How to justify genocide

Introduction
Perhaps the most negative aspect of Biblical apologetics is when it attempts to justify stories describing God's atrocities: not just executions, savagery, brutality and slaughter but also including ethnic cleansing and genocide.   The Biblical apologist has to justify these things because if not, the only other choices are (a) God is a monster or (b) the stories are legends or pure fiction. Neither of these choices is acceptable to the Apologist. 

Hence, the Apologist finds himself with no option but to justify the range of atrocities commanded by God (see the list here). The apologist does this by avoiding any discussion on God's options and focusing on the options available to human beings. 

Finally, he illustrates his argument with a real life example that ironically is itself potentially a war crime!

1 The Destruction of the Midianites

A classic example is the destruction of the Midianites described in Numbers 31:1-35 where approximately 200,000 men, women and children are slaughtered when God commands Moses to send his armies to kill every male, Balaam, and the five kings. Moses' soldiers capture the women and children and animals, and valuables, and burn the cities. Then they return to Moses who is not pleased to see any survivors,  so the soldiers cold-bloodedly kill all the male children and the mothers, grandmothers and pregnant women.  They keep 32,000 virgins alive for themselves. (It is not explained how the Israeli soldiers could determine if a woman was a virgin or not). 

1.1 The Justification for Genocide

The Apologist explains... 

a) God had to kill the Midianites because they worshipped Baal and were probably criminals. Therefore there is a risk they would corrupt the purity of the Israelites if they were to intermarry. This would destroy the means by which the Messiah would be born. And if the Messiah wasn't born, the human race would never be saved from sin.

b) The Midianites send 6,000-12,000 married women to "aggressively offer sex" to the Israelite men and encourage them to be disloyal to Yahweh.  And that's why God orders the Israelites to attack the Midianites.  

c) Moses is shocked to discover the "sex weapon" women haven't been killed so that's why he has them executed and that's why the young boys were also executed.  The 32,000 female virgins could be assimilated into the Israeli population.  But the boys could not.

1.2 Disanalogy

The flaws with this "justification" are so obvious they don't need pointing out, but one thing to note is the essential disanalogy - the emphasis from the Apologist on human actions whereas the issue is all about the actions of God - a supposedly omnipotent, omniscient entity who can perform miracles and is not limited as humans are.

1.3 The Greater Good

The apologist then attempts to expand on the "greater good" argument in 1.1(a) using this analogy: 

Think of a desperate battle situation where a bridge must be blown up - even with innocent people crossing it - in order to prevent a position from being overrun by an enemy that would cause even greater slaughter and loss of life among innocents. The ancient Jewish people also faced limited options when acting within their limited circumstances.

1.4 What would you do?
The Apologist then challenges his audience to make a choice:

Would you blow up the bridge or not? Would you do something bad or allow something worse to happen? 

Well, I don't know if I would blow up the bridge because I don't have enough information. The Apologist says "something worse" will happen if I don't send hundreds of innocent people plunging to their deaths in the river below. But how does he know that? And how am I supposed to know the detail in his imaginary scenario, given the small amount of detail? 

1.5 What would God do?

But most importantly - how is any of this relevant given that we are discussing God's choices? Obviously, there are examples of situations where people were killed in order to save a greater number of people. But that's a human situation. God does not have human limitations. Human beings "face limited options when acting within their limited circumstances" but God does not (or so we are told). So the Apologist is dodging any discussion of God's choices by focusing on my choices. But I am not God! If I was I would have a whole range of choices where no one dies.

1.6 Hypothetical

The other problem here is the concept of using hypothetical examples to explore moral concepts.  Although this can be done using very simple situations (such as the trolly thought experiment) it doesn't work in complex situations like this where there is a huge amount of missing detail and a degree of prescience required to predict what would happen in future circumstances. How do we know that not blowing up the bridge would result in something worse? Why were the people crossing the bridge, and who were they? Where was the enemy while the people were on the bridge? What is my role (military commander? Freedom fighter?) And so on. 

1.7 Not hypothetical!

So that was in 2012. Three years later it emerges that this is not a hypothetical example. It is actually a real life incident from the Korean War, where General Hobart R. Gay ordered the destruction of the Waegwan bridge across the Naktong River whilst refugees were crossing it in order to escape the conflict. This incident - among many others in that conflict - is potentially a war crime and Korean families are still fighting for compensation. 

So the Apologist ends up trying to justify a Biblical warcrime by referencing a modern day warcrime!

2 US Military Atrocities in the first weeks of the Korean War   
The details of these events in Korea are well documented. Six weeks into the Korean War in August and September 1950, the area around Waegwan was the site of intense fighting as North Korean forces pushed south toward Daegu. In an attempt to slow the Northern advance, on August 3 American forces blew up the bridge at Waegwan while hundreds of refugees were crossing. 

This took place under the orders of Major General Hobart R. Gay and Lieutenant General Dell Plunkett who believed the refugees were North Korean soldiers in disguise. 25 miles down river the 650-foot long Tuksong-dong bridge was also destroyed as refugees crossed.


The following account comes from the Associated Press in 1999...

GIs: U.S. killed Korean War refugees

Report details more instances of civilian deaths at hands of U.S. in Korean War.

In a single deadly day in August 1950, six weeks into the Korean War, a U.S. general and other Army officers ordered the destruction of two strategic bridges as South Korean refugees streamed across, killing hundreds of civilians, according to ex-GIs, Korean witnesses and U.S. military documents.

An old soldier recalled the critical moment at one bridge.

"I said, 'There are people!' And they said, 'You have to blow it! There's no other way!' " ex-Army engineer Joseph M. Ipock, of Jackson, N.J., told the Associated Press.

Ex-GIs told the AP of the bridge blowings and two other incidents, machine-gun and mortar attacks on refugees, during interviews about what happened at No Gun Ri, South Korea, in late July 1950. In that case, as reported Sept. 29, veterans corroborated Korean accounts of hundreds of refugees killed at U.S. hands.

One bridge blowing, with its refugee deaths, was recorded briefly in an official Army chronicle, but not until 10 years after the event.

The trail of dead civilians, many of them women and children, has been a hidden underside to a well-known chapter in U.S. military history, the southward retreat from advancing North Korean forces of three Army divisions into a defensible perimeter across South Korea's Naktong River in July-August 1950.

The withdrawal often was confused. The U.S. Army itself told South Korean civilians, citizens of an allied nation, to head south. But the AP found in researching declassified Army documents that U.S. commanders also issued standing orders to shoot civilians along the warfront to guard against North Korean soldiers disguised in the white clothes of Korean peasants. Military lawyers call those orders illegal.

Just days into his first combat command, the 1st Cavalry Division's Maj. Gen. Hobart R. Gay told reporters he was sure most of the white-clad columns pressing toward American lines were North Korean guerrillas.

"We must find a means to hold these refugees in place," the division commander said.

Days later, on Aug. 3, 1950, Gay waited on the east bank of the Naktong River as his division retreated across the bridge at Waegwan, the last crossing open to North Korean units reported massing more than 15 miles to the west.

His troops had failed in repeated efforts to turn back the flood of refugees, even firing warning shots over their heads.

"Finally, it was nearly dark," Gay later wrote to an Army historian. "There was nothing else to be done."

Then he gave a fateful command.

"General Gay stood up in the front of his jeep and shouted out, 'Blow the son of a bitch!' " veteran Edward L. Daily recalled.

The preset charges exploded, rapid fire, shattering the supports, dropping one of the bridge's hulking spans into the muddy waters of the Naktong.

"They went right down," remembered ex-lieutenant Daily, of Clarksville, Tenn. "It was like a slow-motion movie. All those refugees went right down into the river."

"It was a tough decision," Gay wrote to the historian, "because up in the air with the bridge went hundreds of refugees."

The division's 1950 war diary didn't report the refugees' deaths. But the later narrative by Gay, who died in 1983, led to a brief mention in an official war history published in 1960.

What happened earlier that August day, however, 25 miles downriver at the village of Tuksong-dong, never has been reported.

Ex-sergeant Carroll F. Kinsman remembers the streams of white-clad humanity shuffling across the 650-foot-long Tuksong-dong bridge -- women clutching children, old men, overloaded ox carts.

"We stayed up all that night and searched them," Kinsman, a veteran of the 14th Combat Engineers Battalion, said in an AP interview. They found no infiltrators, he said.

Retreating Americans hadn't yet sighted North Korean units near the river around Tuksong-dong on Aug. 3, the declassified record shows. But American officers knew the enemy would arrive eventually. Pressed by a timetable, they proved unable to keep the refugees back from the bridge, rigged for instant demolition.

Soldiers fired over the heads of those crowding across and tried to warn them the bridge would be blown up, said the veterans, men in their 60s or 70s.

"They tried to stop the refugees from coming across, and they wouldn't stop. They were abutment to abutment," ex-engineer Leon L. Denis, of Huntsville, Ala., recalled in an AP interview before his death Aug. 31.

The men of Company A, 14th Engineers, had taken two days to set 7,000 pounds of explosives on the steel-girder bridge. When the detonation order came at 7:01 a.m., "it lifted up and turned it sideways and it was full of refugees end to end," said Kinsman, of Gautier, Miss.

"These people were on the bridge, and you saw the spans of steel flying and you knew they were killed," said ex-GI Rudolph Giannelli, of Port Saint Lucie, Fla., driver for Col. Richard W. Stephens, the 21st Infantry Regiment commander who was the last officer across the bridge.

In separate AP interviews, Kinsman, Denis and Giannelli said hundreds of civilians were killed. Ipock said he could see only 30 or 40 refugees from his vantage point.

"There was people on that bridge when it went up," Ipock said. "And during war that's the story. They're up there and they pull the plunger and that's it."

Kim Bok-jong, 73, a Korean who said he was 200 yards from the bridge, out of view around a hill, remembered "people rushed back toward us and said many people died when the Americans blew up the bridge."

The dying didn't end there, he said. Panicked refugee families stranded on the far shore after the bridge was destroyed tried to swim the river, Korea's largest.

"Many -- I mean many -- people drowned," Kim told the AP. "Women with kids were exhausted before reaching the southern bank and disappeared under water. Sometimes kids were abandoned in the middle of the river."

The veterans said they don't know who gave the detonation order at Tuksong-dong. The operation was noted in the 14th Engineers report with a simple "Results, excellent."

From the bridges, the U.S. Army units moved into defensive positions along the Naktong, in what came to be known as the Pusan Perimeter. They had arrived at the river after weeks of retreat through South Korea -- and after countless, sometimes bloody encounters with refugees.

Four 1st Cavalry Division veterans told the AP that on Aug. 2, the day before the bridge blowings, they were among several dozen soldiers retreating toward the Naktong and being trailed by perhaps 80 white-clad Koreans.

In mid-afternoon, five North Korean soldiers -- disguised in white -- appeared in front of the Americans, they said. Veteran Edward L. Daily said the North Koreans opened fire and quickly were killed. Another ex-GI, Eugene Hesselman, remembered it differently, saying the intruders surrendered and were led away.

Because it was believed they came from among the refugees, said Hesselman, of Fort Mitchell, Ky., "we got orders to eliminate them (the refugees). And we mowed them all down. The Army wouldn't take chances."

Scattering too late, every man, woman and child was killed, Daily said. He and veteran Robert G. Russell said they found about 10 disguised North Korean soldiers among the dead. Hesselman said he doesn't recall that infiltrators were found.

"I didn't like to do it," said Russell, of West Fargo, N.D. "It was just pure survival at the time."

About a week earlier, a half-dozen 1st Cavalry Division veterans recounted, mortar fire was directed at possibly a few hundred refugees moving down a railroad track about 100 miles southeast of Seoul.

Americans had been ambushed the night before by North Koreans who mingled with refugees, said ex-GI James McClure. Now, he said, he spotted another white-clad group, including women and children, through his binoculars, and put in a call to a command post.

"The colonel contacted mortar and decided to kill them instead of allowing them through the line," said McClure, of Federal Way, Wash. He couldn't recall the colonel's name.

When the mortar fire hit, "there were legs, arms and bodies flying everywhere," McClure recounted. Veteran Henry Matthias, of Baltimore, said he believes about 70 refugees were killed.

Matthias said he and GIs around him didn't fire because "the North Koreans were coming in, but they were a long way away." Other ex-GIs said North Korean uniforms and weapons were found on bodies afterward.

Some officers and other Korean War veterans drew a distinction between killing civilians simply because of suspicions of enemy among them, and destroying a bridge -- a strategic necessity -- with refugees on it.

But others, looking back, said refugees on targeted bridges should have been protected -- for example, by deploying soldiers to hold them back and retrieving the soldiers later by boat.

Three days after blowing the Waegwan bridge, Gay did send boats across the Naktong, to bring across 6,000 stranded refugees from the west bank, the declassified record shows.

The North Koreans didn't appear in force on the west bank between Waegwan and Tuksong-dong until Aug. 7, four days after the bridges were blown, the record shows.

From a 50-year vantage point, historians are beginning to look anew at those first desperate weeks of the Korean War.

"Civilians were in the way, their friendliness could not be counted on, they were scary and it was unclear who the enemy was," Marilyn Young, a New York University history professor, said in an interview. "The U.S. Army was taking the population as a whole as the potential enemy."

Killing of noncombatants was then -- as now -- a crime under the international law of war and the U.S. military code, military law specialists note.

Although reports of North Korean atrocities were widespread at the time, possible war crimes by American troops weren't an issue during the 1950-53 war, a West Point expert said.

"This now will change the way we look at the Korean War," said Gary D. Solis, a law professor at the U.S. Military Academy.

Last year the South Korean government rejected, on a technicality, a compensation claim filed by survivors of the bloodshed at No Gun Ri in July 1950. But after the AP published its No Gun Ri report, in which U.S. veterans said their unit killed a large number of refugees under a railroad trestle at that South Korean hamlet, the U.S. Army and Seoul government announced investigations.

In addition, since the Sept. 29 AP report, accounts have surfaced in South Korea and the United States of still other civilian killings at U.S. hands in the Korean War.

Those reports have yet to be corroborated. But Defense Secretary William Cohen said last week that after investigating No Gun Ri, "we'll see if there's substance to the other allegations." He didn't specify what new allegations the Pentagon may look at.

(AP investigative researcher Randy Herschaft contributed to this report.)

3 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of Korea

The 1999 No Gun Ri articles prompted hundreds of South Koreans to come forward to report other alleged incidents of large-scale civilian killings by the U.S. military in 1950–1951, mostly air attacks. In 2005, the National Assembly created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of the Republic of Korea to investigate these, as well as other human rights violations in southern Korea during the 20th century. The commission's docket eventually held more than 200 cases of what it described as "civilian massacre committed by U.S. soldiers". 

By 2009, the commission's work of collating declassified U.S. military documents with survivors' accounts confirmed eight representative cases of what it found were wrongful U.S. killings of hundreds of South Korean civilians, including refugees crowded into a cave attacked with napalm bombs, and those at a shoreline refugee encampment deliberately shelled by a U.S. warship. 

The commission alleged that the U.S. military repeatedly conducted indiscriminate attacks, failing to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants.  In its most significant finding, the commission also confirmed that South Korean authorities had summarily executed thousands of suspected leftists in South Korea – possibly 100,000 to 200,000 – at the outbreak of the war, sometimes with U.S. Army officers present and taking photographs. 

Of all American wars, the Korean conflict is believed to have been the deadliest for civilians as a proportion of those killed, including North and South Korean  non-combatants killed in extensive U.S. Air Force bombing of North Korea, and South Korean civilians summarily executed by the invading North Korean military.  The commission also recommended that the Seoul government negotiate with the United States for reparations for large-scale civilian killings by the U.S. military. This did not occur. Assistant U.S. Secretary of State Stanley Roth was quoted as saying in Seoul at the outset of the No Gun Ri investigation in 1999 that the United States would consider investigating any similar Korean War killings that came to light.  The 1999–2001 investigation was the last conducted by the United States. 

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Gun_Ri_Massacre#Truth_and_Reconciliation_Commission