Atrocities don’t mark the cause

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/11/2010 (5676 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Most Americans regard the Second World War as a just war because the United States helped stem the vicious tide of global fascism. But during that war, American soldiers dismembered Japanese corpses and collected their body parts as souvenirs.

A contradiction? Not really. You can commit war crimes on behalf of a just war just as easily as an unjust one.

But you wouldn’t know that by reading comments about five U.S. soldiers accused of civilian murders this year in Afghanistan.

According to news reports, the soldiers also cut fingers from corpses and posed in photographs with them. When the army announced in October that it would court-martial one of the soldiers, Spc. Jeremy Morlock, reaction from antiwar activists was quick and predictable: The war was a mistake all along, and our military crimes prove it.

Meanwhile, army officials moved to keep photographs of the atrocities out of the public eye. If the photos go viral, officials say, people around the world will turn against America’s struggle in Afghanistan.

Just like the antiwar crowd, ironically, the army is assuming war crimes will become a metaphor for the war itself.

They’re both wrong. The soldiers’ alleged acts are horrible, of course, and the military should prosecute the charges to the fullest. But these crimes don’t speak to the larger purpose and validity of the war in Afghanistan, any more than American atrocities during the Second World War reflected on the justice of the campaign against the Japanese.

Let’s leave aside the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the U.S. justified as a way to prevent further carnage. On the battlefield, American soldiers routinely killed Japanese civilians and mutilated Japanese bodies. Yes, our enemies committed all kinds of atrocities during the war. But so did we.

Americans collected bones, scalps and skulls from the Japanese dead or near-dead. None of this was a secret, either. In 1944, Life magazine published a full-page photograph of an attractive young woman posing with a Japanese skull. “Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her,” the caption declared.

But skulls were difficult to carry and — especially — to prepare: Soldiers first had to remove the flesh from the severed head, either by boiling the head or by leaving it out for ants to eat. So they preferred to collect ears, which were tidy and small.

“The other night Stanley emptied his pockets of ‘souvenirs’ — 11 ears from dead Japs,” read a 1943 article in a marine newspaper. It was not disgusting, as it would be from the civilian point of view.

Actually, most civilians seemed fine with the practice. That same year, a Baltimore newspaper reported a local mother had asked authorities to allow her son to send her an ear he had cut off a Japanese soldier. She wanted to nail it to her door, she said, so everyone could see it.

Although some Americans did object to these atrocities at the time, it would be much later before Second World War veterans expressed regret for them. Some U.S. military men had committed monstrous acts, to be sure, but America’s larger military cause remained just.

Is the cause in Afghanistan also just? I really don’t know. But here’s what I do know: The alleged crimes committed by Morlock and his platoon don’t speak to the answer. Atrocities happen in almost every war, just and unjust alike. So it’s far too simple — and a bit dishonest — to claim the crimes of this war make the war itself criminal.

But it’s also dishonest for military officials to keep hiding the photographs of the atrocities, which should be released as soon as possible. If the war is just, it remains so regardless of what these soldiers did; and if it isn’t, we should pull up stakes and come home.

The photos will also remind us how far we’ve come since the Second World War, as a people and as a nation. Back then, most Americans accepted or even celebrated wartime mutilations; today, we’re mortified by them. But we shouldn’t let the atrocities colour our overall view of the war, no matter how hard it is to look at them. That’s the easy way out.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York University.

— Los Angeles Times