Our existence as a nation is threatened today, not only from without but from within, by moral erosion and civic disintegration. Two decomposing forces are at work the Marxist condemnation of our entire social structure, and the pacifist rejection of our right to national self-defense. Both attacks compel us to rethink problems to which we have given little attention for many, many years. The problem of modern war is confusing enough in its technological aspects. It is also maintained that the technology of modern war has totally changed the relation between war and political order, so that now political order could no longer be maintained if the price of its maintenance is war. On the other hand, our time has revived the doctrine of just war, both on the Communist side and on our own, although the two doctrines are quite different. At any rate, clarity about the problem of war in its moral aspects belongs to the intellectual equipment the modern citizen needs.
A footnote first: One does not consider the problem of morality and war in timeless abstraction but rather in the setting of a singular historical situation. Our situation is singular in that we are living in a political order created by Western civilization under assault by the hostile force of communism. Both sides are armed with nuclear weapons. There are those who would also mention the United Nations among the features making up the singularity of our historical situation. I personally would not do this, on the grounds that the UN, while designed to alter the nature of international politics, has in fact not done anything of the kind and has played by and large a minor role in contemporary affairs. That leaves Western civilization, communism, and nuclear weapons as the salient features, as far as the problem of war is concerned. One more prefatory remark concerning the approach to morality: We take it for granted that nobody today thinks of morality in the terms of that caricature drawn up in the eighteenth century, a body of cut-and-dried abstract principles valid unchangeably for all times and places. Rather, we approach moral problems as Aristotle suggested: as the mature man’s rational response to reality, both the fundamental reality of being and his own nature, and the changing reality of time and place. (Cf. Eric Voegelin, Das Rechte von Natur, Oesterr, Zeitischrift Für Öffentliches Recht, XIII, 38–51)
As children of Western civilization, who cannot cut ourselves off from our own shadows, we cannot overlook what the great minds of the West have found out about war and morality. Among the remarkable products of this civilization of ours is a doctrine of just war, or, as Paul Ramsey suggests, “justifiable war” (Paul Ramsey, War and the Christian Conscious,1961). There is no need to study the history of this doctrine in detail, but it may be useful to recall that there are at least three different versions of it and that the distinction between them may help us considerably. Augustine, the originator of the doctrine, did not say that war was justified if and when one side defended a just cause. He had too low an opinion of the justice of human causes to take that position. We remember his argument against Cicero who had claimed that a people was constituted by “common interests and a common acknowledgement of right,” i.e., “true justice.” Augustine demolished this view, pointing out that “true justice” is the property of God rather than of fallen man and that a people was held together by “a common agreement as to the objects of their love,” as were, e.g., the Romans by their common love forliberty and the praise ofmen. Augustine’s definition of a people is a fat more existential one. Whatever it is that a people may love, they are a people in so far as they agree on a common object of love. Furthermore, a people and the government that it produces are the existential foundation of peace and order and justice, “such as this mortal life can afford.” This peace, imperfect as it may be, all the same participates in the perfection of God’s peace. Any created nature requires peace and seeks peace even through strife. Augustine clinches this point by observing that even bandits maintain peace in their gang, but then hastens to add that the peace of the wicked “does not deserve to be called peace.”
These are the conceptual elements from which Augustine shapes his doctrine of the justification of war, i.e., of military action aimed at killing enemies for the sake of public defense. His justification of war is remarkable in that he denies justification of killing to which a private person may resort in individual self-defense. Confronted with an armed robber who threatens my life, I may still not seek to kill him, says Augustine, for this would put an inordinate value on my own life, something that should not be loved more than it is worth, i.e., more than God. Augustine remarks that the law permits killing in individual self-defense but points out that the virtuous man is not enjoined by the law to kill under such circumstances. The soldier, however, is in a different situation. The law bids him kill the enemy and punishes him if he does not do so. Moreover, when engaged in military action, the soldier acts not in his own interest but as an “agent of the law.” He takes life not for his own good but for the common good, the peace and order that is endangered by the enemy. And his is an action prompted by the common love through which he is a part of his people. Thus it is in the spirit of service to good and sacrifice for others that killing is justified. The background of all this, of course, is the assumption that wars will occur, for, as Augustine says, “It is the wrongdoing of the opposing side that compels the wise man to wage just war.” This is no cause for moral celebration, for the war is caused by wrongdoing but not justified by one’s own high justice, and both war and wrongdoing are occasion for deep grief for all of us.
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The type of doctrine of just war of which all of us tend to think automatically was not developed until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is linked with the names Victoria and Grotius who developed the concept that a nation can be justified in going to war only if it acts to punish a wrong or vindicate a right. All nations together were assumed to constitute one legal community in which the enforcement of justice lay within the particular nations (Cf. Walter Schiffer, The Legal Community of Mankind, 1954). In a sense this is a return to Cicero’s idea. But it also amounts to the idea that wars arise over cases which can be catalogued and handled in terms of particular rights and particular wrongs and that wars are necessary because there is no supranational agency to adjudicate these cases and enforce the judgments. This idea came to the fore again after World War I when it served as the foundation for the League of Nations and, later, the United Nations. The new concept was that of “disputes” which, if not settled, presumably forced nations to go to war. Accordingly, the League of Nations established machinery for the “peaceful settlement of disputes” and sought to make use of this machinery obligatory for all nations. The doctrine of just war in the sense of Grotius was now converted into another one in which war in defiance of this international machinery was termed “aggression,” and resistance to aggression was called “sanctions.” As we know, the peaceful settlement machinery of the League, or that of the UN, was never fully accepted and thus the sole concrete substance of the concept of “aggression” was removed. All the same, the concept has played a major role in modern times as a general term of condemnation in connection with military action.
Between Grotius’s doctrine and the modern idea of “aggression” and “sanction” another view of war was developed. It stemmed from Vattel’s observation, in the eighteenth century, that since there was no objective way of determining the justice of either side in a war, and since both sides claimedthat they fought for a just cause, in effect both sides were equal in that respect. Accordingly, the nineteenth century no longer was interested in justifying war on the basis of just causes but rather talked of power conflicts and the requirements of the balance of power. We have here not so much a justification as a characterization of war. Wars will occur when several units of order and political existence rub shoulders with each other and occasionally find themselves in a conflict that to each side appears as a clash of existences. This is a late formulation of an insight that can be found in much earlier writings, even though in not fully elaborated form: while actions are subject to moral judgments and are appropriate matters for judicial contention and verdict, existences as such are not. There is no way to adjudicate the claim of one people to exist as compared with that of another, and a conflict, once it has arisen, is not resolved by the observation that both have an equal claim. What is more, a clash of political units involves existence which for many people constitutes the setting of peace, order, justice, that is, the representation of the good and true in their lives. If we look closer, it is this same insight that prompted Augustine to justify action in defense of a people which he characterized as no more than a group in agreement on a common object of love, i.e., an existential community.
There is one other, ultra-modern version of the doctrine of just war (let the reader note that I use the word “modern” without the usual overtones of praise) many people doubt the right of our country to go to war, to “impose our will on others” unless and until our society has become perfect. This notion is ideologically complex, for it stems from the background of the total critique of society as taught by communism, Anarchism, and other radically revolutionary movements of our time. Society, so it is implied, has no right to do anything, including engaging in war, maintaining public order through judges and police, and levying taxes, as long as it has the marks of imperfection upon it. While faulty, everything that a society does lacks title of authority. This implies that once perfect, a society could do no wrong. We must remember that the Communist and Anarchist ideologies postulate that whatever society will emerge from the destruction of the present-day society will by definition be perfect.
Enough of the doctrines by which war has been justified. None of these doctrines can be ignored when we make up our mind on morality and war. That does not mean that all of them are equally valid. I may have already indicated that I regard Augustine’s view as free from self-righteous pretenses as well as clearly aware ofpolitical realities and thus to be preferred, even though the part of truth that is contained in the others must not suffer neglect. The doctrine of just war represents our participation in Western civilization. We must now turn to the second great reality of our time, the Communist attack on our society.
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The crucial question about communism is whether we are or are not to regard it as simply one government among others, a government, let us say, with a peculiar economic system. The organization of communism calls itself a party. A party normally is a group of persons standing ready to run a government. A government, as we have seen, procures peace, establishes order, and administers justice within its realm. In that sense, the Communist Party is misnamed, for rather than running a government it substitutes for government a conflict operation which knows no peace and respects no justice. For Communists postulate the continuation of a bitter struggle against a more powerful class enemy even after they have assumed power in a country. They expect this struggle to continue for an indefinite time to come. They regard themselves as a minority surrounded by people whose instincts, habits, and traditions are alien and injurious to Communists and whose resistance they cannot possibly conquer by force. They assume that they and their subjects are not bound by a common love. Thus the co-existence of Communists with these elements is not peace, even though the struggle may be conducted with the instruments of government rather than those of armies, Lenin coined the concept of “protracted struggle.” A struggle that would continue during the entire “period of transition” between the overthrow of capitalism and the emergence of the new society. Stalin characterized this period as “an entire historical era, replete with civil wars and external conflicts, with persistent organizational work and economic construction, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats.” During this period, there could be no government. What the Communists put in place of government carries the name of “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Lenin emphasizes the difference quite consciously. “The dictatorship of the proletariat,” he says, “is not the organization of order but the organization of war,” Stalin, too, speaks of this regime interms of military conflict: “general staff,” “strategy,” “tactics,” “reserves,” and so on. The purpose of this regime is not to maintain peace but to wage the “protracted struggle,” to combat an enemy with whom one has to co-exist and whom one cannot “vanquish” by force, to maintain the spirit of irreconcilable struggle within the ranks of the Revolution. As the regimedoes not serve peace, neither does it look to justice. On Lenin’s showing, the regime is “based on force and not limited by law.” Justice, he insisted, must be subordinated to the requirements of the class struggle.
The Communist power organization closely adheres to these ideological concepts. War-like operations have characterized the Communist regime from the outset. The police is organized and operates as an army. It has all kinds of weapons, is housed in barracks, and trained to fight in military formation. The regime maintains a host of spies against its subjects. It engages in activities designed to break the spirit of its subjects. It takes life among its subjects not on the grounds of wrong-doing but on the grounds of hostility. If the Communist regime resembles a government, it is a military government conducted by an occupation force, in the midst of a hostile country. Military government is part of a general combat operation, and so is the regimeof the Communist enterprise. As no Communist regime yet has brought peace to the people it controls, so Communist foreign relations have aimed at conflict rather than peace. The avowed chosen instrument of Communist foreign policy is a type of conflict defined as “wars of liberation and popular uprisings.” In spite of the definition, these movements of subversion and unrest are not confined to the cause of liberation from colonial rule. They continue even in countries that have already won their independence, until they submit to a Communist regime. Once under a Communist regime, they do not enjoy peace but continue subject to the official warfare waged on them by those in authority.
The reason for the “peacelessness” of communism lies in the ideology which has focusedthe Communist’s attention exclusively on the destruction of the “inhuman” present-day society. Unlike so-called “utopian socialism,” Marxism-Leninism does not comprise a blueprint of an ideal society. It does, however, contain a strategy for the revolutionary destruction of what now exists. Its faith in the ultimately beneficient “laws of history” claims that nothing but good can follow from the radical tearing down of the house we now inhabit. In that it believes that total destruction to be salutory, communism, along with Anarchism, should be called an ideology of destruction. Neither communism nor Anarchism has developed theories of a future order. There is no Communist political theory or a Communist economic theory. There is no theory of a Communist culture or of a Communist world order. Some pathetic attempts to lay the foundations of such theories were made by Stalin but did not go beyond the stage of hints. Communists literally “do not know the things that belong to their peace” and could not know them if they wanted to, since their ideology has defined only the struggle, the enemy, and the forces of the Revolution. The precepts of the protracted struggle, of combat organization, and of revolutionary strategy are dear, emphatic, and consistent—but nothing in his ideology tells the Communist when and how to come to rest.
This inability of communism to arrive at peace is what gives the Communist assault on existing societies its peculiar character. That assault fits into no available pigeon hole. Should it be characterized as “aggression” in the sense of the League of Nations concept? Communists, at least those following Lenin, do not consider war a decisive and preferred instrument of their struggle, although they also reject pacifism as bourgeois reaction. Should one look upon it as great-power aggrandizement in the sense of nineteenth-century politics? Communists are not primarily interested in territory but rather in the control of people and will trade territory for other means of manipulation if necessary. The crux of the matter is that a regime of Communists is a perpetual combat operation and thus an instituted condition of “peacelessness.” Societies, which now have governments in the normal sense, pass into the Communist peacelessnessif they succumb to Communist forces in any way whatsoever, with or without “aggression” in the form of military invasion. The struggle of “free,” i.e., not Communist-controlled societies against communism is thus essentially in defense of such peace as these societies have achieved. One can hardly grasp this situation with the help of concepts of international relations such as “aggression,” “great power conflicts,” or “international disputes.” Augustine’s peace as the supreme common good of peoples and his justification of fighting for the sake of this good is more to the point, even though Augustine could not have foreseen the present situation. communism, not only through military action but through its embattledregime, assails that peaceon which decent men everywhere depend for their human potentialities.
Now the question arises to what extent the entire justification of war and fighting has been eliminated by nuclearweapons and the indiscriminate destruction to which they are supposed to commit future belligerents. The crux of the discussion in this regard has been the death of “innocents,” i.e., non-combatants. Innocents have always fallen victims to warfare. All the same, their death has not affected the justification of war, on the theory of the “double effect.” This concept, originated by Thomas Aquinas, distinguishes between the intended effect of an action and secondary or unintentional effect. It is only the intended effect which should be taken into consideration in judging the morality of an action. Thus if militaryaction aims at combatants, seeking to conquer and possibly even kill them, this action is covered by the general justification of the war, if any. On the other hand, the intentional killing of non-combatants is not covered, although if non-combatant are unintentionally killed in the course of justified military action, the whole action does not thereby become unjust. In the case of nuclear weapons, and even inthat of obliteration bombing, the argument now goes, this distinction can no longer be made. The death of innocents must be intended. The military action thereby turns, at least partly, into murder. War is no longer justifiable.
Another argument is based on the concept of proportionality, also stemming from Thomas Aquinas. He argues for “moderate defense” so that the evil of the remedy should not exceed that of the original wrong. Such proportionality, we now hear, is no longer possible in the age of nuclear armaments. Their use means the mutual destruction of the combatant countries, plus the destruction of other countries, and in the extreme even the depopulation of the earth.
What conclusions are drawn from these assumptions? Some recommend that we rid ourselves of atomic weapons so as to make just wars possible once again. Others would commit us to never using the nuclear arms we possess. Still others want unilateral disarmament. And a few do not tire of repeating “Rather red than dead.” The conclusions seem to fall into two categories: either a wish that conditions were not what they are or else a refusal to defend the political order under which we live. Neither can be called a moral solution. One is mere wishing for what cannot be. The other is the destruction of the extant common good for fear of some alleged common evils. An apparently moral critique of war turns into an immoral subversion and disruption of society.
The rationale of subversion says that a society that permits war is not worth having, however, it is not the worth or unworth of societies that tenders wars possible but the fact that human beings live in many societies that differ from each other in language, culture, and the common love around which they are constituted. Reaching deep into historical roots, each of these societies is a given setting of human life: that makes activities, love, purpose, and growth possible. Each of them is particular in the sense of not constituting a class with others, except insofar as it belongs to the class of social orders. “That among particularities accidents will occur is not accidental but necessary,” said Rousseau, and Hegel re-stated the idea in Paragraph 324 of his Philosophy of Right (Cf. K. N. Waltz, Man, the State, and War, 1959). Among the particularities of historically grown societies, war is a possibility on which one must count, just as one must count on accidents in traffic in which many cars are driven by particular drivers. Self-defense is thus necessarily anintegral part of political existence in a world of many nations, a necessity that could be obviated only by a world state which in turn would make civil wars and uprisings an almost daily occurrence.
When the will to self-defense dies, the “common love” that holds a people together dies along with it. Citizens become fear-struck demi-animals, each scrambling for whatever small tangible possession has the strongest hold on him at the moment. The impression of the disintegration of France in the spring of 1940 must have been General de Gaulle’s overriding experience. He perceived then that without the readiness to self-defense there can be no people and no political order and that without a vigorous participation in a common political existence men fall into total disarray. Whatever mistakes de Gaulle may have made subsequently, this insight rather than any cheap nostalgia for past glories of totalitarian design has been his basic motive.
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The ideological rejection of self defense by those whose minds are totally obsessed with the fear of nuclear war amounts to a version of nihilism. To say, “In the atomic age, no society is worth defending” is tantamount to saying that sheer physical existence is preferable to the love of the good that constitutes a people. “We lose our values which are worth defending and then lose our arms and language, and with loss of civilizational identity become incapable of governing ourselves” said Vico, in the eighteenth century, and in the twentieth Raymond Aron adds this comment: “The costs of servitude for a people and a culture may be higher than the costs of a war, even an atomic war.” The renunciation of a society’s self-defense becomes one prong in a multi-pronged nihilistic subversion, others being the tearing down of sexual inhibitions, the undoing of a common religious orientation, the moral condemnation ofthe entire economic system, the rejection of anything that speaks of authority, of up and down, more important and less important, sacred and profane.
The attempts to establish the immorality of nuclear war have turned out to stem from either wishful or immoral roots. That, of course, does not alter the fact that the deliberate mass killing of innocent people, either through atomic or conventional weapons, cannot be morally condoned. The answer, however, is not the decomposition of political order but rather the elaboration of weaponry and strategy which, to speak in Paul Ramsey’s terms, makes “just war possible.” Efforts in that direction have been made and have proceeded quite far. We have moved along three paths: one toward more diversified and sophisticated weapons enabling us to control nuclear forcemore and more and to subject it to a clear-cut military purpose; the second toward a strategy of nuclear war that has turned its back even on the practices ofWorld War II and is more strictly geared to a “counterforce” concept; third, toward a doctrine of conflict management which has sought to increase and enlarge the situations offering us choices and to avoid situations in which the sole choice is a nuclear strike against an entire country.
No man in his right mind can do anything but grieve at the thought of any war. A “just war” is not something to be sought and celebrated. But the defense of one’s peace for the sake of the “common love” which unites men in peoples is so much an integral aspect of our humanity that to deny it to men, insofar as it is defensively justified, means to put nothingness above the good.