A Thinking Reed

Just War and "The Good War"

Written by

Lee M.

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A propos of Memorial Day, Pen at The Gutless Pacifist links to this interview from last year with pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas. The ever contrarian Hauerwas, as we might expect, rejects the received view of World War II:

This Memorial Day, the new monument to World War II veterans formally opens on the Mall in Washington, D.C., commemorating the war we regard as blameless, since it fought Nazism. Is World War II a blameless war, from the nonviolent Christian’s point of view?

Not at all, because World War II was not a just war, because the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender. In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that. Those actions were also not in keeping with just-war theory, since they involved the intentional killing of civilians.

I think there are (at least) two senses in which we might say World War II was “not a just war,” and it might be helpful to distinguish them.

In the first place, Hauerwas is right that certain actions of the Allies violated the norms of the just war tradition as generally understood. The bombings of civilian population centers, whether with conventional or atomic weapons, pretty clearly violates the requirement of discrimination, i.e. that civilians never be deliberately targeted.

The demand of “unconditional surrender” is often thought to violate just war criteria because it seems to require the enemy to be totally subjugated to the victor. It is, effectively, to demand that the enemy submit to a condition of slavery.

On the other hand, to show that the war as actually fought by the Allies failed to comport perfectly with just war criteria in certain ways is not to show that no possible war against the Axis would have been just or that it would have been better not to fight at all. It’s certainly conceivable (though historians would have to judge whether it would have been feasible) that the Allies could have resisted German aggression but conducted that resistance within the constraints of just war criteria.

For instance, instead of insisting on unconditional surrender they could have demanded that Germany surrender its ill-gotten territorial gains and return to its pre-war borders (similar to the demands that were made upon Iraq in the first Gulf War). And they would have had to refrain from deliberately targeting civilians in enemy countries (it has been argued by several historians that this wasn’t militarily necessary anyway).

This still leaves untouched the question of Germany’s treatment of the Jews, which, quite apart from German territorial aggression, would seem to have called for some kind of intervention (though it’s doubtful that any of the powers of the day would have been willing to undertake such an intervention on purely humanitarian grounds). Conceivably some kind of intervention could’ve been undertaken without requiring unconditional surrender, though, since it entails disregarding the offending nation’s sovereignty it might come to amount to the same thing. But in the case of massive extermination of innocent people, unconditional surrender may well look like the lesser evil.

The upshot, I would say, is that though Hauerwas may be right that some of the actions of the Allies violated the canons of just war theory, there was still a just war to be fought against the Axis. And, moreover, the war as it was actually fought may well have been vastly preferable to not fighting at all (unless, that is, we follow Hauerwas in taking the pacifist position).

Comments

12 responses to “Just War and "The Good War"”

  1. Maurice Frontz

    Unconditional surrender was a term that FDR used unilaterally in Algiers, if I remember correctly, and that Churchill and Stalin had to go along with for Allied unity. But certainly the way the post-war occupation developed indicated that they embraced it.

    I think unconditional surrender was warranted in the situation of WWII because the Allies were not going to countenance any sort of arrangement that would leave Hitler and Hirohito in power. After blitzkrieg and Pearl Harbor, one could argue that it simply was not an option. One was implicitly making an argument that the governments were illegitimate and no negotiated settlements that would leave in place the legitimacy of the Nazi and Japanese military governments could be tolerated.

    As regards carpet bombing, certainly the idea of revenge was a factor, especially in Britain after 1940. But more likely, it was thought that victory was impossible without such methods. A moral failing certainly. But can it be stated unequivocally that w/o the use of saturation bombing, unrestricted submarine warfare, and other such inhumane methods, the war would have been won by the Allies? Such a question need not imply approval of using immoral means to achieve moral ends, but it bears asking.

    To sharpen the question, Bonhoeffer chose to participate in the Abwehr plot, thereby making himself an accessory to murder. He did so not because he believed that he was not culpable, but because he believed that he could not avoid responsibility in a fallen world, and that in choosing to keep his hands clean, he would sully them with the blood of innocents. Does this argument have any part to play in whether war can be just and what actions can be justified?

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  2. Lee

    I wonder if when people condemn “unconditional surrender” this is a product of a near-absolutist notion of national sovereignty. We seem to be more willing nowadays (for better or worse!) to distinguish between fundamentally legitimate and illegitimate regimes in framing foreign policy, especially when it comes to foreing intervention (e.g. Kosovo, Iraq).

    By contrast, in the old days it seems like it was more or less taken for granted that all states were on equal footing legitimacy-wise and that made negotiated settlements more likely.

    Was WWII the turning point where the legitimacy of the enemy regimes came to be a decisive factor in setting policy?

    Regarding Bonhoeffer, I’ve always had great trouble with the idea that sometimes one must “dirty one’s hands” in order to do the right thing, simply because it seems to me that if one is doing the right thing, then one is not incurring any guilt, and so one’s hands remain unsullied. If plotting to assassinate Hitler was the right thing to do, then I don’t think Bonhoeffer incurred guilt for participating in the plot. Perhaps because Bonhoeffer was a kind of pacifist he felt that he was betraying his principles, but for the non-pacifist it doesn’t seem to be so much of a problem.

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  3. Maurice Frontz

    Lee,

    I think you have it right regarding “unconditional surrender” and the legitimacy of government. In fact, I was going to make the point in the last post, but I didn’t think I could do it cogently. I think that the growth of the idea of democracies has made it far more acceptable to impose or demand “regime change” as a condition for ending the war. Those who are in practice against all wars but in theory not pacifists cling to the idea of legitimate government and national sovereignty as crutches for why (x)war is not justified. This leads to the bizarre treatment of people like Saddam Hussein, etc., as leaders who are legitimately governing their people and their government may not be infringed upon. James Turner Johnson discusses this kind of thinking in his January 2005 “First Things” article.

    It is an open question, of course, whether every situation of a bad government demands a war and every possible new government would be an improvement on the previous one.

    As for Bonhoeffer, I think that his particular way of solving his problem lies in his theology of justification. Any attempt to justify a deliberate disobedience to the commandment of God against murder would be simply self-justification. Likewise, turning a blind eye to the suffering of the nations under Hitler for the sake of “keeping his hands clean” would be another act of self-justification. A close reading of (The Cost of) Discipleship, especially when he discusses Matthew 6, indicates that DB is more than familiar with the idea of giving away everything in order to justify oneself and not for the sake of Christ. In his thought, I am persuaded that he sought to act in the best tradition of Luther’s
    “Pecca fortiter,” not justifying his complicity with sin but relying on Christ’s mercy should his decision turn out to have been wrong.

    Our popular discourse on the Iraq War in particular and war in general has been to justify it or vilify it. Perhaps it is (too) Lutheran to say that war exists and that it is part of our living-in-the-world, which can never be extricated from sin. It must neither be glorified nor justified, nor can we simply wash our hands of it. Paradoxical, yes – perhaps too much so.

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  4. Joshie

    Wouldn’t any war be considered unjust by a pacifist, since they are opposed to war as a general principle?

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  5. Lee

    Are you referring to Hauerwas’ condemnation of WWII as an unjust war? I think he is speaking hypothetically here, i.e. even if one is not a pacifist, WWII still failed the just war test.

    He’s said similar things elsewhere about Iraq – e.g. that even Christians who adhere to just war theory should not have supported the war.

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  6. Lee

    Pr. Frontz – Your explanation of DB’s reasoning makes sense to me – I’ve always had trouble with Luther’s advice to “sin boldly”, but if it means acting even when we’re not 100% sure if we’re doing the right thing and trusting in God’s grace if we turn out to be wrong, I can buy that. What I have trouble with is any idea that we might be called upon to do something that we believe at the time to be wrong.

    Incidentally, I recently requested Jean Lasserre’s (the French calvinist who helped “convert” DB to pacifism) book “War and the Gospel” from our local library.

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  7. Joshie

    I understand that he was speaking hypothetically, but I can’t help but wonder if any war would fall short of any standard of justice in the mind of a pacifist.

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  8. Lee

    Oh, right I getcha. Yeah, I think there may be a certain lack of objectivity there.

    I once read a book by John Howard Yoder called “When War Is Unjust” wherein he tried to give a sympathetic account of just war theory, but ended up, in effect, saying that JWT more or less entails the same judgments about war as pacifism!

    In part, I think it’s because there are more or less strict readings of the tradition – someone like James Turner Johnson, or even Paul Ramsey (a Methodist, btw), would say that JWT justifies a lot more than, say, the US Catholic bishops who seem to take a much stricter view.

    This does make me wonder a bit about the usefulness of the tradition when it can yield such widely divergent conclusions!

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  9. Maurice Frontz

    No war can possibly meet the criteria of jus in bello. To do that, the conduct of the war would need to be perfect. The best one can hope for is jus ad bellum and for a prosecuting authority responsive to criticism on the conduct of such war. I think that many pacifists decide that since no war fulfills both criteria, just war theory is thereby bankrupt.

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  10. Joshie

    well put rev.

    Reply
  11. Lee

    Though, to play the devil’s advocate for a moment, should we support the onset of a war if we have good reason to believe that jus in bello criteria will be violated? For instance, if FDR had announced, at the time of entry into the war, that we would carpet bomb German cities, should Christians have supported the war?

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  12. Maurice Frontz

    Lee, that is an excellent point, but:

    If one is anti-war, one will always hold a prima facie belief that jus in bello criteria are going to be violated wholesale. Actually, that is the default position of most people who are against a particular war – look at all the suffering the prosecution of a war will cause; look at how many violations of jus in bello there will be. Those who “want” war will point to the necessity of such war to preclude or end human suffering.

    I think many people look back at WWII and say: yes, we did some things we should not have done – i.e. saturation bombing, internment of Japanese, etc., and we say: if we had it to do over again, hopefully we would have handled it differently. However, it was a war that needed to be fought. I hope that is not too cavalier with the amount of death and suffering Allied tactics caused.

    It is difficult to say whether or not Christians should have supported WWII if FDR would have announced saturation bombing. We are spared from such decisions by the fact that no leader ever chooses to reveal his cards in such a fashion.

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