Reading the discussion of "war guilt" which reverberates
in the correspondence columns of the newspapers, I note the surprise with
which many people seem to discover that war is not a crime. Hitler, it
appears, has not done anything actionable. He has not raped anybody, nor
carried off any pieces of loot with his own hands, nor personally flogged
any prisoners, buried any wounded men alive, thrown any babies into the
air and spitted them on his bayonet, dipped any nuns in petrol and touched
them off with church tapers -- in fact he has not done any of the things
which enemy nationals are usually
credited with doing in war-time. He has merely precipitated
a world war which will perhaps have cost twenty-million lives before it
ends. And there is nothing illegal in that. How could there be, when legality
implies authority and there is no authority with the power to transcend
national frontiers?
At the recent trials in Kharkov some attempt was made
to fix on Hitler, Himmler and the rest the responsibility for their subordinates'
crimes, but the mere fact that this had to be done shows that Hitlers's
guilt is not self-evident. His crime, it is implied, was not to build up
an army for the purpose of aggressive war, but to instruct that army to
torture its prisoners. So far as it goes, the distinction between an atrocity
and an act of war is valid. An atrocity means an act of terrorism which
has no genuine military purpose. One must accept such distinctions if one
accepts war at all, which in practice everyone does.
Nevertheless, a world in which it is wrong to murder
an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive
on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth
of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.