X

Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

Product ID : 46731785


Galleon Product ID 46731785
Model
Manufacturer
Shipping Dimension Unknown Dimensions
I think this is wrong?
-
No price yet.
Price not yet available.

Pay with

About Humane: How The United States Abandoned Peace And

Product Description A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humaneIn the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. It hardly matters who’s president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. The United States exercises dominion everywhere.In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical―to ban torture and limit civilian casualties―have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed―and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences.The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. By that time, the US military had embraced the agenda of humane war, driven both by the availability of precision weaponry and the need to protect its image. The battle shifted from the streets to the courtroom, where the tactics of the war on terror were litigated but its foundational assumptions went without serious challenge. These trends only accelerated during the Obama and Trump presidencies. Even as the two administrations spoke of American power and morality in radically different tones, they ushered in the second decade of the “forever” war.Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all. Review "[Moyn] takes the reader on an excruciating journey, in incisive, meticulous and elegant prose, about the modern history of making war more legal, and in effect sanitizing it so that it can continue forever . . . [He] puts the whole issue in a tough, pragmatic perspective . . . The yearning to avoid war and yet make it more humane will . . . continue, rendering Moyn’s book timeless." ―Robert D. Kaplan, The New York Times Book Review"Smart and provocative . . . Arriving 20 years after 9/11, as the United States has withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan, Humane encourages readers to ask central questions too often lost amid the chatter of the foreign policy establishment." ―Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times"Moyn offers a sorely needed history of how war has become palatable . . . The brilliance of Moyn’s [book] is in how [it] wrest[s] control of the dominant narratives that have gripped the public imagination in the post-9/11 years, and in particular, the country after Trump." ―Rozina Ali, American Prospect"An important book . . . [Humane] points out that Americans have made a moral choice to prioritize humane war, not a peaceful globe." ―Dennis C. Jett, The Washington Post"[Humane] is an important extension of themes [Moyn] has been developing since his critical account of 'human rights' in 2010’s The Last Utopia . . . One of Moyn’s greatest gifts as a scholar and a writer is his capacity to combine a carefully crafted historical narrative with both an analysis of political and legal discourse and a righteous anger at the abuses this discourse enables." ―Jeanne Morefield, Jacobin"Beyond being a meditation on the meaning of war, it is a history of the tension between pacifism