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Monday, January 31, 2005
Unclosable Issues
The history of Man is filled with weighty questions about the necessity of various horrific deeds. Yet, as William Pitt has told us, "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." If necessity is a touchstone for justice, then justice itself must be served -- and those who argue for the "necessity" of certain deeds don't often accommodate one's demands for justification.
Toward the conclusion of World War II, Allied strategists conceived of the idea of completely annihilating Dresden, a nominally non-militarized city in Germany. The rationale was twofold:
- The resulting chaos would soften Germany for penetration from the east by the advancing Russian forces, while simultaneously impeding the transfer of German troops from the west to deal with the threat;
- A demonstration of the sort of frightfulness the Allies could unleash at the fullest extension of their abilities might break the allegiance of the German people to the regime that bestrode them.
The rationale found favor with the high command, and in a series of air raids on February 14 and 15 of 1945, Dresden was duly bombed out of existence. Not only was the city destroyed by high explosive and incendiary bombardment, but the attacking forces also strafed crowds of noncombatants fleeing the destruction, to increase the chaos in the region. Estimates currently deemed reliable place the total casualties from the two-day raid at about 30,000 dead, nearly all of them German civilians.
Of course, there would be still greater drama later, when, at the orders of President Harry S. Truman, the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed by the only atomic weapons used in warfare to date. The destruction of those two industrial centers, which reaped nearly 200,000 overwhelmingly civilian lives, was sanctioned on the strength of estimates by American strategic planners that a ground invasion of the Japanese islands could cost as many as a million American casualties.
The argument over the morality of those bombings rages to this day. It will continue to rage, because the pro-bombing forces cannot prove that such horror was required to end the war on acceptable terms, and the anti-bombing forces cannot prove that it was not.
In war, men die. Not all those who die agree beforehand to put their lives at risk. The deliberate slaughter of noncombatants was once regarded as beyond consideration, forbidden by the Geneva Conventions and condemned by the natural sense for the outrageous that lives in every human breast. Clearly, that changed with the Twentieth Century. Indeed, one could say it changed when Napoleon Bonaparte established the first of the post-Industrial Revolution mass armies, populated mainly by conscription.
Your Curmudgeon has written on this subject before. Today it is before us once again, because of Afghanistan, Iraq, and a curious volume titled The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History.
Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom are almost closed issues: "almost" because there can be no doubt that, but for the American invasions, far more people in either country would have died at the hands of their domestic tyrants than ever fell to American arms. Those who continue to oppose the invasions mostly do so on the grounds that they weren't really necessary to American interests -- a judgment call, to be sure, but sometimes offered sincerely -- and thus constituted a kind of imperialism even if no American colonies resulted. The opposers rail at the Bush Administration for its eagerness to shed the blood of foreigners. They will not accept that Dubya settled on the invasions as regrettable necessities, made unavoidable both by the savagery of the Saddamite and Talibanic regimes and by the importance of those regimes to the furtherance of Islamic terrorism.
Could they be right? Your Curmudgeon can't see it, but there are others who can, and not all of them are consumed by hatred of President Bush, the Republican Party, or the United States of America.
The Politically Incorrect Guide is a cut from another joint. In addressing the Civil War, it takes the neo-Copperhead position: that the war was unjustifiable on either legal or moral grounds. Legal, because the contractarian basis of the United States Constitution implied a right of secession, should the federal government not stick to the terms of the deal; moral, because the death and destruction the War visited on the country could have been averted by negotiation, while still bringing an end to slavery and preserving the federal Union.
To put it gently, this is a minority view. Yet those who hold it are mostly intelligent and sincere, and none of them yearn for the restoration of slavery. The passage of time and the occlusion of many facts and opinions of the Civil War era have made it impossible to convert the neo-Copperheads to the orthodox view, or vice versa.
Concerning certain of the costs of the Civil War, there can be little dispute. President Lincoln fastened a federal grip upon the Union that was unprecedented in its straitness or scope. He imposed income taxes and conscription, introduced fiat currency, suspended habeas corpus, and sought to silence or imprison many of his opponents by the use of vaguely worded sedition laws. For conscription alone, Lincoln must endure a harsh scrutiny, for what is conscription if not involuntary servitude, with the added risks to life and limb of warfare?
Any justification for Lincoln's quasi-dictatorial administration must be premised upon the necessity of forcing the Confederate states back into the Union and ending slavery in the process. But at this time, no proposed argument for or against that necessity is beyond all challenge. The issue can never be closed.
War is not the most terrible of things. Enslavement is worse than death, whether it's literal subjugation by a tyrant or the self-subjugation of reflexive retreat before a bully. But war has its costs, not merely in blood and treasure but also in the freedom of the citizens of the belligerent nations. If we are to learn anything from the unclosable issues raised by the wars of the past, we should learn this: those who advocate war are seldom perfectly candid about what the costs will be, even to themselves.
Some argue that the shape of America's present-day overgrown bureaucratic government was latent in the original federal design, and that the Lincoln Administration was but an inevitable step along the way. Others contend that our present travails could not have occurred if not for the Civil War and Lincoln's wartime measures. Neither side will ever convince the other, just as the pro-atomic bombers and anti-atomic bombers cannot move one another...just as the pro-Dresden annihilation and the anti-Dresden annihilation forces cannot. And whenever one of these wounds to our national confidence is rubbed raw, we will flinch, and wish for the millionth time that it might all be blessedly, mercifully forgotten.
It must not be forgotten. So much pain and death must amount to something; it must never be thrown away. For in our time, so long after those terrible days, our uncertainties about the claimed necessities can only produce some good if we can acquire a more self-protective skepticism about war and assertions of national emergency, whenever, wherever, and by whomever they're raised.
Comments
Very nice piece. We sane libertarians need to keep this sort of thing in mind.
By the way….your trackback isn’t working for some reason. I can’t ping you. But I’ve linked to this article.
Ed
Posted by Ed Mick on 02/01/2005 at 03:49 AM
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