Anti-Subjugator

The human rights organisations came out and said that war should not be used as a solution to human rights problems.

That is a universal claim. A universal negative. It says: war is never the solution. Not "in this case the costs outweigh the benefits." Not "we examined the anti-war position and found it sound." The universal. Never.

A universal negative is refuted by a single counterexample. The counterexamples exist. Germany 1945. Japan 1945. Kosovo 1999. Grenada. Panama. Iraq itself, from 2003 until the abandonment, which produced a functioning if imperfect democratic government. Every one of these is a case where war was, in fact, the solution to a human rights problem.

The claim fails at undergraduate logic. One counterexample refutes it. There are many. That is not a hard problem. That is the first thing they teach you.

So where were the professional philosophers? The logicians? The people whose entire professional discipline is argument analysis - quantifiers, domains, universals, the tools for exactly this? There are professional logicians. There are departments full of people trained to spot a false universal from across the room. Their mandate is argument analysis. They did not run it. They were silent, for the same institutional reasons the human rights field was silent, and their silence is the same charge.

The standard work on this question is Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars, published in 1977. Walzer is a philosopher. His entire framework is the argument that war can be justified, including on humanitarian grounds. He did the work, decades before the debate. The human rights organisations did not engage with it. They acted as if the question were settled. It was settled - in the opposite direction, by the philosopher whose job it was to settle it.

The claim was never tested. It was asserted. And the rape rooms kept running.

I chased John Howard. I got through to him. We talked. I thanked him for sending Australian troops to liberate Iraq in 2003. Then I asked him to task the CSIRO with investigating the anti-war position. Why was Beazley willing to go on television and support the rape rooms? That was a question with a testable answer. It could have been examined the way the CSIRO examines any other question. It should have been examined. It was the Prime Minister's to task.

Here is the email I sent him on 27 November 2018:

Hi John.

Thanks for our brief chat, it was a great honor to meet you in person, and I am so thankful that you sent Australian troops to liberate Iraq in 2003.

What shocked me most about the Iraq war was that anyone in Australia would oppose it. Saddam was ordering the rape of Iraqi women, and chopping out the tongues of Iraqi men. That reason should be enough justification for any Australian to take action.

But what I would like you to have done is task the CSIRO to employ some social scientists to get to the bottom of exactly why people like the Labor Party would oppose liberating Iraq from institutionalized rape/mutilation/murder/torture. It is as if we disagree on the concept of right and wrong.

As discussed, could you please pass on the above request to Scott Morrison?

Note that I have done my own research since 2002, but I am an amateur and I think it needs professional analysis and then some practical action from that research.

Thanks. Paul.

On 30 November 2018, his office replied. I quote it in full:

Dear Paul

Thank you for your email of 27 November. I enjoyed our discussion. It goes without saying that I share your views regarding Iraq. Whilst I fully understand your ambition I do not think it would be appropriate to employ the CSIRO in the manner that you have suggested. However, that would be an issue for the current government. If you wish to pursue it you should approach the Prime Minister's office via his website at www.pm.gov.au or by writing to him at Parliament House, Canberra, ACT, 2600.

With all good wishes.

Regards

John Howard

Read it again.

He shares the views. He had the conversation. He enjoyed it. And he declined.

Not because the views were wrong. He says they are right. Not because the question was unanswerable. It was answerable. Not because he did not have the platform. He had the highest platform in the country, and he had it again as an elder statesman whose word carries weight. He declined. And he pointed me to the next office, which is the same move the field made, and the same move the Prime Minister's office makes to this day. Someone else. Not me. The next office. The next inbox. The next person who assumes someone else will handle it.

That is the bystander effect with the full institutional weight of the Australian state behind it. The man who agreed would not say so in public. The man who could have opened the door left it shut and handed me the address of the man who would also leave it shut.

And notice the last line of my own email: "I am an amateur and I think it needs professional analysis." I knew. In 2018, I knew. The work needed to be done. I knew I was not the professional. I asked for the professional. The professional declined. The professional said he agreed and declined. The professional pointed me to the next professional, who would also agree and also decline, and so on up the chain, forever, while the rape rooms kept running.

Two years later I stopped asking for the professional. I did the professional analysis myself. It took twenty-three years in total. It is finished now. The corpus is the professional analysis that Howard said was unnecessary, and the record of his refusal to commission it is part of the corpus.

Now the part that is about you.

You live in a democracy. You have more power than you think. The power was never absent. It is not being used because each person assumes the responsible party is someone else. The Prime Minister. The CSIRO. The human rights organisations. Someone more qualified. Someone whose job it is.

That is the bystander effect. It is the entire barrier. It is the reason nobody did this. It is not that people disagreed. Most people did not disagree. They assumed someone else was handling it.

Ivan is proof. Ivan spent years arguing with me. He lost sleep over the arguments. He threw argument after argument, link after link, statistic after statistic. He eventually conceded the logic. He documented the conversion publicly. Ivan still insists he is an ordinary person. He cannot see what I see.

Ivan is an ordinary person. Ivan is also the whole difference. He chose to be honest. When the argument held, he updated. That is it. That is the entire thing. It is not difficult. It is not a special gift. It is the simple choice not to lie, applied consistently, over years.

The corpus says most people are evil. The definition is specific: people who have the correct information and choose to dismiss it. By that definition, most of the planet qualifies. It is not because the action required is hard. It is because the action required is easy, and most people still do not do it. Choosing to be good makes you stand out. It should not. It does.

Nobody did this because the doctrine said it could not be done, the Prime Minister said there was nothing to investigate, and everyone assumed someone else would do it anyway.

All three excuses are gone.

The doctrine is falsified. War is sometimes the solution to a human rights problem, and the correct question is not whether war is ever a solution but whether the specific case justifies the specific cost. The universal is refuted by the record.

The Prime Minister's framing is documented. Howard said he agreed, said it was not appropriate to investigate, and pointed me to the next office. It is on the record. It was the alibi, and the alibi is visible now.

The someone else is you.

You do not need to be a pioneer. You do not need to run the audit. The audit is done. It took twenty-three years and it is finished. You do not need to be a philosopher, a human rights lawyer, or a soldier. You need to write a letter. You need to join a group chat. You need to stop assuming that someone else is handling it.

The group chat exists. Join it. The letter exists. Send it. The names of your family members are in the letter, and named cases get routed. The record grows. And when the record is large enough, someone will notice that there are enough people to form a party and contest the next election. It does not matter who notices. It only matters that the count is real.

The queue is not long.

Neither is the walk.

If you want the depth behind this post - the framework, the method, the full audit - the corpus is at https:/mutazilah.org/corpus.htm. Read paul.txt first, follow the reading order, and the rest follows.