On the Ethical Discourse of War: A Critique of the View that “Any Attack on Civilians in War, Regardless of Justification, Is Terrorism:"
Why must we define terrorism primarily in terms of attacks on civilians? This is a fundamental question. Here, the term “civilian” is presupposed as a passive, inert, and de-agentified entity—an “othered” mass stripped of resistance, rather than a spontaneous, subterranean current, a dynamic, centralized, revolutionary subject in the classical sense. These are not the red-flag-waving crowds of the May ‘68 uprising in Paris, but rather what Paolo Virno once described as the speculative “multitude”—a cynical, drifting humanitarian appendage.
It is particularly interesting that we can apply a symptomatic reading (*lecture symptomale*) to detect a repressed desire buried within this proposition—a revolutionary impulse. Everything appears so beautifully utopian on the surface: the idea that war should be governed by strict classical constraints—a naive game exempt from real-world brutality. Yet this idealism reveals a deeply entrenched reactionary structure, reminiscent of Hegel’s dialectical inversion where he mistook civil society (*bürgerliche Gesellschaft*) for the cunning of Absolute Reason (*List der Vernunft*).
“Power does not suppress life, but consolidates itself through the production, regulation, and differentiation of life... thus, power demands that we must defend society.” This insight by Michel Foucault in *Society Must Be Defended* offers us a sharp analytic lens. With it, we can examine this problematique from two angles.
First, the construction, reproduction, and alienation of the group consciousness of the “multitude.” Under post-Fordist domination, general labor is fragmented into mobile, temporary employment relations. The traditional exploitation of labor time is extended into the extraction of human potential itself. Consequently, the multitude is violently extracted from its conscious class identity and exposed as a negative, nomadic subject cast into a vacuum of existential insecurity. At the same time, due to the symbolic colonization of public discourse by the *Urvater* and the excessive redundancy of modernity, the multitude—as exiles of symbolic encoding—develops a collective consciousness grounded in negation, albeit one that is dynamic and internally conflicted. Thus, in a momentary glance from global capitalism, a symbolic subject stripped of subjectivity rises momentarily as an exceptional wave upon the universal ocean. Whether this wave collapses back into the sea or evaporates into the clouds—alienation or potentiality—remains uncertain. Yet the posture of this reproduction is already a concrete embodiment of both.
Second, the transformation of war from pure violent event into a targeted disciplinary apparatus (*dispositif*)—a production factory of subject identities under a regime of truth akin to Auschwitz. We now see the homogenized logic of contemporary warfare: “We attack civilians because civilians might be Hamas!” If a civilian can prove their innocence and disassociation, then we will “humanely” spare them. This logic eerily echoes the “Good Citizen Certificates” issued by Japanese officers in puppet Manchukuo. Strikingly, the discourse of “humanitarianism” now openly admits its own preconditions (though humanitarianism always had them), revealing its duplicitous face. Identity encoding has become the core function of postmodern war. The violence is not a failure of humanitarianism but rather its very expression. The apparatus produces two subject identities: “mob” and “good citizen.” But this division does not exist to protect the “good citizen”—on the contrary, it legitimizes the annihilation of entire collectives. The good citizen is always potentially a mob. And all of this unfolds under the tacit assumption of humanitarianism. This is humanity, as evidenced through the practical experiences of Imperial Japan, Israel, and Nazi Germany. A Kafkaesque irony indeed—“to destroy your subjectivity, and pretend it has nothing to do with you.”
Having analyzed this transformation, we can now offer a preliminary conclusion. Under the apparatus of war’s residual *plus-de-jouir* and the phantom structure of a compulsive subject, the prohibition of humanitarianism is violated in its very presence—like the forbidden fruit in Eden, where the sacred symbol on the fig tree is precisely the source of its desecration. The function of the multitude is equally important; it operates simultaneously on both sides of symbolic subject production, both as the producer and the object of violence. This creates a “quarantine-labeled slaughter line” on the horizon of bare life. The concept of bare life here eliminates both the negation platform of civilian resistance and reinforces the sovereign logic of warfare. As Slavoj Žižek might say, this is the model of the ideological sublime object—it conceals real violence while simultaneously generating a paradoxical system of violence.
This is the open-air panopticon—but the gaze watching us hides behind the veil of “humanitarianism.”
“There must be a moderate solution,” insist the Confucian humanists. “Why not focus on textual nuance in international law, or cry hysterically in the UN assembly?” How predictable. Lu Xun once sketched their essence with chilling precision: “...They no longer boast about themselves, just place all their hope in the League of Nations; now they neither boast nor trust the League, but only pray to gods and lament history…” (*“Have the Chinese Lost Their Self-confidence?”*). Today, they seem to have entered the second stage—just one step away from seeking the shelter of Jehovah himself. We do not harshly condemn them—we pity them, for they have become accomplices to the very forces they claim to oppose.
The fatal flaw in their theories lies in their failure to recognize the most fundamental, most insidious reaction hidden within humanitarianism itself. This reactionary logic extends far beyond postmodern warfare—it pervades every domain of society. It fills every binary unit of cultural meaning—production-consumption, discourse-text, regulation-negation, difference-repetition—with a monotonous, impoverished ideological speech of capitalism. It absorbs all intuitive revolutionary potential into the obscure subcurrents orbiting the edges of signifying chains.
Marx described this reactionary process sharply in the *Communist Manifesto*: “The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation... It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation... it has resolved personal worth into exchange value.”
Inheriting this legacy, we must now deploy these invincible theoretical weapons to pierce the illusion—to unveil the reactionary veil cloaked in the name of “humanitarianism” within the domain of postmodern war.
Fukuyama, with a zealot’s conviction, once proclaimed the end of history under neoliberalism. The potential tensions of the future were restructured into a messianic organ suffering from autoimmune rejection. In this rhetorical enclosure, the very form of postmodern war has undergone a qualitative transformation. Most crucially, the ontological status of “civilian” has been suspended—reduced to a metaphysical abstraction, a homogeneous sacred victim (*Homo Sacer*). Violent discourse, wielding the symbolic Lance of Longinus, tears the essence of revolution—the people—from the flesh of revolutionary posture, constructing a false dichotomy: a revolution severed from its people. Revolution becomes a mechanical void; the people, reduced to disconnected idiots divorced from their life-world.
Now we can observe the reactionary nature of this shift. Biopolitical governance deprives the people of their right to political participation—specifically, their right to engage in ideological warfare. The people become the governed objects of a heavenly sovereign—a quantifiable, outsourced dataset. Both collective operations and subjective dynamism are utterly extinguished. What is revealed is a predictable path: the impossibility of people’s war.
Yet we have always understood that “those above and below united in desire can prevail” (*The Art of War*), and thus, we know even more clearly that revolutionary warfare must never be detached from the people. The Huaihai Campaign could not have succeeded without thousands of peasants pushing carts to deliver supplies. The Pacific War could not have been won without ordinary Americans enlisting in defense of the homeland. The Russia–Ukraine War is not driven by Zelensky’s comprador regime, but by the Ukrainian people’s will to defend their land. The Palestine–Israel conflict is not about the outdated doctrines of Hamas, but about the heroic counteroffensive of the Palestinian people.
This fundamental reaction is, at its core, a repression of the revolutionary impulse of the people—a suppression of the very possibility of revolutionary war. It masquerades as protection for the innocent but in truth shackles the negative potential of the remainder. It appears Kantian in its love for justice, yet is more like the Qing dynasty’s fear of progress. This is “humanitarianism,” and the sympathy it claims to offer.
So, returning to our initial question: why must the attack on civilians be the first criterion for identifying terrorism? The answer is now clear. It is a deliberate obfuscation of the primary contradiction, producing a humanitarian spectacle that halts political momentum. Its ultimate goal is to safeguard capitalist globalization and modernity.
“What is to be done?”—this eternal question rings loudly still. The structure of ideology seems immovable. The Babel tower of capitalist realism appears indestructible. “The revolution is dead, but long live the revolution,” said Marx. What kind of parable is this? I believe it is not a teleological endpoint, but the haunting presence of a ghost—a communist ghost still drifting at the window of the world. It eternally knows where the Achilles' heel of this architecture lies. It forever chants the unfinished summoning of the great Qu Yuan.
It seeks not the wagging submission of *The Story of Wu Xun*, nor the pathetic resignation of *Hai Rui Dismissed from Office*. What, then, is its path? I wish to end with a passage I deeply cherish:
“The truth of Marxism, in all its intricacies, ultimately rests on one phrase: rebellion is justified. On this truth, we rebel, we struggle, we build socialism.”
When this truth truly returns to the self-evidence of the lifeworld, then the desiccated corpse upon the cross will sprout living flesh once more— and on the third day, a resurrection shall come in a blaze of active becoming.