Supreme crime
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The legal principle that to initiate a war not in self defense, but with the intent to conquer territory and subjugate other people, is not only a crime but a supreme crime was introduced by Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States at the Nuremberg Trials. This legal concept became even more important with the advent of the Nuclear Age, and with the fall of the Soviet Union, which had maintained a balance among superpowers that had kept relative peace for about half-a-century.
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[edit] Background
The quintessence of law is to favor justice as defined by moral principles determining just conduct. For centuries, secular philosophers were pointing out the apparent discrepancy in moral codes based on religious precepts that impose penalties on individuals, but not on large groups of individuals, societies, engaging in activities that harm others. An extreme example is the intentional extermination of human life, murder, in case of serial killers limited to several individuals, in case of societies often resulting in deaths of thousands or millions of human beings.
The illegality of wars of aggression was intensely discussed in ancient times. The loss of human life during the World War I prompted the debate about the legality of war-making in the League of Nations. Shortly after the cessation of hostilities on the European theatre of the Second World War, Justice Jackson framed the legal principles making the initiation of a war of aggression a supreme crime as follows:
- The power of sovereign states to make war, except in self defense, should be restricted by law. ("It is high time that we act on the juridical principle that aggressive war-making is illegal and criminal")
- This law must apply equally to all nations. ("I am not willing to charge as a crime against a German official acts which would not be crimes if committed by officials of the United States")
- Nations can act only through their leaders and thus the individuals responsible for initiation of an aggressive war are accountable for acts of violence against others committed in the name of the state. ("The guilt we should reach is not that of numberless little people, but of those who planned and whipped up the war.")
These principles were embodied in the judicial decision of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg that the initiation of a war of aggression is not only a crime, but a supreme crime. In the years to follow, the United Nations sponsored the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), to judge persons alleged to be guilty of the supreme crime. This court was voted into existence on July 17, 1998 by delegates from 120 nations. The only nations voting "no" were the United States, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Qatar, Yemen, and China.
[edit] Conflict resolution
A war, according to Carl von Clausewitz (1780 - 1831), is the continuation of diplomacy by other means, i.e., replaces rational conflict resolution with violent acts of aggression. According to the basic principles of the conflict-resolution theory, a prerequisite to a solution of a conflict by negotiations is that negotiations are conducted by using reasonable arguments and are not guided by emotions and inconvertible beliefs.
[edit] Religious canons and morality of war
According to Bainton (1960), until the Emperor Constantine reign, no known Christian writer approved of war. Afterwards, the church codified the principle of the just war (justum bellum). The Islam's counterpart of the just war is the notion of jihad, proposed by Ibn Rushd (Averroes). Throughout the ages, Christian and Islamic leaders instigated or sponsored unprovoked wars of aggression, typified by wars expanding the Dar al-Islam (lands of Islam) into the Dar al-harb (lands of the infidel) and by the Crusades.
The cruelty and savagery of the Crusades was later replicated in the Protestant vs. Catholic wars of religion, of which the most devastating was the Thirty Years' War, depopulating many areas of Europe to about a half of the pre-war inhabitants. Throughout Christian history, only Anabaptists and Quakers rejected the notion of the just war while the mainstream religious community, with individual exceptions, either overtly supported or tacitly accepted militarism and wars of conquest.
[edit] Religious and militarist attitude studies
Among the reviews of the studies scrutinizing relationship between religious and militarist attitudes, E. W. Russell's (1971) monograph excels in many respects other meta-studies of this topic. Russell concentrates on studies of the close relationship between militarism and nationalism and studies pertaining to the paradox, that
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- while universally accepting peace to be a major value, the more devout Christians tend to have stronger militarist attitudes than do the less devout Christians.
Russell comments that "religious belief is probably the most important aspect of a world view" and that "the Christian belief has dominated Western culture for 2000 years, and is clearly related to the authoritarian-punitive world view." He observes that in the Old Testament, the wars were religious crusades; that God was said to demand these wars and required the utter and complete destruction of the enemy. He concludes that
Russell's observations support the notion that with respect to prohibitions against the collective violence the New Testament is deficient and the Old Testament (and Qur'an) are not only deficient, but instrumental during the decisive phases of the decision-making processes to initiate a war.
Russell's concerns are echoed by the progressive Jewish and Christian theologians, such as Richard Rubenstein, Johann Baptist Metz and Gustavo Gutierrez. In this context Marc H. Ellis, called "the most important contemporary Jewish theologian," in his Unholy alliance: religion and atrocity in out time (1997, p.17) asks:
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- "To find a path beyond atrocity and beyond a religiosity that sponsors and is silent before violence, after thousands of years of Judaism and Christianity, is it part of our fidelity to abandon these religions, at least as we have known them? In doing this, we explore the truths found in opposition to ancient and modern religious understandings that lead to atrocity, and the hope that might energize us to build a world without barbarism, (...) a life that bends toward community rather than empire." (Ellis, 1997, pp. xvii, 185).
[edit] E. W. Russell's Paradox Supported
The conceptual soundness of E. W. Russell's paradox is supported by empirical studies such as the study by Krus and Webb (1993) of the January 12th, 1991 Congress vote on the Gulf War, giving President George H. W. Bush war powers. This vote was uniformly interpreted as a party vote by the media, with Republicans voting for and Democrats against the war. However, at that time, Democrats had a majority and thus the pro-war vote was determined not by party-line votes but by cross-over votes. Results of this study, analyzing the relationship between the religious background of the members of the 102nd Congress and their vote on the war, are summarized in Fig.1. Congressmen associated with religious denominations closer to the Old Testament were more likely to support the initiation of the 1991 war against Iraq.
Perhaps the most interesting finding of this study of the 1991 Congress vote on the Gulf War was that the Jewish vote was split evenly with 21 Jewish members of Congress voting against the war and 20 voting for the war and did not show any relationship to the continuum in Fig. 1, as the Jewish community is diverse and pursues many diverse interests. If Christianity would not be grafted on Judaism, the Jewish community would be likely viewed and treated as any other minority. However, Christianity, grafted upon Judaism, ascribes to Jews qualities that are detached from reality. Christians frequently define Jesus Christ as primarily the God and only incidentally a Jew, killed by the Jews. This line of reasoning leads to anti-Semitism. An alternate line of reasoning is that Jesus Christ was primarily a Jew and that Jews are the chosen people, this reasoning leading to philo-Semitism. Ellis (1971, p.51) elaborates this point as follows:
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- "The contemporary prevalence of philosemitism within the context of Christianity is due to the Christian encounter with the Holocaust. If it is impossible to chart a Christian future that leaves behind the death camps, it is difficult, if not impossible, to envision a positive expression of Christianity with the death camps it helped to construct at its center. Instead, what occurs is an attempt by Christian theologians to use the Holocaust as a way of bypassing the "terminal" condition of Christian belief. If the Holocaust symbolizes the demonization of the Jews and in this way represents the alienation of Christianity from its source, by recovering the beauty of the Judaic faith and by realizing that Israel is chosen and that gentiles are grafted onto that choseness, the history of Christianity can be confessed and jettisoned. By looking to the Jews as the authentic people and themselves as a secondary, grafted upon people, the history of triumphalism comes to be seen as alien, a detour which is now realized as such."
[edit] Religious dispensationalism
E. W. Russell's paradox is intensified by the phenomenon of the religious dispensationalism. Objectively measured, the zeal of fundamentalist Christians and their unconditional support for Israel, is higher among the fundamentalist Christians than among the Jewish community.
In general, the U.S. population does not support the initiation of a war. However, in the case of Israel, the fundamentalist Christians tip the scale over the critical 50 percent (Krus & Webb, 2001), as shown in Fig. 2.
[edit] Spiritual counseling
An example of the importance of moral codes as related to the decision to initiate a war is spiritual counseling of President George H. W. Bush by Reverend Graham. As told by Barbara Bush (1994) in her autobiography, the presidential couple was well aware that the decision to go to war will cost human lives and lives of countless children (p. 388):
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- "George told me last night that they decided that it [the war] would start tonight. All America is praying and we are, too. As we said our prayers, his voice cracked and his eyes got misty. I know that those innocent children get to him."
To obtain spiritual counsel on this matter, they invited Billy Graham to the White House. Graham dispelled the doubts the first family had about killing civilians and, using the notion of the just war, absolved the President of personal guilt. President Bush had also sought and obtained the support of most religious leaders prior to initiating the Gulf War.
[edit] Retrospect and prospectus
That the balance of power is a conditio sine qua non of existence of the international law and absence of major warfare is the primary axiom of the political science. During the Second World War, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt held a series of discussions with Soviet Premier Stalin. Roosevelt's son James in his book A Family Matter (1980) describes their discussion at Yusupov Palace on the southern coast of Crimea in February, 1945, that established the balance of the nuclear power on the world scale that kept a relative peace for a half-of-a-century.
This power balance was disturbed when President Reagan convinced Premier Gorbachev that the unipolar world, headed by the benevolent United States, will be a better place to live in. Instead of keeping this promise, the leading elites of the United States initiated an escalating series of wars, as predicted by the balance of power theory of the social science
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- "if the power balance among nations fails, nothing will prevent the dominant superpower to ignore the international law"
and prognosticated by Samuel P. Huntington in his (1993) Clash of civilizations. It was within this context that Premier Putin called the fall of the Soviet Union
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- "The greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century."
In the absence of secular powers to keep peace, intellectual powers and the power of the world opinion, are among the few remaining factors that may avert conventional and possibly nuclear wars looming on the horizon. Whether these forces will be strong enough to accomplish this task remains the foremost issue of our age.
[edit] Notes
- ^ It seems difficult to imagine another issue more relevant to social science than studying the decision-making processes when one group of people decides that another group can be sent into combat to inflict death and to face possible death. Facets of this decision-making process have been studied by philosophers, historians, and social scientists during the course of recorded human history. The 1991 Gulf War provided a unique opportunity to study objectively factors leading toward the decision to go to war, as it was the only war in the recent history of the United States where the Congress vote was about equally split, providing the necessary variability of the data to make it suitable for quantitative analysis. The 1941 Congress vote on the war with Japan was close to unanimous, with the single dissenting vote of Jeannette Rankin of Montana, as was the September 14, 2001 Congress vote when California Democrat Barbara Lee cast a single vote against the measure to give President Bush power to revenge the destruction and damage of several New York buildings on September 11, 2001. The Korean War and the Vietnam War were not voted upon.
- ^ Two oldest extant cultures are the Judaist and Chinese, each spanning about six-thousand years and both rooted in its own cultural heritage. Supporting our hypothesis is the fact that throughout the millennia of the Chinese history, the experience of Jewish diaspora in China was profoundly different from the history of Jewish diaspora in the Christian countries.
[edit] References
- Bainton, R. H. (1960) Christian attitudes toward war and peace. New York: Abingdon. ISBN 0-687-07027-9.
- Bush, B. (1994) Barbara Bush: A memoir. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. ISBN 0-02-519635-9.
- Clausewitz, C. von (1991) Vom Kriege (19th ed.). Bonn, Germany: Dümmler.
- Ellis, M. H. (1997) Unholy alliance: religion and atrocity in our time. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Publishers. ISBN 0-8006-3080-7.
- Huntington, S. P. (1993) The clash of civilizations? Foreign Affairs, 72/3.
- Krus, D. J., & Webb, J. M. (1993) Quantification of Santayana's cultural schism theory. Psychological Reports, 72, 319-325 (Request reprint).
- Krus, D. J. & Webb, J. M. (2001) Für oder gegen ein militärisches Eingreifen: Ist die Einstellung zum Krieg eine Variable der Gesinnung oder des situationsbedingten Gemütszustands? Zeitschrift fur Sozialpsychologie und Gruppendynamik in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 26.Jg. Heft 2, 3-8 (Request reprint in English, in German).
- Roosevelt, J. (1960) A family matter. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-24621-6.
- Russell, E.W. (1971) Christianity and militarism. Peace Research Reviews, 4, 3, 1-77.
- Russell, E.W. (1974) Christentum und Militarismus. In Huber, W., & Liedke, G. (Hrsg.), Christentum und Militarismus, Studien zur Friedensforschung. München, Germany: Kösel-Verlag, 21-109.
[edit] Further reading
- Chomsky, N. (2003) Preventive war: the supreme crime. Znet, August 11. (Request reprint).
- Chossudovsky, M. (2005) War crimes and the "just war" theory.(Request reprint).
