“There are no innocent civilians," said Curtis LeMay, the American general whose firebombing campaigns killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese people in 1945. "It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.”
He was an engineer by training, who had been given a problem and, to his mind, solved it.1 It was nothing personal. His planes even dropped leaflets over Japan telling the civilians below to flee.
LeMay has been on my mind since October 7 because he was an architect of military campaigns in the war against fascism — the sort Israeli leaders have cited in defense of their war in Gaza. When 84 Danish children burned to death because of Allied bombs meant for the Gestapo, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this month, no one suggested the war against Nazism be stopped. You have to accept civilian casualties. It’s nothing personal. Israelis, too, warn civilians to flee before they bomb.
Curtis LeMay ruthlessly slaughtered innocent noncombatant human beings, then had a distinguished career and died peacefully at the age of 83, much honored for his service in a war most of us think was worth fighting. (The worst retribution he endured was being mocked in Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove and derided as a bad politician when he ran for Vice President with the segregationist George Wallace in 1968.) But he knew he was lucky. If the Allies had lost, he said, he would have been tried as a war criminal.
In other words, LeMay saw that his immediate problem wasn’t History’s view or whether his side was in the right. It was, instead, how get his men to kill strangers who hadn’t done them any harm. Who had done no harm to anyone, as far as he knew. LeMay was too smart and self-aware to dodge this question, which is central to modern warfare.
Humans as a rule are reluctant to murder (in World War II, the U.S. Army found that in the average group of 100 soldiers in combat, only 20 were actually shooting at the enemy). Even if you're filled with rage at abuses and injustices you've suffered, it is no easy thing to kill or torment a person who didn't personally commit that crime. Some movement of mind and heart overcomes this reluctance, enabling people to kill, and to live with themselves afterward. And so that onlookers justify those acts, thus making more slaughter possible.2 How do we do it?
There are four possible answers. All are things you tell yourself, to get your mind to be indifferent to the individuality, the personhood, of other people — and, thus, uncaring about their suffering and their lives. Whether your cause is good or bad, just or unjust, these are the mantras available.
They are:
1. This innocent noncombatant person is nothing compared to our goal. Don't bother asking this question.
2. This innocent noncombatant person isn't really a person.
3. This innocent noncombatant person isn't really a noncombatant.
4. This innocent noncombatant person isn't really innocent.
I They Aren’t Really Innocent
I've begun with number 4 — "there are no innocent civilians," in LeMay's words — because it's the most pernicious. Of the psychic licenses to kill, it's this one, right now, that's seducing the largest number of seemingly sane people around the world.
On the Israeli side of the war, for example, are people enraged by Palestinians in Gaza who can be seen on videos celebrating the terrorists as they brought back Israeli hostages and corpses. (They were supposed to tell a crowd of hyped-up young men waving guns to cut it out?) And the Republican Congressman who wanted to prevent any aid going to Gaza "because I would challenge anybody in here to point to me, which Palestinian is Hamas, and which one is an innocent civilian?"
On the other side — the one that sought to excuse and even justify Hamas' murders — is the notion that Israel is a "settler colony." That supposedly makes all Israelis legitimate targets for the anti-colonizers. The day after the Hamas fighters killed hundreds of men, women and children, for instance, the Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America issued a statement saying "yesterday, the Palestinian resistance launched an unprecedented anticolonial struggle.”
Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute defines settler-colonialism as "a system of oppression based on genocide and colonialism, that aims to displace a population of a nation (oftentimes indigenous people) and replace it with a new settler population." The theory holds that these crimes, even if long past, shape current injustices that need to be redressed in the present. And that's a helpful lens for understanding the world. As a reminder that this is true and important, some people today in the United States describe themselves as "settlers," because they live on lands that were stolen from others 50, 100 or even 300 years ago.
Effective consciousness raising, maybe. But this is not literally true. A Los Angeles resident who signs his emails with a declaration of his settlerhood did not come to Los Angeles with guns and shoddy claims of superior right. He did not force anyone to quit their land and give up their home. He is a person who accepted the options before him — which is not the same as the person who, a century or two ago, set that arrangement in motion.
To say he is a settler — same as those who committed the original crimes — is to replace insight with a fairy tale: Once there were Good People here. Then Bad People came and robbed them, and everything that has happened since is fruit of a poisonous tree. This is what settler-colonialist theory is devolving into on campuses (including my son's middle school, where "settler" has become one of the many insults 12-year-olds throw at each other). In its materials, the organization National Students for Justice in Palestine refers to the U.S. and Canada as "occupied Turtle Island" — denying the fact that, at some point, an occupied land becomes a hybrid land.
The folly of this sloganeering should be obvious when it comes to Israel, which has actual settlers brutally displacing, abusing and killing indigenous people today. If you make no distinction between a thug shooting at Palestinians on the West Bank and a peacenik Israeli in Tel Aviv, you have no political tools to address the problem of settlements. You have, instead, left politics behind, as Roger Berkowitz pointed out the other day.
[S]ettler colonialist politics is fundamentally moral rather than political. It operates on a simple innocent and guilty matrix that sees every existing state as guilty. These states are facts, not going anywhere. More than that, they are the accomplishment of dreams for self-determination and collective action by their people over generations and centuries. There is something overly simplistic about immediately imagining every state to be evil simply because it is not eternal. As a result, calls for decolonization are so radical as to be either meaningless or mere ethical performances rather than political actions.
But this relatively meaningless performance has led, now, to people justifying the slaughter of children because they are supposedly settler-colonialists. In other words, because they are not innocent.
II They Aren’t Really Noncombatants
A variant of the same sort of thinking is the claim that innocent noncombatant people are not really noncombatants.
Here the license to kill is created by reframing all people on the other side as militarily useful, and thus legitimate targets. Doesn’t matter if they’ve done no wrong personally. Yes, that cute baby is incapable of firing a gun, but her presence furthers the enemy's military objectives.
On their website, Students for Justice in Palestine proffered a document explaining that "settlers are not ‘civilians’ in the sense of international law, because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land."
III Our Cause Is Sacred — Serve It Without Question
The third license to kill is the notion that The Cause outweighs any moral claims by any individual. We are doing what we must, we have no choice, there is no point in even thinking about the harm we're causing.
LeMay was on to this justification, too. He explained how it works, in real time, in his autobiography (co-written with the novelist MacKinlay Kantor):
You drop a load of bombs and, if you're cursed with any imagination at all you have at least one quick horrid glimpse of a child lying in bed with a whole ton of masonry tumbling down on top of him; or a three-year-old girl wailing for `Mutter ... Mutter...’ because she has been burned. Then you have to turn away from the picture if you intend to retain your sanity. And also if you intend to keep on doing the work your Nation expects of you.
Enthusiasm isn't necessary for this outlook. You can make do with a simple plodding sense of workmanlike obligation — my job is this, I do my job.
Such was one Oregon settler who told another about the chore of displacing native people: “We found several sick and famished Indians, who begged hard for mercy and for food. It hurt my feelings; but the understanding was that all were to be killed. So we did the work.”
Nor does the abstract cause need to be glorious or even widely shared. This "it's a living" attitude was also shown by the Mafia henchman recounting how he tied down a man on a pool table and sliced off his testicles. "It was nothing personal," he says. "It was just business."
Mafia ethics aren't very appealing, though, so this form of indifference is more often attached to the sort of abstraction that didn't exist before 200 years ago — the Nation, the Future, the Family, Socialism, Civilization, Democracy.
Or Communism. Lev Kopelev was a Communist Youth League leader in Ukraine during the great famine induced by Soviet collectivization in 1932–33. He makes a cameo appearance in Stephen Kotkin’s biography of Stalin, going from village to village, demanding supposedly hidden grain from starving peasants. He had, he says, complete confidence in the importance of ignoring their pain. “I persuaded myself, explained to myself: I mustn’t give in to debilitating pity!”
I don't mean to suggest that people didn't slaughter and immiserate one another before these beautiful abstract words came along. There has always been killing in the name of great kings and great things. A tour I took once of Jerusalem's archaeological sites was a steady drumbeat of the phrase "and that dark stratum in the soil is a sign that the city was taken and burned to the ground." Assyrians, Babylonians, Romans, Byzantines, Muslims, Crusaders, Muslims again, and so on and on.
But until the past three centuries, slaughterers did not evoke some universal good. The Crusaders who rode through Jerusalem in a river of blood crying "Deus vult!" (God wills it!) were not trying to persuade their victims that they were making a better world for everyone. The Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258 because the Abbasid Caliph had refused to surrender, and death to refusers was their rule. The 19th century King Ghezo of Dahomey (now Benin) mounted his throne on the skulls of defeated enemies to display his power. None of that came with, or stemmed from, a claim that all History had a purpose served by one's monstrous acts.
In the 21st century, though, people style themselves superior to our benighted forbears. Moderns don't kill people just because they can. They do it for the Great Cause, which gives them no choice.
Hamas: "This is the day of the great revolution to end the last occupation!” said Mohammed al-Deif, the leader of Hamas’s military wing. "The Palestinians are ready to pay an even higher price for their freedom.” said Abu Marzouk.
Israel: "We will not realize the promise of a better future unless we—the civilized world—are willing to fight the barbarians,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
As Alana Zeitchik, who as six relatives being held hostage in Gaza, wrote recently , it is a shock to come to people with anguish and fear for other human beings, real people with real faces — only to be met with cold abstraction:
I have seen former co-workers be so quick to share unverified headlines fed by Hamas yet say only a few private words of sympathy to me. It would appear they believe my suffering to be collateral damage in service of some universal truth they hold higher.
Obviously, come claims to universal truth have more merit than others. Most of us can agree that it's good that the Allies won World War II, and not the Axis. But we should be wary of the universalist claim nonetheless. In the moment, it devalues the humanity of those who are, supposedly unfortunately, in the way. It is that moment that gives permission to kill them.
But what of people who do not or cannot avail themselves of the great shrug of a true believer? Facing the blood they have spilled, what do they tell themselves?
IV They Aren’t Really Human Beings
Dehumanization (this innocent noncombatant person isn't really a person) accompanies atrocity and oppression, and it always has. The ancient Greeks called their slaves anthropoda (human-footed stock) and the ancient Japanese called people in their despised caste "eta" (meaning four, as in four-footed). War brings out this imagery as surely as sunset brings moonrise. "We are fighting human animals and we will act accordingly," Israel's Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, said two days after Hamas' attackers had killed more than 1,400 Israelis. Some days later, Benjamin Netanyahu said the enemy were "bloodthirsty monsters."
For the most rigorous and ethical consideration of this aspect of the mind you can read David Livingstone Smith's good books or check out his Substack, Dehumanization Matters, (for example, here):
No one has thought more clearly or deeply about this topic.
Still, I don’t agree entirely with him.
It seems self-evident that calling people rats, vermin, filth or animals would make it easier to abuse and kill them. There is certainly a correlation between dehumanizing rhetoric and cruelty. But does dehumanizing thought cause the cruelty? Smith says it does, yet I find it hard to believe that people are so dumb, or so consistent in their thinking.
Human beings are pretty obviously human. It is very hard to deny this, especially face to face.
The archives of atrocity are full of people failing to stick to their supposed beliefs about the inhumanity of victims — like the settler I quoted above. Another example: When the Nazis first imposed the wearing of the yellow star on Jews, Joseph Goebbels complained to his diary about the "idiotic sentimentality" of ordinary Germans: "people everywhere are showing sympathy for [the Jews]."
I don't think this means that people are innately good and kind. (Both the settler and the ordinary Germans under Hitler set their doubts aside and got in line.) I think it means, rather, that people are inconsistent and not much guided by their "beliefs." Whatever they’re being told about vermin and rats, it is hard for anyone to think "this person who cries and bleeds and speaks just like people in my family, isn't really a person."
For this reason, I agree with scholars and writers who argue that dehumanization is less a foundation of beliefs than it is a kind of theater — a display of anger, outrage, and, often, the power to harm the enemy. "The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not," as the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has put it.
I suspect that the thought that another's pain doesn't matter — the thought that prompts a young man to phone his mother to boast about how he's killed ten strangers with his own hands — needs to be simpler and easier to hold than the notion that the enemy aren't human.
As a motivator, and justifier, of murder, I think the other thoughts I've mentioned (the Cause is too important to ask this or they aren't really innocent or they aren't really noncombatants) are more potent.
In any event, as this terrible war continues, I'd advise you (whatever side you've taken, if you've taken one) to beware all four of these psychological licenses to kill.
Some years ago the sociologist Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog found that a disproportionate percentage of ruthless organized political killers are engineers.
The motives of people who actually kill aren't always the same as the motives of the people who justify their actions. That's another post. Suffice to say here that there's a lot of hideous cross-pollination in these two psychic process.