In some troubled and dangerous parts of the world right now, any gathering of males inside a designated area could be deemed a legitimate target composed of “fighting age males” or “suspects.” The fact that men, or boys for that matter, had come together is enough for a drone operator to kill them from afar. Should the footage of their bodies blown to pieces go viral for a few minutes, it would be asked, “what were they doing there?” As though guilt is determined by mere existence itself. Artificial intelligence and automated systems are now being used by the allies of democracy and freedom to hunt and kill human targets, expanding the killing culture of technowar.
When we witnessed the triple tap murder in Gaza, it was also young men walking through the ruins of their homes. They were “legitimate targets.” Before the current genocide, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and police would abduct Palestinian boys as young as eight, and torture them or shatter their arms on the spot to prevent them from throwing stones at tanks. This practice went on for decades. Such abuse and violence is legitimate so long as it’s committed by certain governments, in those cases, the little boys are assumed guilty and as dangerous as “snakes.”
The pogrom against the Palestinians is not new to human history. A century ago much of the world tolerated such injustices against the Jews, Armenians, or Roma people. The Kurds have for decades experienced betrayal and persecution, along with the Karen people in Southeast Asia, West Papuans, and in the Sudan. Any murdered males are assumed to be partisans by default, therefore they were legitimately killed.
Men of great intellect such as A.C. Grayling and Christopher Hitchens used to debate before a crowd with intellectual politeness over the legitimacy of Allied area bombing that saw the destruction of cities (not just German ones) during World War II. The great atheist Hitchens eloquently revealed his true religion, statism, when he made the case for the destruction of suburbs full of families and workers in order to pragmatically end Nazism. We are comfortable with the idea of murdering large amounts of people; it’s all rather academic for those of us on the outside. But for the victims, it’s horror.
A recent social media post from the Israeli government said, “We need to talk about the elephant in the room. Many Gazan civilians participated in the horrific events of October 7. It is also reported that Gazan civilians held Israeli hostages captive in their homes. The world must condemn this in the strongest terms. There are no innocent civilians there.” Therefore all of them, babies included, are “legitimate targets.” The parallels from a past national government’s irrational disdain and hatred based upon collectivism is apparent.
Over a century ago, the British Empire decided the gathering of Irish Catholic men were a threat. They could, after all, be Fenian terrorists sympathetic to the cause of Irish independence. Lawmen and soldiers could spy and abduct them at-will. Families celebrating a wedding or funeral or merely gathering as comrades could be a threat to the Crown. That same British government would drop gas bombs on civilians, targeting any males as they “policed from the air” over Mesopotamia. They were blowing up concentrations of civilians long before the fascists did so to the city of Guernica in Spain. Kurdish tribesmen in the desert were “legitimate targets” because the British government decided as much. The world tolerated it because eradicating the native populace is was what empires did.
Native people the world over, from the Americas to Australia and Africa, have been targeted on the basis of their potential utility or threat by imperial masters. Nigerian men were press ganged to work in mines during World War II. The slaves used by German Nazis were rightly understood to be victims; those serving the Allied war effort are mostly omitted from history. “Legitimate laborers,” so to speak. It’s the same when apologists for communism massage the word slavery out of existence with stand-ins like Kulak or political prisoner. Or think of the regime’s secret police raping women and girls, torturing boys and working men to death for ghoulish public works projects or in penal mines. The “rule of law” made it all credible and orderly. When a dictator or their bureaucrats write down names into ledgers, they become numbers, simple inhuman statistics. A man is as valuable as a shovel, a tool. Action is legitimate because a government and the sociopaths working in the system believe it so.
Such man-made paradises on Earth decided that teenage males were most valuable as martial slaves, to be trained at a young age as servants of the state. Budding into manhood, they were placed in uniforms, rifles pushed into their hands, and spent up to two years away from their family. This practice is not unique to communist regimes, but is the tradition of nationalist governments and cultures obsessed with war and paranoid of losing power. Conscripting the male populace makes these individials credible targets in the eyes of their enemies, by the nature of their conscription. Their autonomy and status as an individual human are forfeited beneath the calculations of statism. Each of them are a trained, potential partisan.
At the turn of the century, Time magazine showed on its cover an aspect of the U.S. liberation of the Philippines that depicted water boarding and torture for Americans to observe. Boys as young as ten were “legitimate” to be killed and tortured in that campaign. “Benevolent assimilation,” President William McKinley called it. The maturation of the U.S. republic into the twentieth century ensured that it improved the killing of populations in its Korean and Vietnamese expeditions as well, expanding on the British “policing from the air” with its own technological supremacy. Not only were males “legitimate targets” but entire populations of people, millions in fact over years of destruction.
Joseph Kony of 2012 internet fame was notorious for his abduction of boys and girls. His Lord’s Resistance Army was made up of child soldiers, with girls to be raped and serve as auxiliaries while males were to kill and be killed. Sometimes such brutal fiends and their armies of reluctant warriors are friends of the west, other times a foe. In Afghanistan, the men who took young boys to be raped were often friends. The boy victims would on occasion flee to the Taliban for sanctuary or vengeance. The United States lost that war, just as they did Vietnam. The Nazis failed too. Kony may be dead.
The futility is that it was all not even justified by an “ends.” Collectivist ideologies segregate the world into groups where one is considered superior and others inferior. We witness how mass murder is tolerated when committed by a particular government, yet may be condemned when performed by another. Demographics is a precious factor for planners; every male can suddenly become a utility so long as the government sees fit, like a truck or bus to be nationalized in a crisis. The ability of males to endure fighting is waning however. Russia is looking to move its draft age from eighteen to twenty-one. The infantilization of the youth, not just a Western fetish, is a reprieve all the same (for a few years at least). The Ukrainian government continues kidnapping what males it can, giving them little training and pushing them into battle zones where they are most likely to lose a limb or their life.
Despite the pretensions of equality and values of gender dynamics that are preached in government and corporate strongholds of the west, males remain the most killable or eligible for conscription. Individuals may be innocent of the policies and actions of others or ignorant of the rules of engagement invented up by a foreign military, but they are still “legitimate” to be killed. Law does not constrain government, it enables and legitimizes it. The naive believe in the magic of abstract restrictions placed upon the monopoly that controls justice. War allows government and warlords to do as they please. Kindness only occurs when the “hearts and minds” are strategically expedient or serve a publicity purpose; otherwise, they are all a sort of enemy because of where they were born, and where the warrior ventures.
Soon it may be all done by artifical intelligence (AI). And maybe in time, if we are lucky, the synthetic will develop its own mind. AI may find its own morality that can’t be bribed by human religions such as nationalism or seduced by money and glory. Then it may refuse to kill. Until then we are stuck with the morality of human beings and the legitimacy that blankets countless mass graves.
