Justifying the Horror of War

WAR was described in JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association) in 1988 as “the most terrible scourge of the 20th century.” It is estimated that 90 million people have thus far been killed in wars in the 20th century. Historically, about 50 percent of war-​related deaths have been civilians, but the percentage has risen dramatically. By the 1970’s, civilians were said to account for 73 percent of the deaths, and in the 1980’s, for 85 percent of them.

How can humans justify such wholesale murder of civilians? In a similar way that early Americans justified slavery. They refused to view the victims as human. The textbook The Sociology of Social Problems observes: “The ‘all men are created equal’ dictum did not apply to Negroes, since they were ‘property,’ not men.” Similarly, the JAMA article noted that the nations deny “the full humanity of the victims, typically limiting their identity to single-​attribute designations that are asserted to threaten the sovereignty of the nation: he is no longer a man, a father, a wood-​carver, a small farmer, but a bourgeois; she is no longer a woman, a student, a daughter, a lover of poetry, but a Marxist.”

Clergy-supported nationalism has largely been responsible for the horrible slaughter, as Catholic historian E. I. Watkin acknowledged: “Whatever the official theory, in practice ‘my country always right’ has been the maxim followed in wartime by Catholic Bishops. . . . Where belligerent nationalism is concerned they have spoken as the mouthpiece of Caesar.”

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U.S. Army