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OPPENHEIMER, TRUMAN’S DEGREE AND GAZA

By Joel Levin

The Oscar nominations are out, and the big winner is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist/mathematician who, in concert with a number of other scientist/mathematicians, worked on a killing device named ‘the atomic bomb’ that caused the death of 200,000 people, almost entirely civilians, at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unlike other stories that have captivated Hollywood about 20th century mathematician/scientists – A Beautiful Mind about John Nash, The Theory of Everything about Stephen Hawking, The Man Who Knew Infinity about Srinivasa Ramanujan, or The Imitation Game about Alan Turing – Oppenheimer centers on the work, not just the creator of the work. The hero is the bomb, not the bomb maker, and the elation we are meant to feel is the success in making that bomb. Should we be elated?

Not necessarily. In 1956, Oxford University was engaging in its tradition of awarding a former President of the United States an honorary Oxford degree. In the case of Harry Truman – who helped the British win the war, save the island, spare people’s lives, and give them the opportunity for a fresh start in a peaceful world – it was a foregone conclusion that the degree would be awarded. Put differently, it was more foregone than usual. However, Oxford University, being a medieval institution, growing from a monastic tradition where all assembled have a vote, put that matter to vote of all members of the Oxford community, generally meaning the faculty, at the famous Sheldonian Theatre, one of the masterpieces of British architecture designed by Sir Christopher Wren.

Those assembled of all stripes were present to rubber stamp (or more kindly, put by acclamation) the award of the degree to the U.S. president, particularly to a leader of the effort to win World War II such as Harry Truman. However, one lone female research assistant in philosophy, Elizabeth Anscombe, rose to protest. In her view, rather than being a war hero, Truman was a war criminal. Rather than embodying a moral force who saved lives, he was an immoral agent who unnecessarily killed hundreds of thousands. To her, dropping the atomic bombs on civilians with no military advantage as a way to force the surrender of the Japanese military was indefensible. Consider what Anscombe said: “Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder. Naturally, killing the innocent as an end in itself is also murder”. Of the perhaps thousand people attending the Orford University assembly, Anscombe managed four votes: herself and three of her closest friends.

Anscombe later went on to academic fame, including writing on the problem of morality during war, the idea of just wars, the problem of innocents, and other moral conundrums, such as the dilemma of double effect. She eventually retired as a distinguished Cambridge professor known for contributions in a number of fields: metaphysics, perception, action theory, semantics, and philosophy of mind, to name a few. However, her courage – as a junior faculty member, and a very lonely female one at that, in saying to all the world: stop and ask what is going on, when she was powerless and alone – is itself a significant contribution. That said, let us take a quick look at her examination of the three main issues relevant to Truman’s degree to see their value in understanding the war in Gaza today. We might re-classify these issues as who started the war, how we should conduct the war, and how we should end the war. Anscombe chose to ignore the first, made a conceptual error on the second, and nailed perfectly the third. The three issues and her insights are instructive.

First, she largely ignored how the war started. The British side of the war officially began with the German invasion of its ally, Poland, on September 1, 1939. The Allies, the UK and France, had warned Germany that if it took such action, there would be war. Germany took the action and war, after some dithering (the so-called Phoney War), followed. For the Americans, the start was even more dramatic, with the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, a German ally, and war declared immediately thereafter. Staying with the issue of the atomic bomb, the attack on Pearl Harbor was a singular aggression, unwarranted, hugely destructive, and causing the death of 2,400 people.

Of course, the Japanese, then and later, pointed to pre-existing grievances, including trade embargoes, and various lower level diplomatic sanctions. There are always antecedents, whether one looks to Japan, who was unhappy about an American trade embargo, or further back to America, unhappy with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, and on and on and forever. Similarly with Gaza, where various aggression, belligerencies, killings, and claims going back to 1917, 1948, 1967, and  all seem to figure. Antecedents are reasons to be unhappy, even aggrieved, but almost never are they sufficient to justify aggression and war, whether by the Japan or Hamas.

However, Anscombe ignored all of that in the argument. War once begun almost inevitably become exponentially more terrible, with far more people by several orders of magnitude killed later than were originally killed (in the case of the Gaza war, so far about 25,000 Gazan and Israelis post-October 7, as compared to 1139 originally). Because of that fact, Anscombe ignored the issue of origins. Simply, she wanted to get to peace. One might here think of the Good Friday Agreement, which in an extremely imperfect way settled decades, almost a century, of murders, terror and 50,000 casualties in Northern Ireland. As part of that peace process, those who were clearly terrorists and murderers were set free, and those who engaged in the most vile and pernicious acts were rewarded. What did not seem to count much in reaching peace, the third issue, was how it all started.

Is Anscombe right here? That is an issue far too large for this blog, but we might consider how disproportionate to the original act of killing the Archduke Ferdinand at Sarajevo leading to W.W. I with 17,000,000 dead, for example) war becomes as it continues. Original events are overshadowed by the desperation and devastation of those caught up in it, whether civilian or even soldiers who are little older than children lead to hate and destruction, on the other. We do not think that we should be unconcerned with self-defense or required to turn the other cheek. However, that is a different matter than license to achieve a full measure of satisfaction through enormous destruction, or to think that any of it would necessarily qualify as a moral response to an original immoral action. In any case, that worry seems to be the line of thinking for her.

The second issue – how to conduct the war – is what almost all who look at Anscombe’s speech and her writings focus on. How is Israel conducting the war? Is it in some way in violation of international law?

Again, to briefly summarize issues and stories far too vast to do justice to a brief summary – Anscombe’s criticism of Truman centered on the fact that he, and his predecessor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, dropped massive bombs on civilians in order to help convince Germany and Japan to surrender. The fire bombing of enemy cities – the civilian dead, if difficult to estimate, was probably between 250,000 and 300,000 in just the firebombing of Hamburg, Dresden and Tokyo – followed by dropping Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb first in Hiroshima and then Nagasaki was calculated to do exactly what Anscombe thought to be morally unacceptable: choosing to kill innocent people as a means to gain an advantage against others in a war. This was not considered an act of genocide, since the term ‘genocide’ was not invented until about 1943 in a book by Raphael Lemkin, and not a crime until 1948, when adopted as a Geneva Convention.

But even today, despite the enormous killing of members of a single national group, it likely would not be considered to be genocide: those killed were of a specific ethnicity or nationality, but not necessarily killed because of that. They were not hunted to be killed elsewhere, but were casualties simply because they were in the way, as a means to the end of winning the war. However, being innocent of one crime hardly makes one innocent of others and to Anscombe, killing innocent people to gain an end was unacceptable, unethical, immoral, and worthy of the strongest condemnation.

What, then, is Anscombe’s conceptual error? Surely killing innocent people to achieve an end, whether they are hostages, innocents, civilians, diversions, or anyone else, is simply wrong. However, not all killing is the same. We do not think that accidentally running someone over is the same as running someone down with the intent to kill them, particularly if one backs over them repeatedly to make sure they are dead. Intent matters, and it was intent that caught the attention of Anscombe. Basically, her position was that if someone primarily intended to do harm to the enemy, destroy buildings, sever railroad lines, block highways, destroy bridges, eliminate factories – even though they knew that there were huge numbers of civilians, who would be killed, and regardless of any disproportionality (that is, for example, any small gains in destroying railroad tracks could quickly be undone within a matter of hours, but the bombing of a railroad station might kill thousands of people) – it was not morally impermissible in war to kill those civilians. There had to be the primary intent to want them dead.

This, of course, is the exact justification of Israel of Netanyahu, and the Israeli Defense Forces who, it would be fair to say, do not want civilian deaths. They are not interested in killing Palestinians for the sake of killing Palestinians. Rather, Hamas is the target, and it is just a sad fact of war that others will die to hit the target. Anscombe gives them a pass. But is this right?

We do not always think so in either our ordinary moral intuitions or in national criminal law. If one acts with reckless indifference towards the safety of others – tosses bricks from a building roof when there are people below, even though not intending to hit anyone, but bad things sometimes occur – one is considered as having committed some degree of murder. That is, it is not a sufficient justification to say that it wasn’t one’s intention when firing toward a crowd that one did not want to hit anyone in the crowd, things just happen. In war, as in ordinary civilian life, these things must be weighed. Calculations must be had, no matter how distasteful, and reason must prevail. Bombing a building housing 100 civilians to kill one Hamas official is such a calculation and one necessary to get right.

Put differently, even if it is clear that Hamas uses civilians as hostages, that is not itself a reason to kill hostages. It may, for all the distasteful aspects of it, offer a reason to give Hamas a pass. Recklessness sometimes blurs with intentionality. As the dead pile up, as destruction spirals out of hand, and as the breakdown of society lurches forward, it might well make very little difference whether one is intentionally murdering people or recklessly doing so.

The third issue is the one that most bothered Anscombe. It was her view that the conditions required by the U.S. for peace – basically focused on the requirement that Japan unconditionally surrender and thereby eliminate the exalted status of the emperor – was an unreasonable and immoral pretext to continue a war which involved the killing of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of individuals. That is, not being concerned with how the war began but being quite concerned about intentions in conducting the war, one ought to be extremely diligent about taking advantage of ways to end it. Exacting every last ounce of retribution from the enemy is not reasonable, and the war should have been ended long before the dropping of atomic bombs by simply acceding to the Japanese request to leave the emperor in place but otherwise surrender. The two usual issues of how the war started and how it was conducted are pushed aside for what, to Anscombe, is the critical question of how it can end.

It is worth listening to her words: “Given the conditions, that [a more prolonged war] was probably what was averted by that action [the dropping of the atomic bombs] But what were the conditions? The unlimited objective, fixation on unconditional surrender. The disregard of the fact that the Japanese were desirous of negotiating peace. The character of the Potsdam Declaration – their ‘chance’. I will not suggest, as some would like to do, that there was an exultant itch to use the new weapons, but it seems plausible to think that the consciousness of the possession of such instruments had its effect on the manner in which the Japanese were offered their ‘chance’. We can now reformulate the principle of ‘doing evil that may come’. Every fool can be as much of a knave as suits him.”

There can be no real doubt that that desire for peace by the Japanese even without Oppenheimer’s bombs was real. The recent review by Andrew Cockburn in LRB of Evan Thomas’ new work on the decision to drop the atomic bombs sets this out in detail. Cockburn shows the Japanese were more than willing to achieve a negotiated peace prior to the dropping of the bombs. The sticking point centered on leaving their Emperor Hirohito in place.

In fact, Japan’s position was well-known at the time. For example, General Carter Clark, the head of the Special Branch of the Military Intelligence Service, when interviewed in 1959: “We didn’t need to do it, and we knew we didn’t need to do it . . . we used [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] as an experiment for two atomic bombs”. Or take the words of Admiral William Leahy, the wartime Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from his memoir: “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender”. In fact, consider the ultimate authority on the military, the head of the European Theater of Operations, General Dwight Eisenhower, who said that it was his belief at the time “that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary“.

The destruction of the lives, families, possessions and hopes of hundreds of thousands of people, all for a goal of little value: this is what Albert Einstein hints in the film and what Anscombe shouted at Oxford. It is the kind of immoral transgression being made today by Netanyahu, and, in his service, the IDF. (Of course, the position of Hamas in calling for the destruction of all the Jews in Israel and never-ending terror is incredibly worse. Article 7 of The Covenant of the Hamas states “The Day of Judgment will not come until Moslems fight Jews and kill them”. The criticisms made here are directed at those who ultimately have a moral compass, a rational basis, a respect for life, and because they are democratically elected, have some ability to be held responsible. Hamas fails on all counts. It is a fundamental and sad truth of moral conduct that, in dealing with those bereft of ethical principles, one cannot meet them on their own grounds, but must act better even in face of their spite or contempt, and give up notions of retributive justice, even if under certain conditions, that retribution is well justified).

This is the reality of the dropping of the atomic bombs, the reason that Anscombe opposed giving the honorary degree to President Truman who dropped them, and the warning in the Oppenheimer film that Albert Einstein gave to Oppenheimer: “Now it’s your turn to deal with the consequences of your achievement”. The killing of innocents, the wiping out of families and hopes and futures, the continuation of war that causes horrendous destruction and yields only marginal benefits: all that is what Einstein seems to be chastising Oppenheimer about and what Anscombe is screaming from the top of her lungs to Oxford concerning the decision to grant Truman an honorary degree. Taking a look at the conduct of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the IDF under his control, we see all of that in his absolute requirement that the end of war requires the end of Hamas. Consider what Netanyahu has said. He wrote (among other places, in a WSJ op-ed) that there are three conditions for any permanent cease-fire: the destruction of Hamas, the de-militarization of Gaza, and the de-radicalization process of Palestinian Society. The first, of course, is the problem. Hamas is an organization with widespread support, a network of alliances, fierce loyalty, and diverse allegiance by a significant number of those who live in Gaza, the West Bank and in the Palestinian diaspora. Is it possible to eliminate this complex structure? Not only would that be so destructive as to basically wipe out most of Gaza, it would prove an impossible task unless most of Gaza is wiped out. An ongoing conflict means more Israeli and Gazan soldiers killed, vastly more civilian deaths, and the complete devastation of Gaza society, with Netanyahu enjoying only the illusory retributive satisfaction of seeing some, but hardly most, of Hamas leadership destroyed. A very grim result.

Let us put the issue generally. Consider if Lincoln had required as part of the surrender of the South that everyone with allegiance to the Confederacy be destroyed, imprisoned, or simply be sent to re-education camps. Consider the same with those who had allegiance to Emperor Hirohito or to Prime Minister Benito Mussolini or to the Apartheid regime in South Africa. What is being demanded by Netanyahu to achieve a permanent ceasefire is the problem. It constitutes a serious wrong according to Anscombe, the continuing cause of the loss of life of hundreds of thousands of people. So long as Israel focuses on how the war started and so long as the rest of the world focuses on how the war is conducted, they will miss what Professor Elizabeth Anscombe perceived to be the crucial question in any conflict: how can we end it?

An Addendum

As I write this, there is another in a line of possible proposals to cease hostilities, return the hostages, and provide an infusion of food, fuel and medicine. It may or may not succeed and will likely in any case be followed by further and more thorough attempts to achieve peace. Regardless, what is on the table is not enough and very late. However, it would be extremely humane and welcome, and the right thing to do. Nothing that I said in the original article written a week ago about the many delays and impediments put in the way of any settlement has changed, in that the conditions demanded for a ceasefire have been unreasonable, while delays in achieving a ceasefire have resulted in more death and further destruction. One needs to be cautious now about the success of potential possible or temporary pauses in the war, given the belligerency, irrationality, violence, and indifference to human life that the conflict has generated thus far and which it may well tragically continue to generate in the future.