Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War
by Samuel Moyn
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pp.
Samuel Moyn is a recognized intellectual historian who teaches both history and law at Yale. His earlier books were written for an academic audience, however in Humane he has an immediate message that he wants to communicate to the general public. There has in recent years been a movement to make war more humane, specifically by minimizing death or injury to noncombatants. Moyn believes this motion poses a threat:
At our phase in the coming of humane war, its advocates and audiences should reevaluate whether they have lost their way in assisting to entrench continuing violence, which they might struggle to end rather. If the quest for more humane war could sooner or later decrease not simply collateral death and damage however even combatant killing and injury, the looming danger of something far more disquieting is likewise real. What if the elemental goal of endless war is not the death of opponent soldiers but rather the potentially nonviolent control of other peoples? Would that be tolerable? (p. 324)
If you are opposed to war, gentle war, to the degree there can be such a thing, is inadequate. That was fully obvious to the foremost critic of war of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Count Leo Tolstoy. Just as challengers of slavery sought to abolish it rather than ameliorate the conditions of bondage, so should opponents of war seek to end it, not to humanize it. It was no accident that Tolstoy drew this example, as he had actually been affected by the American pacifist and abolitionist Adin Ballou. “The Cornell University creator Andrew Dickson White, a long-distance visitor to Tolstoy’s estate, was shocked when Tolstoy firmly insisted in conversation that Ballou was the ‘greatest of all American writers'” (p. 34. Many readers of mises.org will have read White’s terrific study Fiat Cash Inflation in France.).
Tolstoy’s opinions on war mattered a great deal, as he was a global star, widely considered the world’s primary author. His followers included Mahatma Gandhi and William Jennings Bryan, who visited Tolstoy at his estate in Russia. Frequently, though, his viewpoints on numerous subjects struck lots of people as odd and extreme, such as his declaration that Shakespeare was an “insignificant, inartistic author.”
The movement against war naturally had other leaders besides Tolstoy. “Among the leading ideologues of eternal peace in the 2nd half of the nineteenth century was the Englishman William [sic] Cobden, who insisted that free trade could someday combine humanity where Christianity had actually graphically failed to do so” (p. 21. Cobden’s given name was not William however Richard; maybe Moyn slipped due to the fact that he was thinking of William Cobbett.).
As I have currently discussed, the antiwar movement of that time wished to end war, not make it more humane, and undoubtedly Tolstoy was sometimes lured to go further. In War and Peace, Prince Andrei suggests that soldiers in battle need to function as ruthlessly as possible, for instance killing opponent prisoners out of hand. Increasing the scary of war might make it more likely that individuals would end it. By no ways was this view confined to fictional characters; Tolstoy himself was of this viewpoint, though he later withdrew it, and the terrific Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz spoke in similar terms. Moyn lists a number of examples, but one need to be added also: General William Sherman, who validated his tactics of wanton damage with this exact same argument. Luckily, the view did not dominate in the peace motion, and the movement in reality consisted of efforts to enhance conditions for wounded soldiers, of which the most notable were the activities of the Red Cross, founded in Geneva in the 1860s. But the primary focus of the antiwar movement was in other places. Countess Bertha von Suttner, one of the leaders of the mainstream motion, who had actually encouraged Alfred Nobel to endow a reward for peace, was justifiably upset that the corecipient of the very first peace prize was Henry Dunant, a founder of the Red Cross however not an advocate for war’s abolition.
Schemes to end war was plentiful both prior to and after World War I. Moyn does not point out one of the most in theory intriguing of these, a plan by the philosopher Josiah Royce to end war through insurance coverage companies, a proposition that prefigured some later tips by libertarians for defense through such agencies. (As I fear is all too evident, I am prone to attempt to catch out authors in mistakes and omissions; however in doing so, I am especially unreasonable to Moyn, whose scholarship for this book is prodigious.)
Moyn views with much favor efforts to end war through global law, implemented by a worldwide body able to utilize military to oblige approval of its choices. In this connection he devotes much attention to the work of Quincy Wright, a leading authority on global law who favored such a company. (In his account of Wright’s youth, Moyn points out that Carl Sandburg was a household pal which Quincy and his daddy printed editions of Sandburg’s poems on their family printing press. It must likewise be noted that they were joined in this activity by Quincy’s sibling Sewall, who was to become of the twentieth century’s primary theorists of evolutionary biology.)
I can not think that this is an effective scheme to end war; the “cops actions” of the international body do not cease to be wars by providing another name. To his credit, Moyn cites a dissenting view by John Bassett Moore, the primary American authority of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on global law. Moore “felt it was not a good idea for their country to renounce its bequest in exchange for the pottage of limitless war to keep other nations from battling one another (p. 77). Moyn also points out a post by Edwin Borchard, Moore’s biggest disciple, on the illegality of Franklin Roosevelt’s bases-for-destroyers deal with Britain (p. 347, note to p. 122).
Moyn likewise sees sympathetically the unsuccessful effort to try Kaiser Wilhelm II for criminal conduct in launching World War I. By making rulers personally responsible for their conduct, peace would be encouraged. Once more, I discover myself in dissent from Moyn. Is a tribunal of judges from the victorious side in a war a fit body to decide the responsibilities for a war’s outbreak? Did Germany and its kaiser bear the primary regret for World War I? I do not think so, and though I can not argue the concern here, the point is much contested. Moyn likewise praises the post– The second world war Nuremberg tribunal, mentioning that the main indictment of the German leaders was for starting the war, not for crimes versus humanity committed during the conflict. One should once again ask whether “victor’s justice” is preferable, all the more so in that the Soviets, sitting in judgment on Germany, had like that country invaded Poland when the war began.
Moyn covers a huge variety of issues, and I have area to cover just one more. Today critics of American diplomacy frequently indicate the Vietnam War as the principal circumstances of horrendous conduct by America during wartime. Those of us alive at the time will never forget the “body counts,” the My Lai massacre, napalm and Representative Orange, and the saturation bombing of both Vietnam and Cambodia. Moyn states that bad as it was, the Korean War was worse. “Korea was the most brutal war of the twentieth century, determined by the strength of violence and per capita civilian deaths. In three years, 4 million passed away, and half of them were civilians– a higher proportion of the population than in any modern war, consisting of World War II and the Vietnam conflict” (p. 135).
Although a variety of treaties looked for to manage military conduct throughout war, severe efforts to apply such procedures is a quite current development. The notorious program of killing by drone, in which civilian casualties are couple of, a minimum of as compared with earlier military attacks, is a prime case of the effort to “humanize” war. It is specifically this that excites Moyn’s suspicions. He fears that the expansion of such ventures, together with programs of international security, would subject the world to hegemonic control by one or a couple of dominant superpowers. In cautioning against this threat, Moyn has actually rendered a fantastic service to peace.