Yes,
enabling violence IS violence, but morality depends on purpose: in this case,
Empire
In April 2018 thousands of employees of the
tech giant Google placed their careers in jeopardy by signing a public protest letter to their CEO. Citing the company
motto, “Don’t Be Evil,” the letter argued that “Google should not be in the
business of war.” It demanded that
Google cancel a contract with the Pentagon to develop “Artificial Intelligence”
(AI) computer programs that teach themselves to identify targets from drone
footage. The employees further asked
that Google ban all future work on “warfare technology.”
In June Google caved in,
announcing that while it would fulfill its Pentagon AI contract, it would not
seek to renew it. It released a
statement of AI principles, including seven “objectives” that are so broad and written
so incomprehensibly in modern corporate mealy-mouth that they provide the
dissidents no assurances. There is a
pledge in it that is a little easier to interpret, although it still contains
enough loopholes to justify the original contract: Google will not “design or
deploy AI” for weapons or other technologies that “cause injury,” and will not
provide AI to aid “surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.”
The statement also made
it clear that Google would “continue to work with governments and the military
in many other areas.” It will compete for multi-billion dollar Pentagon contracts in “Cloud” service for data storage,
which is at the core of effective military operations.
And lest we forget in
the flood of propaganda with which we are inundated -- about freedom, courage, sacrifice,
global stability, protecting other nations, free trade, and humanitarian relief
-- the primary goal of our trillion dollar military budget, as Defense Secretary
James Mattis has properly said, is to make our armed forces “more lethal.” One of my graduate assistants in a university
statistics course, a Green Beret, put it this way when asked during a presentation
on probability for artillery targeting why his charts showed overlapping circles:
“because we want to kill them all.” No
matter the specifics of their work, this is what contractors for the Pentagon support.
Let’s take a look at
the issues raised by this entire incident, and see why the letter deserves one
cheer now, and opens the way for another two cheers farther on down the road.
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The letter by the Google
dissidents calls out the disingenuous practice, so prevalent in American public
life and particularly in the maintenance of our empire, of making a moral
distinction between engaging in violent acts and participating in the
infrastructure that enables them. It recounts
how Google tried to placate initial complaints by calling its work “non-offensive”
and saying that it would not be used to “launch weapons.” The employees’ response? That any product for the military “could
easily be used to assist in (its violent) tasks.” The AI improvements, they noted, would
“assist in surveillance – and potentially lethal outcomes…”
We see Google’s dodge,
the claim that providing the infrastructure for violence in not itself
violence, everywhere in our culture:
· In
June 2018 reality TV star Kim Kardashian West talked reality TV president Donald
Trump into pardoning Alice Johnson, who for three years managed operations in
the Memphis area for the Cali drug cartel.
Johnson had served 22 years of a life sentence. Media reports uniformly adopted the language
of Johnson’s supporters: she was a “first-time” offender convicted of the
“non-violent” crimes of laundering money and moving product. The American Civil Liberties Union hailed the
decision because it could pave the way to ending the “senseless punishments” of
tens of thousands of prisoners serving time for “non-violent” drug offenses.
· Also
in 2018 Harriet Clark, the daughter of the get-away driver on a Black
Liberation Army robbery team that murdered two police officers and a Brink’s guard
in 1981, argued that her mother should be paroled because she “did not kill
anyone.”
· In
2013 over a hundred governments signed an Arms Trade Treaty that committed them
not to export particular weapons to a regime if they have “knowledge at the
time” that those weapons “would be used” to attack civilians or commit other
war crimes. But they could export other
weapons to the regime that would enable it to stay in power and continue engaging
in these illegal acts.
· When
trying to win congressional approval of assistance to the rebel “contras” trying
to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980’s, the Reagan
administration gained the necessary votes by agreeing to make the assistance
“non-lethal aid” such as boots, uniforms, and radios, or even “humanitarian
aid” such as food and medicine.
· Similarly,
the Reagan administration argued that cash and food assistance to the
Government of El Salvador was not war-related and so should not be subject to
human rights conditions that Congress had placed on military assistance. El Salvador was using the aid to cover its
entire non-military budget, freeing up its own funds to pay the salaries of its
rapidly-expanding armed forces. It also
integrated the aid directly into its counter-insurgency campaigns in contested
villages.
· In
1965 President Lyndon Johnson was perplexed and angered when the Government of
North Viet Nam rejected his offer to create a Mekong Valley Authority to provide
electricity and raise living standards, as the Tennessee Valley Authority had
in America during the Depression.
Johnson made the offer as the U.S. invasion of Viet Nam raged, and the
enemy was already routinely attacking economic aid projects that were part of
the U.S. counter-insurgency strategy.
· In
2003 American University professors who opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq nonetheless
took a contract during the Pentagon’s armed occupation to help manage Iraq’s
schools. In their perspective, refusing
to assist the occupation would mean that the Iraqi people would be “denied the
assistance they desperately require.”
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What these examples
have in common is that violence is presented as a separate action rather than
as the product of a system of actions.
U.S. law properly makes no distinction between the actions of the
members of a group carrying out a criminal act: they’re all implicated in the
crime. Indeed, prosecutors often treat
the “intellectual authors” of a crime as being more culpable than the
worker-bees. For example, they will
typically reduce a hit-man’s sentence in exchange for testimony implicating the
person who ordered the hit. Nobody
questioned that approach when it was used to convict Charles Manson for the
murder of Sharon Tate and her friends.
In his Inferno, Dante properly
punished crimes that required thought and deviousness in a lower, hence hotter
circle of hell than crimes of passion and pure violence.
· Think
about the Cali Cartel, and how it murdered competitors and how its customers devastated
the Memphis area with robberies to finance their habits during the three years that
Alice Johnson ran marketing operations.
There was nothing non-violent about the gang she was helping, or indeed
about any drug-dealing operation.
· Similarly,
Judy Clark took part in the planning and carrying out of an armed robbery, and so
under felony murder laws of course was held responsible for the three
murders. This was not her first
involvement with the BLA in armed robbery, and when she was arrested she had a
gun under her seat and an ammunition clip in her pocketbook. In contrast to her daughter’s argument, after
many years Clark herself accepted responsibility for the loss of life. Ironically for someone who was part of the
Weatherman bombing campaign in the 1970’s, she has become a trainer for the “Puppies
Behind Bars” that teaches police dogs to detect explosives!
· The
Arms Trade Treaty exempts from its ban weapons that keep dictators in power,
from aircraft and tanks down to machine guns and pistols, as long as their use against
civilians is simply threatened. The
pathetic prohibition only on specific items of weaponry that an exporter
somehow knows in advance will be fired at civilians was all that
survived of a robust initiative in the 1990’s, the Nobel Peace Laureates’ Arms
Trade Code of Conduct. That Code called
for a ban on all arms exports to governments that had not been chosen by
their people in fair and free elections, and so survived on a system of
violence and threat.
· And
as for the use of “non-lethal” means to back up a violent system of control, be
it in Nicaragua, El Savador, Vietnam, or Iraq, this is a distinction without a
difference. The support system for
aggression is part of the aggression, as Nazi civilian bureaucrats, media
figures, and lawyers learned when they were condemned to hang after the
Nuremberg trials.
Mentioning Nuremberg
brings us to the motivation for the Google letter: the natural human, moral
need not to be complicit in something bad.
This is a laudable need, although it is inherently symbolic. Somebody will buy the product you boycott; a dissident
person or company will be replaced by another; divested stock -- be it in
corporations operating in apartheid South Africa (a campaign I vigorously
supported) or producing life-giving fossil fuels (a campaign I vigorously
oppose) -- will be bought by somebody else.
And Science is like Stormy Daniels, beautiful but amoral. Everything discovered about calculus, quantum
physics, nuclear energy, probability, AI, or computer processing ends up being
used in peace and war.
But symbolic campaigns,
from Thoreau going to jail to protest the invasion of Mexico to draft resisters
during the Viet Nam war, have been spurs to policy changes by bringing issues
to a broader audience and putting pressure on leaders. Without courageous people speaking out
against the errors they see around them, we’d never see change. Let’s hope that the Google employees are the first
swell in a coming wave of opposition to collaboration with imperialism.
*
* *
By reminding us that
non-violent acts can support violent ones, the Google dissidents have done a public
service. So one cheer for them. And the other two cheers? One more will come when they move past the
violence being done by the United States with drone attacks, and come to a judgment
about its purpose: winning what the Pentagon calls “the long war” for control
of the Middle East and North Africa.
The primary flaw in the
Google letter is that it too misunderstands the nature of violence. Violence is not necessarily bad. Sometimes it’s needed to achieve something
good. Sometimes John Lennon and
Beatles-killer Yoko Ono’s apolitical song “Give Peace a Chance” just doesn’t
get it done. It took the U.S. Army,
bayonets drawn, to integrate Southern schools and colleges. Nelson Mandela had to turn to terrorism, as
leader of the ANC’s Spear of the Nation, to fight the totalitarian apartheid
government. Even the two most famous
American pacifists of the 20th century, Albert Einstein and Martin
Luther King Jr., supported the military effort to defeat Nazi Germany and
Imperial Japan. If we were facing those
enemies, most of the Google signers would surely want to make their AI work as
effective as possible in finding and bombing targets.
After all, the nuclear
scientists who flocked to Los Alamos to build nuclear weapons to deter German
use didn’t give the morality of their work much thought until Germany
fell. Then the suicidal Japanese resistance
on the outer island of Okinawa, where U.S. casualties were about one in five,
made it obvious that the new weapons would be used to force Japanese surrender before
a similarly costly invasion. The horrific
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in any event a continuation of the
conventional bombing campaign that had killed far more Japanese civilians. They may well have saved Japanese lives, let
alone American, when compared to an invasion.
So the next step for
the Google dissidents, and for all of us opposed to the drone killings that
started in earnest under President Obama and have continued apace under
President Trump, is to make our opposition to the long war clear. If we want to be protected from terrorism, which
is the Pentagon’s justification for the long war, the best way is to leave the
Middle East alone, and let it pick its own governments and sort out its own
issues. To do that, we have to renounce
our right to the oil of the region, which is what has been behind our
interference since the discovery of extractable oil there in the 1930’s.
The final cheer for the
Googlers will be when they see that the long war itself is just the latest in
the over-arching policy of empire that has been at the core of the American
experience:
· seizing
land from East Coast Indian nations in the 17th century, and buying 400,000
slaves seized from Africa to improve the land,
· shaking
off the British constraints that held settlers behind the Appalachian Mountains
in the late 18th century
(also known as the American Revolution),
· seizing
land and power from Mexico and Indian nations across the continent in the
middle of the 19th century,
· moving
across the Pacific in the late 19th century to take Hawaii and the
Philippines,
· ruling
Central and South America in the first half of the 20th century
through “our bastards,” as President Franklin Roosevelt called the regimes we
placed and maintained in power,
· and
finally, replacing the exhausted colonial overlords after World War II as the guarantor
of Western military and economic domination by propping up a new set of
cooperative regimes across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia – a role that
continues today.
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