Leonard Cheshire morality of force

Leonard Cheshire morality of force

Talk given by Leonard Cheshire on ‘The Morality of Force’ at the United Service Institute of India. Law and conscience as aspects of morality. Treaties governing conduct of war. Historical background leading to the war and right to defend yourself. Discusses pacifism, particularly in India. Responsibilities of military men. Role of Christianity. Morality of bombing. Submitted with caption 'Label on original container faded away.
Side 1 "The Error of Pacifism" at St Lawrence Jewry. Leonard Cheshire talking on pacifism, drawing on his own personal experience of war and faith, at St Lawrence Jewry Church in the City of London, part of a series of talks published as a book by Reverend Basil Watson "Peace and the Bomb: St Lawrence Jewry Talks" 1983.
Side 2 "Morality of Force" at United Service Institute of India, New Delhi 9 April 1979. Made at the end of a tour around New Zealand'.

1979-04-09

Audio recording 00:44:38

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SCheshireGL72021v20003-0002, SCheshireGL72021v20003-0002-Transcript

Leonard Cheshire Resonate Project

File Title: Talk given by Leonard Cheshire on ‘The Morality of Force’ at the United Service Institute of India, 9 April 1979

Duration: 44 mins 42 secs
Transcription date: 10/08/20
Archive Number: AV-S_006_S2

Start of Transcription

00:00: Group Captain Leonard Cheshire: New Delhi, Monday April 9th 1979: talk on Morality of Force.

00:11 [applause] to 00:17

00:19: GLC: Ladies and gentlemen. I’d like to say first of all what a very great privilege I count it to have been invited to address such a distinguished audience here in New Delhi on what for me is the last day (almost) of a 3 months’ tour beginning in New Zealand, giving talks of one kind or another, mostly of course about disabled people. I’d like to thank you so very much for your extremely warm introduction, and I only wish that I had the clear memory that you have for facts. I haven’t unfortunately. I think we’re all aware that this is a very profound subject – moral issues facing military men or the morality of force. It’s complex too, in the sense that we can’t really afford to be too dogmatic about it. There is room for different opinions. Nevertheless, it’s of such importance that I do think we need to address our minds to it very seriously, and I also think that despite its complexity there are points of reference that we can establish, and also certain general principles that we can lay down to guide us. And I would like as best I can to try and approach it in a systemetised way. My terms of reference are moral issues facing serving men. Well clearly, I think you would expect me only to talk about moral issues insofar as they relate to force – the use of force. You wouldn’t for instance want me to suggest what you do when that happy day arrives when you find on your desk a letter from the Inspector of Taxes making an enquiry about an entry or so in your personal account. So, I restrict myself to the use of force. And by force, I mean force used by a legitimate government of a severity sufficient to cause considerable loss of life and damage to property. We’re not talking about the force involved in arresting a gangster or terrorist or something of that kind. Now in talking about it, I want to look at it from the point of view of our being able as military men (if I may for the moment identify myself with you as military men) what our obligation is when we meet somebody who holds that force is not permissible – a pacifist or somebody of that kind. I’ve listened to many arguments between military men and pacifists and I have found that usually the pacifist will win the argument in the eyes of the third party listening, because he appears to be for peace, and the military man appears to be for war. It is very necessary in my opinion firstly that we recognise the sincerity of the other person’s point of view, that we recognise the dilemma that we both face, and thirdly that we can meet his arguments with a reasoned objective answer. And so I’d like to preface my talk with a consideration of what do we mean by morality, in view of the fact that there are so many different countries, cultures, philosophies, religions in the world, which differ and have differed down the ages. Well morality is a general term for the good, and it derives from the Latin word mores, which means customs that all societies and civilisations from the beginning of history have evolved and which they consider binding upon their members and for the good of society. But morality only comes fully into play when there is a claim on the person, on me in my inmost being of what I ought to be – what I know I ought to do – though it’s contrary to prevailing custom around me. So, there are 2 aspects on which I would like to touch briefly regarding morality – one law, and the other conscience. Now law as law may be defined as an ordinance of reason made for the common good and promulgated by the person or persons in authority over the particular society. The police, the army, the nation will have its laws. And we know perfectly well – particularly as military men – the consequences of breaking the law. Every time the law is broken, disorder to a greater or lesser degree is brought in and a habitual law breaker becomes a disrupter of society. Moreover, we also know that the more disciplined a group can be the more able it is to achieve its particular ends. Law should be there not only to maintain order but to help the society in question achieve its end. I say that in order to establish the necessity of abiding by the law where we can see that it is law. There are 3 different kinds of law: first the positive law as it’s called, which is the man-made law which societies from the nation downwards make for the good running of their own society. There is then the natural law and also the eternal or divine law, both of which in fact I wish to assert are part and parcel of the same law, though I acknowledge that some may not agree. The natural law is the law that the majority of men consider to be the way that we should behave as human beings. It derives not from any man-made system, but from the nature of man himself. And it was the Ancient Greeks who first started working out the concept of the natural law – of natural justice. And although there’ll be many people who’ve opposed and disagreed with the fact of the natural law, nevertheless throughout the ages people have worked at it. Today you’d probably call it human rights. The purpose of the study of the natural law is to define and describe the dignity of the person and the rights of man and to make them valid in society. I don’t think that we would really disagree (most of us) with the fact that there is a natural law. But we have a sense of what is naturally just. The eternal law of course pre-supposes the existence of a Creator. And clearly those who do not acknowledge or have not as yet felt they can acknowledge the existence of a Creator will not accept the eternal law, but this is not crucial to our purposes today. The eternal law gives the natural law a new dimension. If we remember the definition of law, made for the common good and promulgated by the person in authority, then we will accept that the divine or eternal law is the order of things prescribed by the Creator for the development of man’s faculties and for the attainment of his eternal end, as well of course as for the harmonious running of society, in the same way that there are physical laws that hold nature together and enable it to function harmoniously, so I think we can accept that there are natural laws which enable human society to function harmoniously and to attain its end. And I think before we come to consider the use of force, we have to be clear in our minds what is our goal as members of the human family. We would agree, despite our differing backgrounds that our goal must be the triumph of good over evil and the ultimate unity of the entire human family, a unity that enables the human family to live in peace, in justice and in freedom and opportunities for all. That is our goal. And if we were to ask what is the lowest common denomination of the natural law, I think we could say despite our differences that the natural law is there to uphold the dignity of the human being. But we should never do anything that degrades another person’s human dignity, and in a positive sense should work to build up his dignity. These are the principles by which we should live. Those are the laws, but we now come to conscience – our understanding of the law. Now also, people will deny the existence of conscience, which of course is used in many different senses, but I want to take it merely from the point of view of our practical daily experience. Conscience is the ability that we have to judge the ethical status of our actions. It pre-supposes a law written on the heart – on each of our hearts – as distinct from the external laws. It is not a separate faculty that we have, like the faculty of memory, but it is an ability that we have which comes into operation when we are faced with a concrete situation requiring a moral decision. You could equate it to the ability to do mathematical sums. Where we are presented with a mathematical problem, we have the ability to work it out – some better, some less. Myself, I have great difficulty I must admit. Conscience must be held to be inviolate. If a man truly believes in conscience – that he must do this – we do not have the right to force him. But conscience is not the final arbiter of what is truly right. We have a duty to inform our conscience, just as if we wanted to be a mathematician, we’d have a duty to study and practice mathematics. And therefore I say that where there is an honest and upright search for the truth, where there is a genuine attempt to live by the dictates of our conscience, and where we accept a share of responsibility for the wellbeing of our neighbour, of all other human beings, there is morality. Of course, morality also pre-supposes a knowledge of the facts relating to the situation in question. So now with that introduction, we have I think to confront the concept of morality with the war convention. So I now come to the war convention, by which I mean those rights and obligations that have been specified in certain treaties and conventions, particularly over the last 100 years – like the Geneva Convention, the Hague Convention and various resolutions of the United Nations which have been written into international law and broadly speaking are accepted by the majority of men. Now the war convention starts with a certain view of international society as we know it today. An international society consists of a series of sovereign states, just as a state consists of a series of individuals. In fact, you can make a comparison between public law, international law and domestic law – there is a domestic analogy. And those sovereign states have certain inalienable rights – first to territorial integrity and secondly to political sovereignty, in the same way that we within our nation have the right to be secure in our homes and to determine the kind of life we want to live in our homes. So, the war convention states that the one crime against international society is aggression, and that where there is aggression the state that is being overrun has the right to defend itself. It in fact doesn’t at the moment permit any other circumstances under which one may go to war. The difficulty is that in the war convention there is great poverty of terminology. In the domestic scene we have armed break-in, we have robbery with violence, we have murder, we have theft, we have all sorts of different terms which enable us to put the particular crime in its right place. And even that has not yet been defined by the United Nations. So, we are faced here with a difficulty. I think that before we consider the right of the state to defend itself, I ought to look at the objections that some members of society raise against the right to defend yourself. There are some people who maintain that the best way of dealing with a criminal aggressor is appeasement. And of course, the most notorious example of that unfortunately is the action of my own country, Great Britain and France in the 1930s, right up to 1938 in the face of Hitler. I cannot go into historical details, but I do assert that in 1938 when Hitler wanted to march into Czechoslovakia, all the military cards were in fact on the allied side. Hitler had 37 divisions, Czechoslovakia had an equal number of divisions and was determined to fight till the last man. France had 87 divisions and Britain had six. Hitler’s generals said ‘This is militarily impossible’, but Hitler said ‘Never mind, they won’t fight’. What governed the decision in 1939 was not a sense of justice, but a fear of war. And I would like also to assert that an excessive fear of war, an excessive desire for peace, can very often bring war closer and not push it away. You have the contrary example of Finland in 1939, which was threatened by Russia, of invasion. And Finland could hardly stand up to Russia, but she did. And the result of her standing up was that she got (although she was defeated) much better terms than she would ever have got had she given in. And so, this raises a very, very fundamental point: that the right to defend yourself against a criminal aggressor – shall we say somebody like Hitler and his Nazi armies – has a moral value in itself. Aggression in the international field is much more dangerous than armed break-in and violence in the domestic scene, because on the international scene there are no policemen. And there will be no policemen until we have a United Nations police-keeping force without the right of veto by any nation. And therefore it is the victim and his allies who alone can act as the policemen, and therefore the war convention quite rightly in my humble opinion says that not only do you have the right to defend yourself, but you have the right to punish in order to deter future possible aggressors. And so, I think we can say that every time an aggressor is allowed to get away with it, which he was by the policy of appeasement, you give future aggressors more opportunity. In the same way, in the domestic scene, if you give way to hijackers and kidnappers you open the field to how many more? The other contrary argument which we do have to take seriously is pacifism. I’m not of course aware of the degree of pacifism in India, and pacifism is such a general term that we have to be rather careful when we talk about it, in making sure that we know what kind of pacifism we’re talking about. I’m only concerned with what is called absolute pacifism – that is to say those people who believe that under no circumstances whatsoever may you retaliate by force. Now I stress again that when you meet such a person you must respect his view. His view is wrong in my opinion, but he sincerely holds it because he feels that the world has been fighting for 5000 years, and where have we got - therefore let us look at an alternative action. But what the pacifist does is always to look at fighting in the abstract. He doesn’t consider it in the concrete historical situation. And although I’ve discussed this with most or many of the leading pacifists in my country, I’ve never met one, who when you say to him ‘If a man with a sub-machine gun were to come into this room and open fire on those in it, do I have the right to shoot him’, he will never answer. He will bypass that question. Because if he says no, then he loses credibility, because what he is doing by refusing to stop him is in effect half-condoning the action. And if he says ‘Yes you may shoot him', then he’s given his case away. But there is a new form of pacifism which is attracting a lot of people’s support, and that is the argument that if we were invaded today - shall we say by Nazi … by Hitler – we do not retaliate, we do not defend ourselves, we let the aggressor overrun us, and then we make ourselves totally ungovernable. We refuse to co-operate: we won’t man the telephone exchange, we won’t run the buses, we won’t run the trains, we won’t produce food, we’ll do nothing. And they argue that the incoming soldiers will be so demoralised by attacking men who never shoot back, that ultimately, they will give it up. It’s presented by a number of intellectuals, by a number of churchmen, and it sounds at first sight rather appealing. But to me it is completely naïve, for 2 main reasons. If the aggressor were a man who lived by the normal rules of society, there might be some force in it, but a criminal aggressor does not live by those rules, and history shows us that in the face of weakness, he only becomes more of an aggressor. Secondly, in order to do this, you would have to be highly-organised as a nation, and you’d be deprived of all your communication media. You’d have to have an extremely high morale and you’d have to have the total support of the majority of the nation, because what would happen is you would open the door to collaborators who would see an opportunity for coming to power themselves. And we know in war how hard it is in a lengthy war to maintain your morale and your fighting spirit. But added to that you would have to declare here and now that you were never going to defend yourself, no matter what an enemy did to you. Otherwise you’d be in the hypocritical situation of maintaining your armed forces which you never intended to use. And the moment you did that you would open the door to anybody. So, I say that this is a view held by people which we as military men need to consider seriously and be able to answer in a reasoned way. Finally, I think as a Christian can we reconcile the Christian belief in the God of love who calls all of us to love our fellow men, and by loving them to love God: can we reconcile that with killing on a mass scale? I can only answer that the call to love is to love all men. And if therefore we are faced with a situation in which there are 2 groups of people whose lives are at risk, your country, which is about to be invaded, and therefore all your civilians are at risk. And alternatively, the lives of the aggressors: we have to choose what we think is the better course of action. And I cannot see that we have an obligation not to attack an aggressor, even though he’s going to take the lives of our own nation. In other words, we cannot say that the Christian command to love forbids us going to war. In life, given the world we live in, we cannot always choose what is a perfectly good course of action. We have to choose between the better of 2 alternative courses. And if somebody comes in this room with intent to shoot, our first obligation is to the members in this room – not to the terrorist, who for reasons of his own wants our life. Now, let us take the case of aggression. And it will fall upon the leaders of the nation that is being threatened to decide whether or not there really is aggression. It raises the question of first a pre-emptive strike. – Do we have the right of pre-emption? Well it is a difficult question to answer, but there is at least 1 situation in which we can definitely say yes. And that is where the following 3 conditions apply. One: that there is a clear manifest intent on the aggressor’s part to invade and injure you. Secondly: where there is a sufficient degree of preparation to make that intent a positive danger. And thirdly: where there is a general situation in which not resisting him is going to place you in ever-increasing danger. There are other conditions in fact under which we may go to war: intervention, counter-intervention, humanitarian intervention. They are difficult and complicated and I prefer to leave them until question time, but except to talk very briefly about humanitarian intervention. There are virtually no examples in history, however far back you go, of real humanitarian intervention. The closest that one can find is the Indian intervention in Bangladesh. Now, when they come to make a historical judgement, obviously people will differ in their interpretation. So, I’m taking the interpretation which a lot of people would subscribe to, but I could be wrong. In this instance I think it’s fair to say that there were other motives than purely relieving the oppressed members of East Pakistan (as it then was), but nevertheless what happened was that the aims of India were so totally identified with the aims and wishes of the oppressed people of Bangladesh, that it enabled India to make a very quick and successful attack, and then a very quick withdrawal, and then to show great humanity to the defeated army. And I think that that is an example in history that will go down as the closest that there’s yet been of one state coming to the help of a severely oppressed people. Having determined that we may go to war (what the juries call jus ad bellum), we finally have to look at the way of fighting – jus in bello – your rights in war. The general principle I think is simple and clear: that we should not use any means that are excessive to our objective; that everything we do should be related to winning – there should be nothing done wantonly, or nothing that’s destroying for the sake of destroying. But of course, it is absolutely essential from the beginning that we know exactly what our war aims are. In the case of World War II against Nazi Germany, it was unconditional surrender, because the Nazi system was so vicious that there has to be a political reconstruction of the country. In Korea it was reaching the 49th parallel, although I know that that objective changed later. But clearly the methods that you’re going to use in war will vary according to the nature of the war and what your war aims are. Those should be clearly known to the military command that has to carry on the war. But now I’d like to look at one or two difficult problems. The first is individual conscience. – To what extent does an individual soldier have the right to refuse to obey an order? I stated that conscience is inviolate, and that if a man really believes in conscience – that he mustn’t do something – we have to respect it. But to make a moral judgement you have to have full knowledge of all the facts relating to that situation, and if it were a campaign or major action, no individual soldier or member of the armed forces could have sufficient information to make such a judgement. The very fact that he’s joined the armed forces means that basically he has confidence in his government. Secondly, if what you’re going to do by withdrawing from the action were to jeopardise seriously the lives of your comrades, I think you’d have to consider very deeply before you decided to opt out. But if you are asked to do something which is clearly unjust – like shooting a prisoner who was out of action and no threat to you any longer – you have the absolute right to refuse. I don’t know all the facts of [unclear], but there is an example to the point. Secondly: interrogation, which some people might call torture. Again, we have this poverty of language. We use torture as the only word we have for the use of physical means to extract information. Now I have to express a personal opinion, but my personal opinion is this: that as a matter of general policy, torture (by which I mean imposing extreme injury on another man) is not admissible, for the reason that it does really go against the natural law. Number two: it degrades the person who uses it. Number three: it escalates the level of violence, and number four: it’s doubtful whether you’ll get the information you need, because if the man’s being put under such physical pressure, he will say anything in order to stop the process. However, we have to consider (and I’ve been trying to grapple with this problem) a situation where you may have me in your power, and I have information which is of such crucial importance, that unless you can get it from me, you may lose the battle. Now what are our respective rights in that case? I think this is an instance which we have to describe as extreme emergency, and under such a situation (as an exception), I think that you would have the right to apply almost any pressure you wanted on me to get it. If you could do so without degrading me, my dignity as a human being, so much the better. But if it was a matter of many thousands of lives depending on it, I don’t honestly think I could expect you to treat me over-kindly. Now finally, the war convention is based on a total distinction between civilians and soldiers. The argument is that a soldier, by becoming a soldier has forfeited his right to live – whether he does it voluntarily, or whether he’s conscripted. As a soldier he’s fair game to be shot, but the civilian may never be shot. To kill a civilian according to the war convention is murder. Now this originated with the days when wars were fought between professional armies (mostly mercenaries), who made up their rules between themselves, and really there was nothing to be gained by killing civilians. But if we take the question of total war, like World War II, I personally question whether that distinction is really valid on these grounds: we are increasingly becoming an integrated society. When the nation fights, it’s not just the military forces, it’s the entire nation. We in Britain considered it fair game to be bombed – that was part of war. So, if you have a nation that is totally behind the war effort, can we really say that there is a distinction between civilians and soldiers? If we were to say we will not under any circumstances bomb any of the enemy’s cities, consider what would happen. The enemy is given safe areas in which he can put his war production, re-group his armed forces, put his missile sites if he wishes to; he’s guaranteed safe positions. It’s rather similar to an army in olden days, taking a large mass of civilians and making them march in front of itself, and say in effect ‘I dare you to shoot’. So I personally think that this question of distinction of civilians and military men in a situation of total war - only total war - needs to be reconsidered. But at the same time, it is clear that when we fight, we have to fight with honour. We have to fight in such a way that a settlement is possible – a final solution is possible. We should fight in such a way that the enemy and the whole world will respect us for the way that we’ve fought. And where there comes a situation that you can hold back your fire without too grave consequences to yourself, for humanitarian reasons, then I think we should do it. When we go to war, we have to win. We have to acquire the military skills, the national determination and the sense of pride in our unit, to make certain (given the fact that we are the victims of aggression or we’re going to somebody else’s help) that no matter what the odds, we win. But we have to win if we possibly can with honour. We have to remember that our ultimate goal is the complete unity of our human family. So, in war, we should as I said do our utmost to fight in such a way that we will earn the respect of all honest-thinking people the world over. And in peace time we need to show that at heart we too are men of peace; that we want a solution to international problems by peaceful means, not by war – that war is our last resort. And that we should show by our actions, that we really have the good of all human beings at heart, and not just our national interest. I thank you ladies and gentlemen for having listened to me.

44:22 [applause] to 44:32

44:42: End of recording

End of transcription