War guilt
Sir: Your article on 'War Guilt' makes saddening reading to anyone who remembers that the same arguments were paraded out to de- fend paeificism and appeasement in the thirties.
You argue that it is both easy and comforting to say 'the war we wage is a just war,' but surely the reverse is the truth. To confess that a war is just is to face the nec- essity for a personal commitment to struggle and sacrifice; to argue that 'all wars are to be utterly eschewed' is, in the present con- text simply a soft and flabby ex- cuse for doing nothing while our Asian neighbours are being murdered. This 'new morality' to- ward which you are groping ap- pears suspiciously like the old, hypocritical Anglo-Saxon appeal to conscience to cover moral sleazi- ness—in this case, the betrayal of our Asian allies.
You quote, with apparent ap- proval, Robert Jackson's condem- nation of Nazi aggression, yet we would never have been able to bring the Nazis to trial had we not (at the last possible moment) deci- ded to make war more effectively and fiercely than the Nazis. Had we been prepared to resist (i.e., make war) when the Nazis invaded the Rhineland, we could have peacefully prevented World War u and the consequent killing of fifty million people. Even the 'slaughter in the trenches' might well have been avoided if the English-speak- ing peoples had been united, ade- quately armed, and morally pre- pared to resist the 1914 invasion at the outset. Instead, we were twice misled by the sort of devious moral arguments you are attempt- ing to resuscitate.
If what the Communists are doing in Indochina is not aggres- sion, then the word has no mean- ing whatsoever. Your article and cartoon appear to- assume that an inoffensive North Vietnamese re- gime was wantonly attacked by an unholy coalition of South Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, America, et al.; whereas, in fact, it is the North Vietnamese Communists who are fighting a war of aggression on their neighbours' territory as brutal and immoral as anything in the record of the Axis powers. If they succeed, the world will be back under the law of the jungle, with the strong attacking and killing the weak as a matter of course.
The fact that isolated excesses may have been committed by Allied soldiers, under severe stress, can- not surely be compared with the systematic terror and mass murder practised as deliberate government policy by the communists. To try to equate the two is a complete moral abdication. The ultimate moral responsibility for My Lai must be placed squarely on the shoulders of the communist dic- tators who started this war and have waged it with persistently barbarous methods.
Communist militaristic imperial- ism, with its doctrine that 'armed struggle is the highest form of human activity', is the one major force making for war -today. The civilised majority of mankind have the choice of uniting for effective resistance against this aggressive plague, or of doing nothing. Free world journals would be better em- ployed in enunciating these hard truths that set men free. rather than the easy lies of pacifism and appeasement that lead men into slavery.
Robert Botsford London NW1 Sir: Comment on the trial of the unfortunate Lt Calley is pre- &tunably subject to sub judice restrictions in America but not, it is apparent, in this country. For this reason it is perhaps pertinent to point out that no one yet has seen fit to consider the matter in a more pragmatic or realistic man- ner.
It is an obvious and known fact that the difference between a guer- rilla/Viet Cong / Freedom-,Fighter or whatever and an ordinary peas- ant farmer is precisely the same as between a rifle and a spade. Uni- form is not usually worn by 'the other side' in this war and to take up a rifle and put down a spade or vice versa is all that is required to effect the desired change of identity. Add to that the difficulty of identifying by any facial dif- ference.
It does not seem to be denied that the village of My Lai had harboured Viet Cong and was pro- bably in the habit of doing so whenever the inhabitants con- sidered it safe to do so e.g. at night. So Lt Calley was faced with a problem which was all too familiar to those of us who served in Burma in 1941. There is, to the average European, no difference in appearance between a Burmese ar.d a Japanese when both are dressed in the distinctive Burmese costume. As many of us found to our cost.
Simply stated the problem is whether a given individual is ene- my or friend—or more precisely enemy or peasant. The matter of age and sex does not come into it since it does not take any great strength or force to pull a trigger. Lt Calley was engaged in a 'seek and destroy' mission and the cold fact is that if he had any rea- son whatsoever to suppose that the apparent peasants of My Lai were Viet Cong or Viet Cong supporters then he had simply no option but to act as he did. He may have been wrong in his supposition but if you cannot identify your enemy by some distinctive method then you risk your men and yourself if you do not take all measures open to you to avoid any possible damage.
All are agreed that war is an evil thing—but it does not become less evil if carelessness results in greater casualties.
Martyn Snow 105 Coleheme Court, London sw5
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