Human Shields and Imagined Communities

At what point do we just live?

I’m not sure if it will even make it into American news, but Amnesty International just published a report about Ukraine that’s worth your attention. In the report, entitled “Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians,” Amnesty reports the following:

Between April and July, Amnesty International researchers spent several weeks investigating Russian strikes in the Kharkiv, Donbas and Mykolaiv regions. The organization inspected strike sites; interviewed survivors, witnesses and relatives of victims of attacks; and carried out remote-sensing and weapons analysis. 

Throughout these investigations, researchers found evidence of Ukrainian forces launching strikes from within populated residential areas as well as basing themselves in civilian buildings in 19 towns and villages in the regions. The organization’s Crisis Evidence Lab has analyzed satellite imagery to further corroborate some of these incidents.

Most residential areas where soldiers located themselves were kilometres away from front lines. Viable alternatives were available that would not endanger civilians – such as military bases or densely wooded areas nearby, or other structures further away from residential areas. In the cases it documented, Amnesty International is not aware that the Ukrainian military who located themselves in civilian structures in residential areas asked or assisted civilians to evacuate nearby buildings – a failure to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians.

This practice, that of quartering military units within residential areas, is a common tactic of defensive or guerrilla warfare. Hamas and Hezbollah do the same thing, firing rockets into Israel from heavily-populated residential buildings. Spanish anarchists did it too, using churches, schools, and homes as their bases. So did the Taliban, and the Iraqi resistance, and Syrian rebels (Kurdish and otherwise). Especially in countries occupied by a more powerful foreign military, resistance usually requires operating from non-military buildings.

The problem with this practice is what Amnesty’s report makes quite clear. Using a civilian building or operating out of a heavily-populated residential area endangers non-combatants. However, this is also what makes this practice most desirable to those who use it: the combatants become surrounded by “human shields,” living and breathing civilians that their opponent must attack in order to have a chance of killing their intended target.

There’s a psychological strategy in this use of human shields and civilian buildings. When a school or a hospital gets blown up, the aggressor looks really, really bad. When images and videos of children with missing limbs or old women with charred skin start circulating throughout the world, it gets harder for the military who caused those acts to claim to be reasonable or have a justified grievance.

The propaganda coup won by such events isn’t just external, however. Civilian casualties tend to work very well in the favor of the defending military as well. Every time Israel sends a retaliatory rocket into Palestinian territory and kills innocents, more Palestinians are radicalized to fight Israel. The US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq followed this same pattern, turning the local populace even more against the US each time an innocent kid was killed in an attempt against a resistance leader.

That’s why Ukraine is doing this, though they deny completely the details of the Amnesty report. In fact, the Ukraine branch of Amnesty International tried to stop its publication, and the responses from officials sound like they could equally have come from Hamas or the Taliban:

Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s minister of defence, said “any attempt to question the right of Ukrainians to resist genocide, to protect their families and homes … is a perversion” and presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted that “the only thing that poses a threat to Ukraine is a Russian army of executioners and rapists coming to Ukraine to commit genocide”.¹

In the first two months of the war, I spent a lot of time tracking Ukrainian dissent against the war, and particularly following the odd propaganda struggles in which the exact same video would be labeled as either proof of Russian war crimes or proof of Ukrainian war crimes. This is inevitable, especially with so much social media saturation and virtual participation, and I still have no idea what the truth of any of it is. And then I had to stop, because the whole thing was making me go a bit mad.

The only reason I’m returning to this now is because there is a much larger question I’ve been thinking about for a long time, even more so now that I live in Europe and have completely rejected many of my former “American anarchist” political views.

The question is about sovereignty and false collective consciousness, especially in the modern conception of community as something virtual and chosen, rather than something physical and organic. And it relates directly to this issue through the question of imposed decisions.

The best way to explain the problem for me is to quote from one of my most popular and controversial essays, “What happened to Anarchism? A Critique of American Antifa.”

Two events stand out in my memory that pointed to this shift, both protest marches. One was an event against police brutality, organized by several black community groups and churches. At the beginning, the organizers had made several impassioned pleas to the crowd to stay non-violent, and had specifically singled out Black Bloc as an unwanted presence.

By this point, I no longer engaged in Black Bloc tactics, but was standing near friends I knew intended to mask up once the police arrive. “Fuck that,” I heard one of them say, and the others with her agreed. Then, probably about fifteen minutes into the march they indeed put on their masks and pelted the police with stones, leading to the cops using pepper spray on the unwitting crowd.

Another event, a year or two later, started with even more stern words towards any anarchists in the crowd who intended to be violent. That event was a vigil for a homeless First Nations man killed by a police officer, and the tribal elders who led it made clear that Black Bloc was not only not welcome but would be considered no better than the police who shot their tribesman.

The tactic of escalating violence and baiting the police to attack “non-combatants” is something I witnessed repeatedly. It was something Black Bloc anarchists actually defended as an important strategy, the legacy of Auguste Blanqui’s vanguardism (though few even knew who he was). The idea was that the masses must be shown how violent the police state is before they will rebel against it, and if manipulating the police into becoming violent against the crowd (even by initiating the violence) was the only way to do so, then it must be done.

But…look. If I throw a rock at a riot cop, knowing that cop will then pepper spray a bunch of old women standing around me, can I really say that the cop is fully responsible for the violence? I already knew the cop would do it: I was planning on it. In that case the cop is just one part of a chain of effects which I initiated.

The same goes for the use of human shields and quartering soldiers in hospitals, schools, and residential buildings. Sure, the people making these decisions might tell themselves that they don’t really want Russian cluster bombs to fall on innocent civilians, but they also know that if this does happen, those civilians will get even more angry at Russia and support the Ukraine effort harder.

Well, up to a point. From the Amnesty International report:

The mother of a 50-year-old man killed in a rocket attack on 10 June in a village south of Mykolaiv told Amnesty International: “The military were staying in a house next to our home and my son often took food to the soldiers. I begged him several times to stay away from there because I was afraid for his safety. That afternoon, when the strike happened, my son was in the courtyard of our home and I was in the house. He was killed on the spot. His body was ripped to shreds. Our home was partially destroyed.” Amnesty International researchers found military equipment and uniforms at the house next door….

…Three residents told Amnesty International that before the strike, Ukrainian forces had been using a building across the street from the bombed building, and that two military trucks were parked in front of another house that was damaged when the missile hit. Amnesty International researchers found signs of military presence in and outside the building, including sandbags and black plastic sheeting covering the windows, as well as new US-made trauma first aid equipment.

“We have no say in what the military does, but we pay the price,” a resident whose home was also damaged in the strike told Amnesty International.

Now, and as the report makes clear at the end, Ukraine’s decisions to put civilians in harm’s way doesn’t even slightly absolve Russia from being the actual perpetrator of the violence, anymore than that rock an anarchist lobbed at the riot cop absolves the police from their violence against the crowd.

But at what point does such a situation end? Or, better said, at what point does direct violence against an aggressor no longer become the preferable way of dealing with the aggression?

I guess this question reveals me to be one of those really awful humans called “pacifists,” but so be it. I see one of the most insidious beliefs of the modern world to be the construction of false consciousness and false collectivity, the idea that humans can and should sublimate their particularities in the service to the egregore of a nation or an identity group. In other words, Benedict Anderson’s analysis of the nation as an “imagined community,” imagined as a “deep, horizontal comradeship…that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.”

I cannot remember the source, but I recently read someone describe Zelenksyy, NATO, and the EU all intending to fight Russia “to the very last Ukrainian.” Whether such an analysis is true or not, it points to a question I rarely read anyone asking: at what point is it better to live than to fight for an imagined community?

To fight for an actual community that is being threatened—your family, your friends, your neighbors—seems to be a very human thing. I’d fight to the last breath for my husband, my sisters, my nephews, and my friends, and I think most of you would all say the same thing. But I’ll be honest: I cannot think of a single abstract concept or imagined community worth risking anything for.

That is why putting civilians in harm’s way, why using residences, hospitals, and schools as military bases is a brilliant and horrible tactic. It’s how you might be able to turn a pacifist like me into a raging nationalist hell bent on sacrificing myself and strangers to avenge someone I love.

That is why the military of Ukraine is doing it.

And to take this all out of Ukraine for a moment, it seems to me that this was exactly the point of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. Just like the spoiled little middle class American brat throwing a bottle at the police is meant to trigger a hoped-for aggressive reaction that will turn the crowd against the police, her visit there feels calculated to have turned public opinion against China. I highly expect anti-Asian sentiment in the US to increase, and maybe we’ll soon hear beating of war drums.

But maybe something else will happen, something that might also happen in Ukraine. Maybe people will tire of the violence and turn against the leaders of these imagined communities. To some of my readers, this probably sounds morally reprehensible or an argument in defense of Russia, China, or of Empire in general. I have no love for these things, but we must really ask at what point the altars of the nation-state have been soaked in enough sacrificial blood.

I guess this is the logic of the forest, rather than the city. Staring at the forest outside my window, greatly diminished from its former glory, it’s hard not to remember why there are so few trees left. Most of the great oaks of the Ardennes were felled for the cities and for the building of ships, just as most of Ireland’s forests were destroyed for war. It was the same in France, with the last remaining old growth in Bretagne felled during the first World War.

I think the forest asks a different question that humans don’t know how to ask any longer: at what point do you just live? At what point do all the ideas humans have about what is just and righteous stop and life itself takes over? And when do we finally choose to nurture, shelter, and grow the life around us rather than destroy everything at hand for someone else’s imagining?

I don’t know how to answer that question, either.

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/04/ukraine-civilians-army-bases-amnesty-russia-war