All the suffering that there is EssaysandAphorisms

Rohan Price

Thoughts on fate and atrocity

We know all the suffering that there is. We do not fall into an abyss. We descend into a canyon. We can see the bottom of it. Our suffering has an appreciable depth. It is familiar because we have been there. We know people down there. Lying flat or milling around. We can grab a lien. And scramble back up. Nobody much considers this idea of fate these days. You could be dead. You might not have survived. But you have. Now respond to the horror and misfortune of it with determination to find your strength. The wreckage, the limbs strewn limp, bloodied and dusty, are not yours. What you feel about the atrocity is irrelevant. What matters is how you respond, take charge of yourself, impress yourself on the world that remains. Only this has meaning in the world of the living. This is Nietzsche’s personalised idea of fate and suffering, of course. Fate is to be answered by action. Atrocity is taken as a challenge. Not taken lying down. Not a prolonged self-pity. But there are other ways to see fate than provoking a duty to strike back. 2.

Under fate there exists all the suffering that there is. Fate tells us how much suffering can be inflicted if we are to keep our Being intact. Being – an original balance of violence and pity minded by fate – is a state of unlikely constraint attuned to fate. This is how we know by name all the maniacal epigones who went too far. We know who took second-hand ideas to their limit, and beyond the pale. And you only have to go too far in your own way. Sure Stalin, Mao, Hitler, come to mind first but the list descends down and down, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Baby Doc ... All the way down the death spiral to Major Mitchell clearing an Antipodean riverbank of about 200 of those menacing blacks, Edward Curr killing 500 of them to make Tasmania safe for agriculture. We know how they claimed authority from a hideous morass of bad ideas to make their action seem perfectly reasonable. We know them because they had no claim to Being. They rubbed our noses in it. But they have lost posterity. Now we can rub theirs in damnation.

The shadows of the shadows in command went too far as well. Whole crosssections of societies. Emboldened. Opportunistic. Marching across the plain in

rank after rank, fanning out into their depravities or cold indifference as the mayhem about them lit up everything. Stripped of Being, these days, ghostly and rattling around their big houses, unable to find their currency, they know all the suffering that there is but can find no consolation in that knowledge. Their chance to moderate themselves, make amends has passed. Being is a groove that you are lucky to find. And no one cares if you don’t find it. It is an ability to hold out the encroachment of the world with a narrative that your ease and comfort is necessary to it. Fate is the world having the last say in that. 3.

We accept all the suffering that there is. At the heart of Christian fate is an idea that suffering that has happened or will happen to a person is unavoidable. 1 Destiny, we are told! And we go with that idea without thinking about it. It follows from this that there is a plan, an eternal one, guiding everyone and everything. This person or that one was always going to heaven or hell. How then can it be fair to punish or reward anyone In this life. That is not something that Augustine nor Calvin could resolve. We tap into our fate, confirm it through action. Spend a lot of time proving that we are on Team Destiny. This idea of fate as a faithful election, a bone-deep feeling of election, offered enormous comfort to crusaders and conquistadors operating in the heathen world. They could imagine that their violence was just, necessary and an enactment of the world in God’s image.

They were restoring the world to a proper state like it was an abandoned garden needing a pruning, ploughing and fencing. For them to show initiative meant that they followed a blueprint. They felt a natural response to world of disorder. We might remember Pope Urban II or Pizarro by name and deed. But the world beyond the frontier of Europe did not need them. It needed people like them to do things like the things they did. Being is denied to anyone who fills such a blank space, and goes forth to annihilate. Nothing is redeemed by knowing or not knowing that they serve another’s compulsion to excess. Useful idiocy or sly intuition in the exercise of violence matter for nothing. You just don’t know how to stop or why you should. Or, you are so intoxicated with yourself that a right to resist you cannot be acknowledged.

4.

Your actions will have the effect desired by your master whether or not you are aware that you are a cipher. It is preferable that you are unaware. It is better that you have no idea that you take another’s will for your own, that you direct action within a broad field of permission. It is better, too, that you are left to imagine what the limits of your violence might be. Your scope of action is increased if you do not know that you jeopardise your Being by going too far. Talk about taking bullets for the team. This is why no green light for your plunder is needed. Your action endorses a policy that does not need to be written down in extreme detail to be real and effective because you give up your Being for the God of state. We will leave it up to your conditioning. We did a good job on that.

5.

Arcadia operated as a sexual fantasy of unlimited roaming framed by misted hills and crumbling columns. Arcadia also operated as an inspiration for its opposite. Reduced to a uniform grid to contain behaviour, Arcadia could be productive without freedom or spontaneity or leisure. How can Arcadia be sublime AND a repressed hell pit at the same time? Arcadia is a blackberry thicket. Sweet earthy berries and vicious pricks combined in the same experience. The new world could not admit this. It had to be seen as one thing or another. Progress is not served by an ambivalent image. You could not have the cake and eat it too. The pricks were necessary experiences. An account of virgin land could only be made by violence and exclusion. Having your cake is either a lurid invitation to innocence or it is nostalgia. Strike that. They are the same thing.

6.

In his 1946 lecture in the U.S., Albert Camus reflected on the murder, rape and destruction of the war in Europe. He told his audience that ‘the human condition requires truckloads of blood to arrive at some imperceptible shift in destiny’ and that we should ‘reject in thought and action any acquiescent or fatalistic way of thinking’.2 Among the handful of insights possessed by a handful of people, so claimed Camus, is the idea that force is not great or inevitable. So, he rejected the Christian idea of fate, too. Camus repudiated, in absolute terms, the idea that we

should lie down in awe of the forces arraigned against us. Do not wait for the bulldozer to crush you.

In some unspecified way, Camus expected that we can be better, do better, than silently rue fate. He believed we could escape our fate of violence with the rule of love. Camus cannot accept that we are blighted. Or, more precisely, he cannot accept that it stands to reason that we are blighted. We are lost, corrupted, behind the eight ball. You do not need to believe in the Garden of Eden to accept determinism. That your life, its transactions and repudiations, all happened before you were born. That there are hopscotch boundaries and limits containing you no matter how zany or on edge you think you are.

8.

What if, instead, among the insights arising from all the bloodshed, we accept that we have no capacity to stand above fate to find a peaceful way to live with a degree of constructive action equal to those with hearts set on destruction? And, although we have no power to reject the idea that violence is necessary to the course of history, we can know where its limit is – we can know when the suffering caused by violence runs beyond constructive tension to become more than enough. We can see the bottom of the canyon. If we can know all the suffering that there is, see with our own eyes the length and breadth of the ditch, then we can set a limit on it. Although the tens of millions of dead from World War Two belied it, according to the Lord Chancellor in 1944, cited by the prosecution in Singapore, the international law of nations is ‘a practical guide’ designed for ‘the protection of the occupants of Occupied Territories against the violence of the invaders’ should not be regarded as ‘the vain imaginings of a few pedants’.3

On such a basis, we will not allow another purge state of Stalin, another famine society of Mao, another Rape of Nanking or Manila, another Singapore slaughter etc, etc. Until another such outrage occurs, brows are furrowed, international law mentioned and it becomes acceptable for cheaply made night time television to make jokes about it a few months later, as if some people deserve the benefit of

the paradox, but others don’t. This means the solemn, with warm hearts and cold eyes, set the limit – not on what’s funny. That’s a chimpanzee reflex. On what’s achievable and decided through memory and recorded as destiny – a measure far finer and better reasoned than rules declaring limits. There is an Institute in France that decides what foreign words will be let into spoken and written French. Does ‘pullover’ or ‘hamburger’ make the grade? That sort of decision-making.

The imperceptible shift that Camus suggests that human improvement over time can happen. Every time we wash ourselves in blood, we grow a little more repelled by the experience. The incremental increase in our nausea is not enough to take action to prevent the next atrocity, as am sure the Lord Chancellor, looking for a fall-back in law, must have understood in order to stand at the dispatch box to make an attempt at righteous humanism. We must, instead, make a united stand against fate even if we are mocked by the same townsfolk as Zarathustra. We must tackle fate’s exoneration with laws specific enough for practical vengeance and lofty sounding enough to sound like God is talking. In all the striving to sound focused on justice, and ever so reasonable in conducting its mission, however, what is lost in war crimes retrospection is the ability to see ourselves clearly. The only significance of destiny for a war crimes prosecutor in, say, Singapore in 1947 was that then actions of the accused, Nishimura, Kawimura, Oishi, Yokota, Jyo, Onishi, and Hisamatsu throughout the occupation were crystalised into their personal fate before an appointed noose. This depended on a deviation from their hopes but not the narrowed fate of victor’s justice. The process underlining such a twist in fate assumed complicity when they said they did not know or found their initiative when they said they were being led.

9.

What

if, instead, we accept violence as the sinew of history, as an engine of fate.

We should not find ways to unilaterally resist fate in the name of love in the revolutionary sense Camus suggested. We should keep score instead. Take fate away from destiny. Stop characterising it as the opposite of loving hope. Let go of the idea of fate as a prompt to transcendence. Make fate a ceiling. Make it the limit of what is acceptable. Fate watches history to deny Being to those who go

too far. Camus, fresh from the suffering of France, believed that, by pulling out the thorn in his side his pain would go away, or more dangerously, that the optimism of a unified front in a resolution of love would heal the wound, cure humankind. Yet, our tallied resistance to violence with violence, the struggle for Being, is all we have. That such resistance is possible means that violence must have limits. Fate is not a get out of jail for free card. Such absolution, so beloved by Christians, contended that murdering communists, Muslims or Jews was the only acceptable earthly reckoning because of the dyed in the wool nature of their creed. Imagine that a person’s perceived essentialism, and their incompatibility because of it, does not affect the cancelling of Being resulting from initiating an atrocity. That the accountancy of Being through the limit on fate is an underlying principle. 10.

The prevailing idea of fate in Singapore after the events of February 1942 is another version yet again. But all the senses of fate discussed to this point converge on the place plausibly enough. Christian fate. Unavoidable. Every participant carried a tick or a cross on their soul decided before their birth. They crossed each other’s paths. They did what they were meant to do to end up where they were heading. Yomi-no-kuni is the Shinto Land of the Dead.

Sometimes Japanese Christians use the term synonymously with Hell. But the Japanese could only be devils if their policy was to go after innocents. They just did not care enough that there were innocents sprinkled among the Volunteers, communists and the rabid pro-China types.

Nietzsche’s fate? Dig deep to use survival as a blessing for the chance at vengeance, resistance or some other purposeful transfiguration. Plenty of survival after the Singapore atrocity. Not much of the other stuff. Heads hung low. Slaps on the face. Existence not Being.

Camus’s fate? Well, we can rail all we like against the fatal power of the badly intentioned. Bad people always carry the day with an unshakeable belief that they are doing a good thing. The Japanese had to win the war quickly to sue for an honourable peace. An unresolved war of resistance in Singapore conducted by people they knew hated them was not on the cards. As implacable enemies, the KMT Chinese could never link arms with the Japanese, or each other, to prevent the Sook Ching, either. So much for the Koombayah fate peddled by Camus. Like the fate of Nietzsche and the Christians, the fate of Camus flunks a basic reality check. Singapore must have a fate of its own.

Thoughts on fate and responsibility

Let us say that our project is to find the Japanese soldiers morally responsible for the Sook Ching. If we adopt a libertarian philosophical position, and privilege a free will explanation above all else, we must ignore the prior conditions to the arrival of the Japanese in Singapore and their expression in causation as a law of nature. These are the concerns of the hard determinists. If I cannot do otherwise than I do then free will must not exist. This position aligns strongly with the Japanese of Singapore acting in defence or mitigation. As we cannot go back in time to change the steps toward an atrocity, or the determinist law that Newton, Hume and Nietzsche would say propels us toward it, then we cannot be morally responsible even when we apparently author it. Fate in such a case appears as chain of occurrences building up to a major event that occurs independently of the responsibility of the final link. The British prosecution in the Singapore war crimes trial were, understandably, having none of this. Yet they could not plausibly contend that each of the seven Japanese officers indicted for war crimes to stand trial acted according to free will. That an exercise of morally significant freedom capable of being punished could only come from an individual according to their uninfluenced will. Instead, they had to run what philosophers like to call a compatibilist argument. This is an argument that tries to reconcile free will and determinism. We can have free will, even if determinism is true. On

the first page of the prosecutor’s opening remarks this kind of free will, infused by the determinism of rank or the irreversible chain of events, but not detrimentally to guilt, puts the accused war criminal in the dock as a sufficiently individual entity to bear moral responsibility for their action. The language used gave the game away. The accused were ‘jointly charged with the responsibility for a series of close-set massacres’ and that these were ‘arising from a common plan’.4 Thus, a group of officers conceived to have acted in concert nevertheless held enough in individual volition to bear moral responsibility. Determinism could not be let off the leash in the opening statement and allowed to sniff around the reasons for Japanese anti-Chinese policies dating from, say, 1937 or earlier. It was quite enough for the prosecutor that there was a plan immediately preceding the invasion of British Malaya and the fall of Singapore to counter anti-Japanese elements among the Chinese community of Singapore. Nor could there be any consideration of the entrenched Japanese distinction, stretching from the home isles to Singapore, shared alike by soldiers and civilians of Japan, between participating in the war out of duty and supporting it with nationalist fervour, and whether you gave up your life in resignation or with pride did not alter events. You did it. Determinism, although a simple stream of connected ideas to those who believe in it, is apt to clutter and unnecessarily complicate the narrative of one who contends against it. That’s why there is a drive in every war crimes trial to limit determinism just enough to make an individual accountable.

There is also the possibility that Japanese individuals did what they did in Singapore for reasons that were causally determined as a matter of interiority. That is, they were not to blame because there was a pattern of behaviour instilled in their brain that made them do what they did because it seemed causally necessary. We would not blame a person for their behaviour if they had a brain tumour that made them aggressive. That sort of thing. Science now says alcoholism is not your fault. That kind of thing. Liberated, every one of us, by rationalism in bigger and bigger Broadway lights! Before long we will all be stars, not fallen ones or villains, or waking in an alleyway like a hobo. No one will have to be blameworthy. We will all have reason for our frailty.

When you read through the prosecution cross examination of the accused in the Singapore war crimes trial there is little short of an obsession in the questions asked of individuals about their rank, their reporting line, their view on whether the massacre was needed, etc. a soldier, to be guilty of atrocity, either has to be the highest rank, and have the buck stop with them because of their presumed knowledge and power to order others, or, if not the highest rank, high enough and clearly enough capable of free will in the exact manner, place and timing of executing people. One either voluntarily took moral responsibility by rank or by operational decision-making. Free will, not determinism, is the prosecutor’s fetish. No prosecutor wants to hear an accused soldier say that their will, and responsibility for it, was overborne by the command of another or the logical outcome of a course of events beyond their control. This leads to a tendency to ask an accused soldier whether they knew what they did was wrong as the only criteria of moral responsibility when it is entirely irrelevant should a soldier be factually deprived of the ability to choose a course of action that the prosecutor believes to be right.

A universal determinist would say that because of the properties of an object, and the force or stimulus it is subjected to, there is only one way it could have acted. More than this, such a surmise applies to humans and their existential world to the extent that they, too, have no power to exercise choice.

The British said that operational reasons were denied to the Japanese as a justification for the Sook Ching killings due to their casualness in choosing who was to be shot or not. Presumably, a soldiery befitting an anti-resistance operation required a degree of professionalism and concern for justice set by the British and their example. Yet, when questioned, Japanese soldiers were adamant that their policing and mopping up activities after the fall of Singapore felt operational. They said this because they would be shot by their own Army for insubordination if they did not play their required role in the massacre. The lack of a specific, coordinated and planned operation with a specific military reason did not

suspend the chain of command or prevent them being shot for refusing to do the bidding of the central command.

In Singapore in 1947, General Nishimura, commander of the Imperial Guard of the 25th Army group, was tried under military law for being ‘concerned’ among others ‘in the massacring of Chinese civilian residents’ in a manner contrary to him being ‘responsible for [their]lives and safety’.5 There it is. If we are asked to pinpoint the suitably individualised moral responsibility of Japanese officers for the Sook Ching, this stands as its indictment. After going into a darkened tunnel where individual and group responsibility, the prosecutor burst into the clear light of individual responsibility. Like the relationship of master and servant of father and child, it was reasoned, Nishimura and his co-accused, had ‘increased authority and power’ and with it ‘increased duty and responsibility’.6 The only allusion to determinism made by the prosecutor was that the rules and obligations of a superior were “thrown upon the accused” as if to say that had there been a twist of events before the landing in Northern Malaya in late1941 an altogether different set of seven or so men would be standing in the dock five years later, but that, events happening as they did, these were the men who occupied the seat of the Occupants, and who were put to the standard of restraint and benevolence.

Let us fly the kite of innocence. When Japanese soldiers attended concentration centres to conduct screenings and drove victims in trucks to execution sites to dispose of them at Punggol Beach, Changi Road, Amber Road, Singapore Docks, Mata Ikan, Changi Spit, and Tanah Merah, they had no choice about participating in the process of killing. That was their contention at trial. An order is an order whether it is legitimate or not. Questioning orders was not an option. The moral responsibility decreases the further down the chain of command we go. The illegitimacy of the screening process, and whether it was operational or not, matters for nothing to the central question of moral responsibility.

Let us say that you are in a building during an emergency. In Harry Frankfurt’s example, you have a choice between escaping by Door A or Door B. 7 That’s a false choice if Door B is locked when you turn the handle. So, you had to go through Door A because Door B, if investigated, could not be called a real option.

Determinism still requires free will as a part of the law of nature that determines that an event is going to happen. Fatalism is a belief that no matter what you do, an event was going to happen.

1Endnotes

McKim, Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms, 75.

2

Camus, Lecture, ‘The Human Crisis’, at 45:20 min.

3 WO 235/1004 18901, ‘Chinese Massacre Trial – Opening Address’, 3.

4 WO 235/1004 18901, ‘Chinese Massacre Trial – Opening Address’ (Singapore War Crimes Trial 1947) 1.

5 WO 235/1004 18901, ‘Complete Transcript of Chinese Massacre Trial’.

6 WO 235/1004 18901, ‘Chinese Massacre Trial – Opening Address’, 2.

7 Frankfurt, ‘Alternative possibilities’, 835.

Bibliography

Frankfurt, Harry (1969). “Alternate possibilities and moral responsibility”. Journal of Philosophy 66 (23): 829–839.

Archive

WO 235/1004 18901 ‘Complete Transcript of Chinese Massacre Trial’.

Internet

Mortensen, Viggo, Reads ‘Albert Camus’ The Human Crisis’ (2016) Avail at: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=aaFZJ_ymueA (Accessed 17 August 2023).