Two weeks ago, Kevin Miller alerted me to his post about Marquette University’s suppression of a College Republican fundraiser. The CRs had an “Adopt a Sniper” program, with the proceeds benefitting troops overseas. Marquette University, ever the stickler for Catholic morality, thought this was just too much, and got all medieval on the GOP’s hineys, breaking out the campus inquisition, the rack, the iron maiden (excellent!), and other horrors in order to squelch their freedom of speech.
Kevin and I have disagreed here on Catholic Light about the definition of torture, and I would enjoy hearing him explain why the atomic bombings of Japan were immoral (I am open to the argument, but since the entire Japanese population was being mobilized for war, I tend to think it was legitimate.) However, Kevin says in this episode, “I submit that Marquette’s reservations have little if anything to do with Catholicism, and much if not everything to do with irrational politically correct emotionalism,” and explains why.
I second Kevin’s argument, particular about the nature of the sniper’s work. It’s very difficult for a sniper — as opposed to, say, a bomber pilot or artilleryman — to accidently kill the innocent, as a well-aimed bullet is the very definition of a precision-guided munition. A sniper demoralizes the enemy, causing them to give up more quickly. He epitomizes the virtues of patience and fortitude, which are essential to his duty.
Gunnery Sergeant Carlos Hathcock, the most famous Marine sniper, saw things differently from Marquette University. To him, being a sniper was about saving lives: “Hell, anybody would be crazy to like to go out and kill folks….I never did enjoy killing anybody. It’s my job. If I don’t get those bastards, then they’re going to kill a lot of these kids. That’s the way I look at it.”
Gunny Hathcock probably killed 300 Vietnamese soldiers in Vietnam, equivalent to about seven platoons. Yet he won a Silver Star for saving lives at the risk of his own:
Ironically, the only decoration for valor that he won was for saving, not taking, lives. On his second tour in Vietnam, on Sept. 16, 1969, he was riding atop an armored personnel carrier when it struck a 500-pound mine and erupted into flames. Hathcock was knocked briefly unconscious, sprayed with flaming gasoline and thrown clear. Waking, he climbed back aboard the burning vehicle to drag seven other Marines out. Then, “with complete disregard for his own safety and while suffering an excruciating pain from his burns, he bravely ran back through the flames and exploding ammunition to ensure that no Marines had been left behind,” according to the citation for the Silver Star he received in November 1996, after an extensive letter-writing campaign by fellow Marines had failed to win him the Medal of Honor for his exploits with a rifle.
I agree with you man, I remember the japanese had an entire unit of toddlers and infants ready to fight. Oh and elderly too.
I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic, Jayson, but the Japanese government was actively training children and the elderly to resist the Americans with sharpened sticks. The military establishment wanted to keep fighting until the last Japanese life was extinguished.
Eric,
Yes, there was general mobilization. I doubt, however, that the whole population was “combatants” in the relevant moral sense (i.e., in the sense intended in the Church’s teaching that you can’t target “noncombatants”). (To what extent, and how effectively, would they have carried out that resistance – with sharpened sticks? And what indeed about those who obviously wouldn’t have been able to participate – infants, the elderly, …? Certainly they weren’t legit targets.)
Yes, I was being sarcastic. Killing thousands of innocent elderly children, infants, babies in the womb even, just because we thought it would produce some higher good in the long run is NOT ACCEPTABLE. It’s a blight on humanity. That you can’t see that is sad.
The Marquette College Republicans are providing support to troops, whether financial or material. Are they therefore legitimate targets?
Richard, of all people I would expect you to be at least a little charitable.
I am not saying that deliberately targeting the undeniably innocent (those who are incapable of contributing to the war effort) is morally acceptable. It isn’t.
If a nation makes a decision to mobilize its entire populace, as Japan had; was taking steps toward it, as Japan was; and had made earlier moves suggesting that it was not an idle boast, and Japan had — then there has to be bad consequences in their enemy respecting the civilian-military distinction for Japan’s doing so. Otherwise, there’s no reason for them not to do it, absent an a priori committment to certain values. Which they did not share in this case, making those values meaningless.
The unprecedented kamikaze attacks, the virtual absence of surrenders on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, Japanese treatment of Western POWs and the widespread commission of hara-kiri even among Japanese civilians on Iwo Jima and Okinawa — all fundamentally showed that the US in 1945 was dealing with an enemy who had different values, who didn’t acknowledge the distinction between civilians and military and didn’t follow Christendom’s ideas of hors de combat.
My point is not — “they did it, so we can do it.” No, it’s rather that if the innocent-civilian/legitimate-military distinction is something that men CAN not know (Japan, the Palestinians today). And so statements like “children=innocent,” which are bandied about like self-evident postulates, are not true categorically, but rather are true only within certain discourses and where certain practices are followed. And in a situation where an enemy doesn’t respect it, it becomes **impossible** for you to respect it without rewarding it because you cannot know when they are respecting it and when they are not.
And if you simply ignore their actual behavior, and don’t change your rules accordingly, you’re providing an incentive for them to continue to “cheat” or find new ways to act immorally since it doesn’t cost them anything. The civilian-military distinction, like all legal-forensic rules, requires some method of enforcement, some penalty for erasing it (by using “civilians” as soldiers, which the Japanese planned to do). Otherwise it’s just hollow words.
Maybe you don’t get my point about the CRs, Eric.
If the College Republicans were to send materiel to troops — say armored clothing — one could arguably put them into the same category as civilians in a munitions plant.
They’d have a more direct link to the warfare than the Japanese children did.
Anyway, perhaps you can help me with a gap in my knowledge about the war. Do you know if the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were aimed at specific military targets? I don’t happen to know — but I think that such a targeting would be a necessary element if the bombings are to be morally acceptable.
I suppose if the CRs were supplying war materials to troops in the field, then yes, they might be considered legitimate targets, but I still don’t see the point. Are you saying that, for example, Britain should not have tried to destroy V-1 factories during the Blitz, because doing so might have killed civilians?