Louis R wrote:Don,
What's happening here is that people are reacting from the viewpoint of the modern military concept of 'lawful command'. Many forget that this is a very recent invention - it was made up out of whole cloth for the Nuremberg and later trials of Germans defending themselves with the claim of 'just following orders'. And is, IMHO, a valid principle on which the acts of soldiers should be judged. It's also an extremely _fuzzy_ principle in application - the legality of many actions has to be tested in a court of law, which isn't practical when you're on ops. A really nice nasty example is the "Duty of Care" towards minors imposed by many jurisdictions these days, which, taken literally, would make combat operations in the presence of a civilian population impossible. Or not. TTBOMK, it's never been tested, although exiting, probably less stringent, military law protections for civilians have been. In any case, one thing that clearly _would_ be an unlawful command is one relating to the abuse or killing of POWs [one of the 'just obeying orders' situations]; that's what's at the backs of many minds when they say that Thirsk should not have surrendered his prisoners.
It may go to something deeper and more nebulous still, what was behind the indignation that led to Nuremberg: the sense that there are things that are just plain
wrong, whatever the state may claim, demand, or legislate (natural law theory in a nutshell); that authorities that call for them to be done lose their moral claim to loyalty and obedience; and that doing them anyway therefore represents a choice to be complicit in them.
All of which may sound good, but anyone's going to be so, so much more comfortable applying them to other people doing things for other authorities that you don't want them doing - which makes it just a more general case of what you've got in mind, obeying the same pattern.
Turning over entire groups of people to the Inquisition did represent a novel application of Church authority on Safehold, and the concentration camps are a later instance of it. So there's some argument that, at that point, it's a responsibility of rulers and subjects to consider specifically if this is kosher - and if they either skip that consideration or make the wrong judgment, they're liable to pay for it. In the Manthyr case particularly, it's a huge and terrible deviation from the customs of war.
The problem with that position is twofold:
First, does the concept of lawful command even exist on Safehold? Almost certainly not, given what we see in HFQ. OTOH, it is clearly bubbling away beneath the surface, also given what we see in HFQ: people in the AoG deciding that they have been given orders that shouldn't be obeyed and acting accordingly.
Yeah. I think it's going to bubble away in just about any human society without an exclusive tradition of totalitarianism combined with legal positivism. Safehold already has a tradition of sovereignty only more-or-less invested in church or state, and a tradition of law in which, while the Church is an ultimate authority, the bedrock supposition is that it's working in accordance with the Writ which is accessible to everyone. Priests telling you to do something wrong isn't a contradiction in terms for them and hasn't been.
Second, is the order to hand the prisoners to the Inquisition unlawful? On that, I think the situation is very clear indeed: no, it is not. On Safehold, Church law holds pride of place. In fact, I'm pretty sure that there _is_ no national law in the areas addressed in the Writ. The Writ defines not just the legal, but the moral standards by which Thirsk and Dohlar must be judged - and on neither ground do they have a leg to stand on when interfering in the Church's treatment of heretics. That's why they were reduced to pragmatic arguments, and why the fanatics hold those arguments in contempt.
The legal arguments - in terms of positive law, at least - would fail given the terms of jihad. The pragmatic ones, yes, don't make a difference to fanatics. That still leaves natural law or moral arguments as a logical possibility, and I think we can be sure that they're behind some of the people offering pragmatic arguments. But they can't afford to make those arguments because it'd mean condemning the jihad and Inquisition by implication, and you can't do that if you're not prepared (in every sense) to reject their authority.
The Allied position is - has to be - that you
should be prepared to reject the Inquisition's, Mother Church's, authority when it's calling for atrocities.
Taken to a natural conclusion though, it does lead to the legally exceptional claim that people are guilty and due for punishment, in some cases, for actions according to the law as it stood when they committed those actions.
I'm not sure that's avoidable if people want to take natural law claims seriously - I don't see how - but it shouldn't be a comfortable conclusion, putting it mildly.
Anybody saying that Thirsk should not have done what he did is demanding that he apply _their_ standards to the situation, not his own. People do that all the time, of course. It's really difficult to acknowledge that one's own standards may by other than complete and universal. Or, even worse, that you are misunderstanding and misapplying them!
What's really tearing Thirsk up, and a lot of his Navy with him, is the realisation that the Charisians are _not_ in reality heretics, by any objective evaluation of the Writ. That the Church is acting unjustly. And that, to jump to another issue, is why Sarmouth handed them the hot potato. They are now face to face with the application of that same injustice to the provably innocent. [Charis isn't provably innocent: the definition of heresy is, after all, the province of the Church]
Much of what is tearing Thirsk up - and concentration camp guards, too - is the realization that some of his
own standards are violated by service to the Church. It's not just that the enemy isn't really heretics - it's that treating
possible heretics as convicted, definite heretics instead of honorably surrendered enemy combatants or Church law suspects in custody on the Church's say-so is not the sort of behavior they learned in Wednesday school. And misapplying the Book of Schueler makes the Church - and them - the ones who aren't cool with God and the Archangels, at least not the God and the Archangels they would love and respect.
But yeah - the critical thing is just making the point, deadly seriously, that obedience to Zion is a
choice now, and that people will be judged for their violations of the customs of war, for civil and Church law apart from the fast-and-loose stuff spewing from Zion these days, and that just following orders from it will not be accepted by the Safehold states that have adhered to them instead of to the dictates of the Group of Four.
It makes for awkward law, but politically, it puts everyone's finger right on the core issues. Nobody gets to claim they were punished or made to kill after that from a misunderstanding.