Heather Cox Richardson:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now and Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. Today, we’re going to talk about a topic, which in a sense, won’t be surprising at all because of what’s going on in Ukraine. And that’s the question of laws of war or war crimes. What are they, how have they been understood throughout American history or even throughout history? And what does that tell us about how Americans and others grapple with war, try to bound in war, try to lines in war and try to get their arms around something that is inherently violent, uncivil, murderous and bloody. There’s something very poignant to me about the fact that as we’ll see in today’s episode again and again and again and again, different groups of people try to come up with some kind of code of war or laws of war to make it clear when a line is crossed.

And part of what you see is how hard that is, how almost impossible that is and what that really suggests about how difficult it is to infuse anything of morality or ethics into the practice of war. You can say it, you can see it. We are pointing to it in Ukraine, but that’s very different from doing something or recognizing something and acting on something in a concrete way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And it’s worth pointing out that President Biden said that he believed that Vladimir Putin had engaged in war crimes, but on March 23rd, Secretary of State, Antony Blinken released a statement in which he noted as he wrote that the deliberate targeting of civilians is a war crime. And then he said that the Department of State and the US government experts were watching to see whether or not war crimes were being committed by the Russians in youth Ukraine. And on March 23rd, he said, “Today, I can announce that based on information currently available, the US government assesses that members of Russia’s forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine.” He goes on to say that assessment was based on a careful review of available information from public and intelligence reports as with any alleged crime, a court of law with jurisdiction over the crime is ultimately responsible for determining criminal guilt in specific cases.

And then he goes on to say, “The government is going to be continuing to watch this.” So as of March 23rd 2022, the US State Department has assessed that it believes that members of the Russian armed forces have committed war crimes in Ukraine. So, Joanne, when I think about the beginnings of trying to draw lines around acceptable behavior in war time, I have to say, I start with colonial America. And what do we need to know from then about this attempt to try and create as you say, a really a paradoxical humane warfare. It’s like jumbo shrimp. It doesn’t seem like it should go together.

Joanne Freeman:

The first word in my notes is oxymoron.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Okay.

Joanne Freeman:

So, yes, indeed. It is just like jumbo shrimp the near impossibility of imposing morality in warfare in one way or another. What’s interesting about the colonists and particularly the period around the revolution, is the enlightenment was a period when people believed that you could step back and look at in one way or another nature, the world and determine laws, universal laws. And if you could figure them out and apply them, that would in one way better knowledge and better the world. So, it’s not surprising that it’s the middle of the 18th century when there’s a German Swiss philosopher named Emerich de Vattel, who comes up with the idea of creating some kind of law of war, which he titles the law of nations. And in one way or another, what he’s trying to do is to say that wars should be fought as effectively as possible to achieve victory with the least amount of suffering possible.

Vattel writes, “Women, children, feeble old men and sick persons come under the description of enemies and we have certain rights over them, and as much as they belong to the nation with whom we are at war, but these are enemies who make no resistance. And consequently, we have no right to maltreat their persons or use any violence against them, much less to take away their lives.” So that idea, this sort of enlightenment sense of the law of nations and rules of wars floating around in mid 18th century, and then you get the colonies coming together to fight the revolution. And the colonies and the sort of ultimately early United States is thinking along these lines and is certainly making claims about wanting to live up to that kind of morality. So, for example, when the Continental Congress gives George Washington his commission, his commander in chief, they write into his commission the words, “You are to regulate your conduct and every respect by the rules and discipline of war.”

And he has each soldier in the Continental Army sign a copy of rules that included provisions designed to limit harm to civilians. So, that is on the one hand claims being made about morality and fairness and justice and sparing civilians. However, in 1779, Washington launches a really brutal campaign in the Wyoming valley in Pennsylvania. In June and July of 1778, a group of loyalists in Iroquois had swept through that valley and killed several 100 men, women and children. Washington responds to that by sending general John Sullivan into that valley. And these are the orders that he gives General Sullivan as he sets out to devastate and destroy the Indians, the Iroquois so that they can no longer be a threat. He tells Sullivan “to pursue the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more.” And he then goes on to talk about ways in which basically scorched Earth, destroy everything.

Not focusing on people, focusing essentially destroying towns. And there are 40 different Iroquois towns that are destroyed in this warfare. The aim being to push these native Americans out of the way, to get them to leave, to get them to be afraid, to make them in a sense refugees and have them move on, which is pretty much what happens. And because their crops have been destroyed, they begin to move west, but many of them starve that winter because of the lack of food, the Seneca specifically, nicknamed George Washington town destroyer, since that’s pretty much what he ordered General Sullivan to do. So there you have out of he himself getting his soldiers to pledge to follow these moral rules of war, to not take revenge on civilians. And then he literally asked for the total desecration of these Iroquois people. Now, this raises a question, which is what people do we mean when we talk about people? So are talking about white people? Are we talking about other kinds of people? Are there differences?

And in this case, that really blunt in your face kind of “total destruction and devastation language,” he is talking about native Americans. So, that’s probably an easier claim for him to make given what colonists are assuming at that period in time about native Americans. So, that becomes a particular kind of war crime I suppose you could say.

Heather Cox Richardson:

There is, it seems anyway, a difference in his mind between getting rid of the villages, burning and slashing the villages and burning and slashing the people

Joanne Freeman:

Precisely. He’s not focused on people. He wants them to move away and he makes them refugees. But you’re totally right. What he wants to do is destroy their villages, wipe their villages out, terrify them. And by that overcome them and then they will no longer be willing or likely to join with the British and attack Americans.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It’s such a bizarre concept though, because then you’re condemning them to die slowly in agony, instead of die quickly in a brutal attack.

Joanne Freeman:

They are dying, but you are not directly killing them. Right?

Heather Cox Richardson:

And you’re not witnessing it. That to me, I think is a big thing. I think if you’re not looking at it, you can say, it’s not such a bad thing

Joanne Freeman:

As I said, at the outset it’s striking and poignant and kind of sad in a way to see people trying to traverse this territory and come up with something that seems as though it’s going to somehow impose moral judgment during time of warfare.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So it that’s an interesting segue into the middle of the 19th century because in the middle of the 19th century, a couple of things happened, I think, that make Americans try to create boundaries around warfare. And one of them is new weaponry that is exceedingly destructive, but I think we’ll see the same thing in the 20th century with the new weaponry people are like, “[inaudible 00:09:56], we better do something here to make sure we’ve got some boundaries going on.” And then there is this emphasis in America on the law. So, not necessarily on natural law, but on American law. And this comes to the fore during the civil war, not surprisingly at all. The first time that people really begin to talk about what the boundaries of war should be happens in 1862. And that happens when in the summer of 1862, the Dakota in Minnesota have given up their land under a treaty on the condition of course, that they’re going to get annuities and food and shelter and medical care and all sorts of things that are not payment for the land, but that are contract going forward.

And during the war in 62, the Congress does not fund that treaty, meaning that the Dakotas start to starve. And when that happens, they say, “Okay, fine. You’re not honoring your part of the contract, we’re not going to honor ours.” And they start to push back against the white settlers who have settled on their land in Minnesota. The ensuing Dakota war eventually ends with more than 300 Dakotas surrendering to military authorities. Now, through a series of courts marshal that were essentially kangaroo courts, the officials sentenced over 300 Dakotas to death by hanging. Now, they then go to Lincoln to sign off on these deaths. And he recognizes that he has a problem because the Dakotas have made war on the government of Minnesota over this broken contract.

And they are in the field. And the punishment for surrendering for having participated in this uprising is now supposed to be death. Well, this is 1862. Abraham Lincoln’s got another problem of people coming out against the government on the other side of Washington. And he recognizes that there has to be some kind of limit to when the government can essentially kill you for treason during the middle of a civil war. And so he and his people go through all the sentences for the Dakotas who have been sentenced to hang. And he makes a distinction between those people who killed on the battlefield, he commutes their sentences to imprisonment and those people who committed rapes or murder off the battlefield. And those he permits to go forward and results in the largest mass execution in American history on December 26th, 1862, when 38 Dakota men were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota.

That idea that some things are okay in war and some things are not okay in war, then becomes something that people in the United States government care a lot about four months after that hanging on April 24th 1863, Lincoln issues something called general orders number 100. Instructions for the government of armies of the United States in the field. And this becomes known as the Lieber Code because it was written by a guy named Francis Lieber, who was a German immigrant, came to the country in 1827 when he was 28. And he was a political science professor at the University of South Carolina before he moved to New York. And he really cared a lot about the law, about making rules that people could live by.

So he began as soon as the war broke out, to think about writing a code for war. And he wrote to Charles Sumner, the guy who keeps showing up on this podcast in August of 1861 saying, “I desire to write a little book on the law and usages of war affecting the combatants. Some 200 pages, but nothing of the sort having ever been written so far as I know, it would require a good deal of hunting up. And God has denied me the two delectable things, a saddle horse and an amanuensis. Otherwise I would try to write something which Congress might feel inclined to recommend to the army.”

Joanne Freeman:

So, in February of 1862, union and Confederate forces clash at Fort Donaldson, Tennessee. And at that point, Lieber hears that the Confederates wounded his son Hamilton during the battle. So Lieber New York trying to go off and find his son. And in his travels, he meets Henry Halleck, the union general who’s in charge of the department of the Missouri. And they end up becoming friendly. In July of 1862, Lincoln makes Halleck, general in chief in Washington. And shortly thereafter, Halleck begins calling on Lieber for advice on legal and ethical questions that have to do with the treatment of captured Confederate soldiers, particularly gorillas and their distinctions from conscripted troops. So, after Lieber is asked, first of all, by Halleck to think about these issues that have to do with ethical and legal questions of war, Lieber begins to write a memorandum and think about these issues in a way that basically he wants to sift through the different kinds of combatants at war.

He wants to understand and come up with an idea about how regular conscripted troops are to be treated, how Confederate gorillas are to be treated, how enslaved people and formally enslaved people are to be dealt with during combat. In essence, he’s trying to sift through different populations of people to come up with some kind of law of war that seems fair, that seems protective, and that will support three things that he says he’s driven by in working on this topic, which is “the love of truth, justice and civilization.” Again, the poignancy of this, Lieber says he’s motivated by the love of truth, justice and civilization and he’s working on laws of war. This gets back to jumbo shrimp, but the weirdness of this conjunction of things and the seeming impossibility of it is really striking.

Heather Cox Richardson:

The civil war is still this moment, really not by 62, but in 61. And maybe because Lieber wasn’t on the front lines, he still thought that way. It was supposed to be this great noble cause. And these men rode off to war in these uniforms and they had one clean bullet and then they delivered that dear Sarah letter to their wives and then they laid down under a bed of roses. And that was their great noble cause. And the was that by 62, 63 and onward, these horrible weapons that are exploding, grape shot all over the soldiers and are carrying pieces of fabric into people’s bodies where they fester and people die of terrible infections and they’re losing their limbs and they’re losing their eyes and they’re dying of dysentery, they’re hoping to put some boundaries around that so they can continue to have this belief that it is a moment of nobility for young men as opposed to dying in these horrific, morally compromised, ugly ways.

Joanne Freeman:

Along those lines, then Lieber is basically talking about how “armed enemies” should be treated. And in some cases, those people as he puts it, their destruction is incidentally unavoidable and others. Deserters and women and prisoners of war and partisans and spies, are slipperier categories and aren’t in the middle of actual armed warfare in the same way that conscripted soldiers are. So yeah, I think he is trying in one way or another to particularly, and I like the way you put it together, particularly given the horrible brutality of what’s going on, it makes this even more urgent.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, so very famously in article 16 of the Lieber Code, he says, “Military necessity does not admit of cruelty. That is the infliction of suffering for the sake of suffering or for revenge, nor of maiming or wounding except in fight nor of torture to extort confessions. It does not admit of the use of poison in any way, nor of the want and devastation of a district. It admits of deception, but disclaim acts of perfidy. And in general military, a necessity does not include any act of hostility, which makes the return to peace unnecessarily difficult.” In a way it almost feels like saying, we know we are sending you out on the fields to kill people, but we’d like you to be gentlemanly about it. It’s funny I sound so negative because I’m actually a fan of the Lieber Code. I’m a fan of the story behind it and the whole idea of it.

But maybe it just looks different today. It is worth pointing out that the Lieber Code did make it much easier to have successful prisoner exchanges, there was a much more consistent set of behavior for soldiers after the Lieber Code. In the union, of course the Confederacy is going to continue to execute black US soldiers. And it also gave us some sense of what the rights of POWs were. Not that those either were necessarily honored during the war. At least we had them.

Joanne Freeman:

So there’s improvement, which is good. But that’s February of 1863. September of 1864, we have William Tecumseh Sherman’s renowned March through Georgia, right? German’s march. The goal is to desecrate the south. Again, not necessarily people, but land, homes basically to level the south to a degree that it can no longer fight. Sherman sets off to march through Georgia with 60,000 troops. He destroys crops, he destroys commodities, railroads, telegraph lines. He estimated that his army did $100 million worth of damage to the countryside, which apparently is roughly more than 1.5 billion today, destroying 300 miles of railroad, killing livestock and leaving a lot of the population destitute. Now, the logic behind that Ulysses S. Grant, General Grant basically says, “Rebellion has assumed that shape now, that it can only terminate by the complete subjugation of the south. It is our duty to weaken the enemy by destroying their means of subsistence withdrawing their means of cultivating their fields and in every other way possible.” And Sherman acts along those lines.

Heather Cox Richardson:

What Sherman intends to do is… And he says this, he’s very articulate about this. One of the Confederate says to him, “Stop, you can’t do this.” And he says, “I’m going to make war so terrible that you will never engage in it again, because that is less cruel than letting you think you can do this again.” So he destroy everything, all the stuff he possibly can.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s the key here again, is stuff. We’re destroying stuff. We’re not deliberately aiming to attack and kill civilians. So, Sherman essentially is acting in the spirit of the Lieber Code. And he says in districts and neighborhoods where the army is unlisted, no destruction of such property should be permitted, but should gorillas or Bushwhackers molest our March or should the inhabitants burn bridges, obstruct roads or otherwise manifest local hostility, then army commanders should order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless according to the measure of such hostility. So again, stuff, land, railroads, telegraphs. It’s an attack to devastate the south, but it’s not a deliberate attack against civilians. Although, as we’ve been saying since the beginning of this episode, obviously, this kind of damage is going to cause suffering among civilians.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So, it wasn’t only Francis Lieber and people like Ulysses S. Grant and Lincoln and Sherman who were wondering about the modern ways of war in the 19th century. There’s actually another philosopher who’s thinking in the 1850s about the ways people should act during war time. And the most prominent with those is a Swiss businessman, a man named Henri Dunant, who witnessed the aftermath of the battle of Solferino in Italy, which is a particular bloody battle during the Italian war of independence that pitted the French and the Sardinians against the Austrians. And in 1862, having witnessed this horrible battle, Dunant wrote a popular book called A Memory of Solferino in which he suggested that it was important for nation to create an international legal body that could oversee what he called the military art.

He said, “On certain special occasions, as for example, when princes of the military art belonging to different nationalities meet at Cologne or Châlons, would it not be desirable that they should take advantage of this sort of Congress to formulate some international principle sanctioned by a Convention inviolate in character, which once agreed upon and ratified might constitute the basis for societies for the relief of the wounded in the different European countries.” And in 1864, he organizes a convention of European representatives in order to put his idea into action. And he does it at Geneva. This is where we get the idea that Geneva Conventions. In 1864, the rules that they put around war were signed by 12 nations and they established a set of broad rules for the treatment of wounded soldiers and for quite crucially, the establishment of a force of medical professionals, medics, who would not be aligned, but they were there to treat the wounded during war time.

And this becomes the basis of the International Red Cross. And in fact, for his work doing this Dunant would go on to win the first ever Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. Clara Barton, who had been an American nurse during the civil war and who would go on to co-found the American Red Cross, went to Europe in 1869, she becomes familiar with the 1864 Geneva Convention and the work of Dunant, and she writes a 12 page petition to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee after her trip, saying that America must participate in this new plan. She writes, “Perhaps no more advanced step than this. In the march of civilization and humanity…”

Got to pause there for a second. “Had ever have been taken nor more unique or touching sight of its kind had been looked upon than this body of 26 men representing the heads of the war making powers of the world, performing journeys of thousands of miles to sit down in calm council to try to think out if some more humane and reasonable methods might not be found and agreed upon by the governments of the world for the treatment of the unfortunate and helpless victims of the wars.” Can I just say jumbo shrimp?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, jumbo shrimp, but also I do want to say it’s also interesting that in addition to jumbo shrimp, she’s showing that same kind of sense that it’s poignant on the one hand that the effort is being made, and then the reality of it is another thing entirely. So, she’s kind of reflecting some of what we’ve been feeling throughout our discussion of this episode.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, yes. And for all my sort of disbelief at the idea that you can ever make war humane, obviously the reality is that we have wars and people trying to put fences around the way people behave during those wars is a good thing. Well, so the rest of the story of America participating in this, I particularly like because Claire Barton went directly to Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877 to get him to adopt the Geneva Convention. And he thinks it’s a good idea, except that he backs away out of concern that this might be an entangling alliance with Europe nations and he refuses to do it. But then she goes and she talks to James Garfield, President Garfield. And I particularly like this because James Garfield was a sort of philosopher president. He’s a very bright man. And he had been a civil war soldier himself, and he had seen horrible battles and he had seen what those battles did to men.

And he was very concerned about what had happened to the black soldiers on the battlefield. This is something that he cared enough about that when he ran for president, he made it a point to talk about the importance of black soldiers and the equality of black soldiers in American life. So, he likes the idea of joining the convention, but of course, then he is assassinated in 1881 before he can get the convention through Congress. So, at the end of the day, it’s Chester Arthur, who gets America to sign the Geneva Convention. And he endorses its ratification in his first annual message to Congress and legislators in Congress ratify the treaty the following year, we become the 32nd nation to join in the convention. Chester Arthur is a president who never held an elected public office before he became vice president.

He was corrupt as can be as vice president. When Garfield is assassinated, everybody thinks that the whole country is going to be destroyed because he is so corrupt. And once the mantle of the presidency fell on him, the man sat up and flew right. Whenever something like this happens in this area, you’re like, “Really, Chester Arthur did that?”

Joanne Freeman:

Which is exactly what you said. It’s exactly what you said when we were looking at this and mentioned him. Your precise words were, “Really, Chester Arthur?”

Heather Cox Richardson:

In his first annual message he said, “At its last extra session, the Senate called for the text of the Geneva Convention for the relief of the wounded in war. I trust that this action foreshadows such interest in the subject as will result in the adhesion of the United States to that humane and commendable engagement.”

Joanne Freeman:

What we see next is a series of conventions in which in one way or another people are refining or creating or amending this idea, this continuing idea to come up with these rules, whether that means updating the original Geneva Convention or doing something different. So, just to give you a sense of this. In 1906, the Red Cross convenes another meeting of 35 member nations to update the original Geneva Convention. There’s another conference in revision in 1929, which deals with prisoner of war issues brought up by World War I. In 1899 and 1907, Sir Nicholas the second organizes two further conventions on wartime protocol at the Hague in the Netherlands. And they adopt principles almost directly grounded on the language of the Lieber Code. So they’re not necessarily just updating Geneva, but they’re really looking to of the Lieber Code. Then in 1949, there’s a convention that ends up producing a lengthy document with over a 100 articles.

And it goes into much deeper detail on things like the taking of hostages, the mutilation and degradation of prisoners of war, torture, executions, discrimination based on race, sex, religion, nationality, or political affiliations. And there are four sections in this new document. One of them looks to the Geneva Convention for the amelioration of the condition of the wounded and sick of armed forces in the field. Another deals with the amelioration of the condition of wounded, sick and shipwrecked members of armed forces at sea. Another one deals with prisoners of war and another one deals with the protection of civilians in time of war. And it deals in a variety of other ways with some specific issues that haven’t been talked about before, like hospital ships can’t be used for military purpose or captured religious leaders need to be returned immediately.

So, you can see as I suppose you could call it the quote “art of war” is progressing over time. Again and again and again and again, there are these conventions updating, considering new forms of technology, looking at what happened in warfare and seeing where there were lapses and trying in one way or another to again, as we’ve been saying throughout this episode, create a line beyond which you can’t go. And by stating that there are certain things that are not allowable. Trying to draw that line about what is improper and writing that down, putting that down on paper so that it can be something that people can sign onto and agree on.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and speaking of poignant, it is really striking how so many of these new boundaries are a result of things that human beings have tried during warfare. The worse things people think of the more than the Geneva Convention or one or another kind of convention tries to say, “Oh, no, you can’t do that again. You did it once, but you can’t do it again.” And there is, it seems to me this continuing sense of you’re either a country that abides by these things, or you’re an outlaw country. And that’s an interesting distinction as well, not unlike what you started out talking about with George Washington, that these are the ways that gentlemen behave during war time or whatever your words were, but we don’t actually have to treat other people that way necessarily.

Joanne Freeman:

And there’s a difference between speaking of and writing about and codifying in one way or another ideals of war and then behavior on the battlefield that the codification of these things matters immensely I think. Because if you think about the absence of this effort, although it might not alter end up causing a lot of difference in people engaging in warfare, the absence of any effort to do this, the thought of that, just sitting here and thinking about that for the first time, it’s a little bit horrifying as much as I keep coming back to the idea that they’re trying and trying and trying and trying and improving it and yet there’s still this sort of laps of what happens in actual warfare. But if these efforts hadn’t happened, I don’t know, it’s a little horrific to imagine people dealing with all of the horrors of war and how they change over time and not thinking about ways to at least protect some people during time of war.

Heather Cox Richardson:

It is an interesting concept that there are things that we don’t do in society. We don’t murder, we don’t steal. There are all these rules that in order to be part of society, you are not supposed to engage in except during certain times. And then rather than it being a bad thing that you’re killing people, it becomes a good thing that you’re killing people. So, how do you justify that and how do you put boundaries around that you can still then reintegrate into the idea of a society where those sorts of things are not okay. And maybe this is one of the ways that you do that.

Joanne Freeman:

Just as you said, during war in one way or another, people fighting a war say whether it’s true or not is another question. But certainly if you’re fighting a war, you are thinking that in some way, your cause is just and you feel the need to do what it is you’re doing. But all of these conventions trying to minimize suffering and protect civilians, they’re saying, “Okay, whatever you guys deal with the causes of what you’re doing.” We’re saying, let’s look above that and just talk about humanity as a whole. It’s like a parallel level of moral thinking, which may or may not work, but the effort to do that matters.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it is interesting as we’re talking about this, when in fact the United States was not initially inclined to ratify the 1949 version of the Geneva Convention because of something called article 68. And article 68 said you could not use the death penalty by a victorious power in an occupied territory, except in extreme cases of espionage murder, or serious cases of sabotage and where such laws had previously existed in the occupied power, the American representative to the convention, a man named John Carter Vincent, said that the us wanted to be able to determine whether or not to impose the death penalty abroad itself without taking that rule into consideration. So, it’s not until 1955 that the US signs on to that protocol. And then finally in 1977, another Geneva Convention added more protocols to the conventions of 1949 that increased protections for civilians, military workers, and crucially journalists during international armed conflicts.

It also banned the use of weapons that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering or cause widespread long-term and severe damage to the natural environment. Another protocol stated that all people not taking up arms must be treated humanely and there should never be an order by anyone in command for there to be no survivors.

Joanne Freeman:

Now, bring that back to the present and let’s talk for a moment about Russia and Ukraine. We’re all watching, learning of reading about Russia deliberately targeting civilian sites, even a building that announced in huge letters outside of it, that there were children inside. We’ve been talking a lot in this episode about devastation in the flattening of areas of property. And what we’re looking at now is the deliberate targeting of civilians, which is what led to where we started with this program. The statement that Russia was indeed guilty, or Putin certainly was guilty of committing war crimes. Now, I’m sure many of you out there are doing what I have been doing for, I guess, weeks now. And that is immediately expressing outrage with every new example of deliberately targeting civilians, because it’s so obvious that a line is crossed. But wait, these are civilians. Right?

This is… We know that this is immoral. We know that this shouldn’t happen. It’s the spirit behind each of these conventions again and again and again, but it raises a really interesting question. So, let’s say we know that to be true, and let’s say a country does it anyway. And even though these conventions are saying, if you’re moral, if you’re part of the community of humankind, you’re going to behave in a humane and moral way, what happens if the leader of a country seemingly doesn’t really care? Right? Morality and ethics in warfare, kind of like norms and politics, they’re partly voluntary. They partly rely on people agreeing to at least a fundamental level of decency however minimal it might be. There’s some kind of a shared law of nations, but also a kind of sentiment of nations, a kind of agreement that since we’re all humans, since we’re all people that there has to be some kind of spirit of humanity that helps to control what we’re doing during inhumane things like warfare.

So, what do you do if there’s someone who just doesn’t really seem to have interest in the community of people that exists, that abide by those kinds of ethical codes or those kinds of moral codes? And we’re looking at a moment right now, when that’s the question where we have president and a secretary of state who have made the declaration, which it’s an extreme statement to make that someone is a war criminal, has committed a war crime. That’s saying basically this person is inhumane, this person has not behaved in a moral manner. This person has crossed all kinds of boundaries and is now as you put it earlier, Heather, an outside nation. So, then what?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, it does make you wonder if we will see an attempt and certainly Ukraine president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy has hinted in that direction that we will see new protocols trying to stop somebody who is perfectly happy to be outside the conventions, outside the agreements of the rest of the world of how one should behave. The idea of trying to make war humane just is something I simply can’t wrap my head around. And I think one of the reasons I’ve had a hard time with this particular episode, is that we are looking at the extra… There are 10 million people who are refugees at this point. It’s been four weeks. That’s not even death. That’s not even looking at the extraordinary destruction.

And this is all because of one, I would love to be able to say, “Wow, all we need to do is we need to get these countries together and do X,” but I’m not even to the point where I can get my head around that. We live in a world in which it is still possible for one man to reign down that sort of horror on millions of people and there doesn’t seem to be not only a way to stop it now, but there wasn’t a way to stop it from starting. And that’s the place where I’m sort of like, “How can you put the kind of boundaries around war ever that make it not only just humane, but human?”

Joanne Freeman:

And what do you do when the war community sees that kind of horror, points to it, acknowledges it, declares it a crime. And as you said, there’s one man doing what he chooses to do. What do you do? What does the rest of the world do? I mean, that’s the moment that we’re in. What do we do and what consequences face the different things we might do. And if you’re dealing with one person of particular mindset, how do you deal with that person knowing that person might go to extremes. It’s an amazingly fraught moment, it’s an ugly moment. And it’s also a puzzling moment. Because just as you said, Heather, we’re looking at one man and the suffering caused by his invasion.