Orwell and Just War

Michael Bowen of the Gutless Pacifist has been posting some thoughts on Orwell on his blog A Minority of One. Here he quotes Orwell’s well-known argument that pacifism is “objectively pro-fascist”:

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, ‘he that is not with me is against me’. The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

Orwell has become a kind of secular saint, a sort of generalized moral authority, due largely to his brave stand against the horrors of Stalinism at a time when many of his comrades on the Left saw the USSR as the great hope of mankind and his general opposition to all forms of deception in politics. Michael wonders if Orwell “might have had a different view about some of the later wars in the 20th and 21st centuries, including the current war on terror.”

What is interesting to me about Orwell is that, not only was he an enemy of pacifism, but he also flatly rejected any kind of just war theory, at least as far as “jus in bello” considerations are concerned. In May of 1944 Orwell wrote an article in response to a critic of Allied bombing of German cities. He rejects concerns to impose moral restraints on the conduct of war as so much sentimentalism:

Now, no one in his senses regards bombing, or any other operation of war, with anything but disgust. On the other hand, no decent person cares tuppence for the opinion of posterity. And there is something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features. Pacifism is a tenable position; provided that you are willing to take the consequences. But all talk of ‘limiting’ or ‘humanizing’ war is sheer humbug, based on the fact that the average human being never bothers to examine catchwords. […]

When you look a bit closer, the first question that strikes you is: Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers? Obviously one must not kill children if it is in any way avoidable, but it is only in propaganda pamphlets that every bomb drops on a school or an orphanage. A bomb kills a cross-section of the population; but not quite a representative selection, because the children and expectant mothers are usually the first to be evacuated, and some of the young men will be away in the army. Probably a disproportionately large number of bomb victims will be middle-aged. (Up to date, German bombs have killed between six and seven thousand children in this country. This is, I believe, less than the number killed in road accidents in the same period.) On the other hand, ‘normal’ or ‘legitimate’ warfare picks out and slaughters all the healthiest and bravest of the young male population. Every time a German submarine goes to the bottom about fifty young men of fine physique and good nerves are suffocated. Yet people who would hold up their hands at the very words ‘civilian bombing’ will repeat with satisfaction such phrases as ‘We are winning the Battle of the Atlantic’. Heaven knows how many people our blitz on Germany and the occupied countries has killed and will kill, but you can be quite certain it will never come anywhere near the slaughter that has happened on the Russian front.

Orwell is here taking the extreme “realist” position that “war is hell” and once you’ve started you should do whatever it takes to “get the job done.” This places war in a zone beyond the reach of morality. He makes the curious argument that admitting this may actually make war more unlikely:

War is not avoidable at this stage of history, and since it has to happen it does not seem to me a bad thing that others should be killed besides young men. I wrote in 1937: ‘Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet hole in him.’ We haven’t yet seen that (it is perhaps a contradiction in terms), but at any rate the suffering of this war has been shared out more evenly than the last one was. The immunity of the civilian, one of the things that have made war possible, has been shattered. Unlike Miss Brittain, I don’t regret that. I can’t feel that war is ‘humanized’ by being confined to the slaughter of the young and becomes ‘barbarous’ when the old get killed as well.

As to international agreements to ‘limit’ war, they are never kept when it pays to break them. … War is of its nature barbarous, it is better to admit that. If we see ourselves as the savages we are, some improvement is possible, or at least thinkable.

We have seen these very same arguments made by some of the more extreme advocates of a “maximalist” understanding of the “war on terror” – “Hey, war is hell, and, anyway, they started it, and we should do whatever it takes to finish it, even if that means torturing prisoners, killing civilians, nuking Mecca…”

Personally I’m skeptical that placing war in a category “beyond” moral evaluation has made it less frequent than it would otherwise have been. But more fundamentally, all human actions are subject to moral evaluation, even those done in service to a good cause. In fact, maybe that’s when we need to be most vigilant since it’s in service to a cause we deem to be good that we’re most tempted to ignore moral limits.