Leonard Cheshire morality of force

Leonard Cheshire morality of force

Leonard Cheshire talk on the morality of force to the RAF. Points of discussion: distinguish between the right to go to war and how we fight once involved. Definition of morality. Types of law: natural, man-made and divine with differing national perspectives. Continues with discussion of conscience. Goes on with war conventions and treaties and International law. Historical analogy using the war. Place of pacifism: theory never put into practice, is a minority view, always argued in the abstract. New form of pacifism - non-violent resistance. Right or not to intervene in other countries affairs. What is morally justified in war and who at what level has right to judge. Mentions bombing cities and discusses end of war with Japan. Submitted with caption 'Leonard Cheshire talk at RAF Bracknell on the Morality of Force, 13 September 1979. A note on paper in Leonard Cheshire's hand "Unfinished (overran)"'.

1979-09-13

Audio recording 00:47:16

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SCheshireGL72021v20004-0001, SCheshireGL72021v20004-0001-Transcript

Leonard Cheshire Resonate Project

File Title: GLC talk on the morality of force to the RAF on 13 September 1979
Recorded: 13/9/1979
Duration: 00:47:20
Transcription Date: 26/3/2020
Archive Number: AV-S_007

Start of Transcription

00:00:01 Man: RAF Bracknell, Thursday, September 13. Morality of force: a talk.

00:00:13 Leonard Cheshire: Well, commandant, ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to say thank you for the warmth of your welcome, and also for the kind things you said about my having clarified slightly the situation. I'm not really sure that I have. I would also like to say that I find this, for me, a great challenge, because it obviously is a very complicated subject – the morality of force, or moral issues facing serving men – and I don't think any of us can afford to be too dogmatic, particularly as I think we need to bear in mind that we live in an evolving world. Things aren't the same today as they were yesterday, and therefore doctrines and thinkings that had been worked out that applied in the past don't necessarily apply today. And so I'm very conscious on the one hand of the importance of this subject to any of us who are involved in fighting any form of combat or war in the name of our government – should know in our hearts what is right and what is wrong, both from a personal point of view and as regards the position of the nation we're fighting for. And although it is very difficult, I still think there are certain… statements one can make, certain cornerstones, as it were, that help us to build up a reasoned structure. My terms of reference are moral issues facing serving men, and obviously that only means moral issues relating to the use of force. You wouldn't want me to go into other aspects of [chuckling] moral issues, I'm sure. Neither would I. [Audience laughter.] I'd like to do that not only from the point of view of what is right and what is wrong, but from the point of view of our being able to defend what we believe to be the true position when discussing it with a civilian, and in particular when discussing it with somebody who may hold pacifist views. It's not enough merely to state what we believe, we need to defend it in reasoned argument, we need to have thought it out, and in particular, as I'll think say again, it is very important, when we do meet such a person, or become involved in such a discussion, that we recognise his sincerity. Unless we recognise that he truly is trying to find the peaceful solution, and that we must respect him for that, the danger is that the discussion polarises; and I've listened to discussions between sometimes military men and pacifists, and in the eyes of the third party listening, the pacifist has won the argument only because it all polarised and the military man appeared to be saying 'Fight at all costs' and the pacifist appeared to be saying 'Let's make peace if we can'. In the course of talking, the various points we need to discuss and consider one is the war convention – what does the war convention tell us – we have to distinguish between the right to go to war at all, which the experts in the field call the jus ad bellum, and then 'How do we fight once we're involved in a war?', which they call jus in bello, the right in war itself. We also have to try and address ourselves to the question of morality. We're talking about moral issues, but what actually is morality? And in a world that has so many different nations and outlooks and beliefs, how do we arrive at a consensus about what is right and what is wrong? And so for a brief moment, I think I have to try and look at that.

00:05:01 The word 'morality' comes from the word moris, mores, customs, which related to the fact that all early communities of men used to draw up customs of behaviour which were considered binding on their members. And as communities became more sophisticated, these customs became enrolled in law. But morality is something deeper than that. Morality presupposes a personal act on our part involving the whole person. It's a decision we ourselves have to make in the light of a given situation, and in the light of the basic values and principles that we believe to be true. I think one can say that morality only fully comes into operation when we feel a call upon ourselves to act in a way that is different from prevailing custom – in other words, we take a personal stand. Well I would just like to look at morality from two points of view: one - law, and the other - conscience. Law in itself may be defined as an ordinance of reason made for the public good, and promulgated by the person or persons responsible for the particular community. In our nation that would be government… in the police force it would be - I don't know who, in the air force, it's Queen's regulations. Is it Queen's regulations or – not King’s regulations? Oh no, it’s King’s.

00:07:08 Coming to law itself, there are really three different types of law, of which two in fact I think belong to the same category. There is a positive law, in other words, the man-made law, which each community has to make for its own proper running and for the attainment of its particular objective. There is a natural law, which is a law not man-made, but arising out of our nature as human beings and members of society, and there is the divine, or the eternal law, though I realise some people may dispute that. Now the positive law is quite simple. We're familiar with the idea of law, we know that the more law-abiding or disciplined an organisation or nation is, the more harmoniously it runs and the easier it is – more easily it is able to attain its objective. We know that to break the law introduces disorder, and we know that an habitual law breaker is somebody who is breaking down societies, he’s anti-society. So I think we know in our hearts the importance of keeping the law, and therefore of knowing it. I am of course assuming that it's a good law, because obviously there are instances in history where countries have produced very bad laws, purely designed to help the people in power. The natural law, a notion, I know, that is rejected by – or disputed by – some, but nevertheless it's a notion that, beginning with the early Greeks, who were the first to try and codify and analyse it, coming right down to today, has always found popular appeal. You could say that the natural law is a way of behaving that the majority of men think that we ought to behave. It's a law really that is designed to define and uphold the dignity of the human being, and to give it validity in society. Obviously, its interpretation varies greatly from country to country, but if people have doubts as to whether there really is such a thing as a natural justice, well I think we only have to look today at the insistence on civil rights, to realise that this is something that occupies men's minds very deeply and always has. And if we were to give it a common denominator, I think we might perhaps invoke the Golden Rule – ‘Do unto others as we would like them to do to us’. In our hearts, I think, as human beings, we would feel that that is the way that we ought to behave, and in particular to do nothing that degrades another person's dignity, human dignity. And more than that, that we should act in a way to build up his human dignity. The eternal Law of course presupposes a Creator. And if we accept that there is a Creator of the universe, then I think it is only reasonable that he would have laid down a Law for the proper ordering of society and to enable us human beings to attain our end, our destiny, and to govern our relations one with another, and with Himself. The natural law in that case would be that part of the divine Law which we are able to discover by the use of our reason. I'm not going to press the divine Law, ‘cause I realise some, who do not accept that there is a Creator, will think it is just an idea. I only come to it when I have to consider the Christian's outlook to war, which I feel I have to do briefly in a moment. So if we sum up law, I think we have to say that one important duty we all have is to make up our minds – Is there really an eternal Law? Because if there is, it is a Law that arises out of our nature, it is similar to the laws that hold the universe together. Unless we know it – and obey it – we can't fulfil our destiny as human beings, and society cannot operate in the same harmony that it ought to. So the keeping of law, and particularly international law, regarding waging of war, has to be of some importance to our discussion today.

00:13:18 Conscience, the other aspect, relates really to our individual response to a situation. Conscience is the ability that we have to judge the ethical status of our actions. It presupposes a law, as it were, written on the heart. It is not a separate faculty, like that of memory, it is an ability that we have in a given situation to know what we ought to do. To a certain extent, you could compare it to the ability to do mathematical sums: it's something that we all have. It is not a list of dos and don'ts where we can refer to a textbook and say 'Yes I can do this, I can't do the other'; it is essentially something that involves the whole person, and in a given situation, our conscience should be able to tell us whether we are right or wrong, and I think all of us, whatever philosophic views we may hold, have experienced a good conscience – where we've done something that was a sacrifice and… stood up against others but we knew it was right – and a bad conscience – where we know we've done something we shouldn't. Conscience is considered by the Church, and I think by the majority of men, and I think by all religions, to be inviolable. In other words, if a man truly believes in conscience, that he must do something, he must be allowed to do it. But conscience of course is not the final arbiter of what is right and wrong. Like the ability to do mathematical sums, conscience has to be informed. We should do our best through our life to think about what is right and wrong, and discuss it with others who we feel have something to contribute. And so, to sum up about morality, I would say that where there is an honest and an upright search for truth and for what is good, and where we do our best to live up to our conscience, and where also we have the good of all men at heart, not just our own local good, there is morality. The point is that morality can really only be achieved by trying to be good, to be moral, and secondly it can only be considered in a concrete situation. Can't lay down dos and don'ts that apply everywhere, you can only consider the morality of a particular action, in the concrete circumstances of that situation.

00:16:32 We're now coming to the war convention. By the war convention, I mean those rights and duties that have been specified in various conventions and treaties like the Hague and Geneva conventions, and various resolutions of the United Nations, and written into international law, and by and large accepted by all people. Now the war convention is founded on a view of international society, and that view is that international society consists of a series of sovereign states, each of which have certain absolute rights, and two of those rights, and the most important, and the most relevant to us, are one – the right to territorial integrity, and two – the right to political sovereignty. They usually invoke what they call – the lawyers – the domestic analogy; in other words we compare the international situation to a national situation, and the comparison here is with a householder. For the householder within a country has the right to live safely in his own house, and to decide how he wants to run his family affairs. Territorial integrity and political sovereignty. And so the war convention considers that there's only one crime on the international scene, and that is aggression, where another country deliberately and maliciously invades another country for the purposes of imposing its own rule upon that country. Later, I'd like to call into question the fact that United Nations does not accept any other circumstances where one may intervene in the affairs of another country other than by the request of the government of that country, but I'll come to that later.

00:19:10 Our starting point is that in international law there is only one occasion on which a country may lawfully go to war, and that is in self-defence against aggression. Now, immediately we have a difficulty – in fact we have two difficulties. The first is that in international law, dealing with the war convention, there is great poverty of terminology. The only word we have is 'aggression', and even ‘aggression’ has not been precisely defined by the United Nations. On the domestic scene, we have all kinds of things – we have theft, we have murder, we have armed robbery, we have break-in with violence – all sorts of different terms, which enable us to know once the degree of the crime, and to judge the appropriate response. Then again, on the international scene, aggression is much more dangerous than violent break-in on the national scene, because there's no policemen. The only policemen can be the victim state or any other ally that wants to come to its help. …The further complication is that as aggression has not been defined, there can be all sorts of different situations – a border realignment, which is hardly the same as a total takeover – so when we come perhaps to discussion time, we can leave this matter open. At the moment, I'm only talking about an aggressor who intends to overrun and victimise and destroy the political sovereignty of another nation.

00:21:21 So that is the situation that we're faced with today as regards the rights and wrongs of going to war. So before I consider that, I'd like just to take the two contrary arguments that you occasionally meet. The first is appeasement. There always have been people in the world who have believed that the better course of action is to appease an aggressor. Mind you, I'm talking about a criminal aggressor, a man who really is out to destroy your country and impose a brutal, vicious regime on you. Now, in my lifetime I've seen two instances, contrary instances, of appeasement. I've seen the reaction of my country, Britain, together with France, against the rising threat of Hitler, and our reaction was appeasement, despite the fact that right up until after Munich in 1938, the Allies held all the military cards. Even the German generals were totally opposed to Hitler's stand and said that militarily it was impossible. Hitler's answer was 'Never mind, they won't fight'. And because we did not take up a stand, which would have stopped Hitler, or at any rate led to a war in which we considerably outnumbered Hitler and his Nazi army – if you wish to discuss the facts of that we'll do it in discussion time, not now, or if you wish to query that assertion – because we didn't do that, we opened the way to World War II, with all its consequences. At about the same time that we went to war, Russia threatened Finland. Finland had no hope against Russia, but Finland refused to accept Russian demands for an exchange of territory, because – for the defence of Stalingrad and so she went to war. Now, Finland was applauded by the entire international community for taking that stand. The reason is that the war convention gives a moral value to standing up to an aggressor. It accords the victim state not only the right to defend itself, but the right to punish, as a deterrent against future aggressions, in exactly the same way as holds on the domestic scene with hijackers and kidnappers. If once you open the door, where do you stop? So that tells us that if you are faced with a real aggressor and you stand up and fight, it is not merely a question of the right of survival, there is a moral quality to it, because you are upholding the values upon which international society rests. To… give in to the aggressor by appeasement is to diminish those values.

00:25:19 The other contrary argument is pacifism. Now, pacifism is a very, very broad term, and if ever we start to discuss with a pacifist, the first thing to do is to ask him 'What do you mean by pacifism?', and I think the second thing to do is to say 'Well, I'm a pacifist too at heart, by which I mean that I want a peaceful solution at all costs if it's possible. But if it's not possible, and if the threat is too great, then reluctantly I go to war.' That I think has to be the preliminary to any discussion. Now there are all sorts of pacifists and non-violent movements. Some are conditional pacifists who say 'Beyond a certain point only may you go to war', and some are absolute pacifists who say that you never have the right, under any circumstances, to take another man's life. And of those, some are what I would call negative pacifists, who merely stand on that statement and have nothing else to offer, and others are positive pacifists, who do have an alternative to offer.

00:26:41 As regards pacifism in general, just three observations. It remains only a theory, it has never yet been put into practice against an armed aggressor. It is only a minority view, it has never been held by the majority and to be effective it clearly has to be held by the majority, and thirdly, it is always argued by the pacifist in the abstract, in a hypothetical situation, so that you can never balance the harm that would come from fighting against the harm that would come from being invaded. If you translate it to a historical situation, like 1939, not many of the pacifists will hold their ground. In 1939, when Hitler showed clearly what he was, revealed himself in his true colours, the many pacifists or Peace Pledge unionists and others in this country felt that their view was no longer relevant to that situation. I've also incidentally noticed that with a number of pacifists, if you change the conversation to something to do with civil rights that they feel strongly about, like Southern Africa or Rhodesia, they suddenly become extremely militant, because now they're faced with something that means a great deal to them and they see as an injustice, but of course not all.

00:28:25 But there's recently, and I think we have to look at this, appeared a new form of pacifism which takes the form of non-violent resistance. And this view is held by a large number of intellectuals and churchmen in this country and the argument goes as follows: it's based upon the fundamental thought, and this we have to respect, that man has fought for seven thousand years – or however long recorded history goes back – and we still haven't really achieved peace, so can't we look for an alternative? Well, one must respect that point of view. Their argument is this: ‘If an aggressor marches, we do not offer any armed resistance. We let him invade us, we let him do what he wants, but by a coordinated policy of non-cooperation, withdrawal of labour and civil disobedience, we make our country ungovernable. We don't man the post office, we don't man the trains, we don't man the busses, we man nothing except trying to grow food for us to eat.’ And the argument is that in the end, the aggressor will have to go because he can't produce the labour necessary to keep the country running and protect his lines of communication. Well, that may hold an attraction for some, but when you come to think about it objectively, you have to conclude, I think, firstly – that this might be true if the invader was a man who lived according to the dictates of natural justice, a man who, as it were, kept the rules of ordinary society – I mean, I've been told on more than one occasion that – by Indians – that Gandhi with his policy of non-violent resistance based his belief upon the fact that the British government would not break the rules to any major degree. If he'd been trying this in a dictator's country, the response would have been very different. History shows us what happens when an aggressive, criminal dictator takes over another country. He is totally ruthless in putting down all opposition. The proponents of the idea agree that a very high degree of training and organisation would be needed. In fact, they say, a degree of peace-time training equivalent to that given to the armed forces. But all your means of communication and control would be gone, your leaders would disappear overnight, never to be seen again, and a man like Hitler would not hesitate to dispose of anybody who stood in his way, it's what he did. He would terrorise some people and he would do the opposite to others who he thought would become collaborators, and we know from the last war that collaborators can appear only too easily if they are offered inducements. So I find it impossible to believe that that system, even if it were accepted by the nation, could conceivably hold out for very long. But more than that, there's one other thing to consider. If this is the policy that we as a nation are going to adopt, we would have to publicly state it, we would have to disband the armed forces – unless we're going to take the hypocritical situation of keeping armed forces going with the intention never of using them – and we would therefore open the doors to anybody who wished to come in. And even if we thought that we were justified in doing it for ourselves, what about our allies? Because an aggressor could take one step and then he's one step closer to the next country. I've touched on that at a little bit of length because you may meet it, and if you do meet it, I think you should know and think about the answers.

00:33:35 Well now I've done with the rights and wrongs of going to war, except to mention that there is the question of intervening in another country's affairs. The United Nations does not permit it, even in the case of a country that is being brutalised by a government, it will not agree to anybody else going to the rescue of the majority of the population who are calling for help. I'll touch on that and give details of that, if you wish, in question time, but I'd rather move on now. Except I'd like to say that I don’t – I think that rule ought to be changed. Coming then to the question of our rights in war, the general principle is simple, but the application to particular situation may not be quite so simple. The general principle is that one may do nothing that is excessive to the attainment of our final goal – the victory, that everything should be related to winning. Nothing should be done wantonly. There should be no destroying for the sake of destroying, no vengeance, no reprisals. That I think we would all agree, but of course it immediately depends on knowing what are our war's aims. That may seem a silly point to make, but if you come to think about it, it isn't. The aim in World War II was unconditional surrender, and the justification for that… was that the Nazi regime was so brutal that the political system needed changing. When it came to the war in Korea, the objective was the... 40th? 50th? parallel. I forget – does anybody remember?

00:35:54 Man: 38th.

00:35:55 LC: Mmm?

00:35:56 Man: 38th.

00:35:56 LC: Thank you. 38th parallel. And the intention was that one would not go beyond that point, though I believe that there then arose a situation in which it was felt one had to go a bit further. The objectives in a situation like Northern Ireland are totally different from the objectives in World War II. So it seems to me that, when it comes to going to war, the war aims, the objectives one has in mind, need to be clearly known down through many levels, not just at the war cabinet level, but by army commanders, ‘cause only then can you judge what is morally justified and what is not.

00:36:48 Perhaps I might take one or two isolated difficult situations leaving others to be discussed later. The first is: what is the right of an individual to refuse to obey a command if his conscience tells him otherwise? Well, as I said, conscience is held to be inviolable, and if a man truly and absolutely believes in his conscience, and hopefully a conscience he has tried to inform and develop, then, strictly speaking, he should be allowed to follow his conscience. But, in order to know the rights and wrongs of a given situation, as I said in my general introduction, you need to know the true facts of the situation. You cannot come to a moral decision unless you know the implications of what you are doing, of your two alternative courses of action. And if it were anything in the way of a major battle or campaign, I really fail to see how an officer of fairly junior rank could conceivably know enough of the facts to come to an absolute decision causing him to take such a radical step. At the other end of the scale, if you are given an order to do something which is manifestly unjust, like shooting a prisoner who is now out of action and no longer a threat to you, clearly you not only have the right, you have the absolute duty not to do it.

00:38:44 And between those two extremes, there are all sorts of situations where, as an individual, you have to take a decision. I think we can take – one comes to my mind that I don't think is easy to judge. If you're a fighter pilot and you shot another aircraft down and the enemy pilot is parachuting to safety, do you have the right to shoot him or not? If he's coming down over your own country, clearly you do not. If he's coming down over his own country, well, I don't think I know what the answer is. On the one hand, you've got a man who's defenceless and it goes against our nature to shoot somebody who is defenceless, but on the other hand you have a man who is going to land and come back tomorrow in another aircraft. This is an issue that I think only individuals can think about and come to a personal decision.

00:39:52 Then there is the question, the big question, about the bombing of cities, whether with a nuclear bomb or with conventional bombs. Now the second pivot of the war convention is that the war convention makes a total distinction between a member of the armed forces and a civilian. It really goes back to the days when armies were just mercenaries or groups of men who fought each other and had nothing to do with civilians. But the war convention still holds that a man, by becoming a soldier, forfeits the right to live. In other words, when it comes to war, he can expect to be shot at and killed at any moment, and he can have no complaint about that. But the civilian has to be totally protected. In fact it goes so far as to call the killing of a civilian 'murder'. Though recently, it has begun to make certain concessions.

00:41:12 Now personally, and with humility, I question that absolute distinction in our contemporary world. Remember, I'm only talking about total war against an all-out aggressor. I'm not talking about a localised war. Where you have a nation determined to destroy another, normally speaking that can only be done if the whole nation is behind the decision to invade. In our present age we are rapidly integrating, so that we are all interdependent one upon another. In fact, we always were, but it was less obvious and to a lesser degree. The fighting man is dependent upon those who produce his weapons, those who maintain his communications, those who provide him with food. Can you really say that the man who is building your missile is any less involved in the war than the man who delivers it? It is obvious that there is some distinction between civilians and non-civilians, and I think it is obvious and we would all accept as military men that when we fight, we want to fight honourably, and if we can spare a civilians’ life, we would, even if it were at some sacrifice to ourselves. But, if we were to forfeit the right to attack the enemy's cities, just consider what would be the result. To begin with, it's in his cities that his main centres of production lie. So if you declare that you're not going to bomb them and they are all open cities, you are giving the enemy a whole series of refuges behind which he can hide and build up his war production, mobilise and so on. It seems to me that one is giving away such an advantage that you virtually tip the scales fatally against yourself. If you then say, well you can't hold that children are involved in the war, one has to agree. But then a nation does have the option of evacuating children. I personally don't think that in a war where it's the survival of the nation at stake, where it's the holding off of a criminal aggressor that we're concerned with, that it is really viable to stick to this complete distinction between the civilian and the soldier.

00:44:32 And if we move from that to the question of the atom bomb, if we look at 1945, and I say this because I was there myself, I was overhead when the atom bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, I still hold that it was the right thing to do. I don't want to be misunderstood when I say the right thing to do, ‘cause what I really mean is it was the better – it was the lesser of two evils. And may I introduce it by saying this: I'm now just considering the question of the Christian faith which is based upon a commandment to love our neighbour and through loving our neighbour to love God. How can we reconcile that with dropping an atom bomb on another country? Well, I can only say that one has to look at it in the historical situation, and in that instance, what was the alternative? Well, the only known alternative – despite what some people say about rumours of the Japanese suing for peace, which they were not doing officially, there were just two individuals who were seeing what terms they thought they might be able to get – the only alternative was the all-out invasion of Japan. And the Americans had mobilised two invasion forces, the first of which was going in in November 1945 and the second March '46. General MacArthur envisaged a whole year's fighting and calculated the probable losses at 3 million. 2 million Japanese, 1 million – mostly American… but Allied. Against that, there was the hope, but of course it was only a hope, that by dropping one, two, or three bombs in fairly rapid succession, the Japanese would give in. Those two bombs that were dropped took all in all – estimates vary a bit – 150 000 to maybe 200 000 people, admittedly mostly civilians. But if you set 200 000–

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