“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too
fond of it.” - Robert E. Lee
Suppose that you were addressing an academic symposium on
the subject of the ethics of war and you opened with the above quotation. Further suppose that immediately after doing
so you invited your audience for their thoughts on these famous words.
In all likelihood what you would get, would not be
insightful reflection upon what the Confederate general-in-chief had actually
said, either in agreement or disagreement, but a round of vitriolic
denunciation of the man who said it. It would begin with the small handful in the
room who were informed enough to recognize who Robert E. Lee was, but would
quickly spread to the rest as everyone present, whether they be faculty,
administration, student or alumnus, began to compete with everyone else to
demonstrate their woke, anti-racist, bona fides by being the loudest to express their opinion about just what a horrible person you had just quoted. You would be told that you should not have
quoted him, because he led the South which fought for slavery which was racist
and that therefore he must be condemned and cancelled.
Should you be so suicidal as to attempt to correct the mob
you had incited, by informing them that their knowledge was woefully inadequate
and that the real story of man they were subjecting to a “Two-Minute Hate” was
far more nuanced and interesting than they thought, explaining how he was the
career military officer to whom Abraham Lincoln had offered command of the
Union forces at the onset of the American republic’s great internecine
bloodbath, but who turned it down and resigned rather than raise his sword
against his own home state, to which he then offered his services, consequently
becoming the strategist who delayed the defeat of the Southern states’ attempt
to break away from the American union for complex reasons of which slavery was
only one for longer than would have been possible under any other general and
you yourself will be condemned as a racist, bigot, white supremacist and all
sorts of other nasty names that have long ago been detached from any essential
relationship with their lexical meaning and turned into verbal weapons.
Now, it may have occurred to you that in the preceding
paragraphs I have myself done one of the things I have been mocking the
academic woke for doing, that is, sidetracked what was supposed to be a
discussion of the ethics of war, the topic of both your academic presentation
in the above hypothetical scenario and of this essay, by going on about
something else entirely. The
similarity is superficial, I assure you, and, oddly enough, you will find that
the scenario is actually more relevant to our topic than the quotation itself.
Indeed, as far as the words themselves go, General Lee’s
remark does not contribute much to the discussion of the ethics of war. The first clause can be taken as support for
the assertion that war is an evil.
This, however, is neither a controversial assertion nor an ethical
one. It would be the latter if the
indefinite article had been omitted before “evil”, but “an evil” is not the
same thing as “evil”. Evil, sans
article, can be used as either an adjective or a noun. If used as the former it expresses an
ethical judgement on that to which the adjective applied. If used as the latter, it expresses the idea
of that which is the opposite of goodness, or, in terms more acceptable to
orthodox Christianity, the defect that occurs when the goodness of creation is
damaged. When used with the indefinite
article, however, it does not necessarily have these moral and metaphysical
connotations but means merely something that is undesirable to those who
experience it and its consequences.
Earthquakes, floods, fires, etc., are all “evils” in this sense. In this sense, saying that war is an evil is
stating the obvious.
For the purposes of this essay the most important thing
about the general’s saying is when he said it.
I don’t mean that the date – the thirteenth of December, 1862 – or the
occasion – the Battle of Fredericksburg – are particularly significant, just
the war.
Was the War between the American States the last pre-modern
war or the first modern war?
If you ask historians that question you will find that they
are divided on the answer. If it is not
obvious enough already, note that “modern” here is the designation of a kind of
warfare not of the age in which a war took place. 1861-1865 was far closer to the end of the
Modern Age than the beginning and so it would be absurd to even ask the
question with the chronological sense of the term in mind. The case for the war being the first modern
war rests upon it having been fought with more technologically complex arms and
means of communication and transportation than previous wars. The case against it rests upon the even
greater gap in technological complexity that exists between this war and the
earliest wars of the twentieth century – World War I saw the first use of
armoured motorized land vehicles, i.e., tanks, the Italo-Turkish War which
preceded World War I by three years was the first war to employ airplanes, etc.
Regardless of the answer to the question, it is apparent
that General Lee’s words were stated during a war that was transitional between
the old kind of horses and swords warfare that had been a part of human life
since ancient times and the high tech warfare of the twentieth and twenty first
centuries. Now think about what that
means with regards to the quotation.
If General Lee was right to say “war is so terrible” in 1862, how much
more true is this in the world of 2022 in which devices that can kill thousands
of people at once can be dropped for airborne vehicles or shot from launchers a
continent away?
Twentieth century technological development by making war so
much more of an evil than ever before made the ethics of war more necessary
than before. Ethics is serious thought
and discussion about human acts and habitual behaviour considered with regards
to their rightness and wrongness. Every
aspect of war has been examined over the course of the long historical ethical
discussion of war but it has long been apparent that the chief questions to be
considered are two, the question of rightness as it pertains to going to war
and the question of rightness as it pertains to conducting warfare. These are the questions expressed in Latin
by the phrases jus ad bellum and jus in bello respectively. Perversely, at the same time that the
development of weapons of mass destruction, rapid delivery systems, and
everything that makes it now possible to wipe out entire populations from
across the world with the push of a button made the ethics restraining and
limiting war more important, these ethics were being subverted.
Essentially the complex ethical questions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello have been displaced by an over simplistic question of
good and evil. Not the metaphysical and
theological question of good and evil. It
is an ontological question – an
ontological question, not the ontological
question of good and evil, although those asking it demonstrate by doing so
that they have much in common with an ancient sect that answered the latter in
a way that would be considered heretical by the standards of orthodox
Christianity. It is the question of who
the good guys and who the bad guys are.
Or, more precisely, just the question of who the bad guys are because
the sort of people who ask this question always assume that they themselves are
the good guys. Again, the way this
question is asked it is a matter of ontology rather than ethics. The good guys are not judged to be the good
guys because of the rightness of the actions, the bad guys are not judged to be
the bad guys because of the wrongness of their actions. The good guys are the good guys because that
is who they are. The bad guys are the
bad guys because that is who they are.
Identify the good guys and the bad guys and you don’t have to trouble
yourself with the question of whether you are justified in going to war with
X. Of course you are. You are the good guy, X is the bad guy,
therefore you are always right to go to war with X, just as he is always wrong
to go to war with you or anyone else. Similarly,
you need not be bothered with the question of how you are to rightly conduct
war with X. Since he is the bad guy,
you as the good guy, are justified in taking whatever means are necessary to
destroy him, whereas everything he does is by definition a war crime.
The sort of thinking described in the above paragraph has been
prominently on display in the rhetoric of war promoters in every conflict that
Western governments have been involved in since the end of the Cold War. Think about the terms in which Saddam
Hussein was discussed in 1991 and again in 2003. Or Slobodon Milošević from 1993 to
1999. Or the Taliban in 2001. Or Vladimir Putin for the last twenty years but
especially at the present moment. It
was never enough to say that we had such and such a grievance against these and
were prepared to go to war to obtain redress of that grievance. In each case the foe was depicted as an
avatar – avatar in the Hindu sense of the word, i.e., a manifestation of a
divine being rather than the gaming sense of a picture accompanying a profile –
of evil. Only so could we justify to
ourselves doing everything in our power to destroy them. The same sort of thinking was evident in the
rhetoric of both sides during the Cold War.
Before that the Allies engaged in this sort of thinking in World War II,
at least after the Americans joined.
World War II seems to be where it all began. Germany at the time was under the control of a
man who was undoubtedly evil in the adjectival sense of the word described in
the fifth paragraph of this essay. This made it easier for our leaders to paint
him as the avatar, the embodiment, the incarnation of evil, even though one of
the Big Three, Joseph Stalin was just as evil and the same kind of evil as
Hitler. The fact that this depiction of
our wartime nemesis persists to this day, almost eighty years after his defeat,
itself shows that a major change in thinking had taken place from one World War
to the next. Sure, there had been plenty of propagandistic
atrocity stories told about the Germans in World War I but people knew better
then than to take these as Gospel truth and most of them were debunked soon
after the war ended. By contrast, to
this day questioning elements of the accounts of what went on in
German-occupied Poland during World War II can land one with a hefty gaol
sentence in Europe and potentially destroy one’s career, reputation, and life
in general in North America. The
contrast is that much stronger when we take into consideration the facts that
it was the Soviets who drove the Nazis out of Poland, Poland remained a Soviet
puppet state until late in the 1980s, until then we had to rely to a large
extent upon the Soviets or Soviet-controlled sources for much of our information
about what had happened in Poland, that the Soviets were never known for their
trustworthiness and that the Cold War which began almost immediately after
World War II ended hardly provided them with an incentive to be more truthful. Even more to the point, however, was the
fact that after the Casablanca Conference in 1943 the American president at the
time, who was even more crippled morally and intellectually than he was
physically, announced that the Allies would be seeking “unconditional
surrender”. From a strategic point of
view this was a particularly idiotic thing to do as Sir Winston Churchill, whom
FDR had not consulted before making this announcement and was forced to go
along with it or present the world with the image of a divided alliance, knew
full well, because it sent the message to the enemy that he must dig in and fight
to the very last because he can expect nothing in the way of mercy if he loses. From the ethical point of view that concerns
us here, it is the sort of demand that one would only make if he saw him and
his enemy as fighting not a traditional war but a cosmic and apocalyptic one
between good and evil, which is precisely how that maniac with a Messiah
complex saw it. How Sir Winston was
able to stomach being forced to cooperate with this man and Stalin for so long
is one of the great mysteries of the Second World War.
In one last detail of the Second World War we find the
technological transformation of warfare itself into an evil of exponentially
greater magnitude and the subversion of the traditional ethics of war by the
Hollywood formula of good guys versus bad guys coinciding into one. By the end of the war the Americans had
found a way to harness the power of the atom to develop bombs with destructive
power that had to be measured in kilotons each of which is the equivalent of a
thousand tons of TNT. Then they used
two of them, one on Hiroshima, Japan and the other on Nagasaki, Japan, in
August of 1945. The death toll, almost
entirely civilian, was somewhere between one and three hundred thousand. To date this is the only time nuclear weapons
have been used in war. While some
continue to repeat the claim that the death toll would have been higher had
they not been used, this is utter nonsense.
After the defeat of Germany Japan began reaching out to General Douglas
MacArthur, the commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific Theatre, indicating
their willingness to surrender and asking no concessions other than the ones
they were eventually granted. Had
Roosevelt’s successor Truman followed the advice given him by former American
president Herbert Hoover – drop “unconditional surrender”, promise that Emperor
Hirohito could keep his throne and would not be dragged before the kind of
Soviet-style kangaroo court that the Allies had in mind for the German leaders
(see the eighth and final profile in John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson’s Profiles in Courage, 1956, for an
account of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft’s brave and lonely opposition to the
Nuremberg Trials on the grounds that they abandoned the principles of justice
long accepted in the English speaking world, even the United States, for those
of the Soviet regime) they could have negotiated peace without becoming the
only country to have ever committed the barbarous act of dropping nuclear bombs
on cities (see Freedom Betrayed by
Herbert Hoover, edited by George H. Nash and published in 2011, long after
Hoover’s death).
Could this ugly episode have taken place had the development
of weapons that could wipe out entire civilian populations not occurred at
precisely the moment that those who had developed these weapons had thrown out
traditional thinking on the ethics of war and adopted the insane notion,
evident in their “unconditional surrender” policy, that because they were the
“good guys” they could do whatever they wanted to the “bad guys”?
Indeed, it is possible that the development of these weapons
is itself the explanation of the abandonment of serious thought about the
ethics of war for such a shallow, clownish, Hollywood substitute. Discussion of the weaponizing of atomic
energy had begun before the Manhattan Project or, for that matter, World War II
itself and was perhaps the inevitable consequence of atomic research. It might be worth noting, in this context,
the famous 1869 conversation between Marcellin Berthelot, Claude Bernard, and
the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, that the latter recorded in their Journal, in which it was predicted that
a century of research in physical and chemical science would bring man to a
knowledge of the atom at which point God would come down from heaven, swinging
His big set of keys, and telling mankind it is “closing time”. Modern science had placed mankind on a course
that led to the development of weapons of such destructive potential that could
not possibly be used in accordance with traditional concepts of justice in
war. Therefore those intent on using them
had to replace the latter with something else.
Think about how the World War II paradigm has been applied
to all subsequent conflicts. Adolf
Hitler continues to be described in terms similar to those that in traditional
Christian eschatology are applied to the Antichrist. In traditional Christian eschatology,
however, the Antichrist, singular, is the final antichrist and the final
tyrant, the most evil man to ever walk the face of the earth, a man so fully
possessed by the devil that he is basically the incarnation of Satan. In traditional Christian eschatology there
is only one Antichrist, capital A. His
defeat marks the end of history and the Second Coming of Christ. The point is that if Hitler, evil as he was,
was so bad as to warrant this kind of description not only in the propaganda of
the day but long after he was gone he would be a historical anomaly. Yet every foe we have fought since him has
been depicted as the “new Hitler”.
Could this be explained by the fact that the genie of nuclear weaponry
cannot be put back into its bottle and so this sort of rhetoric has constantly
been repeated just in case a “justification” for using it is needed?
Today, the Hollywood paradigm of these are the “good guys”,
these are the “bad guys”, whatever the former do is right, whatever the latter
do is wrong, has been projected even onto conflicts of the past which predated
it. Think about the predictable
response of the academic woke to the quotation from Robert E. Lee discussed at
the beginning of this essay. The woke
look at the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865 as a war between the
“good” North and the “bad” South, basing this entirely upon what they think
they know about the aspect of the conflict that pertained to slavery and race. This was certainly not how the war was
viewed at the time, even by the most self-righteous of abolitionists on the
Union side. Nor is this how the
conflict was viewed in the period of the generation or so after in which one of
the most admirable acts of reconciling a deep societal divide took place as all
Americans came to a tacit agreement to honour the heroes of both sides of that
war. That the woke who spend so much of
their time in fomenting division between people of different skin colours and
ethnic backgrounds see nothing but “racism” and “white supremacy” in such a
healing compromise speaks volumes about themselves.
How contrary the Hollywood paradigm is to the attitude of
the ancients! Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, composed in the eight century BC,
is primarily the story of a falling out that occurred between Agamemnon and
Achilles towards the end of the Trojan War.
The Trojan War was the ten year siege of Troy, the capital of the
kingdom of Ilium in what is now Turkey, by the Mycenean Greek alliance, that
resulted in the total destruction of the city.
Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was the leader of the Greek side, and
Achilles, prince of the Myrmidons, was its greatest hero. The Ionian poet Homer was himself Greek. Homer’s poetry was instrumental in shaping
the idea of a “Greek” identity that transcended that of the Athenian, Spartan,
Cretan, or any of the countless other political identities of the autonomous
city-states of which Greece then and for centuries after consisted. The individual that he most consistently
depicts as admirable in his Iliad,
however, was not a Greek at all but a Trojan, Hector, the son of Troy’s king
Priam, and brother of the far less commendable Paris whose behaviour started
the conflict in the first place. Hector
is depicted as the model whom every would-be hero should aspire to
emulate. By contrast Achilles, the
protagonist of the story, sits out half of it in a sulky fit then, when he
re-enters the battle in a fit of rage over the death of Patrocles, proceeds to
desecrate the body of the fallen Hector in a way that brings him a swift rebuke
from the gods. Homer shows him at his
best at the very end of the story when he shows clemency to Priam, allows the
Trojan king to reclaim the body of his son, and promises to hold back the
Greeks until the Trojans have had the time to conduct a proper burial. Herodotus of Halicarnassus, a fifth century
BC Greek who was born and raised in the Persian Empire and became the “Father
of History” by writing the account of the wars between the Greeks and the
Persians saw no need to demonize the kings of Persia in his history. Thucydides, who wrote the history of the
Peloponnesian War fought between Athens and Sparta later in that same century,
a war in which he had been an Athenian general, was more sympathetic to Sparta
than his own city. So was Xenophon, the
friend and disciple of Socrates – the only one of these other than Plato whose
accounts of their master remain extant – best remembered for his account of his
mercenary service under Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, who picked up the
history where Thucydides left off. The
Romans were far less generous to their enemies than the Greeks were but they
did not demonize them the way the Hollywood-fed West now does. The greatest enemy that ancient Rome faced
in her long rise to empire was Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who from his
base in Carthagian-controlled Hispania, marched his massive army of infantry,
cavalry, and battle elephants – the pre-modern version of tanks – north to the Rhône
valley, before moving south through the Alps to invade Italy where he defeated
Rome and her allies in a series of battles taking much of Italy, although
ultimately failing to take Rome herself.
Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian general Rome
had defeated in the first of the Punic Wars.
When Hannibal was nine Hamilcar Barca took him to the temple of Moloch
and holding him over the fire made him swear eternal hatred and enmity to
Rome. Yet even he is not depicted by
Livy or Polybius in the sort of terms with which we speak of Hitler but was
rather spoken of respectfully as a worthy, if mercifully defeated, foe.
Some might point to the Old Testament as a counterexample to
the above. While it is true that the
Old Testament repeatedly speaks of military defeat as punishment for wickedness
this wickedness is understood in terms of the actions of those so punished not
the fundamental nature of their being.
This can be seen in the fact that far more often than not it is God’s
own people who are on the receiving end of this punishment. In their initial conquest of the Promised
Land, it is true, they are commanded to utterly destroy the seven nations of
Canaan and to show no mercy in doing so and this is explicitly tied to specific
sins of those nations. Pretty much
everyone else in the region was guilty of these same sins, however, and there
was no license given to Old Testament Israel to conquer all of these and
similarly wipe them out. It was not
merely a matter of punishing sin. God
did not want His own covenant people to be led away into idolatry, child-sacrifice,
and the other abominations of Canaan.
They, of course, failed to follow His instructions and very quickly fell
into just these sins leading to the cycle that repeated itself over and over
through their history – they fall into idolatry, etc., God raises up a scourge
to punish them by military conquest, they repent, God sends them a deliverer,
repeat, with the whole process intensifying until the Assyrians and Babylonians
not only conquer the Northern and Southern kingdoms respectively, but carry
them away out of the land as well.
There is nothing in this that would support God’s people holding the
view that the world is divided into “good guys” and “bad guys” with they
themselves as God’s people being the “good guys” and everyone else, the nations
that they conquered and the nations that conquered them, being the “bad guys”.
When we look at the long ethical discussion of justice as it
relates to war from its beginnings in the ancient times just considered through
medieval Christian theology right up to the early twentieth century it is
apparent that the goal of those engaged in this discussion and hence the
purpose of the discussion itself has been to place limits on war so as to
minimize the death and destruction it causes.
It is equally apparent that substituting puerile “good guys” versus “bad
guys” talk for this discussion has as its purpose the opposite end – that of
the removal of such limits as impediments to the use of the new technology of
war that makes it easier to wreak more destruction and death from further away.
It is difficult to think of anything that more completely
puts the lie to the Modern doctrine of progress than this. What we call “advancement” and “progress” in
the technology of war all consists of making war more lethal and destructive
while removing those who wreak this death and destruction further from it. When wars were fought with swords you had to
kill your enemy from within the reach of his own sword. The fighting therefore was much more fair in
the pre-woke sense of the word and the virtues traditionally associated with
warfare, most especially courage and strength, were indispensable. Fighting in such a war was a way to test and
prove these virtues in oneself and this is probably what inspired the second
part of General Lee’s quotation, the part about us growing too fond of
war. If the terribleness of war from
the first part of the quotation means that war is an evil, its value in testing
courage, strength, and what used to be called manliness before toxic femininity
outlawed that concept which drew so many to it meant that it was not an unmixed
evil. When guns were introduced men
could kill their enemies from a distance.
There was still a testing of skill – who had the better aim, who could
shoot faster – and courage involved. It
was a step that increased the distance between the soldier and the death he
wreaked but two soldiers aiming rifles at each other from across a contested
field are still a lot closer to two knights fighting with swords and lances
than someone sitting behind a computer somewhere miles away, perhaps half the
world away, from the buildings he destroys and the hundreds or potentially
thousands of people he kills by the press of a button. That is the generic “he” by the way. I have seen those who regard this as
“progress” celebrate the fact that it eliminates the “sexism” of war because
women are just as capable of sitting behind computer consoles and pressing
buttons as men. That puts a whole new
spin on Rudyard Kipling’s “the female of the species is more deadly than the
male”.
By making war so much more deadly and destructive and so
much more remote from those who start it, technological “progress” has made it
virtually impossible to adhere to traditional jus in bello standards, such as minimizing harm to
non-combatants. These are sometimes
still offered lip service, of course, but this has increasingly become a
joke. Paradoxically, the very thing
that makes it so hard to adhere to these standards also makes it all the more
necessary that we do so. This means
that it is that much more important to follow jus ad bellum standards. We
cannot do this so long as we continue to follow the Hollywood neo-Manichaeism that
has prevailed since World War II. The
sooner we abandon this modern take on an ancient heresy the better.
