In Robert Southey's dramatic poem about the medieval English Peasant's Revolt, Wat Tyler, he imagines the radical priest John Ball (he of the immortal phrase "when Adam delved and Eve span/who was then a gentleman?") as a kind of proto-Tolstoyan pacifist. In this regard, Southey was probably far more influenced by contemporary radical writers than he was by any historical sources about Ball. After all, Southey composed the work when he was only twenty years old and still a radical. According to Wikipedia, he is believed to have originally drafted it in 1794. This is the same year that William Godwin published Caleb Williams—and there are several passages in which one can detect the overt influence of that work.
This is most readily apparent in Southey's themes of pacifism and non-resistance. Sounding much like Godwin's great novel of social protest and anarcho-pacifism, Southey's version of Ball harps frequently on the notion that the retributive justice of the court system is really just a glorified form of revenge. He asks at one point whether his listeners cannot "See in the sable garment of the law/Revenge conceal'd." This is pure Godwin. Then there is Southey's reference to the "blood-purpled robes of royalty," in which we seem to hear an echo of Godwin's phrase about "the gore-dripping robes of authority."
If you have to steal, though, steal from the best—and both Southey's and Godwin's sentiments still have the power to move one, particularly considering the brutality of the criminal punishments that were still meted out at the time.
Southey's naïve and heartfelt work of youthful radicalism takes on a special poignancy and tragedy from the circumstances of its publication. Notoriously, after all, Southey became a great turncoat to the radical cause (much in the style of the "Lost Leader" of Browning's later poem, often believed to be about Wordsworth) and ended as a true-blue Tory who eulogized the deceased King George III with oozing sycophancy. When his political adversaries published Wat Tyler decades after he originally composed it, therefore, it proved a pointedly ironic comment on his later political trajectory. Byron was therefore able to refer to Southey mockingly as "the author of Wat Tyler" in his satirical rejoinder to the latter's eulogy of the King.
And indeed, there are lines in Wat Tyler that ought especially to have made a poet blush who had reinvented himself as an arch-sycophant and flatterer of the powerful: "Aye, aye, hear him—" cries a peasant in one scene of Southey's hero John Ball, "He is no mealy mouthed court orator,/To flatter vice, and pamper lordly pride." Would that the same could be said of the later career of the passage's author!
Still, in Southey's partial exoneration, one can also understand—in reading the poem—why his political vision of the time could not have survived unaltered into adulthood. Wat Tyler is a young man's poem; and its moral system is a young person's ideology. It is too simplistic and idealistic. Yet, for all that—or perhaps because of it—it is still moving—and poses an admirable moral challenge to our adult cynicism.
It is interesting, to start with, that Southey made Ball the mouthpiece for his pacifistic idealism. After all, Southey plainly on the one hand wanted to write a sympathetic portrayal of the English Peasant's Revolt. He was writing a piece in favor of social protest, and saw the discontented peasants as crusaders for equality and social justice. Yet, at the same time, Southey would have run up against the fact that the historical Peasants' Revolt was a brutal and ugly affair in which a mob of (no doubt justly) rancorous villeins descended on the English capital, ransacked it, assassinated and butchered everyone they could find who was associated with the royal government, and were ultimately routed after negotiations broke down with the King. All of this would have conflicted with Southey's Godwinian principles.
Southey gets around this difficulty by reordering the sequence of events slightly—so that the peasant's violent revenge now comes only after the King has perfidiously revoked his promised concessions—and having John Ball admonish the peasants for their willingness to take bloody revenge, even after they suffer this unprovoked betrayal. In Southey's version, therefore, the peasants come across as hot-tempered but justly aggrieved, and Ball is able to remain the morally unblemished hero of the piece and martyr to social justice, because he tries to warn the peasants against the sin of repaying evil for evil. In his moral remonstrations with the peasants, Ball's message—as we have seen—is pure Godwinism. Justice, he cries, should never mean repaying violence with violence. "Justice can never link with cruelty," he tells them. "Is there among the catalogue of crimes/A sin so black that only death can expiate?"
Even as a full-grown adult who has had to shed some of his own youthful radicalism and idealism, I fully agree with Ball (and ergo with the young Southey) on this much. Revenge is not justice; justice is not revenge—and to the extent that our systems of punishment amount really to a system of abstract and idealized vengeance-taking, then they are wrong. Godwin and Southey are dead-right about that. The trouble, however, is that retribution is not the sole purpose that seeking "justice" through the imposition of penalties can serve. These penalties can also be a form of self-defense against violence. A person who has offended against society may need to be deprived of the power to offend again. And indeed, Ball contemplates as much: "Were it not better to repress his power/Of doing wrong—that so his future life/Might expiate the evils of the past[?]"
Perhaps all he is seeking, then, is to protest against the death penalty, and in that I whole-heartedly concur with him: "Does his death remedy the evils he caused?" asks Ball. The answer, surely, is no. And part of the reason is that death is never the only way—in a judicial context—to achieve the purposes of incapacitating the wrongdoer temporarily from committing imminent violence and thereby defending the public. The reason for it can therefore only be revenge, and this—as we have seen—is an ethically impermissible motive, however understandable the impulse toward it may be in a given set of circumstances.
It becomes more difficult, however, when trying to apply these principles in war, since—as even international law contemplates—it may be necessary to kill in pursuit of a just military objective—again on the principle of collective self-defense. It is not always an option to refrain from killing another; unless one is willing to accept death oneself.
I can't help but refer at this point to the current Israel-Gaza war, if only because it is on everyone's mind. Here, I would say, is a very good illustration of a war on Israel's part that is justified partially by the necessity of self-defense. Israel suffered a direct attack on its civilian population, from a blatant aggressor. Israel is therefore fully justified in seeking to act to prevent that aggressor from ever being able to inflict such an attack again—to "repress [Hamas's] power/Of doing wrong," in other words. And under the circumstances, this probably has to mean removing Hamas from power in the Gaza strip and targeting its leadership and armed fighters, unless they voluntarily surrender (in which case they should of course be entitled to full rights as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions).
On the other hand, even a just war such as this cannot be waged in pursuit of revenge. Revenge, as opposed to self-defense, is not a legitimate reason to go to war—and it is even less so when the revenge is being exacted not even from the direct perpetrators, but from innocent civilians, including children. The question many people have been trying to sort out the last several weeks, therefore, is to what extent the Israeli government's conduct of the war (which the U.S. is supporting, giving us a moral stake and responsibility in the matter), has been in keeping purely with the legitimate goal of self-defense—and to what extent it is motivated by the impermissible goal of revenge.
The question is complex. On the one hand, the Israeli military is more constrained in its options than I think many on the left would like to believe. There are only so many ways to remove an armed terrorist group from effective state power, while it holds 200 Israeli civilians hostage in a densely crowded urban area, and bases its own operations and counterstrikes from near or underneath civilian targets. It is probably a tragic fact that, given the way Hamas fights and organizes itself, the IDF cannot wage a morally perfect war, even with the best of intentions (as if anyone could—as if there is any such thing as a morally perfect war anywhere under the sun).
And it has to be said that another one of the injustices that Israel has suffered at Hamas's hands is that the latter has effectively forced the IDF into making these ugly moral compromises by its aggressive provocation, its attacks and hostage-taking, and its subsequent refusal to operate at a distance from civilian infrastructure. However skeptical one may have been in the past, after all, about claims that civilian casualties from IDF airstrikes in Gaza were largely attributable to Hamas's use of innocent people as "human shields," such allegations seem much harder to deny now that Hamas is explicitly taking civilian hostages for purposes of using them as leverage to prevent airstrikes.
Still, it is equally clear that far from all of the IDF's actions in the war are justifiable on self-defense grounds. There is a real motive of revenge involved—how else to explain the seemingly disproportionate attacks we have witnessed—airstrikes on a refugee camp that take out a single Hamas leader, say, but untold numbers of civilians too? Or the collective punishment in the war's early stages that deprived Gazan civilians of food and water? Or the use of white phosphorus over populated areas? To these atrocities one can only respond with the words of Edna St. Vincent Millay: "I do not approve. And I am not resigned." There are some moral costs that are not worth paying, even in pursuit of a just war. And these moral costs are the ones that stem from a military going beyond the acts that are strictly necessary for collective self-defense, and that stray into the realm of sheer reprisal and revenge.
Of course, the Israeli leadership has rightly disavowed any motive of revenge or intent to harm civilians. When a member of Netanyahu's government (though not one directly involved in leading the war effort) recently made a comment floating the possibility of committing a nuclear genocide against the people of Gaza, Netanyahu rightly suspended him and condemned the remarks.
Yet, some of Israel's more sanguine supporters in the U.S. have not been so restrained. Lindsey Graham, for one, notoriously called on Israel's leadership to "level" Gaza—seemingly a call for genocide. In later interviews, he invoked a parallel to the Allies' bombing of Japan and Germany during World War II—an exceedingly troubling analogy, but a very useful one for illustrating the distinction we are trying to draw in this post.
After all, Graham no doubt invoked the Allied bombing because he assumed we would all regard that as justified. Yet, the truth of the matter is that these bombing campaigns were atrocities and certainly incompatible with the modern rules of war. After all, the United States and its allies firebombed Japanese and Germany cities, immolating hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in total disregard for any principles of military necessity or proportionality. Indeed, the Allies did not even undertake these bombing campaigns in order to sweep up military targets—but rather to terrorize and demoralize the civilian population.
These campaigns are therefore very much not the kind of thing that any modern state should be seeking to replicate. Graham, unintentionally, gave a perfect example of what not to do. He provided an historical illustration of how horrifying and ugly war can be when it is waged in a spirit revenge, rather than of self-defense.
Of course, I, like most Americans, think that the fight against Nazi Germany and militarist Japan was a just war. That is to say: it was a war rendered necessary by the need for collective self-defense. But that is not to say that any means used to pursue it were equally justified. A just war can be waged unjustly; and when the United States dropped atomic bombs and firebombs on civilians, those were unjust acts.
The same can and must be said of Israel's war, and the U.S. support for it. The war itself may be just and necessary, as a matter of self-defense. But that does not mean that disproportionate and indiscriminate bombing of civilians is just; it is not.
But, one can say, is it not understandable and human and forgivable that people would seek revenge, after suffering such an atrocious and grievous wrong against them? After Hamas killed 1,400 civilians in an act of unprovoked terrorist aggression, couldn't anyone be forgiven for seeking revenge against them? After all, even John Ball admits that the situation is different when one is acting under the heat of an intense passion aroused by an immediate provocation. In Southey's poem, he contrasts the "cool, deliberate murder of revenge" with the kind of knee-jerk reaction that sparked the Peasant's Revolt: "the momentary violence of anger," says Ball, "may be excused; the indignant heart will throb/Against oppression."
All of this is true, to be sure, when it comes to the extent of disapprobation we attach to the person who takes instantaneous revenge under these circumstances. We can forgive them in our hearts. But that does not mean they are any more entitled to take that revenge, however understandable its motives. This is because the person who is killed in the heat of passion is just as dead and just as wronged regardless.
To a Palestinian child buried and suffocated in rubble in Gaza, for one, it makes no difference how grave and immediate the provocation that led her attacker to act. Because whatever it was, and however recently it occurred, she was innocent of it. This is why we cannot accept a war of revenge. This is why we must speak out against it—if not against the war (which may be just), at least against the revenge in war (which is never just).
This, at least, is what I take from Southey's poem. Even if we cannot, at this late and pessimistic stage of history, embrace full Godwinian or Tolstoyan pacifism; even if we cannot believe that John Ball's way is workable on a large scale; we can salvage from their idealistic message this much at least: we must never wage a war for revenge.
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