Much is made of the virtue of disregarding the lives of some in the name of others. It’s a real tough-guy decision, fetishised in popular culture: Do you have the guts do sacrifice the few to protect the many, or protect the higher ideal?
Less attention is paid to the fact that this is also the starting point of the whole cycle of woe. For all the supposed virtue of principled violence it is also the basis of everything we are supposed to despise. Such cool calculation is the trademark of our folk devils.
Every Al-Qaeda atrocity is born of the conviction that some lives can be sacrificed, discounted, switched-off, in the name of a higher cause. Every Mau-Mau, IRA and ETA killing was committed by people who firmly believed that there were more important things in the world than this particular group of humans. Like the bombers of Dresden and Hiroshima they didn’t necessarily despise their victims, they just judged their lives less important than their own cause. Like Western military strategists they calculated it was worth wasting one group of innocents to supposedly save another.
It doesn’t take a moral genius to invent situations in which it is right to kill another human: A thousand babies are about to be electrocuted by a psychopath. Would it be morally right to shoot him before he had a chance to throw the power-switch? For the vast majority of us of course it would. Nearly all of us would be happy to kill or sanction the killing of one maniac if it prevented the killing of masses of innocent humans. I hope I’d find the courage to do it myself.
But as history shows, it’s a slippery slope. Noble as some acts of violence can be, they set a dangerous precedent. The clarity of the philosophical mind-game slides swiftly into the murky morality of combat and on to the abyss of genocide. Defence is easily converted to proactive defence, bearing a striking resemblance to attack. Counter-terrorism is frequently just a euphemism for state terror.
Self-defence can be interpreted as broadly as the strategist’s imagination. Once a state or organisation awards itself a licence to kill it is easily extended to cover anything or anyone it chooses: We had to invade Afghanistan to prevent terror at home. We had to blow up the Arndale Centre to free the Falls Road. We had to build death-camps to prevent the death of civilisation. We had to bomb the village to save it.
Likewise, once a state or ideology has been labelled the enemy there is no end to the tortured logic that can excuse mistreatment of its innocent. Whatever new misery is inflicted upon the people of Iraq we are assured that this is better than the alternative: Better this than life under Saddam. Better this than risk the lives of our boys. Better this than another attack on home soil. Even children are not exempt from the book balancing: Better the school is bombed than the ‘insurgents’ escape. Once enemy lives have been reduced to statistics every cruelty can be justified by the claim that it prevented greater cruelty elsewhere.
Like the threat of death, the threat of enemy ideology can also tip the moral scales against the lives of the innocent. Over the centuries the threat of Catholicism, Judaism, Protestantism, Islamism, Nazism, Communism and decadent western capitalism have all been cited as good reason to take-out millions of innocent people. (It was sad that they had to die, but look at the alternatives….)
The trick here is guilt by association. Once you have persuaded people that it is morally right to kill to prevent Communism you can then call anything you dislike Communism, say, nationalism. You can then carpet bomb the peasantry of Vietnam, install a Shah in Iran, and train death squads for Latin America. Of course many innocents will die, but no matter. They die for a greater cause – anticommunism.
Once you have persuaded people that it is morally right to kill fascists you can then label all your enemies fascist, and even use this to defend your own fascistic excesses. Montgomery and Rommel, two white Europeans squabbling over whose right it was to exploit North Africa. One however was engaged in a moral war, a war against fascism. Harris and Goering, two white Europeans engaged in a competition to out-mutilate the other side’s civilian population. But of course the German civilians died differently, they died for good.
‘All’s fair in love and war’ is a dictum applied selectively. It’s fine for absolving one’s own violence, but you rarely hear people using it to justify violence against themselves. Note that those who still insist the bombing of Hiroshima was justifiable are the same who scream the loudest about Al-Qaeda targeting civilians. Terrorising our citizenry into submission is a war-crime. Terrorising their citizenry into submission is legitimate strategy.
As much as governments and groups are responsible for initiating indifference to suffering, once in motion it tends to multiply by itself. Viciousness is a vicious cycle. Switch someone else’s life off, treat it as statistical, and they’ll likely do the same back to you.
Empathy with the enemy drains the moment the bombs start falling, replaced by bitterness and a further cranking-up of the madness. While the war in Europe was always going to involve some aerial bombardment did it have to sink to the depths of firebombing civilian areas? Did it have to reach the lunacy of millions of British and German civilians assembling munitions only for them to be dropped on each other? Why didn’t they just drop them on themselves and spare the aircraft? (Perhaps those who defend Hiroshima as a humanitarian exercise could do the calculations, see if that would have ‘saved lives in the long run’?)
Likewise in the Pacific. Both American and Japanese forces had it drummed into them that the enemy was subhuman, brute, void of feeling. Each army went into battle convinced of the unique savagery of the other. You can imagine the consequences. War will never be a pleasant thing, but these lies paved the way to hell.
Killing always requires a higher cause. You have to value something more than the life of the victim before you can extinguish their life. A mercenary or thief must value the booty above the life of the victim. A soldier must value the victory of his own side above the lives of the figures in his sights, or cowering in the buildings below. Journalists, commentators and politicians must convince themselves something greater is at stake before they can convert bleeding burning bodies to collateral damage. In all cases empathy with the victim must be broken before the killing can take place or be excused. It must be replaced by the higher cause.
It is crucially important for states and organisations that we maintain this ability. We must be ready to turn each other into statistics whenever it is politically or economically expedient to do so. If we can’t be persuaded to drain the humanity from a chosen enemy we won’t be able to kill them, or condone their killing. There can be no crusades, pogroms, Somme, Belsen, Dresden, Twin Towers or Fallujah if we doggedly cling-on to the reality of each others lives, and refuse to switch each other off.
