It can be easy to unleash this genie of racial and ethnic hatred in order to facilitate killing in time of war. It can be more difficult to keep the cork in the bottle and completely restrain it. Once it
It would be easy to feel some smug, self-righteous sense of superiority and convince ourselves that such lingering hatred exists only in distant, insular nations like Lebanon or Yugoslavia. The truth is that we are still trying to suppress racism more than a century after the end of slavery, and our limited use of cultural distance in World War II and Vietnam still tarnishes our dealings with our opponents in those wars.
On some future battlefield we may be tempted to once again manipulate this two-edged sword of cultural distance to our advantage. But before we do, we would be well advised to carefully consider the costs. The costs both during the war and in the peace that we hope to have attained when the war is over.
Moral Distance: “Their Cause Is Holy, So How Can They Sin?”
We who strike the enemy where his heart beats have been slandered as “baby-killers” and “murders of women.” …What we do is repugnant to us too, but necessary. Very necessary. Nowadays there is no such animal as a non-combatant; modern warfare is total warfare. A soldier cannot function at the front without the factory worker, the farmer, and all the other providers behind him. You and I, Mother, have discussed this subject, and I know you understand what I say. My men are brave and honourable. Their cause is holy, so how can they sin while doing their duty? If what we do is frightful, then may frightfulness be Germany’s salvation.
Moral distance involves legitimizing oneself and one’s cause. It can generally be divided into two components. The first component usually is the determination and condemnation of the enemy’s guilt, which, of course, must be punished or avenged. The other is an affirmation of the legality and legitimacy of one’s own cause. Moral distance establishes that the enemy’s cause is clearly wrong, his leaders are criminal, and his soldiers are either simply misguided or are sharing in their leader’s guilt. But the enemy is still a human, and killing him is an act of justice rather than the extermination that is often motivated by cultural distance.[25]
In the same way that this process has traditionally enabled violence in police forces, it can also enable violence on the battlefield. Alfred Vagts recognized this as a process in which
enemies are to be deemed criminals in advance, guilty of starting the war; the business of locating the aggressor is to begin before or shortly after the outbreak of the war; the methods of conducting the war are to be branded as criminal; and victory is not to be a triumph of honour and bravery over honour and bravery but the climax of a police hunt for bloodthirsty wretches who have violated law, order, and everything else esteemed good and holy.
Vagts felt that this kind of propaganda has had an increasing influence on modern war, and he may well be right. But this is really nothing new. In the West it dates back at least to those days when the pope, then the undisputed moral leader of Western civilization, established the moral justification for the tragic and bloody wars we call the Crusades.
The establishment of the enemy’s guilt and the need to punish or avenge is a fundamental and widely accepted justification for violence. Most nations reserve the right to “administer” capital punishment, and if a state directs a soldier to kill a criminal who is guilty of a sufficiently heinous crime, then the killing can be readily rationalized as nothing more than the administration of justice.
The mechanism of punishment justification is so fundamental that it can sometimes be artificially manipulated. In World War II, some Japanese leaders cultivated an artificial punishment justification. “Colonel Masonobu Tsuji,” says Holmes,
who masterminded Japanese planning for the invasion of Malaya, wrote a tract designed, amongst other things, to screw his soldiers to a pitch of fighting fury. “When you encounter the enemy after landing, think of yourself as an avenger come at last face to face with your father’s murderer. Here is the man whose death will lighten your heart of its burden of brooding anger. If you fail to destroy him utterly you can never rest in peace.”
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation….
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
The affirmation of the legality of one’s own case is the flip side of punishment motivation. This process of asserting the legitimacy of your cause is one of the primary mechanisms enabling violence in civil wars, since the similarities of the combatants make it difficult to develop cultural distance. But moral distance is, in varying degrees, also a violence-enabling factor in all wars, not just civil wars.
One of the major manifestations of moral distance is what might be called the home-court advantage. The moral advantage associated with defending one’s own den, home, or nation has a long tradition that can be found in the animal kingdom as well, and it should not be neglected in assessing the impact of moral distance in empowering a nation’s violence. Winston Churchill said that “it is the primary right of men to die and kill for the land they live in, and to punish with exceptional severity all members of their own race who have warmed their hands at the invader’s hearth.”
American wars have usually been characterized by a distinctive tendency toward moral rather than cultural distance. Cultural distance has been a little harder to develop in America’s comparatively egalitarian culture with its ethnically and racially diverse population. In the American Revolution the Boston Massacre provided a degree of punishment justification, and the Declaration of Independence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident”) represented the legal affirmation that set the tone for American wars for the next two centuries. The War of 1812 was waged in “self-defense” with the home-court advantage very much on our side and the burning of the White House and the bombardment of Fort McHenry (“Oh! say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light”) serving as rallying points for punishment justification. The moral foundations of our legal affirmation for our nation’s concern for the oppression of others can be seen in the Civil War and the very sincere motivation on the part of many Northern soldiers to end slavery (“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord”), while a degree of punishment
