The Myth of Collateral Damage

I’m Reagan Cobb, and this is The Myth of Collateral Damage

For decades, the United States has treated civilian deaths in war as necessary casualties in service of the greater good. These deaths have become inseparable from the practices and strategies of modern warfare. This can be explained by the theory of necropolitics, which one of the articles that will be discussed defines as the creation of social conditions “in which living people cease to be part of the normative social world,” defining certain groups as an excess that can be killed indiscriminately.¹

Modern warfare has been documented and discussed by feminists, which is why this podcast seeks to use their analysis to understand our present situation. One theory that has emerged out of these discussions is reproductive justice, a framework that has four core tenets. Loretta Ross, one of the creators of the framework, describes these tenets as the right to bodily autonomy, the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to parent your children in safe environments. The practices of modern warfare violate a core tenet of reproductive justice, this tenet being the right to have children and raise them in a safe environment.

The United States has a history of “defending” its citizens by using tactics that result in the mass murder of the civilians of its enemies. A draft from 1961 titled “A Housewife Looks at International Affairs” by Jessie Lloyd O’Connor details her thoughts on this phenomenon in the context of nuclear armament in the wake of the second World War. She points out that if a man cannot “take a live baby to his own kitchen and roast it to death,” then a man should not promote or carry out the strategies of modern warfare.²

This act of violent murder, of creating a warzone out of what should be a home, should be an unthinkable act. And yet, it is instead deemed a necessary act of war, especially as technologies have developed to become increasingly deadly since the sixties. This is especially relevant when nuclear warfare means that the US government would be incinerating “whole cities full of men, women, and children,” or committing millions of these unthinkable acts all at once.³ It’s necessary to ask why it is different when this violence is being carried out on strangers abroad rather than American citizens. It’s also necessary to ask why the government would be building these weapons that “they say they don’t ever want to use,” and why this might be a lie.⁴

Mary Metlay Kaufman discusses the connection between this rhetoric and industrialism in her examination of the Vietnam war, tracing more recent issues back to the Nuremberg Trials where the US acquitted those “primarily responsible for the war, the industrialists and munitions-makers.”⁵ At the end of the war, while leaders of the Communist Party were being prosecuted and indicted under the Smith Act, a corporation’s promotion of the Nazi war aims were “justified as the acts of patriotic and loyal citizens.”⁶

Industrialists and militarists are deeply involved in modern day wars through the production and distribution of weaponry that’s repeatedly proven to be very profitable. Exempting these practices from moral judgement allows profit to be sought without restriction or consequence, creating the opportunity for an incredible amount of harm to be done. In another publication, she examines the “deadly parallel” between Hitler’s strategy of seeking sponsors in industrialists and the contribution of corporations to Ronald Reagan’s campaign.⁷

The use of a “big lie, such as a claim of Communist ‘menace’…to destroy the democratic regimes” also has a history that goes back to the Nazi promotion of German rearmament and militarism.⁸ Politics and war have never remained separate or even distant due to the momentum and profit [wars] provide to politicians and their campaigns.

This insight into feminist theories and writings provides a foundation that can be used to understand the United States’ conduct in war and international relations in the current day. Neoliberalism is a relatively modern economic philosophy that was developed in the 1930s that marketizes “all aspects of human activity,” and has become increasingly prominent in recent years.⁹ In “From biopower to necroeconomies,” Fatmir Haskaj describes the creation of a “necroeconomy” that commodifies death and killing itself as a source of profit through the creation of “sacrificial lambs for the market” that neoliberalism allows.¹⁰¹¹

This is a result of market capitalism that manufactures “scarcity and exclusion that uses the power of the state as violence to create and maintain life-threatening poverty.”¹² Those that are then impoverished are deemed an expendable excess that can be turned into profit through their death. Thus, necroeconomics is “the deliberate targeting of populations…[as] a productive activity,” whether that’s through war, genocide, or other means.¹³

Wars in the modern age are then purportedly “waged on behalf of the existence of everyone, in the name of life necessity” in an attempt to provide validity to these massacres that governments allow and encourage.¹⁴ So, not only is war beneficial to politicians and their campaigns, but it is also profitable for corporations and governments in the context of a self-cannibalizing economy that uses the death of its own citizens as a source of profit. 

This idea can be further examined through current events, namely the genocide occurring in Palestine. Reproductive justice activists have weighed in on the situation, including Sharmila Rudrappa, who published an article titled “No Reproductive Justice with no Ceasefire in Palestine.” She points out that there can be no reproductive justice “that does not consider Gazan suffering,” as settler colonialism shapes “reproductive outcomes for women, and the infants they bear and raise.”¹⁵ The ongoing genocide creates a deadly situation for both mothers and children, both through the ever-present violence as well as the barriers to adequate and accessible healthcare it creates. 

The popular rhetoric from US and Israeli leaders is that these citizen deaths represent collateral, accidental damage, as they are going after Hamas rather than Palestinians. And yet, an article published by Reuters states that “the Palestinian death toll from the war has exceed 37,000” as the weapons that are being used are nothing close to single-target missiles.¹⁶ In fact, the US has reportedly sent “more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs and thousands of Hellfire missiles” since the start of the war in Gaza.¹⁷

Rudrappa challenges this notion, arguing that these “accidental” deaths are instead a “central tactic in military action” that legitimizes the mass killing of civilians.¹⁸ This level of civilian death is “barbarism in any age,” O’Connor reminds us, but somehow it is acceptable in war, and specifically war in the global south.¹⁹

Feminist activists have been involved in anti-war and weapon demonstration and writing for centuries, providing a basis of analysis with which current and past events can be understood, including the development of modern warfare. This development has meant an increasing amount of civilian death and widespread destruction accompanied by systems and arguments that attempt to justify it. This is especially evident within the US and the series of conflicts it has involved itself in since the onset of World War Two. 

Under a neoliberal, and now “necroeconomic” system, the lives of those in the global south are deemed an expendable excess in order to turn a profit. This is in direct violation of the tenet of reproductive justice that affirms the right to life and a safe environment in which to live, as modern warfare seeks to kill and create instability for the benefit of politicians and businessmen. We are seeing these ideas and theories play out in real time in Gaza against Palestinians as reproductive justice activists respond both in publications and protests. 

A Housewife Looks at International Affairs, 1961, Box 85, Folder 15, Jessie Lloyd O’Connell Papers, Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College Special Collections.

Event: Bella Abzug’s Inauguration, 1971, Print D 101, 9.5” x 7.5”, Dorothy Marder Peace Exhibit, Swathrmore, Pennsylvania, https://www1.swarthmore.edu/library/peace/Exhibits/Dorothy%20Marder/MarderExhibit1A_files/MarderExhibit1A.html

Haskaj, Fatmir. “From Biopower to Necroeconomies: Neoliberalism, Biopower, and Death Economies.” Sage Publications 44(10) (2018): 1148–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453718772596.

Kaufman, Mary Metlay. Papers. Sophia Smith Collection of Women’s History, Smith College Special Collections.

Pamuk, Humeyra, and Mike Stone. “Exclusive: US Has Sent Israel Thousands of 2,000-Pound Bombs since Oct. 7.” Reuters, June 29, 2024. https://www.reuters.com/world/us-has-sent-israel-thousands-2000-pound-bombs-since-oct-7-2024-06-28/.

Rudrappa, Sharmila. “No Reproductive Justice with no Ceasefire in Palestine.” Sage Publications 502(6) (2024): 1025–32. https://doi.org/10/107.711/0787/9068926902502542142126622058.

McIntosh, Janet. “‘Because It’s Easier to Kill That Way’: Dehumanizing Epithets, Militarized Subjectivity, and American Necropolitics.” Language in Society 50 (2021): 583–603. https://doi.org/10.1017=S0047404521000324.