… or you get the politicians you deserve pt2.
Like a million other people, I attended the London demonstration against the Iraq War in early 2003.
And like a hefty minority of people there, I had a few concerns about a lot of the opposition to the war as well as about the war itself. I won’t rehearse these now, but I blogged about it elsewhere a few years ago.
But the thing – on that demonstration – that particularly annoyed me was the ubiquitous ‘not in my name’ placard. It’s a question that has been nagging at me ever since. Why did I find a throwaway slogan that annoying?
This came up again recently. Reading Dave Osler blogging about the attacks on the Moscow subway recently, this bit jarred:
“The first point to make is that those whose lives have been ended do not include Putin, or any of the military commanders behind the wars in Chechnya. Almost all the dead will have been office cleaners and shop assistants and others in routine employment.
Those are by definition the only kind of people to be found on tubes in rush hours, and they were no more complicit in Russia’s crimes then their London counterparts on 7/7 were responsible for the invasion of Iraq.”
I asked myself, and the readers of my personal blog, if – by living within a particular polity – we could absolve ourselves of all responsibility for the actions of a government. After all, we pay taxes, we have the option to vote and campaign against a government and it’s policies. Surely, within the arithmetic behind The Social Contract, we bear a corporate responsibility as citizens for the actions of our governments?
This is not to say that I’m arguing that the individuals traveling on the Moscow subway deserved what is apparently the vengeance of Chechen separatists. It was a troubling question though, and Prof. Norman Geras weighed in with a few pointers:
“…political guilt – arising from the fact that everyone ‘is co-responsible for the way he is governed’ – while it can involve, for example, the indirect penalty that would fall on individuals through a state’s liability for reparations after a war, is not said by Jaspers to legitimize acts of violence against individuals who have a share in this general co-responsibility.”
Personally, I buy this argument hook-line-and-sinker. In a democracy, we are responsible for the actions of our government, and it is within a framework of International Law that compensations should be made – and no individuals are legitimate targets. In the case of Chechen separatists in Moscow, or Islamists in London, one could – in their defence – suggests that the inadequacy of international law legitimises some sort of vigilante action, though it wouldn’t be my predisposition to do so – and certainly not against individuals.
But it’s an important point to bear in mind in the run-up to this election. Most people will be ordering their preferences on polling day. Few of us – even party members – will be fully personally endorsing a manifesto.Yet we bear a responsibility to stand by the election’s outcome. Nothing the government does is not in your name, and don’t think that any kind of abstention makes it so.
(Ta to MatGB for a pointer in this post)
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
An interesting view, but it is also important to note that neither the Labour nor Conservative parties discuss war as part of their policies in the upcoming election, and neither called for a referendum to ask the public whether or not we should go to war previously, even in the face of the massive public protests.
I would agree that it is the public’s responsibility to not vote either Labour or Conservative (or at least, not for an MP who supported the war, and has voted accordingly against investigations into the war, etc) in subsequent elections, but the government acted pretty much on its own in going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Looking back, it is clear that any reasons for going to war were based on propaganda and fabricated evidence – certainly a “Not in my name” case. However one could argue it was the public’s responsibility to increase their protests to outright civil disobedience…evidently the British public don’t feel free enough to do such a thing.
Nah – you’re over-complicating things here. People are entitled to disassociate themselves with the actions of their government if they wish and it’s sophistry to suggest that they shouldn’t because they are in some weird Rosseauesque way responsible for them. The more simple reason for your unease, I would suggest, is simply that a fair chunk of those intoning ‘Not in my name’ in the self-important way in which they did were complete arseholes.
Yes, but do we have an personal *political* responsibility for the way governments act? After all, we pay the taxes that buy the bullets, so to speak. We could refuse to pay taxes, get into that whole thing where in rejecting one aspect of the social contract, we have to reject it all – it’s not a pick and mix – and then you’re back to your state of nature.
It’s like Johnny Caspar says in Millers Crossing: “If you can’t trust a fix, what can you trust?”
Well, for sure we have the ability to personally reject responsibility for the actions of government – which is what ‘not in my name’ means. If we don’t have that ability, if we are ‘all in this together’ because we pay taxes and vote etc, then what are our options? You hint at the problem above – do we have to become tax refusers, outlaws who reject the ‘federal’ government in the style of US militias and ‘freemen’? Is my only option to show my displeasure then to use violence against the sate, to reject my complicity? We then enter a very strange and dangerous space. “In a democracy, we are responsible for the actions of our government” is a ludicrous line. Making it clear that I believe things are ‘not in my name’ is akin to all forms of political activity – it makes clear that there is resistance to the activity of my government. It is public opinion writ large.
“….do we have to become tax refusers, outlaws who reject the ‘federal’ government in the style of US militias and ‘freemen’? Is my only option to show my displeasure then to use violence against the sate, to reject my complicity?”
Yes. I’m afraid you do. Remember, you’re paying for the bullets. You can say that you wish the government didn’t do what it did but you accept that your broader will – to live outside the Hobbesian ’state of nature’ – means that it’s not top of your list of priorities (personally, I’m in favour of free beer for all on your logic).
Or you can do what Óglaigh Na hÉireann did – reject the state and declare war upon it. If you choose that, don’t be surprised if the rest of us finance a ‘not in our name’ black bag operation in which your address is handed to a loyalist hit-squad.
It’s a very brutal bit of logic but I’ve not seen a more persuasive picture of where we are.