Scan barcode
A review by gregbrown
Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn
5.0
A nice, neat history covering the attempts to regulate warfare under international law—and the ongoing question of whether it's more important to prevent war in the first place, or ensure it's conducted humanely.
I thought the tension was wholly novel to the present thanks to smart bombs and other "precision" targeting, but activists have been arguing about it for well over a century now, predicting a future that's now come to pass. The book does lend good background to (and makes a great pairing with) Charlie Savage's Power Wars about Obama entrenching Bush administration expansion of military/executive power by building a legal structure to "legitimize" it.
The book goes into less detail about our present moment than I'd like, but it's plenty thought-provoking and endlessly applicable. It certainly makes sense that decreasing the friction and expected human costs (both domestic and foreign) of military action makes it more likely that action takes place—and we've seen that borne out in practice.
Moyn likens the ongoing transnational drone and special forces regime to a more violent form of policing, but I think the idea applies just as well to domestic policing. The reaction since 2014 has been to provide increased training and monitoring through body cameras, but with the intent to try and legitimize an ongoing domination of poor and minority communities. They're spending millions on cop cities, training compounds that mimic neighborhoods where cops can practice violent crackdowns on dissent. Not great!
I thought the tension was wholly novel to the present thanks to smart bombs and other "precision" targeting, but activists have been arguing about it for well over a century now, predicting a future that's now come to pass. The book does lend good background to (and makes a great pairing with) Charlie Savage's Power Wars about Obama entrenching Bush administration expansion of military/executive power by building a legal structure to "legitimize" it.
The book goes into less detail about our present moment than I'd like, but it's plenty thought-provoking and endlessly applicable. It certainly makes sense that decreasing the friction and expected human costs (both domestic and foreign) of military action makes it more likely that action takes place—and we've seen that borne out in practice.
Moyn likens the ongoing transnational drone and special forces regime to a more violent form of policing, but I think the idea applies just as well to domestic policing. The reaction since 2014 has been to provide increased training and monitoring through body cameras, but with the intent to try and legitimize an ongoing domination of poor and minority communities. They're spending millions on cop cities, training compounds that mimic neighborhoods where cops can practice violent crackdowns on dissent. Not great!