Ukrainian President Zelensky Calls for Support Amid Russian Attacks
Drone Strikes on Bridges Are Not War but Usurpation
When a state turns its engines of war upon civilians’ roads and rivers, it steps outside government, and those it assails are left to the common refuge against naked force.
Video now shows what in my time could only be reported: a drone descending upon the Pivnichnyi bridge in Kyiv as cars move across, a flash, a fireball, a gaping hole left in the roadway. We are told this bridge has been struck on two successive days, and that another, the Pivdennyi, has been hit multiple times in the same week. These are not fortified walls, but the ordinary passages by which a people pursue their trades, visit their families, bring food and medicine to market. Whoever orders such blows does something that must be judged not by its success, but by the rule that measures all political power: for what, and over whom, is this power held in trust?
When I wrote in the Second Treatise that to understand political power we must begin with men in the state of nature, I meant only this: that all are by nature free, equal, and independent, and under a law of nature, which is reason, commanding that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Government is therefore not the natural condition but a remedy, instituted by consent that there may be impartial laws and judges, and a common strength to protect everyone’s property, taken in the wide sense of lives, liberties, and estates. Any act that manifestly destroys these without necessity, and without the people’s own authorization, is not the exercise of that remedy, but a relapse into the mischief it was meant to cure.
Here we see, by the accounts given, Russia launching more than a hundred and thirty-five drones in a single night, some striking bridges, another a warehouse in Sumy, with at least one person killed and others injured. I do not pretend to know every disposition of their forces or every plea they may make in their own justification; I note only what appears plainly: that these bridges are civil instruments, and that cars were upon them when struck. To break such arteries is to threaten not an armed camp but the daily subsistence and movement of a people. One must then ask: how can this be reconciled with any claim to be protecting their lives, their freedom of passage, their estates?
Power, I have argued, always bears the burden of proof; liberty needs no permission. If Russia claims some authority over these territories or these persons, that claim cannot rest upon its own assertion, for that would make it judge in its own case. It must show either the actual consent of those now subject, or a clear necessity for their defence, such that temporary hardship is plainly ordered to their safety. Yet the people on the bridge did not assemble to invade Russia; they were travelling in their own city. The strike left, we are told, a gaping hole in a traffic lane; it did not repel an aggression, but created a new one. This is not the rule of a legislative acting for the public good. It is force.
In such a case, those who are attacked do not, by resisting, rebel against government. As I argued concerning the dissolution of government, it is rather the rulers who first rebel against the people, when they invade their property or set up arbitrary power; those on whom they so break faith are then left at liberty to appeal to that common Judge who sees the hearts of men, and, in the meantime, to defend themselves with all the means that prudence and necessity allow. The Ukrainian people, if these reports are true, are not bound to sit still while their bridges and warehouses are made targets. Their right to resist is not a concession from their assailant, but a residue of their natural freedom that no compact can be supposed to have surrendered.
I observe also that the German chancellor has visited Kyiv and agreed, with Ukraine’s president, to a substantial aid package, and that he has said their support arises partly from their own interest, for if Russia is not stopped its war machine will sooner or later turn against them. Here, two points are worth noting. First, a community of free states may, without injustice, assist one another in the defence of life, liberty, and property against a manifest aggression, provided they keep to the bounds of that end. Secondly, it is no objection that they act also from prudence for themselves: the law of nature allows each man, and each people, to take care of his own preservation, so long as he does not thereby destroy another’s innocently.
Some will say that such strikes are part of war, and that war knows no tenderness for bridges. But war, rightly so called, arises when one, having authority by consent, uses force to protect his people against another who has already begun a course of violence. A long train of abuses may then be laid at the aggressor’s door: here, repeated drone attacks on the same bridges, numerous drones launched, civilian structures hit. If this train continues in the same direction, not towards peace by a just accommodation, but towards the subjection of a people by fear and ruin, then what is advanced under the name of war is in truth the project of tyranny. And against such a project, all the world has an interest that there be, once more, enough, and as good, room on this earth for free men to go about their business unafraid.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The state of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.
- Second Treatise of Government — The dissolution of government and the right of resistance: when legislators invade property or set up arbitrary power, they rebel against the people, not the people against them.