilian population of a country committing atrocities are not enemies)