ZINN'S MORAL CALCULUS

[a4a: The following is excerpted from The Politics of History from the chapter, Vietnam: The Moral Equation (pp. 210-222). This is a good book, and I recommend it. The following is an interesting attempt at articulating a "moral calculus" for the use of force. Note that this book was written some time ago, so some of the references, particularly regarding Vietnam, are dated -- but the core arguments hold up well. Any emphasis or hyperlinks added in the text are mine.]

The Left still dodges the problem of violent means to achieve just ends. (This is not true of Herbert Marcuse and Barrington Moore, Jr., in the book they have done with Robert Paul Wolff, A Critique of Pure Tolerance. But it was so true of the Communists in the United States that the government, in the Smith Act trials, had to distort the facts in order to prove that the Communists would go as far as Thomas Jefferson in the use of revolutionary violence.) To ignore this question, both by avoiding controversy about comparative social systems as ends, and foregoing discussion of violence as a means, is to fail to create a rational basis for moral denunciation of our government's actions in Vietnam.

I would start with a discussion from the supposition that it is logically indefensible to hold an absolutely nonviolent position, because it is at least theoretically conceivable that a small violence might be required to prevent a larger one. Those who are immediately offended by this statement should consider: World War II; the assassination attempt[s] on Hitler; the American, French, Russian, Chinese, Cuban revolutions; possible armed revolt in South Africa; the case of Rhodesia; blacks in America. Keep in mind that many who support the war in Vietnam may do so on grounds which they believe similar to those used in the above cases.

The terrible thing is that once you stray from absolute nonviolence you open the door for the most shocking abuses. It is like distributing scalpels to an eager group, half of whom are surgeons and half butchers. But that is man's constant problem -- how to release the truth without being devoured by it.

How can we tell butchers from surgeons, distinguish between a healing and a destructive act of violence? The first requirement is that our starting point must always be nonviolence, and that the burden of proof, therefore, is on the advocate of violence to show, with a high degree of probability, that he is justified. In modern American civilization, we demand unanimity among twelve citizens before we will condemn a single person to death, but we will destroy thousands of people on the most flimsy of political assumptions (like the domino theory of revolutionary contagion).

What proof should be required? I suggest four tests:

  1. Self-defense, against outside attackers or a counterrevolutionary force within, using no more violence than is needed to repel the attack, is justified. This covers the Negro housewife who several years ago in a little Georgia town, at home alone with her children, fired through the door at a gang of white men carrying guns and chains, killing one, after which the rest fled. It would sacrifice the Rhineland to Hitler in 1936, and even Austria (for the Austrians apparently preferred not to fight), but demands supporting the Loyalist government in Spain, and defending Czechoslovakia in 1938. And it applies to Vietnamese fighting against American attackers who hold the strings of a puppet government.

  2. Revolution is justified, for the purpose of overthrowing a deeply entrenched oppressive regime, unshakable by other means. Outside aid is permissible (because rebels, as in the American Revolution, are almost always at a disadvantage against the holders of power), but with the requirement that the manpower for the revolution be indigenous, for this in itself is a test of how popular the revolution is. This could cover the French, American, Mexican, Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Alergian cases. It would also cover the Vietcong rebellion. And a South African revolt, should it break out.

  3. Even if one of the above conditions is met, there is no moral justification for visiting violence on the innocent. Therefore, violence in self-defense or in revolution must be focused on the evildoers, and limited to that required to achieve the goal, resisting all arguments that extra violence might speed victory. this rules out the strategic bombing of German cities in World War II, the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; it rules out terrorism against civilians even in a just revolution. Violence even against the guilty, when undertaken for sheer revenge, is unwarranted, which rules out capital punishment for any crime. The requirement of focused violence makes nonsensical the equating of the killing of village chiefs in South Vietnam by the Vietcong and the bombing of hospitals by American fliers; yet the former is also unjustified if it is merely an act of terror or revenge and not specifically required for a change in the social conditions of the village.

  4. There is an additional factor which the conditions of modern warfare make urgent. Even if all three of the foregoing principles are met, there is a fourth which must be considered if violence is to be undertaken: the costs of self-defense or social change must not be so high, because of the intensity or the prolongation of violence, or because of the risk of proliferation, that the victory is not worth the cost. For the Soviets to defend Cuba from attack -- though self-defense was called for -- would not have been worth a general war. For China and Soviet Russia to aid the Vietcong with troops, though the Vietcong cause is just, would be wrong if it seriously risked a general war. Under certain conditions, nations should be captive rather than destroyed, or revolutionaries should bide their time. Indeed, because of the omnipresence of the great military powers -- the United States and the USSR (perhaps this is not so true for the countries battling England, France, Holland, Belgium, Portugal) -- revolutionary movements may have to devise tactics short of armed revolt to overturn a repressive regime.

The basic principle I want to get close to is that violence is most clearly justified when those whose own lives are at stake make the decision on whether the prize is worth dying for. Self-defense and guerrilla warfare, by their nature, embody this decision. Conscript armies and unfocused warfare violate it. And no one has a right to decided that someone else is better off dead than Red, or that someone else should die to defend his way of life, or that an individual (like Norman Morrison immolating himself in Washington) should choose to live rather than die.

It would be foolish to pretend that this summary can be either precise or complete. Those involved in self-defense or in a revolution need no intellectual justification; their emotions reflect some inner rationality. It is those outside the direct struggle, deciding whether to support one side or to stay out, who need to think clearly about principles. Americans, therefore, possessing the greatest power and being the furthest removed from the problems of self-defense or revolution, need thoughtful deliberation most. All we can do in social analysis is to offer rough guides to replace nonthinking, to give the beginnings of some kind of moral calculus.

However, it takes no close measurement to conclude that the American bombings in Vietnam, directed as they are to farming areas, villages, hamlets, fit none of the criteria listed, and so are deeply immoral, whatever else is true about the situation in Southeast Asia or the world. The silence of the government's supporters on this -- from Hubert Humphrey to the academic signers of advertisements -- is particularly shameful, because it requires no surrender of their other arguments to concede that this is unnecessary bestiality.

Bombings aside, none of the American military activity against the Vietcong could be justified unless it were helping a determined people to defend itself against an outside attacker. That is why the Administration, hoping to confirm by verbal repitition what cannot be verified by fact, continually uses the term "aggression" to describe the Vietnamese guerrilla activities....

One test of "defense against aggression" is the behavior of the official South Vietnamese army -- the "defenders" themselves. We find: a high rate of desertions; a need to herd villagers into concentration-camp "strategic hamlets" in order to control them; the use of torture to get information from other South Vietnamese, whom you might expect to be enthusiastic about "defending" their country; and all of this forcing the United States to take over virtually the entire military operation in Vietnam.

[a4a: Zinn then takes apart the analogy of the infamous 1938 Munich "appeasement" move versus Hitler as the eternal justification of American intervention abroad. I'm skipping that, but you're welcome to read it on your own. Basically he shows how, on examination, using Munich to justify America's invasion of Vietnam was utterly false, on pages 214-217.]

One touches the Munich analogy and it falls apart. This suggests something more fundamental: that American policy makers and their supporters simply do not understand either the nature of communism or the nature of the various uprisings that have taken place in the postwar world. They are not able to believe that hunger, homelessness, oppression are sufficient spurs to revolution, without outside instigation, just as Dixie governors could not believe that Negroes marching in the streets were not led by ouside agitators.

So, communism and revolution required discussion. They are sensitive questions, which some in the protest movement hesitate to broach for fear of alienating allies. But they are basic to that inversion of morality which enables the United States to surround the dirty war in Vietnam with the righteous glow of war against Hitler.

A key assumption in this inversion is that communism and Nazism are sufficiently identical to be treated alike. However, communism as a set of ideals has attracted good people -- not racists, or bullies, or militarists -- all over the world. One may argue that in Communist countries citizens had better affirm their allegiance to it, but that doesn't account for the fact that millions, in France, Italy, and Indonesia are Communist party members, that countless others all over the world have been inspired by Marxian ideals. And why should they not? These ideals include peace, brotherhood, racial [and gender] equality, the classless society, the withering away of the state.

If Communists behave much better out of power than in it, that is a commentary not on their ideals but on weaknesses which they share with non-Communist wielders of power. If, presumably in pursuit of their ideals, they have resorted to brutal tactics, maintained suffocating bureaucracies and rigid dogmas, that makes them about as reprehensible as other nations, other social systems which, while boasting of the Judeo-Christian heritage, have fostered war, exploitation, colonialism, and race hatred. We judge ourselves by our ideals; others by their actions. It is a great convenience.

The ultimate values of the Nazis, let us recall, included racism, elitism, militarism, and war as ends in themselves. Unlike either the Communist nations or the Capitalist democracies, there is here no ground for appeal to higher purposes. The ideological basis for coexistence between Communist and Capitalist nations is the rough consensus of ultimate goals which they share. While war is held off, citizens on both sides -- it is to be hoped and indeed it is beginning to occur -- will increasingly insist that their leaders live up to these values.

One of these professed values -- which the United States is trying with difficulty to conceal by fragile arguments and feeble analogies -- is the self-determination of peoples. Self-determination justifies the overthrow of entrenched oligarchies -- whether foreign or domestic -- in ways that will not lead to general war.

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