Mutual Assured Damnation
For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder, and murder is one of the worst of human actions. So the prohibition on deliberately killing prisoners of war or the civilian population is not like the Queensbury Rules: its force does not depend on its promulgation as part of positive law, written down, agreed upon, and adhered to by the parties concerned. —Elizabeth Anscombe, “Mr. Truman’s Degree”
In 1956, Oxford philosopher and Catholic convert Elizabeth Anscombe published a little pamphlet entitled “Mr. Truman’s Degree,” in which she explained her reasons for opposing the decision of Oxford University to grant an honorary degree to former U.S. president Harry Truman. In critiquing Truman’s justification for using nuclear bombs to destroy the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Anscombe created a modern classic of Christian just-war theory that, sadly, is little known (and less read) today.
Anscombe was, of necessity, writing after the fact; but the silence of American Catholic intellectuals who know only too well that the architects of current U.S. nuclear-weapons policy find their model in Truman’s barbarism is deafening. Worse still are those public voices of Catholicism who attempt to justify the current policy through the revision—or outright dismissal—of nearly two millennia of the Church’s just-war teaching.
It is an almost unbearable irony that former secretary of defense Robert S. McNamara, the chief architect (under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson) of the policy that became known as “Mutual Assured Destruction,” is one of the few prominent figures calling for the end of the immoral targeting of civilian populations as a matter of policy. Whether his change of heart represents a true conversion or simply an aging Democrat’s opposition to the destructive warmongering of the current Republican president, only he knows. But in “Apocalypse Soon,” an article published in the May/June 2005 issue of Foreign Policy, McNamara wrote that
“There is no way to effectively [sic] contain a nuclear strike—to keep it from inflicting enormous destruction on civilian life and property, and there is no guarantee against unlimited escalation once the first nuclear strike occurs. We cannot avoid the serious and unacceptable risk of nuclear war until we recognize these facts and base our military plans and policies upon this recognition.”
Common sense, one might argue; and yet that is precisely what the current debate is lacking.
Throughout the war in Iraq, we have heard rumors of the possible use of “tactical nuclear strikes.” As the Bush administration (without even the pretense of congressional approval) prepares to expand the war into Iran, ostensibly to prevent Iran from developing her own nuclear weapons, officials refuse to take the “nuclear option” off of the table and slyly intimate that Israel, our proxy in the Middle East, might be the one dropping the bombs (bombs that Israel continues to refuse to acknowledge that she has). The same rhetoric characterizes this administration’s “diplomacy” with North Korea, as she (acting rationally, in light of stated U.S. policy) attempts to join the “nuclear club.”
These are not simply dangerous bluffs or attempts at strong-arm diplomacy. In his book Target Iran, former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, whose pre-war analysis of Iraq’s nuclear and other WMD capability has been proved correct in virtually every detail, points to a policy paper, “Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations,” issued on March 15, 2005, by the Department of Defense. The paper, Ritter explains, makes “permissible the employment of nuclear weapons by the United States preemptively, in non-nuclear environments, either to defeat overwhelming conventional opposition, or simply to assure U.S. victory.”
Victory, we might ask, at what cost? As McNamara rightly points out, exposing his own lies as secretary of defense:
“The statement that our nuclear weapons do not target populations per se was and remains totally misleading in the sense that the so-called collateral damage of large nuclear strikes would include tens of millions of innocent civilian dead.”
All of this should give pause to those who claim fidelity to the teachings of a Church whose two most recent popes have spoken eloquently against the current war in Iraq and have suggested that the mere possibility of the use of weapons of mass destruction—chemical, biological, and nuclear—makes it extraordinarily difficult for a military action to meet the traditional criteria for a just war. Can there be “a serious prospect of success” when nuclear weapons may be used? Only if we define success as a military victory at any cost, including the intended death of the innocent, rather than as the redressing of the wrong that justified the war.
Again, if a conflict may “go nuclear,” can we be certain that “The use of arms [will] not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated”? The Catechism of the Catholic Church explicitly notes that “The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.”
American Catholic proponents of the current war, some of whom are already starting to beat the drums for the next one, dismiss such concerns, and even the direct and unequivocal opposition of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, as mere “prudential judgments.” The final responsibility, they rightly point out (though it may be the only thing they get right), lies with the proper authority in the country that chooses to go to war. Having the authority to make the decision, however, does not override the moral obligation to make the correct one. Should we not hope and pray that, even in a prudential judgment, our President would defer to a Pope who declares that the conditions for a just war have not been met and that the use of nuclear weapons is never a moral option?
Already in 1956, Elizabeth Anscombe warned of those who quibble over definitions when the life of the innocent is at stake:
“‘But where will you draw the line? It is impossible to draw an exact line.’ This is a common and absurd argument against drawing any line; it may be very difficult, and there are obviously borderline cases. But we have fallen into the way of drawing no line and offering as justifications what an uncaptive mind will find only a bad joke. Wherever the line is, certain things are certainly well to one side or the other of it.”
We hear the same arguments today from American Catholic supporters of the war in Iraq regarding “torture” and “collateral damage” and “noncombatants” (the latter two terms having the sole purpose of saving their speakers from referring to “the innocent”). We need an air-tight definition! they exclaim. If you can’t provide one that I accept, then who are you, or Pope Benedict, to dissent from the judgment of the President?
And once their sophistry has allowed them to make their peace with torture, they move on to applaud, in their little corner of St. Blog’s Parish, Michael Ledeen’s bloodthirsty call for executing enemy soldiers after they have surrendered, and they embrace the insane claim of Victor Davis Hanson that there are, by definition, no true innocents in any country with which we are at war.
They have forgotten (if, indeed, they ever knew) the purpose of just-war theory. They regard the requirements of both jus ad bellum (the determination of the justice of a war before commencing it) and jus in bello (proper conduct in fighting a just war) as restrictions on our ability to defend ourselves and to ensure victory—restrictions that they fervently believe are unnecessary, since they are convinced of the necessity of any war conducted by a Republican president (the Republicans are the Party of Life, after all!) and the inherent justice of any American actions taken during that war (waterboarding isn’t torture, because the United States doesn’t torture prisoners!).
The purpose of just-war theory, however, is a different type of defense of ourselves, and not simply a high-minded application of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” In prosecuting an unjust war, or in prosecuting a just war through unjust means, we may do great physical harm to our declared enemy, but we do even greater spiritual harm to ourselves and our country. Truman’s decision to drop the bomb shaped the political geography of the 20th century. But the stubborn refusal of so many Americans who should know better to acknowledge the essential immorality of the act continues to shape the spiritual geography of American Catholicism and conservatism. And it is making us something other than the Christians we claim to be. As John Lukacs wrote in Confessions of an Original Sinner, responding to Phyllis Schlafly’s remark that “God gave America the atom bomb,”
“No: the atom bomb was made in America with the help of Central European refugee scientists whose ideas of morality could not have been more different from those espoused by Mrs. Schlafly. Humility and a knowledge of sinfulness, these essential essences of a Christian belief have now become entirely absent in the pronouncements—and, presumably, in the minds—of American ‘conservative’ Christians.”
Those who gave us Christian just-war theory—from Augustine to Aquinas, from Vitoria to Suárez—understood that it was possible to be victorious even in physical defeat, provided that we have acted with justice in the pursuit of the truth. Today, for too many Americans who call themselves conservatives and Christians, that seems a ridiculous notion. “What good does it do to follow just-war theory if we might cease to exist?” they ask. The question is rhetorical, of course, since they have no desire to hear the obvious answer: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:25-26).
And that, in the end, is the most fearsome aspect of the transformation of American Catholicism and conservatism, because it exposes the ugly truth: We have become, in practice if not in profession, more concerned with fleeting victory in this life than with salvation in the next. And that is why, even though the ultimate source of the atom bomb is more likely Satan than God, we, like Eve in the Garden, were only too eager to accept the gift. As Elizabeth Anscombe concluded over 50 years ago:
Weapons are now manufactured whose sole point is to be used in massacre of cities. But the people responsible are not murderous because they have these weapons; they have them because they are murderous. Deprived of atomic bombs, they would commit massacres by means of other bombs.
The pews of American Catholic churches suffer no shortage of Trumans, but where are our Anscombes today?
Scott P. Richert is the executive editor of Chronicles and the author of the monthly column “The Rockford Files.”
Comments
Bravo. Finally, a touch of reason.
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American Catholics are not complicit in these exercises in mass murder to the same degree as are the Christian Zionist “left behind” crowd. Other than a handful of Catholic neo-cons, they aren’t pushing for more war and for the use of nuclear weapons. But the American hierarchy has been shamefully silent as the US has devastated Iraq. I have not heard one word of condemnation of US agression, not one appeal to assist the hundreds of thousands of Christians (most of them Assyrian/Chaldean Catholics) driven into exile since the US invasion of Iraq. But most American Catholics have long since stopped listening to the teachings of the Popes and the American bishops have been discredited by enabling the priest sex abusers.
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Silence is still complicity, however I can only gawk in horrified wonder at those who in the face of 40 million murders, 6 million since 9/11 in abortion clinics won’t even suggest MLK style civil disobedience as it would be disproportionate. Then in the next segment or article explain how we must incinerate Tehran, or torture, or whatever because there is questionable evidence they might have some weapon and might use it. But what is disproportionate to end the holocaust in our midst sets a high threshold for any use of violence or even disorderly conduct.
But as Catholic answers points out (transposing the rules to an insurgency on abortion):
* the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
The holocaust continues, there aren’t 50k troops in Iraq because they were killed 2 decades ago.
* all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
If appeasement is still working here, I see no evidence. If it is working, we should have treated Iraq like Cuba (which is closer) - and wait for the evil people to retire or die of natural causes.
* there must be serious prospects of success;
And “insurgency” could easily end abortion by removing the sites and providers. Or Bush can get his “Enemy Combatant” stamp out and send every abortionist to a military brig like Jose Padilla (no charges, no review...)
* the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.
I doubt it would need to destroy or kill a single noncombatant.
Or to ask two koans:
If an insurgent ran into a building, and it as an abortion clinic, would it be OK to blow that clinic up? (noting we regularly destroy apartment buildings killing a lot of uninvolved civilians).
If Al Queda contaminated pregnancy vitamins with RU486 so caused 3000 unwanted abortions, would the justifiable response be rosaries or rockets?
I’ll support the Iraq war only after every clinic has been turned into a smoking crater, every abortionist executed or locked up being subjected to touchless (or more common) torture, and regime change bullets are used to turn a 5-4 vote to uphold roe into a 4-3 to overturn it. But this is merely what you get when you apply the far weaker justifications for our military wars to our ongoing homegrown holocaust. I’ll stay a pacifist, but if they really wish to stop the destruction of the innocent within our borders, they can start with the phone directory under “A”.
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Kurt,
While you are right to say that the degree of complicity by Evangelicals in these crimes is significantly greater than that of Catholics, the influence of Catholics, Neuhaus, Novak and Weigel on Reichschurch thinking has been disproportionate to their numerical strength. And they have had a toxic impact on the thinking of much of the Catholic blogosphere as well, notably on the curiously misnamed Ratzinger Fan Club and the deceptively innocent looking OpenBook. What’s particularly disquieting about the Reichchurch is its bogus claim to orthodoxy. A serious examination of Neuhaus’ take on the embryonic stem cell compromise, not simply his on the war, ought to be enough to make anyone suspect his claim.
John Lowell
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I second the remarks of John Lowell- he might enjoy my post, “The Zionist Face of First Things - Destroying Christianity for Israel” - here:
http://from-the-catacombs.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html
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Hello Caryl,
From your description, Mc Cray’s piece has all the earmarks of Reichschurch boilerplate, precisely what you’d expect of FirstThings, what with Joe’s Bottum now doing the scenery. I haven’t read FirstThings much at all since Neuhaus’ sell-out on the stem-cell question in 2001. If you’d be interested, I did a web essay for TCR about a year ago on Neuhaus’ rather strange “orthodoxy”, entitled The Cafeteria Catholicism Of Richard John Neuhaus. Here’s the link:
http://www.tcrnews2.com/Neuhaus2006.html
Very best to you.
John Lowell
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TZ, the war in Iraq has little to do with abortion. Abortion has little to do with murder. But if you want to equate the two, try this: bringing an unwanted child into this world, to be raised by extremely fallible and vulnerable people, is just as sadistic and violent as blowing up a clinic or bombing innocent people. Get real and get off your moral high ground. It’s not helping anyone, in particular the wasted stem cells from those 40 million unborn people that could be used for the greater good of mankind.
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Bastardess,
Awash in utilitarianism, you somehow allowed your true calling to pass you by decades ago. You’d have been a sensation at Bergen-Belsen extracting the gold from the teeth of the inmates gassed there. Frankly, I don’t think we’ll need to look any farther than your last comment above to identify this year’s winner of the Joseph Mengele Prize.
John Lowell
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My thanks to John Lowell and Caryl Johnston for their comments. I used to be a subscriber to First Things, but gave it up due to their uncritical support of the Iraq War and for that matter, Bush and his clique in general.
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I gave up my subscription to National Review after becoming appalled with their wagons-circled Bushishm--debate is important on the conservative side! In fact, I eventually learned to read Frum’s famous “Unpatriotic Conservatives” article in “reverse”, finding places like this.
But this longtime subscriber to First Things hasn’t given up on that magazine. Back in the day, they ran several thought-provoking critiques of the pro-Iraq war position, a few of which stick in my mind. You won’t find anything like that at the Weekly Standard.
I preserve the hope that the magazine will come to swallow hard and review those dissenting arguments in light of the facts. Some of them will look quite prescient and it would be well for them to understand why. It’s a great opportunity.
Some of my appreciation for FT is personal: I discovered the magazine quite by chance while I was in a spiritual desert and it was a big help to me.
A part of what is good about conservatism can be found in the pages of FT.
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Hello CS!
You say:
“I preserve the hope that the magazine will come to swallow hard and review those dissenting arguments in light of the facts. Some of them will look quite prescient and it would be well for them to understand why.”
An unlikely development considering the rather well developed conceit so prominently in evidence at First Things. The journal now appears to have been nothing more than a house organ for an attempt to forge a political alliance of Evangelicals and Catholics, that despite its laboring to disguise the undertaking as a kind of extra-Church, “moral ecumenism”. A man of Neuhaus’ effete sensibilities would be loathe publically to admit a theological miscue no matter how poorly considered his judgements may have been. The whole First Things project rests on a very thin theological reed, a now long discredited pure naturalism of J. Courtney Murray vintage, it prospects for the future a kind of exile as Catholic theology finds more and more to its liking in the critiques of Murray by David Schindler. No, Father Neuhaus will die in his reveries before acknowledging the moral responsibility he bears to the Church for his war-mongering. And that he owes a moral debt to the Church would be true no matter what course history may have for the adventure in Iraq.
John Lowell
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“try this: bringing an unwanted child into this world, to be raised by extremely fallible and vulnerable people, is just as sadistic and violent as blowing up a clinic or bombing innocent people”
Really? Judging from your ranting screed I gather that some folks didn’t take your venomous advice.
Your parents!
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Here again we see American Catholicism surrendering theologically and morally to the basic and underlying Calvinist Puritanism of American WASP culture. This is the sort of thing which makes the Vatican roll its eyes, I suspect, whenever the Church in America is mentioned.
Its protestations notwithstanding, the strand of Calvinism America represents is all about this world and worldly success as a sign of predetermined divine Election. It is the capitalist’s theology par excellence. What does this theology lack? Any sort of compassion for the weak, charity for the poor, pity for the sick. The wretched are going to Hell, so why waste time on them? God hates such heathen, so what’s the point. As for us, the Elect, we’ve got it made, so to hell with everyone else--literally. We only have to believe and have faith, and we are so convinced of our own moral righteousness that we can kick the shins of beggards with impunity.
Let them prove themselves worthy by hard work and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Giving to charity means denying them the chance to prove themselves Elect by following the Work Ethic.
As for turning the other cheak? Ask the Irish what Cromwell thought of that command.
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Wow, MP, what a terrible misrepresentation of Calvinism. I can’t believe we still get blamed for everything. It’s like blaming Jews for anything that’s wrong with Poland. It’s not as if there are many of us here. Please, find your bogeyman elsewhere.
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Some deeply provoking, thought-provoking comments. The kind which provoke my thoughts.
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And who actually has and further threatens use of WMD? US, the real global terrorists!
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“But the stubborn refusal of so many Americans who should know better to acknowledge the essential immorality of the act continues to shape the spiritual geography of American Catholicism and conservatism. And it is making us something other than the Christians we claim to be.”
It seems to me that Scott has unveiled facets of the authoritarian mindset that prevails in political discourse in the United States today. See Bob Altemeyer’s - The Authoritarians - for a detailed look at this phenomena (http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/). Or see John Dean’s “Conservatives Without Conscience”.
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John Lowell:
It’s very difficult for me to take you seriously, however sympathetic
I might be to your argument, when your prose is loaded with sotto voce
accusations that Weigel, Welborn, Novak, et al. are akin to Nazis. Or, am I misinterpreting your use of the word “Reichschurch”?
What ever happened to the Christian admonition to speak the truth with love?
Pax,
Noah, who by the way, is a big admirer of G.E.M. Anscombe.
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Oh, goodness no, Noah, by no means have you misinterpreted my use of the term, “ReichsChurch”, in connection with Weigel, Novak, Neuhaus, Wellborn & Associates. I only regret that you were brought to conclude that the comparison I made was somehow veiled. But you’ll forgive me, I hope, for my utter callousness in failing to anticipate that there just might be some out there that would consider me insufficiently charitable in using this term. I promise you, I’ll speak to someone in the Marketing Department before daring to venture out again.
John Lowell
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John,
By asserting that Amy Welborn et alia are Nazis, you have demonstrated primarily two things:
A lack of perspective, that is, an inability to distinguish in degree the moral gravity in another’s moral, political, or philsophical positions as well as an shallow understanding of the horrors inflicted on humanity by ideological mass movements such as Nazism.
An unseriousness, which was only reinforced by the flippancy of your last remark, by which you would dismiss a person based on any perceived taint in their weltansschaung without seeking their conversion through reasoned, civil persuasion.
The latter, I’m afraid, is the larger offense against charity.
“If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”—Mother Tereza
Pax,
Noah
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Truthfully, Noah, we really must insist that someone of your tender years assiduously avoid ReichsChurch blogs of the kind Wellborn or Stillborn or whatever the name. You very well may be drawn there into discussions of why it might be perfectly acceptable to tear some Muslim’s fingernails out in the name of God, Country and the Catholic faith and we’d so very much like to protect you from sweetbreads of this kind. Might I suggest von Balthasar, particularly those instances where he writes of seeking the form of Christ in the world. A real palliative after a few moments of Neuhaus on pre-emptive war.
Wishing you well.
Yours In The Holy Trinity,
John Lowell
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This is the first blog I’ve seen comment on the FT pro-war debacle. I’m thrilled to know I’m not alone on this. I’ve tried to see the good in the magazine. I kept up my subscription thinking maybe they’d come around. But Lowell, you’re right, they have too much to lose. And they have been complicit in mass murder of innocents. Modern war, weapons, circumstances have changed the face of Just war theorizing. Weigel reacted to that by loosening up the requirements for a just war. And the church reacted by tightening up the requirements. When millions can die with one bomb, who do you think is the wiser, more Christian of the theorists? I doubt that FT and its writers on this matter will ever recover from their failure on this.
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Well written. I found this page via StumbleUpon and I look forward to visiting again.
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