How Civilians Became Targets: The Moral Catastrophe of “Collateral Damage”
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In the history of warfare non-combatants have, from ancient times to the present, been victims of martial violence, sometimes taken as hostages or slaves but more often killed and wounded by accident. Yet in the twentieth century we saw the development of weapons and tactics, especially aerial bombardment that entailed deliberate targeting of noncombatant populations. During the superpower arms race that ensued after the first use of nuclear weapons in wartime, it was part of military doctrine that threatening to destroy the adversary’s cities was of the essence of deterrence, and the world settled in for decades of acquiescence in the idea that theoretically, everyone in the world was a potential target. While the arms race has ended, targeting of civilians has not; the more recent perfection of tactics of terrorism has meant that, once again, though on a smaller scale, everyone is a potential target. I make a case for regarding these developments as a moral catastrophe with far-reaching influence on Western culture and self-understanding. More specifically, they constitute an erosion of our most fundamental humanistic value frameworks, revealing a pre-political underlay of nihilism.