Civil and Uncivil Disobedience

[nancylebov]

Jim MacDonald reminds US military personel:

You are not required to obey an unlawful order.

You are required to disobey an unlawful order.

You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Read the whole thing.

This is based on current law, and the law could change. It would only be a moderate surprise if that rule about unlawful orders were repealed or changed out of all recognition.

Civil disobedience requires that you break the law in public and accept punishment. To my mind, this is a tactic, not a moral requirement. People who ran the Underground Railroad broke the law in secret, and I gather that some of them never talked about it. It may have been that they didn't want to be treated as heroes. It may have been that they didn't want to be treated as criminals. It may have been they wanted to keep their options open in case they saw a need to do such things again.

Standing up and being counted in opposition to atrocity is good. So is doing something sneaky to slow down or limit atrocity.

There are sound reasons for being at least fair-to-middling law abiding especially if you live in a society that doesn't have an extremely awful government, but ultimately, all you've got is your conscience and your judgement.

Comments

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

I made that same point in the weeks before our invasion of Iraq, only to be told by everybody who's been through basic training lately that they are no longer taught the 4th Nuremberg Principle in basic, and apparently haven't been in quite some time. That saddened me. It's a good day to bring it up, too, since if memory serves tomorrow is the 60th anniversary of the Nuremberg verdicts.

What I was told by recent and currrent soldiers is that the military now teaches the exact opposite of the 4th Nuremberg Principle. They are taught that the US Constitution guarantees civilian control of the military, and that for a serving soldier to disobey any order given to them by the President or his designees is tantamount to, or at least on the slippery slope to, coup d'etat

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

I got trained on the GCs in my Air Force days. One of the things made clear is that people who:
1. use weapons
while:
2. not following all the rules
don't get protected by the GCs. We're perfectly entitled to shoot them on the spot. And did in WWII.

Like these guys?

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

I assume you think they deserved no rights? or are just a howling hypocrite of the its-okay-if-it's-us sort...

And you're simply wrong about the GCs only applying to regular armed forces and not to, eg, the Free French. See here.

Re: Like these guys?

[libertarianhawk.livejournal.com]

Argument from ignorance . . . how tiring.

The Geneva Conventions are explicit on what the requirements for being a "protected person" are. Look 'em up, they're on line. Don't meet the requirements, you're not protected. The Concord Minutement and De Gaulle's Free French both met the requirements to be protected. They're not hard for a combatant to meet. Don't target civilians. Don't disguise yourself as a civilian (for a militia that means an armband or other distinctive mark, having someone in charge, and carrying arms openly). Fail to meet those requirements and you're not supposed to be protected by the GCs. That's the incentive to comply with them.