Humanity

 Humanity

As those of you who have bothered reading my Facebook page will know, recently I have been reading

Glover, J., Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (London: Pimlico, 2001)

The first thing I have to say about it is that is was not exactly what I was expecting. It is not a history of, say, philosophical or theological ethical thinking in the Twentieth Century, but a history of, more or less, how things have gone badly wrong, and occasionally, have not.

In the book, for example, you get a section on ‘Tribalism’ which can be related to a race or a nation. As Glover observes, all of these things are, in fact, human constructs. Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities gets a name check here. We are taken on a rather scary ride through various conflicts, such as Rwanda and the massacre in 1994, and the chaos in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In this case, Glover bemoans the lack of a suitable internationally accredited force that could impose order and stop the naked murder and ethnic cleansing that was underway. As a book written over 20 years ago, it is scarily up to date.

There are other items perhaps of more interest to the wargamer. Glover argues cogently that the First World War ensured that the military was no longer so sure it should not target civilians. The Allied blockade of Germany did so target and, he notes gloomily, was continued beyond the Armistice. Somewhere around 750,000 civilians died from starvation. By the time the Second World War came around, the bombing was supposed to be precision-targeted at military installations. A bit of practice indicated that this was, with the technology of the day, impossible. As civilians had already been targeted in the blockade, it was a shorter step to area bombing. Again, Glover notes that this continued even after the Allies had air superiority and could have reverted to precision bombing.

Moving further along the line, Glover discusses the development of the atomic bomb, and how it started with trying to deter Hitler’s Germany from doing the same. In fact, the German A-bomb effort was destroyed at the cost of 28 civilian lives, by partisans targetting a ferry. But the project had its own momentum. The targeting of Japanese cities and civilians by area bombing was already established. It was only a short step to using the atomic bomb.

A further issue with the A-bomb specifically is that everyone tried to believe that the decision to use it was someone else’s. The scientists were only developing a bomb. Their job was to make sure it would work if it were used. The use was the responsibility of the politicians and military. The military, of course, followed orders from the politicians. The politician with ultimate responsibility was Truman, and he created an advisory committee to recommend the course of action. The advisory committee spent its time trying to guess what Truman and Churchill wanted to do. Eventually, the decision was made to use the bomb, of course.

Another aspect is what Glover calls the trap. Exemplified by the soldiers in the First World War trenches who, if they went over the top, got shot and, if they refused, also got shot. They were, in short, trapped. Glover outlines a number of instances of informal agreement across the lines, not just the Christmas Truce of 1914. Needless to say, High Command on both sides tried to put a stop to this.

Glover’s discussion of the outbreak of the First World War and its contrast with the Cuban Missile Crisis is instructive. In July 1914 no one could find a way out of warfare. The mobilization timetables were fixed and everyone, as it were, got on the train. There were options for limiting the war. For example, Germany could have gone to war with Russia and not France, and not invaded Belgium. However the military was out of control and refused to change their mobilization plans. Carnage ensued.

With Cuba, Kennedy was firstly aware of the destructive potential of nuclear war and also aware of the risks of sliding into it in the same way as in 1914. Krushchev also wished to avoid war, having seen the effects of the Second World War. Both managed to keep their hawks under control and find an acceptable solution. It can be done, but we need wise and well-informed politicians to do so.

Glover then trots through the Terror of Stalin, Mao’s China with the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia. This is all to do with Belief – in the great leader, in the creation of a better society, and so on. This is well worth reading, if only as a salutary to today’s politicians who seem to be trying to make a cult out of themselves, and to the people who seem to uncritically follow their every word and pronouncement. The views of the British Communist Party members about what they could do over the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 are instructive and alarming.

Finally, we pitch up with Nazi Germany. While Hitler was not the greatest mass murderer of the Twentieth Century, Glover regards the regime as the worst, bringing together both tribalism, in the sense of nationalism and Lebensraum, and Belief, in the messianic claims of Hitler and his acolytes. Thus through multiple little compromises, the distortion of the philosophies of both Nietzsche and Kant, and a large dose of anti-Semitism in the world at the time, the Holocaust was born. Glover points out that railway bureaucrats were quite happy to charge the Reich for return tickets for the guards on trains going to concentration camps, but only singles for the guarded. Children went free. The bureaucrats did not regard themselves as murderers.

No one gets off lightly. Not, obviously, the Germans who, at best, acquiesced to what was going on. Not the Western politicians who decided that they had taken enough humanitarian refugees. A few, such as French civilians who hid Jews, the Italian army who decided that aiding the deportation of Jews was beneath their honour, the Danes who enabled the escape of most Danish Jews to Sweden, and a few others who spoke up against various outrages get positive mentions. But they are not many.

As for wargaming content, well, there is not much, of course, but perhaps sufficient, when coupled with a previous post on the Scope of Wargame Ethics, to give us pause for thought, at least at a strategic level. If the military does not believe in area bombing of targets, they will want armaments that permit precision bombing, and that will affect the equipment they, and wargamers, can deploy. Similarly, wargamers can decide if they attempt to plaster the city which contains a ball bearing factory, or attempt to hit the factory itself, accepting appalling casualties in aircrew to achieve it. In this sense, at least, ethics does have an impact on wargaming.