Ah, what intellectuals today’s conservatives are, always brimming with erudition. Michael Medved speaks of the idea of proportionate response as a criterion of the just war as a “currently trendy notion” and a “misguided contemporary” tool of moral evaluation. How embarrassed we all must feel to have thought it came from Hugo Grotius (1583-1645).
Our moral philosopher has still more instruction for us:“The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and killed 3,000 Americans, virtually all of them military personnel; in the US response, some 3 million Japanese lost their lives, more than 500,000 of them civilians. In their surprise attack on Hawaii, the Japanese easily could have devastated the unprotected population of Honolulu but they pointedly avoided doing so, while the United States ended the war with atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that claimed mostly civilians, as well as the even more devastating fire-bombing of Tokyo (that destroyed sixteen square miles of the city, with one fourth of its buildings, leaving at least 100,000 dead and more than a million homeless). By contrast, the Japanese never succeeded in inflicting any civilian casualties on American victims on American soil. The comparative death toll of noncombatants on native ground, in other words, stands at 500,000 to zero.
“Does the grossly disproportional nature of this conflict somehow undermine the morality of the American war effort? Do the appallingly unequal figures of sacrifice and suffering suggest that FDR, Truman and the other U.S. war leaders deserve censure for their bloodthirsty tactics?”
Those are pretty good questions, actually, even if the entire range of respectable opinion forbids us to pose them. Some issues, you understand, can never be discussed or considered lest society revert instantly to barbarism.
No prizes for guessing Medved’s answer: “The answer remains obvious and undeniable: the American political and military leadership did what it needed to do to bring the war to the quickest possible conclusion, thus sparing the lives of additional Americans (and Japanese).”
So the moral principle appears to be this: I have decided to lay waste to your entire society, and if any obstacles are put in my way they will only prolong the agony. So just get out of my way and let me incinerate children as efficiently as I can.
The elephant in the living room here, the question that is consistently begged in these situations, is whether laying waste to an entire country in response to a limited attack by that country’s government (which, it shouldn’t be necessary to point out, is not the same thing as the country itself) is the moral thing to do in the first place. If it isn’t, then the view that incinerating children should be carried out as quickly and efficiently as possible, with no objections from “liberals,” may just lose the moral high ground.
Oh, and by the way, it is the “international Left” that speaks of proportionality in warfare, according to Medved. It isn’t centuries of Christian just-war tradition, or in fact more civilized conservatives than Medved himself, like Richard Weaver, Felix Morley, or Henry Regnery — all of whom would be condemned by Medved as “leftists.”
The Right has gone wrong indeed.
1:12 pm on September 6, 2006
