My thesis simply stated is this: our government is making murderers of us all. This is not to be passed off as a “shock opening,” a rhetorical device to win the attention of the reader. On the contrary, it is a deliberate and saddening conclusion to which I have been forced by my personal interpretation of current events. As each day passes with its new quota of injustice and atrocity, one thing becomes ever clearer. We are accomplices, before and after the fact, some of us by direct participation, the rest of us by our silent acquiescence.
This is not just a personal judgment reached by me and the rest of the dissident few in our midst who are trying to register some effective protest. My observations and discussions in England and elsewhere in Europe have revealed it as a widespread opinion and one that is gaining in intensity with each new escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. We cannot ignore it when a prominent German liberal writer demands publicly that American poli- ticians and generals be brought before a new international tribunal to face charges of violating the standards we ourselves proclaimed at Nuremberg. Nor should we be too quick to pass this off as some fanatically extreme (or even “Communist-inspired”) opinion. There are war criminals in our midst, and what is far worse, we know of them and their deeds—and close our eyes to them.
For example, some of these criminals were shown on Chicago television not too long ago in a film documentary prepared by the Canadian Broadcasting System. One memorable sequence concerned an act that, to say the least, was a clear violation of the Geneva conventions. A Viet-cong captive was stretched out on the ground with one of his captors kneeling on his groin while another poured hatfuls of water down the victim’s nostrils. When the unfortunate captive finally died—still “on camera,” mind you his body was unceremoniously kicked aside into a ditch. It is hard to decide which was worse: the disgusting deed itself or the picture of the others who stood around (Americans included, needless to say) looking quite pleased, even entertained, by the gruesome proceedings.
The same program went on to feature an American pilot filmed in the process of completing a “successful” bombing mission. One had to see and hear this to catch the excitement and jubilation in the pilot’s voice as he described the splendor of the hits and the panic of the villagers scurrying for their lives while he looked down on them from above. It took me back to the Thirties for a moment, recollecting the horrified gasp with which most Americans greeted that Italian pilot who spoke of the “beauty” he found in the mixture of bombs, blood and flame that reminded him of “flowers” bursting into bloom as he ran his missions against the helpless Ethiopians. (One might even say the Italian must be given the better of the comparison: his was an ecstasy born of aesthetic appreciation; our countryman’s delight stressed the technical perfection and sheer efficiency of his operation.)
The case does not rest on a single television documentary, however. Our national press has provided detailed descriptions of innumerable other instances of similar behavior—served to us, replete with photographs in many cases—with our breakfast coffee. Sometimes the atrocities are committed by our own men; more often by the allies for whose actions we must take full responsibility, since it is our support and encouragement that makes those actions possible. If, as it has been charged, Oradour and Lidice are today villages in Vietnam, these crimes against humanity must be on our consciences; and we should insist that those immediately responsible for them must someday be brought to judgment.
In a special sense, all of this involves us not only as Americans but as Christians and Catholics. In view of all the writing I have done about the failure of German Catholics to effectively oppose the intrinsically evil policies and programs of the Nazi regime, it would be neither possible nor permissible for me to ignore the inescapable parallels which find American Catholics and their spiritual leaders remaining silent before the fact of the misdeeds being committed today by our nation and its allies. Indeed, not only is it a matter of failure to speak the word of protest that is so desperately needed; Catholic opinion, where it is registered, seems to favor an extension of those same policies which have led to the crimes described.
We have, for instance, the recent report of the shocking (but not at all surprising!) results of a national poll in which more than 60 percent of the Catholic respondents favored the use of “whatever added force is necessary to win.” Read that carefully: whatever added force is necessary! I would like to think that these Catholics really did not mean what they said (nuclear bombing, perhaps? a “Final Solution” exterminating all suspected of Vietcong sympathies?). Unfortunately, I am pessimistic enough to believe they did, and my pessimism is not at all lessened by the appeal by one of our leading Catholic “experts” in international affairs that we revise our traditional moral teaching on war to permit the intentional killing of innocents!
Catholics today are appalled by the flagrant nationalism in the statements of Military Bishop Rarkowski during the Nazi period. But what are we to make of the statements of our own military bishop who seems to have gone beyond even those extremes? At least Bishop Rarkowski couched his enthusiasm for Nazi Germany’s war effort in his apparently sincere, however deluded we might think it to be, conviction that Hitler’s wars were just wars. Cardinal Speilman, however, has reportedly embraced Decatur’s dictum that, right or wrong, the nation’s cause is to be supported. (And what is perhaps more scandalous than the Cardinal’s statement is the fact that our more distinguished journals of Catholic opinion have let it pass without comment.)
The Way the War Is Fought
The justice or injustice of the war in Vietnam is not the central issue in this article, however. I have made it sufficiently clear elsewhere—and will undoubtedly find other occasions for doing so—that I do consider this a patently unjust war. But I am concerned here with something quite different: the acts and policies associated with the prosecution of the war which ought to be condemned by every Christian, even those—especially those —who do not share my over-all rejection of the war itself.
Nor can this be read as justifying or “forgiving” the crimes committed by those on the other side. Murder and terrorism are to be condemned outright and unequivocally, irrespective of who may be employing them or for what purpose. It is quite irrelevant, too, whether the National Liberation Front assassinations of village officials be numbered in the tens, the hundreds, or the thousands—just as irrelevent as that senseless debate as to whether the Nazis exterminated six million Jews or “only” one million. The willful murder of even one man (whether by Nazi, Vietcong, South Vietnamese, or American “advisor”) is a crime and deserves unhesitating condemnation as such. But of course, our primary responsibility is still the crimes committed by our men and our allies, and it is with these that this article is concerned.
Unless and until a massive Christian protest is voiced, that responsibility will not be met. There is little hope that improvement will originate with the national Administration. President Johnson shows little or no concern that his most consistent and enthusiastic support is coming from those very persons and groups who opposed him at the last election. In fact, he seems to rejoice in this as a manifestation of some kind of national “consensus,” conveniently overlooking the fact that he has lost the support of many who helped elect him. There is much justice to the cynical observation that, as long as we have the Goldwater policy, we might just as well have taken the man. If nothing else, that policy would have been presented in the blunt candor that distinguishes its author’s public posture and not smothered, as each new escalation has been, in the sickening syrup of pietistic self-righteousness.
One might hope that more of our Catholics in the national legislature would be exerting their influence to assure a fuller recognition of, and respect for, the essential demands of morality; but, here again, the pattern seems to be that of an uncritical acceptance of whatever policy the State Department and the generals present as “necessary.” We can take great pride in the outstanding exceptions to this, men like Senators Kennedy and McCarthy to mention only two, but the sad fact remains that the more consistent and certainly the most outspoken opposition to the nation’s involvement in Vietnam have come from men who are not of our faith.
Perhaps we cannot be too critical of our Catholic politicians on this score. The same pattern of unconcern and disregard has marked the actions (or, to be more accurate, the absence of any action) on the part of the hierarchy itself. Pope Paul (and John XXIII before him) might as well have been speaking as a Moslem leader if we are to judge by the echo his consistent appeals of peace and peace action have received from the spiritual spokesmen for the American Catholic flock. That scandalous eagerness on the part of those Register Catholics to embrace “whatever added force is needed to win” can be traced in large part to the failure of our bishops to provide any moral guidance or direction on this crucial moral issue. Refusal is probably a more accurate word than “failure” in this context, as the editors of Continuum and The National Catholic Reporter discovered in their futile effort to get the bishops to take a stand, or even to express an opinion, on some of the more pressing moral aspects of the war. One watches with great interest to see how Dr. O’Brien’s comments on the question of intentional killing of innocents will be greeted by bishops who so recently participated in the quite contrary decision reached by the Fathers of Vatican II.
No one is insisting upon an official condemnation of the war or formal anathemas directed against those who take part in it. This would not, and should not, be the role of the bishop in this era of the emergent layman. Protest in the bishop’s own name would be enough; less than that, however, is a scandal. When murder and torture become an everyday item in the newspapers and when they are done in fulfillment of a national policy or even only “excused” in the light of that policy, silence is worse than a scandal. It becomes a crime. One can understand the hesitancy on the part of a bishop who finds it difficult to suggest to the men of his flock who have been called into service (and to the families they left behind!) that perhaps they should not be there, that they should certainly not be doing what they are doing there. We can also make allowance for the fact that our bishops, like the rest of us, are susceptible to considerations of national pride and patriotic attachment that make it difficult to take the true measure of our nation’s acts.
But to recognize these factors is not to justify the silence, any more than these same factors can be used to justify the support given by German bishops to Hitler’s war effort. When whole villages, inhabitants and all, are covered with a blanket of napalm merely because there is a suspicion that they may harbor the Vietcong, there can no longer be any comfortable shelter for the Christian under the principle of the double effect or any of the other loopholes we so conveniently read into the traditional “just war” morality. The weapons we are using in Vietnam and the targets we have chosen (not to mention those additional targets already being discussed as the next stage of escalation!), and all the other “irregularities” that occur with diabolical regularity—these have stripped off the disguises and nullified the qualifications so that murder stands revealed as murder.
It should not be left to a small, but happily growing, minority of Catholic priests and laymen to try to redeem the day for the Church in America in much the same manner as that even smaller handful of German Catholics who dared to resist the Nazi power. Our spiritual leaders have far less to justify their silence: no Gestapo is likely to be pounding on their doors or dragging their priests off to concentration camps. At least not yet.
There will be some to say that I have put too much stress on the German parallels, and perhaps I have. In quantity and essential quality, the American atrocities in Vietnam fall far short of the crimes perpetrated by the Third Reich. But the parallels are there, and they are growing more insistent. Note, if you will, the devel- oping “cult of the green beret” (with its equivalent of the Horst Wessel song and all!). I would suggest that there are great similarities here to the adulation lavished upon the S.S. and S.A. “elite” corps in their day, to say nothing of the similarity in the “special services” they performed.
The parallels should be recognized for what they are, and this recognition should force all of us to re-examine and re-evaluate the nation’s policies and our inescapable share of the responsibility for those policies and their consequences. The blood of innocents is already upon our hands. The longer we tolerate these things in silence, the greater will be the blot upon our national honor and the burden of sin upon our individual souls.
