"If the Nuremberg laws were applied today, then every Post-War American president would have to be hanged." - Noam Chomsky
This is a reprint from a chapter from Sir Oswald Mosley's book, The Alternative, published in 1947. Mosley deals with the whole moral issue regarding wartime atrocities, which are committed by all sides. Mosley was in a good position to judge. As a young Member of Parliament he was one of the few people to speak out against the Amritsar massacre of 1919 and the 'Black and Tan' atrocities, making himself very unpopular with the Establishment as a result.
The Union of Europe and the moral question
It is necessary now to consider the general subject of "Atrocities," as they are compendiously described. It is essential to face this question., because a great and abiding bitterness can inhibit both European Union and something more important man any economic solution - the new way of life which may come from a new and wider opportunity. Let us begin by a most unpopular process; let us free our minds from cant. We will ignore for the moment, the darker phases of more recent history and regard only the story of the great nations over the brief span of the last generation. In the course even, of the last thirty year's, the great countries, or various political elements within them, have accused each other of almost every crime in the calendar. Nearly all nations have been accused of these things by their opponents. But, we cannot accept the verdict of a contemporary enemy as history, even if he provides both accusation and judgment with the most differential pomp. Just look at the charges which have been flying about in periods of political passion in the last thirty years: we will return later to the specific matter of the last war.
Americans have been accused in reports published by leading British Daily-Newspapers of the following actions: burning opponents alive at the stake; shooting men and women; flogging and other methods of torture; deportation of men from their homes; imprisonment under ex-post facto laws; deprivation of food and water; herding prisoners like sardines; and racial persecution.
Britons have been accused in reports published by leading British Daily Newspapers of the following actions: murder; rape; robbery; flogging and other torture; looting; arson; outrages on women; deliberate starvation of villagers; flogging of innocent schoolboys; kidnapping of children; brutal ill-treatment of prisoners; and racial persecution.
Frenchmen have been accused in reports published by leading British Daily Newspapers of the following actions: murder; rape and other outrages against women and children; deportation of civilians from their homes; harsh and indecent conditions of imprisonment.
Among the smaller countries, citizens of one or more of the following nations: Hungary; Finland; Rumania; Turkey; have been accused in reports published by leading British Daily Newspapers of the following actions: deportation and massacre of men, women and children; brutal flogging of both sexes; imprisonment under insanitary conditions; producing typhus and wholesale deaths; plundering of hospitals of milk, etc., thus causing deaths of babies; murder; rape; and racial persecution.
Finally, Russians have been accused in reports published in leading British Daily Newspapers of wholesale murder; mutilation; torture of the most revolting description, rape and other outrages on women; herding in prisons under overcrowded and insanitary conditions; religious persecution. Soviet Russia has also been indicted by their wartime comrade-in-arms, Mr Winston Churchill, in the following terms: -
"Bolshevism, wherever it manifests itself openly and in concrete form, means war of the most ruthless character, the slaughter of men, women and children, the burning of homes, and the inviting in of tyranny, pestilence and famine. "All the harm and misery in Russia have arisen out of the wickedness and folly of the Bolshevists, and there will be no recovery of any land in Russia, or in Eastern Europe, while these wicked men, this vile group of cosmopolitan fanatics, hold the Russian nation by the hair of its head and tyrannise over its great population."
Germans have been accused by a Court and Judges constituted by the Allies at Nuremberg in terms too recent, familiar and voluminous to require, or permit, any repetition here. Germans will eventually have the opportunity to argue before History whether, or not, the "horror" conditions in their war concentration camps were largely produced by Allied bombing and consequent epidemics. History will consider such questions in relation to the morality and chivalry of hanging young girls who happened to be placed in official positions in such camps at such a time. Here, we are necessarily concerned for the moment more with what is conveniently forgotten than with the subject of continual reminder from politics and press.
From the foregoing catalogue only one fact emerges: if the verdict of opponents were accepted as final, nearly everyone would be guilty of the most revolting crimes in greater or lesser degree. Further, if all these charges were subject to impartial examination by a neutral court, it is possible, and probable, that no nation would be entirely free from any charge which would, in varying degree, be the subject of shame under any high code of morality. What now of this question of degree? Does it enter seriously the question of morality? Without casuistry, is it legitimate to enquire whether a man is any.less a murderer if he has committed only half a dozen murders that if he has committed a thousand; once a crime has been committed the repetition appears more a matter of additional temptation, or opportunity, than a question of further morality. But, it is unnecessary at this stage to be drawn into any speculative realm of ethics or philosophy.
The moral question in nations in defeat
Let us all agree that such crimes cannot be excused, and that the most that can be urged in favour of the accused is a plea in mitigation. (We assume for the moment that the charges have been proved in a neutral court, which is not the fact in any case to date: neither the charges against Germany, nor any other nation, have yet been examined in a neutral court, and History will not accept them as true until they are). Now, if we agree that no defence for such crimes exists, but only a plea in mitigation, what factors should weigh in such a plea? Is it wrong to suggest that the only factor which can weigh is national necessity? It is not a defence but a plea in mitigation. Let us take an extreme hypothetical case., which illustrates the point. If the life of British Empire had depended in the recent war on the killing in cold blood of one prisoner, it would have been murder to kill him; but the plea in mitigation would have been that the lives of millions had thereby been saved, a mighty structure of civilisation had been preserved, and one thousand years of great history could reach out again to future glories. To take another case, a killing of a man by Lions in the arena of Ancient Rome to make a crowd laugh would, in terms of fundamental morality, have been precisely the same crime; but the plea in mitigation would have been far less, in fact, nonexistent. If we agree at all on these premises of the argument, which seem ineluctable, the preliminary conclusion appears to be inevitable. To murder one man is the same crime as to murder many; no defence exists for such a crime, but only a plea in mitigation; the only plea which appears at all tenable is the higher necessity of the survival of the nation or a great cause.
If, at this point of the argument, some slight psychological resistance is developing in the reader who happens to be a worthy Conservative Churchwarden or a Socialist Nonconformist lay preacher, because he scents some danger in the path along which he is being led in easy stages, let me ask him one question. Supposing in 1940, it had been put to him, as a matter of fact, that the life of the British Empire depended on the shooting of one man - the writer of these pages - would the fact that this writer could not even be charged with any offence against any law have deterred him from voting in favour of the shooting? Can he put his hand to his heart and swear that in such circumstances he would not have committed a crime which in any law, or under any system of accepted morality, would have been murder? Further, would the memory of his decisive vote in favour of shooting me even have ruffled his smooth complacency as he carried the offertory bag down the aisle of his church next Sunday? A little enquiry into the subject of motes and beams might well preclude this discussion. For, once our Churchman has accepted the (to me) lamentable fact that, in these circumstances of national necessity and desperation, he would have been guilty of a technical murder, he has lost the whole argument. The excuse that he could advance for his action is precisely the excuse by which his opponents could cover every action of which he accuses them.
No such situation of desperation arose in Britain to provoke any such action. Invasion was a possibility for a short period, but the life or death of the 1,500 British subjects, whom the Government held in their prisons without trial, was entirely irrelevant to the issue, even if those persons had been ill-disposed instead of proved patriots from the Air Force and trenches of the previous war1. But the situation in Germany, reeling back in defeat in 1945, was very different. Men were short, food was short, disorder raged as all supply services broke down under incessant bombing. They held in prisons or camps a considerable disaffected population, some German, but most alien, who were requiring guards and good food supplies that were wanted elsewhere to the point of urgency and desperation. They were faced in a harsh and very practical form with the very hypothetical question stated above.
We must stress again that, in point of crime, it makes no difference whether the killing is of one man or of many: in practice the dilemma only arises when it affects many. In such a situation would any great nation have lost the last war, because of a moral scruple in its conduct? It is useless to say that the war was begun for moral reasons; they all say that, and anyhow, it has nothing to do with the point. The question is quite different - would any great nation lose a war, and suffer national destruction, rather than treat some minority in a brutal and immoral way? We all know the answer; if we have ever been in a minority in a moment of passion. Everyone knows the answer: no nation would be wiped out rather than behave in this way. There is nothing that every great nation will not do, rather than accept defeat. Only those, who, faced by the test of fact, have accepted defeat rather than violate a moral principle, can throw a stone at others.
Modern war is the end of morality. Those, who are responsible for beginning war, are, also, responsible for ending morality. Can our Churchwarden then continue to rend the soul of Europe with eternal animosities against the German people because their leaders, now dead, followed a principle, which, in similar circumstances of a losing fight, he would have found it very difficult himself to deny. The argument here stated is no sterile dialectic; it will, no doubt, be very unpopular - the destruction of humbug always is - but it goes to the root of the matter in terms of that morality which comes so lightly from so many thoughtless lips. There are times when self-deception and hypocrisy do not matter; these things are old and amiable idiosyncrasies of many of our peple. But such humbug today is a world menace; because it strangles the soul of Europe.
Let us carry the argument forward to the point where the smug gentleman of our imagining must face further vistas of the horror that sometimes confronts men in real and terrible things. If he found a prisoner in a cell who held a secret on which the life of the country , or at least the lives of many of his comrades, depended, would he watch with gentle equanimity the derision of that prisoner at his ineffective efforts to obtain that information; if he had overwhelming force, and brutality, at his disposal? That is a situation which seldom confronts Churchwardens, but is often met, in varying degrees, by military police in an occupied country, where resistance is being organised on a large scale. Did all the Black and Tans emerge quite so spotless from the same test in much the same situation in Ireland, as the Churchwarden would have liked to think in Church on Sunday, just after he had voted for the Coalition Government which used them in an attempt to break the spirit of the Irish by terror? Let us remember that Britain was not fighting for her life at the time the Government employed the Black and Tans in Ireland, but that every country, which occupied another country in the late war, was, at that stage, fighting for its existence.1 It is not pleasant to face facts, but even the most complacent must be made to face them at last, if fresh air and sunlight are to be let into the dark places of the European soul as harbingers of that new Springtime which shall follow a winter of oblivion.
['The 'Black and Tans' were a special force recruited by the British Government to wage a counter-terrrorist campaign against the Irish Voluteers in 1919. Their methods included torture, killing and mutilation of prisoners and wholesale destruction of property. Mosley was Parliamentary Secretary to the Bryce Commission, which exposed the atrocities and helped to bring them to an end. On the other hand, Sir Henry Wilson (Chief of the Imperial General Staff), writing in his diary about the cold blooded murder of Sinn Feiners without question or trial noted that Winston Churchill saw 'very little harm' in such atrocities. In 1920 over 2000 unarmed civilians, including women and children, were killed by British forces].
Final moral question
Let us not shrink from carrying the argument to that final question which has embarrassed in fine dialectic and deep moral searching some of the noblest minds of Europe ever since the zenith of Sparta first exposed to the enquiry of mankind an utterly ruthless method in the service of a higher purpose. The classic world discussed much the right to kill for the purpose of preserving, or fostering the emergence of, some species which was held by the prevailing sentiment to be worthy of much care. Does the best modem thought throw any light on the subject? The reader must settle for himself: at this point I do not seek to interpret such thought, but only direct attention to it for purposes of enquiry. Take a passage from the favourite Sage of our age in a writing which he, himself, selected as the finest, and furthest reaching, exposition of his thought. He is not only a superb intellect: he is also one of the kindest and most generous men that any of us, in any creed or party, have ever known.
The passage runs as follows:-
Acis (to the She-Ancient). Is she all right, do you think?
The She-Ancient looks at the Newly Born critically: feels her bumps, like a phrenologist; grips her muscles and shakes her limbs; examines her teeth; looks into her eyes for a moment; and finally relinquishes her with an air of having finished her job.
THE SHE-ANCIENT. She will do. She may live.They all wave their wands and shout for joy.
THE NEWLY BORN (indignant). I may live! Suppose there had been anything wrong with me?
THE SHE-ANCIENT. Children with anything wrong do not live here my child. Life is not cheap to us. But you would not have felt anything.
THE NEWLY BORN. You mean that you would have murdered me!
THE SHE-ANCIENT. That is one of the funny words the newly born bring with them out of the past. You will forget it tomorrow.'
Is it still necessary to say to our Churchwarden in the language of this same Sage, "Think child, think." Turn to the teaching of a moral philosopher who has long been accepted by many very serious and moral thinkers as pre-eminent in moral theory: "As for doing evil that good may come, it is really a meaningless phrase: because if good comes of it, and it was done with that intention, it cannot be evil."
Considerable qualification and development follows which the reader should study for himself, but the conclusion appears more or less to be: "From the point of view of practical decision, the end does always justify the means, in the sense that the course of action which will produce a balance of good results in the circumstances should be the one adopted." These are principles which have been laid down by leading thinkers in very different spheres, who have long and rightly been greatly honoured in Great Britain.
I will not attempt to apply these principles to the cases we have discussed, or pronounce any verdict upon such actions in the light of those opinions. Each reader must work out such problems for himself with the assistance of the best minds which the contemporary world can offer. These principles are here quoted for one reason: it is necessary for many people to realise that these deep matters of theory, and hard facts of reality, are not quite so simple as they wish to believe. It is time, in fact, that they stopped chattering and started thinking.
The crime of substituting terror for policy
For my part, I return to the point where I began, My position is mat such crimes, as we previously discussed, cannot be defended, and all that we can do in this respect is to listen to pleas of mitigation. The only possible criterion of such excuses appears to be national necessity which rests on the degree of danger to the life of a great nation, which would have arisen if the crime had not been committed. In such a light I should certainly judge events within my own experience. For instance, it would appear by this test that certain actions of British Government in India were less reprehensible than in Ireland. Personally, I opposed in Parliament and outside both the policy which employed the Black and Tans, and the policy which utilised similar measures in India. In both cases, incompetent and frightened Governments were, in my view, substituting brutality for efficiency. Their failure either to present a policy or to grip the situation was covered by an ineffective terrorism. They were characteristic of the epigram of a wise old man upon a well-known Conservative family: "they can never come to a decision until they have lost their temper." Such Governments fumbled and hesitated in paralysed indecision until the situation frightened them, and, then, turned weakly to the brutality of passion.
Neither terrorism had even the excuse of necessity. But the plea in mitigation in the case of India would obviously be the greater. The reason is not that any more justification can exist for maltreating Indians than Irishmen. The reason is rather that in India a tiny White population was surrounded by a vast sea of hostility in which it would rapidly be submerged if the situation got out of hand, even for a brief period. Terrorism, therefore, was employed both as a substitute for a policy and for a sufficiency of efficient force. In Ireland, no such plea of mitigation could be argued. The home island was adjacent and possessed overwhelming force; the use of Black and Tan terrorism had no vestige of reason except that it was a dirty little under-the-counter substitute for an open and effective repression by regular troops from which the Government shrank because of its effect on American and world opinion. In the first instance a Government had at least the excuse of being frightened into brutality: in the second case terrorism was part of a squalid intrigue which masked dishonesty and hypocrisy.
The extreme of extenuation can be urged in the case where the whole life, history and future of a great people is at stake: the minimurn of mitigation may be pleaded in a case where bewildered old men seek to cover the bankruptcy of their policy and the squalor of their souls, in some dispute which has no vital significance, by a little sly terrorism and back parlour sadism. I regret that it is necessary to refer to these old policies of vile memory, which are very much within my personal experience, because, with a small band of companions, I began the Parliamentary fight against them, which ultimately succeeded in checking brutality if not in securing a constructive policy. Brutality and terrorism, born of fear, laziness and incompetence, have always seemed to me as contemptible as they were unforgiveable. If anything rough has to be done in a dark, fierce world which, on occasion, compels the facing of such reality, by men hardened to a higher purpose and called to the steel test of great events, it should be done openly in the full light of day, and explained in terms of such high necessity that men may understand and God forgive. Such things cannot be defended: but mercy can hear a plea in mitigation, and it has been said that to understand all is to forgive all.
These memories are revived here for one purpose only: it is necessary to redress the balance in Europe. Even so, let it not be thought that only the past can be cited to restore an equilibrium to the moral position, which will enable Europeans to live together. It is unnecessary to refer to the occupation of Germany after the previous war, concerning which we have already cited some facts from responsible British sources at the time. We have also, already, referred to some events of the present occupation of Germany, and observed that many Englishmen can extend to the Germans in this respect a sympathetic understanding because some of the "Britons" now occupying Germany have already occupied us. I will go further in the determination to restore some balance to an argument which has too long been one-sided: because, whatever offence is now given, the attainment of a new 'equilibrium' is necessary to the future harmony of Europe. Therefore, I now reprint a brief article which I wrote at the time of Nuremberg and the beginning of the post-war starvation of Germany: -
Nuremberg and after
" With courts, judges and gaolers we are not concerned. They loyally and faithfully execute the laws which political forces lay down; they can do no other. These words are addressed to some of those political forces, and to some only among them.
"Are you yet satisfied? Or will you now permit the slow murder of a whole people by mass starvation? Even the finer spirits among the war leaders revolt against that; only the small — the incredibly small — demand further vengeance. The large of mind and spirit have more than had enough; is it not now enough even for the lesser?
['mass starvation' Mosley is referring to the notorious Morgenthau Plan, agreed by Roosevelt and Churchill at the Quebec Conference in 1944 and confirmed by them and Stalin at Yalta in 1945. The Plan required the dismantling of all industry in Germany, turning it into a strictly pastoral and agricultural country. Effectively, this would have meant the deliberate starvation of about 30 million Germans. Incredibly, the Plan was put into operation after the war, but had to be abandoned when it became clear that it was preventing the economic revival of the rest of Europe.]
"The principle of retroactive law has been firmly established in Europe. By that principle an opponent can, at any time, be eliminated by a new retrospective law made to fit his particular case. Do you not yet feel safe? You have not merely killed political opponents in cold blood: that was a commonplace at certain periods of history c we thought they were past. You have also killed brave soldiers who obeyed orders. You have made a zoo and a peep-show of your victims for the gloating joy of eveiything that is lowest in human or beast. You have mocked and derided the sufferings of the women who loved these men. You have done things not often known in the millenia of Western history — why? — Modern history has taught us the answer, even if the history of brave men had not already told us that such things are only found in those who fear.
"What else can it mean? — the long, slow ordeal of trial' and killing to assure yourself that they are really dead, and that it is just; the frenzy of indignation because they were permitted last words, and you fear that even from the scaffold they will say something you cannot answer; the scattering of the ashes in an unknown place so mat even their bodies may not rally the souls of men and prove them in the end stronger in death than you are in life. (Study the psychological works on Totem killings and subsequent Totem fears, if you are interested to follow further the 'rational' processes of the 'Democratic' mind) Then the desire to debase by every means, and, above all, to prevent any dignity in death: the manacling of the victims, the tenor of suicide. Why not permit it — if you were determined they must die — it was the habit of a finer civilisation in the Hellenic world than you have yet known.
"To try to prevent suicide, and to fail, was to enshrine Goering for ever, in the mind of every German, within the lustre of that immortal line from Goethe's Achilleus, when the hero is ready to 'take from the hand of despair the glorious crown of unfading victory.' You incurred that reverse because you could not bear the thought of a suicide that might rob you of your ritual of debasement.
What can all this signify in terms of the psychologist, except a deep sense of personal inferiority in your subconscious measurement of yourself against the victim? But we need no such learning to teach us mat. For a man — a real man — in victory has but one thought — to prevent the necessity of further strife. The elimination of the opponent is enough — preferably not by death if he is a brave and manly figure. Can we conceive a real man — in victory dancing round a. manacled enemy — shrieking insults in the face of death — laughing at the suffering of the women — frightened of his victim's last words — frightened even of his ashes — terrified of his 'legend'? What strange, dark spirit of some remote underworld has possessed our virile England?
"Even now is it not enough? Must you also destroy the million masses of ordinary people? Surely it is only the outstanding whom your natural character, for reasons obvious to any psychologist, leads you to hate? Cannot you spare the ordinary, the poor, the humble, the suffering? Is vengeance not yet slaked? Can you not even now leave the past to history? Or do you fear, too, the cold contempt in the eyes of posterity?
"It is well said within our time that the 'grass grows green over the battlefields, but over the scaffold, never.' This grass will not grow green. Revenge will follow vengeance until some generation is found great enough to disrupt the circle of fatality, and to break this 'Bondage of the Gods.'"
Look Foreward
The last sentence of this article provides the reason for my present striving. Europe must forget and forgive, if the Continent is to live, in which resides our history, and on which rests the hope of Mankind. Can any great nation look back on the story of even the last generation without some sense ofmea culpa? The answer is clearly no; but few are sufficiently influenced by the creed which they profess, to be any less interested in the throwing of stones. Is it too much to hope that a new Europe will grow away from the memory and influence of such events, as British Empire and French civilisation have developed far beyond many of the impulses and occurences which marked their origin? Who would condemn the present structure of British Empire by reason of the brutal and bloody incidents which occurred in the establishment of some Colonial outpost, or in the Indian Mutiny? Who would blame the fine flower of twentieth century French culture for the dark fertility of blood with which the Revolution soaked those deep roots? If National Socialist and Fascist civilisation had reached a maturity which was a glory of constructive achievement, would any philosopher of the future have troubled more about events discussed in Nuremberg than the birth pangs of any other civilisation? Can any serious thinker condemn a man of thirty, because there was a mess in the bedroom when he was born? To adopt this attitude is to show a lack both of the historic sense and of any realistic appreciation of the way of nature and of life.
The greater good cannot always be achieved without the lesser evil. Will that be denied by those who justified the dropping of an Atom Bomb on civilian populations with the plea that the war would be shortened and the lives of soldiers would be saved? That argument could only mean that it was more important to save the lives of British and American soldiers, which would have been lost in the invasion of Japan, than the lives of relatively few Japanese children who perished in the agony of Hiroshima. The argument that the end justifies the means, that national necessity overrides the suffering of individuals, and that the few must be sacrificed to the many, could scarcely be pushed to a further extreme of moral dubiety. It is not for us here to judge these things, and no attempt is made to do so. The purpose of this writing is rather to eliminate an hypocrisy which poisons the soul of the world. In the light of recent history a little humility is not amiss in judging others: not even in those who profess the creed which makes humility the chief virtue, but refuse with insensate arrogance even to contemplate the possibility that they have constantly committed the crimes of which they accuse others. Such types in daily life are merely laughable: in the seats of power they are a world fatality. The wounds of Europe must be healed before the work of construction can begin. They are wounds of the spirit, and they are kept open by these animosities and memories of atavistic savagery. These old tilings have no interest to the creative mind, but they impede our work. That is why we ask Europe not to look back, but to stride forward. In these pages I have attempted to describe some possibilities which beckon us onward in the march of the European spirit. They are worth that effort of the living mind and will, which forgets the past and, thus, achieves the future. Division is death, but Union is life. |
