FINDING OUT ABOUT the death march was an accident. Three weeks ago we were driving through a place called Ranau, on the lower slopes of Mount Kinabalu in Borneo, when the guide suggested we stop. By a modern Catholic church, in a slight dip, stands a stone memorial commemorating the death of Gunner Albert Cleary, aged 22. Cleary, an Australian PoW, had been tied to a post on that spot by the Japanese guards, and for 11 days starved, beaten up, urinated and spat upon.
Almost all the other prisoners died too. They had been part of what became known in Australia as the Sandakan death march. Of 750 British and nearly 1,700 Australian prisoners, forced to walk the 250 wild kilometres from Sandakan on the coast to Ranau in 1945, six escapees survived. Those who fell en route were shot, bayoneted or beheaded; those who made it to Ranau were worked to death. Some of them were killed after Japan’s formal surrender.
As it happened, in the same week The Borneo Post covered a story from Japan. A judge in Tokyo rejected a libel suit brought against a Japanese newspaper over a claim of war crimes in China years earlier. The relatives of two officers were suing over an article in the Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, published in 1937, which had approvingly reported a beheading contest between the pair, where each attempted to decapitate as many Chinese prisoners as possible. The headline had been: “Mukai at 106 v Noda at 105 — the two lieutenants go to a play-off”. Apparently the piece had been seen at the time as something of a morale booster.
After Ranau I couldn’t get Cleary and his comrades out of my head. Many people die in wars or as the result of violence. For that great majority of us who aren’t pacifists and who wouldn’t attempt to interpose our bodies between our sisters and the raping Hun, there’s always the question of whether some kinds of violence are less bad than others.
What makes the fire-bombing of Tokyo less morally offensive than the great Mukai-Noda decapitation contest?
That was bothering me, along with the occasional outburst from a film or singing star — maybe Celine Dion — for whom the mere fact of deaths caused by allied troops in Iraq seemed to be enough. If we kill innocents, in whatever numbers, in whatever way and for whatever reason — save direct self-defence — then what says that we’re not just as bad as they are?
When you hear that the US and Iraqi forces have gone in (as this week) into an insurgent town, it inevitably means an aftermath of chalky little corpses with terrible wounds, or a picture of a hand in the rubble. Every week a family car is shot up by mistake by a scared infantryman, and the kids are just as dead as they would have been had they been herded into a barn and burnt to death by the Wehrmacht. Maybe, like lots of people say, there’ s no real difference.
You can (and some folks do) apply this retrospectively or worldwide. Aren’t the moral advantages conferred upon us because we didn’t behave with the close brutality of the Nazis or the Japanese cancelled out by the high-flying death dealt out on Dresden or Hiroshima? Aren’t suicide bombers merely an unarmed people’s response to an Israeli firepower that itself kills civilians?
Letter after letter in newspapers suggests these equations, so how come (I thought, returning from Ranau) they don’t work for me? And this is despite the fact that I can see the virtue of them. The assumption that your own actions are usually justified, no matter how extreme they are, is something of a guarantee of a fall from grace. Wasn’t the disgrace of Abu Ghraib a consequence of just such a feeling of automatic virtue, in which whatever was done was essentially OK because the cause was essentially OK?
There is even an argument, and Norman Mailer has expressed a variant of it, that there is a kind of moral superiority in killing what you can see. The coward kills from 15,000ft, dropping bombs that must kill people who he never has to meet. The suicide bomber manfully looks into the eyes of his fellow creatures — and then immolates them. By this token the machinegun squads of the Einsatzgruppen were superior to the men who, later on, put the Zyklon B into the ceiling vents of the gas chambers. Even Himmler understood that this face-to-face slaughter was taking its toll. Shooting tens of thousands of people on the edges of ditches, in ravines, on beaches, in forest clearings — people whose cries you hear, whose terror you witness — can be a bitch.
And I don’t buy this either. The Japanese soldiers who used Chinese civilians for bayonet practice after the fall of Nanjing were not the moral superiors of the men who flew — or even who ordered — the Enola Gay. Just the opposite. Everything is not the same and death isn’t just death. And the uninsured boy racer who takes out his mum’s car and ploughs it into the side of someone’s family day out does not inhabit the same ethical universe as an SS man or a member of the Ukrainian militia.
I can assert all this, but how do I make the distinction? I think intention matters. If your violence is caused by a desire for Lebensraum at the expense of racial inferiors, the intention is obviously less honourable than, say, that of removing Saddam Hussein. But if the desire behind the Iraq invasion had been, as some critics charged, merely to annex Iraq’s oil, then all deaths caused by the coalition would have been morally repugnant.
And the motivation matters. I believe that it is depraved to take pleasure from the murder, ill-treatment or torture of fellow human beings. Societies which permit or encourage such behaviour are inferior moral societies to those where it is regarded as shaming. Imperial Japan, where the newspapers could expect their readers to enjoy the stories of competitive beheadings, was in this sense a morally debased society.
The Nazi occupation of Europe, which some people compare to the American occupation of Iraq, was punctuated by its Lidices and Oradours — collective punishments handed out to entire towns or villages. There has been no instance of a town where US or British troops have shot all the men, herded all the women and children into a mosque and then set fire to it. The Nazis believed in terror, as do the anti-democratic forces in Iraq; whatever our mistakes, we tend to believe in hearts and minds.
The actions of depraved members of a disapproving society — deeply shamed by people such as the Abu Ghraib abusers and their weird sadism — don’t have the same implications as similar actions carried out as a matter of policy by elite members of a depraved society. What had happened at Abu Ghraib in Saddam’s day — real electrodes, not dummy ones — was specifically ordered. The regime existed because of such terrors, not despite them.
It’s important, it seems to me, that we don’t confuse ourselves with false equivalence. The result of that would be an incapacity to take any action that carried even the risk of harm. But it’s just as important to understand that this doesn’t let us off the hook. If we became careless of whether or not people suffer because of our choices, we could still become the thing we hate.
