I’ve previously argued that George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire is implicitly a great pacifist work. While rewatching season 2 with my younger son, I re-discovered a scene worthy of a pacifist ovation. While Talisa, the crucial pacifist character, appears only in the show, the following exchange sheds great light on the role of martial negligence in Martin’s fictional universe. For context, Robb Stark is the King in the North, Talisa is a battlefield medic, and they’re surrounded by the bodies of maimed and dead soldiers.
Talisa: That boy lost his foot on your orders.
Robb: They killed my father.
Talisa: That boy did?
Robb: The family he fights for.
Talisa: Do you think he’s friends with King Joffrey? He’s a fisherman’s son that grew up near Lannisport. He probably never held a spear before they shoved one in his hands a few months ago.
Robb: I have no hatred for the lad.
Talisa: That should help his foot grow back.
Robb: You’d have us surrender, end all this bloodshed. I understand. The country would be at peace and life would be just under the righteous hand of good King Joffrey.
Talisa: You’re going to kill Joffrey?
Robb: If the gods give me strength.
Talisa: And then what?
Robb: I don’t know. We’ll go back to Winterfell. I have no desire to sit on the Iron Throne.
Talisa: So who will?
Robb: I don’t know.
Talisa: You’re fighting to overthrow a king, and yet you have no plan for what comes after?
Robb: First we have to win the war.
Notice: Rather than argue that war can never be justified, Talisa shows that Robb is unleashing the horrors of war casually. He has no master plan to bring great good from great evil. Instead, he has a master plan to do great evil, motivated by vague wishes to do great good. Proverbially, however, if you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Is this scene an unfair caricature of the practice of moralized warfare? Hardly. U.S. leaders of both parties barely thought about what would happen after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Muammar Qaddafi in Libya. Roosevelt’s view of Stalin was mind-bogglingly naive. Wilson, a former Princeton professor, wrote his sophomoric 14 Points, then dumped most of them in a failed effort to build a sophomoric “League of Nations.” This is what a morally serious case for just war sounds like, but don’t expect to hear anything like it for as long as you live.
Why do even well-intentioned leaders so carefully plan for war, and so negligently plan for peace? Simple: Despite their self-righteousness, they’re drunk with power. Well-intentioned? Don’t make me laugh. Yes, with great power comes great responsibility… which politicians routinely fail to exercise in reality and Westeros alike.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Z
Jun 18 2019 at 4:05pm
Spoilers ahead:
We might contrast Robb Stark with someone who does have more of a grand plan: Daenerys. And toward the end of the series, she presents a moral case for not only war, but the killing of innocents. I’d be interested in your take on her case. I don’t find her argument remotely compelling in its application, but it does have the allure of being hypothetically plausible. It’s allure was showcased when Matthew Yglesias (imo, rather appallingly) endorsed her mass murder of an entire city. It’s a moral pathology worth discussing if only because it’s apparently shared by some ‘very serious people.’
Mark
Jun 18 2019 at 11:46pm
I felt that the Yglesias article was a bit tongue-in-cheek and done for the purpose of being contrarian, like all the articles about how the Empire is really the good guys in Star Wars.
The major problem in Dany’s argument is revealed where she tells Jon that people who disagree with her don’t get to choose. This is a problem, because humans all have highly motivated cognition, and we are always convinced that we are on the side of good. Humans are also bad at predicting the future, and are prone to make predictions that favor what they wanted to do anyway. Dany is a great example of this, being convinced of her own destiny from the beginning and never questioning it even after finding out that Jon is the legitimate king. She wants to break the wheel, but failed to foresee some of the negative consequences of her actions in various parts of the East. I think strong deontological rules like “don’t kill people except in self-defense” are, overall, a good and necessary check on the human tendency to always think we are in the right and that our actions will have good consequences, even if they cause people to avoid taking good actions in particular instances. When people feel free to ignore such deontological rules with an “ends justify the means” argument, things can quickly turn into a law-of-the-jungle situation.
Mark Z
Jun 19 2019 at 5:16pm
I agree, I think utilitarianism can be tempting and perilous in leaders, and I liked that the show illustrated that she basically used the utilitarian argument that future generations will benefit from the suffering today’s innocence as a cover for what were really her own emotional reasons for wanting to burn the city.
It’s a somewhat ironic turn, since the show has spend much of its course making a mockery out of simple deontologists like most of the Starks, who have suffered, failed, and inadvertently wreaked havoc because of their rigid adherence to their moral code. To see a character positioning herself a ruthless consequentialist – and largely a product of two men who imagined themselves astute masterminds, Tyrion and Varys – may sort of vindicate the simpler, more rigid morality of the Starks. Though I guess maybe not so much, since one of them did blindly follow Daenerys into battle until it was too late.
MarkW
Jun 18 2019 at 6:01pm
I’m with you in the general case — war is declared too casually and unthinkingly. But in the world of Westeros, what were Robb Stark’s choices if not to declare war and attack? Proclaim the independence of the North and await the inevitable attack by the Lannister armies? Swear fealty to the sadistic, psychotic new boy king who’d just murdered his father? Or perhaps abdicate, walk away, and let Joffrey appoint somebody else (Roose Bolton?) as ‘Warden of the North’? Were there other, better, options?
As for having a detailed plan — did U.S. authorities have a detailed plan in December 1941 for what would happen in Germany and Japan after their ultimate defeat? And if — as I suspect — they did not, is that a fatal indictment of the decision of the U.S. to go to war following Pearl Harbor?
Or, to pick perhaps a better analogy (using a small, northern country), was Finland right to try defend itself against the USSR rather than capitulate immediately in the Winter War? What about its subsequent decision to align with Nazi Germany in order to reclaim territory lost to the USSR? And, finally, its decision to fight <i>against</i> the Nazis after signing an armistice with the Soviets? Would it have been better for Finland to have found its own Quisling whose government would have accommodated Soviets and/or Nazi invaders? And if they had, isn’t it likely Finland would have ended up behind the Iron Curtain at the war’s end as its Baltic neighbors (and every other country as far east as Finland) did?
Mark
Jun 18 2019 at 11:35pm
I think a better strategy for Robb would have been to declare independence in the North and defend against the Lannister attack while consolidating his power there. Moat Cailin was considered a very strong defensive position that had never been taken from the South. Many of the problems with the North (including the attacks by the Greyjoys and Boltons) stem from Robb going south to attack the Lannisters instead of defending his own kingdom.
The US and Finland in World War II are examples of self-defense; I don’t think the argument here is that countries that are attacked should immediately surrender. But Robb Stark’s invasion of the South was a war of choice that he started, and had devastating results for him and the North.
MarkW
Jun 19 2019 at 6:51am
“But Robb Stark’s invasion of the South was a war of choice that he started, and had devastating results for him and the North.”
Maybe declaring independence and taking a defensive approach would have been a better strategy, but it would have meant starting a war all the same.
“The US and Finland in World War II are examples of self-defense”
Yes, but the Atlantic and Pacific oceans are vastly bigger barriers to invasion than Moat Cailin. The U.S. could have adopted a defensive strategy following Pearl Harbor which would certainly have succeeded and cost a tiny fraction of American treasure and lives that the actual offensive strategy did. As for Finland, Czechoslovakia was also invaded, but did not resist.
Tyler W
Jun 19 2019 at 9:53am
I think Martin’s strategy for eliminating this option was getting Caitlin, and thus the Tullys, involved in the conflict. The hostilities were really ignited by Caitlin’s kidnap of Tyrion and Tywin’s response was not to attack the North (of which Caitlin claimed her authority), or the Vale (where Tyrion was held), but the Riverlands. Of course the Riverlands would take issue with this, and would side with the Starks anyways due to Caitlin’s role as Lady of Winterfell. The inclusion of the Riverlands forced Robb’s battles south even if he were to take a defensive position, and the Riverlands are tough to defend.
Mark Z
Jun 19 2019 at 5:27pm
I’d echo what Tyler said about the Riverlands’ involvement changing things, and add that Robb wasn’t just a political actor here: one of his key aims was getting his sisters returned, and without invading the south, he’d never obtain any bargaining chips to trade to get them back.
I think Bryan underestimates the conditional case for war, not in the sense that he’s wrong about the unnecessary havoc it causes, but that it’s actually a rational endeavor more often than he admits. Two sides that are risk averse with incomplete information about the other’s intentions can easily end up engaging in seemingly pointless displays of aggression to project strength in order to deter aggression from others. Ideology and irrationality are certainly factors, but I think it is underestimated how much wars – even seemingly pointless one – are really the result of game theoretic problems with agents behaving fairly rationally.
JK Brown
Jun 18 2019 at 8:11pm
One could argue there is even less justification for war in this age of promoting democracy and freedom of people. No plan for after the war can be valid since it depends on simply handing over the “liberated” territory to the same people who now live there. No assurance of liberty or freedom for all or many can be assured in such a situation. On the other hand, the call to “do something”, to “protect the innocent” is loud in Western nations needing only the martial spark to ignite.
As we see below in this speech by Abraham Lincoln, April 18, 1864, no one expected the war to last so long, nor for it to affect the post-war justification. Six hundred thousand soldiers died over differing definitions of the same word. Incidentally, a mass of people had their condition raised to that of free people, then free citizens, initially mostly to negate a negotiated settlement.
Kevin Jackson
Jun 18 2019 at 9:57pm
Why does FDR’s naive view of Stalin support your point? The US didn’t depose Stalin. The US didn’t go to war with Stalin. The diplomatic approach with Stalin, and his successors, has been effectively pacifist.
The better comparison, of course, is Germany and Japan. Which are also the two biggest success stories for a moral way argument.
Mark Z
Jun 19 2019 at 5:32pm
One might argue that the European theater of WW2 was a direct consequence of WW1 and Wilson’s mismanagement of the aftermath, and that, while war may have been justified once it was already on the horizon, it also demonstrates the far reaching costs of the first world war, and what a mistake that one was.
Jeremy N
Jul 10 2019 at 3:43pm
If I could boil down your argument (just trying to simplify without losing your core point but let me know if you disagree with my summary), ‘It is immoral to begin a war without having a well-thought out plan for a better outcome.’
You’re neglecting the possibility that one can be fairly confident that the state of the world can be improved even if you don’t know exactly how to achieve it. There might be many potential improvements, and you can be pretty confident that one of them will prevail even if you don’t know exactly which (in this case, it could be the institution of Stannis Baratheon, who would have a pretty solid claim). You would also need to consider the urgency, the longer you wait, the more likely a very unfortunate outcome would prevail.
I only want to point out that there are situational complexities that can make this decision an optimal choice, even without planning for a specific outcome.
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