Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn

Abstract

Reviewed by: Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn Matthew McManus (bio) Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021), ISBN 9780374173708, 416 pages. The term “revisionist history” has become something of a slur, referring to the propagandistic rewriting of established fact for the purpose of advancing a partisan narrative. This is despite the fact that reviewing and adjusting the historical record is what good scholars do, and great scholars can even give us an entirely new way of looking at familiar subject matters. [End Page 345] Samuel Moyn (Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School) is a great scholar and historian, and his earlier books The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World offered radically contrarian—but nuanced—reevaluations of the contributions of international human rights movements. Moyn highlighted how, far from relentlessly challenging established systems of power and domination, appealing to a narrow discourse on rights could prove a powerful sedative when easing to conscience of the readily placated. His latest book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War for Farar, Straus and Giroux is equally contrarian and sure to provoke criticism from many quarters. But it serves as a necessary analeptic to all of us who too easily accepted the standard narrative about international humanitarian law hook and crook and deserves a wide readership. I. THE INVENTION OF FAT FREE, SUGAR FREE WAR The standard hagiographic history of international humanitarian law, or the laws of war, runs something like this. From at least the days of Ashoka and St. Augustine, many intelligent human-ists acknowledged that more should be done to blunt the savage edges of war. But for a long time, a combination of barbarism, the intransigent self-interest of Westphalian nationalists and self-identified realists, and the sheer scale of the problem meant that the most vicious wars continued unabated. Then, starting in the 19th century with the founding of international NGOS like the Red Cross and the formulation of the first major treaties like the Hague Conventions, things started to get better. Flash forward to the moral abyss of the Second World War, and we got the broad outlines of international humanitarian law as it stands today. Imperfect, and without a doubt imperfectly enforced, but none the less a major step forward. What makes Moyn such an acute analyst generally is he is never so cynical as to just reject stories of progress (however small). Humane never denies that the effort to humanize warfare constitutes a significant step forward, or that we should simply embrace what Michael Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars called the “war is hell” and there is nothing that can be done about its thesis. But Moyn continuously draws our attention to the fact that things are not as rosy as one might suppose. International humanitarian law rests on two basic principles: jus ad Bellum—the principle that states should only wage war under just conditions—and jus in bello—that a war waged under just conditions must also be fought in a humane way. If one abides by both of these principles, one wages a just war. The conventional wisdom is that the two necessarily and always operate in tandem. Moyn challenges that with a massive amount of evidence, pointing out how the effort to humanize the waging of war can in fact serve to help legitimate conflicts that should never have been started in the first place. In particular, he singles out the United States as the: ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason. It has also been Americans who are revealing—contrary to literature since Homer—that the most elemental face of war is not death. Instead, it is control by domination and surveil-lance, with mortality and even violence increasingly edited out.1 [End Page 346] In other words, there is nothing wrong with the waging of forever wars—against communism, terrorism, and the enemies of freedom—so long as...