Leonard Cheshire talk to RAF staff college on morality of force

Leonard Cheshire talk to RAF staff college on morality of force

Group Captain Leonard Cheshire: Staff college, RAF Bracknell, September 4th, 1980. Morality of Force. States that cornerstones of the use of armed forces are that you have to know that your cause is right, good and necessary and that the means you are using to win are also right, good and necessary. Continues with right to defend and defines morality. Talks of natural, man-made and divine laws. Continues with conscience and Geneva and Hague conventions and International laws of armed conflict. Goes on with discussion of appeasement, non-violent resistance and pacifism. Continues with discussion on rational for fighting war in current climate as well as arguments for and against dropping nuclear weapons on Japan at the end of WW2. Submitted with caption 'Speeches by Leonard Cheshire:
RAF Bracknell Staff College - Morality of Force - 4/9/80.
St Georges Chapel - Discipline of the Cross - 13/3/81. See also AV-S:210 / AV-S-01-04-10'.

1980-09-04

Audio recording 00:44:46

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SCheshireGL72021v20016-0001, SCheshireGL72021v20016-0001-Transcript

Leonard Cheshire Resonate Project

RAF Staff Collage – Morality of Force – 4/9/80
Duration: 44:50
Transcription Date: 26/06/2020
Archive Number: AV-228 Side 2
Start of Transcription
00:00 Group Captain Leonard Cheshire: Staff college, RAF Bracknell, September 4th, 1980. Morality of Force.
00:13 GLC: Well I would like to thank the commandant very much indeed for inviting me once again, particularly since we once served on the same squadron, at different times. I haven’t heard your quote about Machiavelli before, so I’ll have to go away and think about that.
[00:30 audience laughter].
00:32 GLC: And also last time I spoke to you, you may not know this, but you’re so well briefed you probably do, I overran my time by I think about ten minutes, so thank you for inviting me despite that.
[00:45 audience laughter].
00:46 GLC: I’ll try not to do it again. As the commandant says, this question of moral issues facing serving men when it comes to the use of armed force is a very important one. It’s also a very complex one. It’s one on which many different views are held, and so it’s difficult, in fact, impossible, to be dogmatic. I think the most that one can do is to establish certain principles; one or two cornerstones, as it were, to enable us to think out what our own particular position is. But I do hold that it is absolutely vital for anybody in the armed forces to think this matter through and discuss it, in order to help form one’s viewpoint. The reasons for this are two, I think. Firstly, that if one is going to fight a war and win it, one has to know that the cause is right and good and necessary, and also that the means that one is using to achieve that goal are also right and good and necessary. But in addition to that, I hold that as serving men, you have a duty to be able to enter into a discussion with non-serving men who may hold completely different views, perhaps extreme pacifist views, and be able to meet them on their own ground. Assuming that we grant the right of a nation to defend itself, that nation must have the equipment, and the strength, and the collective will with which to do it. And it is too late to wait until the moment of war. Therefore, the moulding of public opinion to enable the armed forces to have the legitimate strength and equipment that they need is of crucial importance. And I have listened to a number of debated between military men, mostly, in my experience, retired military men, debating with pacifists and usually, in the eyes of the third party listening, the pacifists win. And the reason is that the discussion becomes polarised: the military man appears to be saying ‘fight at all costs’, whereas the pacifist is saying ‘peace is better than war’. So, as a preliminary to what I’m going to say, I would like to stress the absolute necessity, if ever you are in that situation, of establishing right at the beginning that you are a man of - we are men of peace. We want a peaceful solution. We see the armed forces as a necessary instrument towards peace, and only as the final, last resort do we want to go to war. Now my subject is the moral issues facing serving men. So that immediately brings into question the issue of morality.
4:57 What is morality? And how do we determine what is moral and what is not moral in view of the fact that there are so many different cultures in the world, different religions, different viewpoints. What is the common denominator? Well, morality is a general term for the good; for what is right. And it’s derived from the word ‘mores’ meaning customs, for the reason that every society, every little group of human beings, right back into prehistory, has always established customs, which they consider binding upon their members. The purpose of which is to hold the group together, and to keep it in harmony. And of course, as these civilisations developed, these customs became refined and eventually established into systemised codes of law. But morality only fully comes into operation when there is a claim upon a person, upon me on the inmost core of my being, to stand up for what I think is right when it is against what other think, against the general trend of the customs of our particular society. When I’m having to take a stand – a moral stand – against other people. So, we see that there are two aspects to our morality: the external one – the law – and the internal one – conscience. And briefly I would like to look at both of those. First, law. Law may be defined as an ordinance of reason, made for the common good, and promulgated by the authority responsible for that particular society, whether it’s the air force, whether it’s a school, the nation, and now united nations. It’s important to understand the purpose and nature of law to put everything into perspective. Law is there for the common good, or should be. I’m obviously talking about the good laws, not the bad laws made for the benefit of a particular government. Law enables a society to work in harmony, but it also enables it to achieve its particular ends. And anybody who’s been in the armed forces knows the necessity and the value of law and discipline. Somebody who breaks the law is a disruptor of society and therefore it is important to us in this discussion, in two respects, first that there is a law regarding the rights and wrongs of going to war, called the War Convention, but also, if there is a law established to keep the whole human family in harmony, then by breaking it we introduce disorder into the human family. So, it’s an area in which we do need to apply our minds. There are three types of law: the positive law, or the man-made law, the natural law, and eternal or designed law. So, the last two are probably one and the same thing. The man-made law is obvious enough: it’s the laws that countries and societies make to govern their own… societies. It’s relevant to us only in respect of the law that governs going to war and the use of weapons in war, which I call the War Convention. The natural law is something different, and I realise the moment that I mention natural law, I enter the field of controversy because there are some who consider there is no such thing as the natural law. The natural law might be equated with natural justice. It is a law that arises not out of the decisions of men, but out of the nature of man and the nature of society, you might say in the same way as the creation – the physical nature – is held in harmony by law, by physical law. It is obvious that the laws of nature keep creation in harmony, without them everything would be chaotic. The Greeks were the first to develop the concept of the natural law, and down through the ages, despite doubt and opposition, various groups of people have tried to work on it, define it, and so on. And the very fact that there’s so much emphasis today on human rights indicates the inner conviction amongst I think the majority of people that there is such a thing as an absolute set of laws, independent of what we may think, that are necessary in order to keep the world in harmony. But of course, how to discover the nature of it, specifically, is another matter. It’s purpose is simple enough: to define the dignity of man and to give it validity in social life. I think you might say that if we were to look for the common denominator amongst all the varying points of view, we can say that morality consists in safeguarding and respecting the dignity of our fellow human beings. Or you could invoke the golden rule: do unto others as you would expect them to do to you. The eternal law, of course, presupposes that there is a creator, a god, and if one doesn’t believe that, obviously one won’t believe that there is an eternal law. I don’t feel it’s my function today to go into that, except to say that given the nature of law, and ordinance of reason made for the common good and promulgated by the authority responsible for the particular society, then if there is a god who created the world and created us, it’s entirely reasonable that there should be a law to help us attain our eternal destiny, and obviously it’s important for us to think about that and make up our own minds. Looking at the different religions, I think that would could arrive at a common denominator in respect to the eternal law, and to say that our final objective as members of the human family must be the triumph of good over evil and the unity of the entire human family, a unity that will enable all of us to live peace, justice, and freedom, without the privation and the division that we know today.
14:07 Conscience is something very personal. It is the ability that we have to judge the ethical status of our actions. To decide in a concrete situation what is right and what is wrong. It’s not a separate faculty like that of memory, it’s an ability to work out right from wrong. You might equate it to the ability to do mathematical sums except that if I use that metaphor, then I can’t have any conscience at all, because I can’t do mathematical sums. But as with doing mathematical sums, you have to practice, and you have to learn. So, in other words, we need to inform out consciences. We need to think about it. We need to seek other people’s views. It is the personal response in a concrete situation requiring a moral decision as to what we should or should not do. And I think all of us know, despite those who feel there is no such this as a conscience, that when we’ve done the right thing, even though it’s cost us something, we have a sense of wellbeing. We have a sense of inner peace. When we’ve given in and done what we knew we shouldn’t have done, we feel the opposite. So to sum up, I would say that where there is an honest and upright search for the truth and for what is good, and where there is an effort to put what we think to be right into practice, and where was have the good of the whole human race at heart, not just the good of our particular community, there is morality. Well to move on now to the question of war, and in particular the War Convention. Now the War Convention means those rights and duties that have been certified in various conventions, like the Geneva and Hague Conventions, and various resolutions of the United Nations relating to war. Now this falls into two parts: the right to go to war at all and when you go to war, what may you or what may you not do. The War Convention in based upon a view of international society of consisting of different sovereign states, each of which has certain inviolable rights and particularly the right to territorial integrity and political sovereignty. And here I want to invoke what is called the domestic analogy. The domestic analogy is a very useful ally whenever you come to think about the morality of force or discuss it with other people. It means that you transfer the problem – the international problem – to the domestic scene. So those two rights of territorial integrity and political sovereignty can be equated to the right we have as householders to be safe in our own house, and to be able to run our family affairs as we want. International law – the War Convention – admits only one crime on the international scene and that is aggression. But the trouble we legally run into is that in the War Convention, there’s great poverty of terminology. On the domestic scene we have all sorts of things like murder, armed break-ins, robbery, and so on, all of which define a particular crime and give us some idea of what is means to what should be done about it. But in the War Conventions there’s only that one word: aggression. And even that has not yet been defined by the United Nations. The War Conventions give every country the right to defend itself and that I think is in accordance with natural justice or natural law. We all have to defend ourselves, but more than that, it actually gives a moral value to act of defending your country or going to somebody else’s help against an aggressor. An aggressor can be looked upon as a criminal on the international scene. The reason it gives a moral value to defence against clear aggression is that every time you stand up against an aggressor, you strengthen the values upon which international society depends. Every time you give in, you weaken those values. In the same way that if you give in to a kidnapper or a hijacker, you open the door to others. Now I think for a moment, we ought to look at the contrary view. The views that state, that hold, that we do not have the right of defence.
20:32 First there’s appeasement; I don’t want to go into that, but I do want to assert that appeasement against an aggressor will never work. And 1938 shows that, in the case of Hitler. At that moment, Hitler’s generals told him that what he was wanting to do – invade Czechoslovakia – was not militarily possible. He said, ‘never mind, they won’t fight’. Those generals were waiting to depose him the moment we stood firm and said ‘no’. But we never did. And in consequence of that, Hitler attained a position of complete dominance, with the result of World War II, which I hold could always have been averted had we been firm, took a total toll of 55 million lives. Appeasement will not work against a clear aggressor. The other view is pacifism and non-violence. Here we are in difficulty, because pacifism covers such a wide spectrum of different points of view. The absolute pacifist, who says that under no circumstances may you ever take a human life, I think probably we would know how to answer, because if you take it onto the domestic scene, and you say to him ‘now let us suppose we are in an international airport, and three gunmen take our three submachine guns from their luggage and start opening fire on all the passengers in the customs lounge, what is the policeman’s duty? Does he do nothing, or does he try to stop them, which he can only do by firing on them?’ I find that the pacifist will never answer that question. He will hate it. Because if he says ‘do nothing’ I think he loses credibility, and if he says ‘well, unfortunately he must open fire’ then the case is given away, and you’re then faced with at what point – beyond what point should we not use violence? For instance, with a nuclear weapon. But if we are confronted with such a person, I do think it’s very important that we respect his sincerity and that we conduct a reasoned, honest argument. There are other views that hold that if an aggressor marches against you, you don’t resist him with arms, but you use non-violent methods. You make yourself ungovernable. You refuse to cooperate. You don’t man the post-office, the telephone, the trains; you do nothing. And the argument goes that in that event he’ll eventually have to give up. Now this view is held by a lot of people, of all sorts, young and older, churchmen and intellectuals, and we need to face it. But I think that by their own declaration, it’s clear that it won’t work. For one thing, they acknowledge that in order to make it work, there would have to be a peacetime training in non-violent resistance, of a degree – of the same degree as we give military training in peacetime to our armed forces. And how that would come about, I don’t know. Secondly, it presupposes an element of goodwill in the aggressor. Often Gandhi is quoted, but – and I think my Indian friends would agree with this – Gandhi’s non-violence worked only because he was dealing with a nation that was prepared to live by the rules, or at any rate, some of the rules. Against a Hitler, it’s inconceivable, because all leaders would be removed in the middle of the night, the worse elements of the community would be induced to take positions of power; it obviously would not work and it did not work in World War II. But even more important than that: for it to work, you would have to disband your armed forces. You’d have to declare that you were not going to war, and then you’d open the door to whoever might want to march. There are other, finally, who say ‘yes, we grant the right to defend ourselves, but we don’t grant the use of nuclear weapons’. That point I’d like to come to a little later, because that is something that we do have to face up to.
26:32 Now, granted that we may defend ourselves, the question is how? What methods, what weapons may we use. The general principle is very clear: that everything we do must be geared solely to winning. Nothing should be excessive to the threat that faces us. There should be no wanton destruction, no killing for the sake of killing, no revenge. We have to fight in such a way that a proper peace is possible at the end of it. We have to fight in a way that will earn the respect of those against who we’ve fought, and yet, of course, we’ve got fight professionally and without whole hearts. The principle, I think is clear, but the applications in particular circumstances may be very difficult. The first thing that comes into question is, assuming there is an aggressor, at what point do we stand up and oppose him? Obviously, you can’t wait until he has marches across your frontier – it’s too late. You do have the right of some form of pre-emptive strike. There usually… it’s usually expected that there are three conditions which give you that right, but obviously you can only take each case on its own particular merits. The three conditions are: 1) that there is a manifest attempt to harm you, to attack you, 2) that there’s a sufficient degree of military preparation to make that attempt realistic, and thirdly, that you are in a situation that the longer you wait, the weaker your position becomes. If those three conditions are obtained, then it is granted normally that you have the right of a pre-emptive strike, but of course if you do that, the onus is then on you, on the country concerned, to later show that it was justified in what it did. But you’ll understand that we are here in a very difficult and sensitive situation, which will call for very clear thinking and sound judgement. I’d like to take one of two specific instances to illustrate the application of the general principles, at random. For instance, the question of torture. And here again, we have a poverty of language. There is only one word for interrogation using force of some kind, and that is torture. And so immediately we sort of revolt and say ‘well, we can’t accept torture’, but I’d like to look at it realistically. Let us take a situation in which, shall we say, you have me as an enemy – you’ve caught me; you’ve captured me – it’s the eve of a major offensive, D-Day, if you like, or Normandy. I know where and when the defensive if being launched. If you can get that information out of me, you have a good chance of winning the day, of saving – holding off the offensive. If you don’t, you may lose it. Now in that case, a very great deal is at stake. Now what are your rights? Well I would have to acknowledge that if that were the situation – I know it’s an extreme one, but nevertheless, it could happen – if that were the situation, I would have to concede to you the right to use a considerable amount of violence, of force, against me in order to get it out. There would be too much at stake for you to say ‘well, the rules of behaviour prevent me from doing anything and trying to get it out of you by a battle of wits’. But I would like to think that in the way that you did it - I know this may sound contradictory – you would somehow manage to preserve my dignity. I am quite certain that there are ways of using force which are totally different from the terrible ways that were used by the SS and the Gestapo forty years ago. What the real answer is, I don’t know. But it is something that some members of the military forces are going to have to face up to. So that is one situation that I oppose. Then individual conscience; at what stage do I have the right, as a member of a fighting unit, to say ‘no, I won’t carry out that order’? If I know that the order is morally wrong, and unjustified, then I do have the duty to say no, but we can only judge the morality of an action in the context of the actual situation. We have to know exactly what is at stake, why it is being done, what will happen if it isn’t done. And if it is something of major importance – a major military action – I don’t believe that a relatively junior officer or member of the forces could have adequate knowledge to make a proper judgement. Furthermore, if by opting out I’m going to put the other members of my fighting unit in serious jeopardy, I’d have to take that into account as well. Clearly, if I’m told to shoot a prisoner of war, who now is out of action and no longer a threat, then I have the duty to say no. You can see the right and wrong as two extremes, but the different situations in between can be very difficult. I can only say that it’s here and now that we need to think about it, think through it, and try and reach a moral standpoint so that if the time comes, we are in a position to judge. Then finally, nuclear war. This is the biggest question, I propose, of all. May I briefly introduce you by looking back to 1945, and the two atom bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at the latter of which I myself was present. Now, I have to assert, and I have listened to every conceivable argument against it, that under the circumstances, it was the better thing to drop it than not to drop it. My reason for saying that is that given the attitude of the Japanese Military High Command at that time, which was to fight at all costs to the last man, the only foreseeable way of ending the war was an all out invasion of Japan. And America had mobilised an invasion force of 5 million men, the first wave of which was going to the Southern Islands – am I right or…? Honshu, pardon my geography, in November 1945, and the second wave to the mainland, main Island in March ’46. General MacArthur estimated a year’s fighting and 3 million deaths; 2 million Japanese, 1 million ally – or mostly American, of course. The decision as to where to bombs should be dropped was made by – that it should be dropped and the… the principles for choosing the target – were laid down by President Truman. It had to be a military target, not a civilian target. And under those circumstances, how can we really say that it would have been a better thing to withhold the bomb and continue the conventional war? I personally cannot see it. The argument is raised ‘well, if we had continued with the conventional war, maybe Japan would have surrendered well before you ever reached the mainland’. But you can’t conduct a war on those suppositions. Now if we transfer that to the present day, what are we do say? I think the first thing is that we want to be clear when talking it over with somebody who is not a military man, that there are distinctions in the use of nuclear weapons. We are only considering the use of nuclear weapons in the event of an all-out attack by another nuclear power, who is proposing to use nuclear weapons himself. And in that event, I presume, one’s first nuclear strike is not against its citizens, but against his own missiles. Well, the right and wrong would have to be decided after a weighing up of the alternative consequences or using them or not using them. If you don’t use them, clearly you use the war. And you have to say to yourself ‘is the defeat of our country, the destruction of our country, the occupation of it by an aggressor a lesser or a greater evil than using a nuclear strike against him?’. I think I would have to say that in principle, there could well be a situation under which the use of nuclear weapons is justified. But obviously only as an absolute last resort. The anti-nuclear lobby, which is very strong, always uses the term ‘destroying the whole world. They argue that to use a nuclear strike is to destroy the whole world, so I think that when discussing it with them, the first thing is to say that you do have an option as to how and where you use nuclear weapons, and with the existing trend towards greater precision and cleaner weapons, the possibility of limiting to some extent the damage to civilians, is increased. Arising out of that is the argument do we have the right to threaten to use them?
39:51 The Catholic Bishops of America made a statement last year, or early this year stating that it was morally wrong to use weapons of mass destruction, meaning nuclear weapons, against areas of civilian population and therefore if that were so, it is wrong to threaten to use them. Well, in the discussions that I have had with the Catholic Bishops of this country and other religious groups, I have tried to say that is an ambiguous statement, because first, we do not necessarily use a nuclear weapon for the mass destruction of civilians, and secondly the threat to use them is the one thing, as far as we can see, that has kept major war at bay. If you were suddenly to remove your nuclear weapons, which is the consequence of what – the logical consequence of what they’re saying, although they didn’t actually go as far as to say that – you suddenly create a vacuum, because nuclear weapons belong to the fabric of our defence, [unintelligible] that is the nuclear part. And in my opinion, it is very dangerous to suddenly create a vacuum, because at least the present situation is one that everybody understands; Russia understands it, China does, America, Britain, NATO; we all understand the situation. But if you suddenly remove a major element from it, you create uncertainty, and vacuums always have to be filled. So, I think that it would be against the interest of the whole world if we were suddenly to take that drastic step. Far better to continue with disarmament discussions and negotiations in the hope that eventually it may be possible to have a balanced, neutral reduction. So to come to my conclusion, to sum up, I feel that nations do have the right to defends themselves against clear aggression, that to do so has a moral value all of its own. That if ever that unfortunate situation comes about, then we have to fight with all our strength, proportionate to the particular threat, and of course, proportionate to our war aims: we have to know what our war aims are. Fighting against Hitler and his Nazi regime has a very different thing, shall we say, to fighting the Korean War. That was a limited objective. Your war objective – the threat that faces you governs the degree of force that you yourself use. But we have not only to win, but to win with honour. We have to fight in such a way that peace is possible at the end. That we don’t create so much ill will that we end up in a worse situation after it that we were before.
43:30 And finally, here and now, in peacetimes, we need to be men of peace. We need to do what we can to help eradicate the causes of the war, which apart from an aggressor, I hold to be injustice. Peace is the effect of justice. Peace doesn’t exist its own right; it only exists as a consequence of justice and freedom. And where there are major sections of the world in great poverty, in great privation, and others are relatively well-off, we are in danger. And we have a duty, as members of the human family, whether we are in the armed forces or not, to try and do something to put that balance right, to fill that gap. Thank you.
[muffled speech in the background].
44:40 Speech Ends
44:50 End of recording.
End of Transcription