The guilt of war is always
confined to a few persons.
Plato, Republic, 360 BCE
Decisions Precipitating War
The
legal principle that to initiate a war not in self defense, but with the intent
to conquest territory and subjugate other people is not only a crime but a
supreme crime was introduced by Justice Robert H. Jackson at Nuremberg Trials
convened shortly before atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
With the advent of the nuclear age this legal concept became even more important
than it ever was. After the fall of the Soviet Union, disturbing the military
balance among the superpowers that kept relative peace for about a half-of
the-century, the concept of supreme crime acquired supreme importance.
Background
The
quintessence of law is to favor justice as defined by moral principles
determining just conduct. For centuries, secular philosophers were pointing out
the apparent discrepancy in moral codes based on religious precepts that impose
penalties on individuals, but not on the large groups of individuals, societies,
engaging in activities that harm others. An extreme example is the intentional
extermination of human life, murder, in case of serial killers limited to
several individuals, in case of societies often resulting in deaths of thousands
or millions of human beings.
The
illegality of wars of aggression was intensely discussed in ancient times. The
loss of human life during the World War I prompted the debate about the legality
of war-making in the League of Nations. Shortly after the cessation of
hostilities on the European theatre of the Second World War, Justice Jackson
framed the legal principles making the initiation of a war of aggression a
supreme crime as follows:
The
power of sovereign states to make war, except in self defense, should be
restricted by law. ("It is high time that we act on the juridical principle
that aggressive war-making is illegal and criminal")
This
law must apply equally to all nations. ("I am not willing to charge as a
crime against a German official acts which would not be crimes of committed by
officials of the United States")
Nations can act only through their leaders and thus the individuals responsible
for initiation of an aggressive war are accountable for acts of violence against
others committed in the name of the state. ("The guilt we should reach is not
that of numberless little people, but of those who planned and whipped up the
war.")
These principles were embodied in the judicial decision of the International
Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that the initiation of a war of aggression is not
only a crime, but a supreme crime. In the years to follow, the United Nations
sponsored the creation of the International Criminal Court, to judge
persons alleged to be guilty of the supreme crime. This court was voted into
existence on July 17, 1998 by delegates from 120 nations. The only nations
voting "no" were the United States, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, Yemen, and
China. With the exception of China with a long tradition of nonparticipation in
global affairs, all the states voting no were the Middle East theocracies, or in
the case of the United States incipient theocracies.
Conflict resolution
A
war, according to Carl von Clausewitz's (1991) is the continuation of diplomacy
by other means, i.e., replaces rational conflict resolution with violent acts of
aggression. According to the basic principles of the conflict-resolution theory,
a prerequisite to a solution of a conflict by negotiations is that negotiations
are conducted by using reasonable arguments and are not guided by emotions and
inconvertible beliefs. This is why our founding fathers unequivocally affirmed
the principle of separation of secular and ecclesiastic powers, a sine qua non
of rational discussion and rational conflict resolution. On the other hand, the
incessant and interminable warfare among the monotheistic theocracies of the
Middle East is the living proof that the solution of conflicts of interests is
not facilitated, but hindered by strong religious beliefs.
Religious canons and morality of war
According to Bainton (1960), until the Emperor Constantine's reign, no known
Christian writer approved of war. Afterwards, the church codified the principle
of the just war (justum bellum). The Islam's counterpart of the just war
is the notion of the jihad, proposed by Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Throughout
the ages, Christian and Islamic leaders instigated or sponsored unprovoked wars
of aggression, typified by wars expanding the Dar al-Islam (lands of
Islam) into the Dar al-harb (lands of the infidel) and by the Crusades.
The cruelty and savagery of the Crusades was later replicated in the Protestant
vs. Catholic wars of religion, of which the most devastating was the Thirty
Years War, depopulating many areas of Europe to about a half of the pre-war
inhabitants. Throughout Christian history, only Anabaptists and Quakers rejected
the notion of the just war while the mainstream religious community, with
individual exceptions, either overtly supported or tacitly accepted militarism
and warfare.
Religious and militarist attitude studies
Among the reviews of the studies scrutinizing relationship between religious and
militarist attitudes, Russell's (1971) monograph excels in many respects other
meta-studies of this topic. Russell concentrates on studies of the close
relationship between militarism and nationalism and studies pertaining to the
paradox, that
While
universally accepting peace to be a major value,
the more devout Christians tend to have stronger
militarist attitudes than do the less devout Christians.
Russell comments that
"religious belief is
probably the most important aspect of a world view"
and
that
"the Christian belief
has dominated Western culture for 2000 years
and is clearly related to the authoritarian-punitive world view."
He
observes that in the Old Testament, the wars were religious crusades; that God
was said to demand these wars and required the utter and complete destruction of
the enemy. He concludes that
"...by modern standards, such as used at the
Nuremberg trials,
Yahweh was directing his people to commit genocide on all who opposed him."
Russell's observations support the notion that with respect to prohibitions
against the collective violence the New Testament is deficient and the Old
Testament (and Qur'an) are not only deficient, but instrumental during the
decisive phases of the decision-making processes to initiate a war.
Russell's concerns are echoed by the progressive Jewish and Christian
theologians, such as Richard Rubenstein, Johann Baptist Metz and Gustavo
Gutierrez. In this context Marc H. Ellis, called "the most important
contemporary Jewish theologian," in his Unholy alliance: religion and
atrocity in our time (1997, p.17) asks:
"To find a path beyond atrocity
and beyond a religiosity that sponsors and is silent before violence,
after thousands of years of Judaism and Christianity, is it part of our fidelity
to abandon these religions,
at least as we have known them? In doing this, we explore the truths found in
opposition to ancient and
modern religious understandings that lead to atrocity, and the hope that might
energize us to build
a world without barbarism, (...) a life that bends toward community rather than
empire." (Ellis, 1997, pp. xvii, 185).
|
Fig. 1. Religious
affiliation of members of the 102nd U.S. Congress and the likelihood
of their pro-war vote. More Catholics voted against the war than for
the war. Presbyterians were most likely to give President Bush war
powers.
|
Russell's
Paradox
The conceptual soundness of the Russell's paradox is supported be empirical studies
such
as the study by Krus and Webb (1993) of the January 12th, 1991
Congress vote on the Gulf War, giving President George H. W. Bush war powers [1].
This vote was uniformly interpreted as the party vote by the media, with
Republicans voting for and Democrats against the war. However, at that time,
Democrats had the majority in the Congress and thus this pro-war vote was not
determined by the party-line votes, but by the cross-over votes. Results of this
study, analyzing the relationship between the religious background of the
members of the 102nd Congress and their vote on the war, are summarized in
Fig.1. Congress members associated with religious denominations closer to the
Old Testament were more likely to support the initiation of the 1991 war against
Iraq.
Perhaps
the most interesting finding of this study of the 1991 Congress
vote on the Gulf War was that the Jewish vote was split evenly
with 21 Jewish members of Congress voting against the war and 20
voting for the war and did not show any relationship to the
continuum in Fig. 1, as the Jewish community is diverse and
pursues many diverse interests. If Christianity would not be
grafted on Judaism, the Jewish community would be likely viewed
and treated as any other other minority [2]. However,
Christianity, grafted upon Judaism, ascribes to Jews qualities
that are detached from reality. Christians frequently define
Jesus Christ as primarily the God and only incidentally a Jew,
killed by the Jews. This line of reasoning leads to
anti-Semitism. An alternate line of reasoning is that Jesus
Christ was primarily a Jew and that Jews are the chosen people,
this reasoning leading to philo-Semitism. Ellis (1971, p.51)
elaborates this point as follows:
"The
contemporary prevalence of philosemitism within the
context of Christianity is due to the Christian
encounter with the Holocaust. If it is impossible to
chart a Christian future that leaves behind the death
camps, it is difficult, if not impossible, to envision a
positive expression of Christianity with the death camps
it helped to construct at its center. Instead, what
occurs is an attempt by Christian theologians to use the
Holocaust as a way of bypassing the "terminal" condition
of Christian belief. If the Holocaust symbolizes the
demonization of the Jews and in this way represents the
alienation of Christianity from its source, by
recovering the beauty of the Judaic faith and by
realizing that Israel is chosen and that gentiles are
grafted onto that choseness, the history of Christianity
can be confessed and jettisoned. By looking to the Jews
as the authentic people and themselves as a secondary,
grafted upon people, the history of triumphalism comes
to be seen as alien, a detour which is now realized as
such."
|
Fig. 2. Support for the
initiation of a war by the general population
(bars) and by the fundamentalist Christians (triangles).
|
Religious
dispensationalism
Russell's paradox is intensified by the phenomenon of the religious
dispensationalism. Objectively measured, the zeal of fundamentalist Christians
and their unconditional support for Israel is higher among the fundamentalist
Christians than among the Jewish community. In general, the U.S. population does
not support the initiation of a war. However, in the case of Israel, the
fundamentalist Christians tip the scale over the critical 50 percent (Krus &
Webb, 2001), as shown in Fig. 2.
An
example of the importance of moral codes as related to the decision to initiate
a war is spiritual counseling of President George H. W. Bush by Reverend Graham.
As told by Barbara Bush (1994) in her autobiography, the presidential couple was
well aware that the decision to go to war will cost human lives and lives of
countless children (p. 388):
"George told me last night that
they decided that it [the war] would start tonight. All America is praying and
we are, too. As we said our prayers, his voice cracked and his eyes got misty. I
know that those innocent children get to him."
To
obtain spiritual counsel on this matter, they invited Billy Graham to the White
House. Graham dispelled the doubts the first family had about killing civilians
and, using the notion of the just war, absolved the President of personal guilt.
President Bush I also sought and obtained the support of most religious leaders
prior to initiating the Gulf War.
Retrospect
and prospectus
That
the balance of power is a conditio sine qua non of existence of the
international law and absence of major warfare is the primary axiom of the
political science. During the Second World War, President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt held a series of discussions with Soviet Premier Stalin. Roosevelt's
son James in his book A Family Matter (1980) describes their discussion
at the Yusupov Palace on the southern coast of Crimea in February, 1945, that
established the balance of the nuclear power on the world scale that kept a
relative peace for a half-of-a-century.
This
power balance was disturbed when President Reagan convinced Premier Gorbachev
that the unipolar world, headed by the benevolent United States, will be a
better place to live in. Instead of keeping this promise, the leading elites of
the United States initiated an escalating series of wars, as predicted by the
theory of the balance of power:
"If
the power balance among nations fails,
nothing will prevent the dominant superpower
to ignore the international law"
and
prognosticated by Samuel P. Huntington in his (1993) Clash of civilizations.
It was within this context that Premier Putin called the fall of the Soviet
Union
"The greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the 20th century."
In
the absence of secular powers to keep peace, intellectual powers and the power
of the world opinion are among the few remaining factors that may avert
conventional and possibly nuclear wars looming on the horizon. Whether these
forces will be strong enough to accomplish this task remains the foremost issue
of our age.
References
Bainton, R. H. (1960) Christian attitudes toward war and peace. New York:
Abingdon.
Bush, B. (1994) Barbara Bush: A memoir. New York: Charles Scribner's
Sons.
Clausewitz, C. von (1991) Vom Kriege (19th ed.). Bonn, Germany: Dümmler.
Ellis, M. H. (1997) Unholy alliance: religion and atrocity in our time.
Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers.
Huntington, S. P. (1993) The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs,
72/3.
Krus, D. J., & Webb, J. M. (1993) Quantification of Santayana's cultural schism
theory.
Psychological Reports, 72, 319-325
(Request reprint).
Krus, D. J. & Webb, J. M. (2001) Für oder gegen ein militärisches Eingreifen:
Ist die Einstellung zum Krieg eine Variable der Gesinnung oder des
situationsbedingten Gemütszustands?
Zeitschrift fur Sozialpsychologie und
Gruppendynamik in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 26.Jg. Heft 2, 3-8.
(Request reprint in English)
(Request reprint n German).
Roosevelt, J. (1960) A family matter. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Russell, E.W. (1971) Christianity and militarism. Peace Research Reviews,
4, 3, 1-77.
Russell, E.W. (1974) Christentum und Militarismus. In Huber, W., & Liedke,
G. (Hrsg.).
Christentum und Militarismus, Studien zur Friedensforschung.
München, Germany: Kösel-Verlag, 21-109.
Notes
[1] It
seems difficult to imagine another issue more relevant to social
science than studying the decision-making processes when one
group of people decides that another group can be sent into
combat to inflict death and to face possible death. Facets of
this decision-making process have been studied by philosophers,
historians, and social scientists during the course of recorded
human history. The 1991 Gulf War provided a unique opportunity
to study objectively factors leading toward the decision to go
to war, as it was the only war in the recent history of the
United States where the Congress vote was about equally split,
providing the necessary variability of the data to make it
suitable for quantitative analysis. The 1941 Congress vote on
the war with Japan was close to unanimous, with the single
dissenting vote of Jeannette Rankin of Montana, as was the
September 14, 2001 Congress vote when California Democrat
Barbara Lee cast a single vote against the measure to give
President Bush power to revenge the destruction of and damage to
several New York buildings on September 11, 2001. The Korean War
and the Vietnam War were not voted upon.
[2]
Two oldest extant cultures are the Judaist and the Sinic, each
spanning about six-thousand years and both rooted in its own
cultural heritage. Supporting our hypothesis is the fact that
throughout the millenia of the Chinese history, the experience
of Jewish diaspora in China was profoundly different from the
history of the Jewish diaspora in the Christian countries.
