The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0420; War Crimes and Atrocities

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. The Thomas Jefferson Hour is brought to you by High Plains Public Radio and New Enlightenment Radio Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Today's program was recorded in May of 2004 and it is about war crimes and the atrocity of war. Please join us as our producer and host for the day, Janie Quill, speaks with Thomas Jefferson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Today seated in front of me is Thomas Jefferson our third president. Good day to you, Mr. President. Good day to you, citizen. Mr. Jefferson, today we have a very volatile subject and that is the atrocities committed during war, war crimes. And I would like to start by just asking you for your knowledge of war crimes either before your time or during your time.

Well, war is a form of barbarism. Once civilization breaks down into armed struggle, inevitably what occurs is mayhem and killing and it's possible for us to channelize war to a certain degree. But whenever you unleash these forces of deadliness, there will be inevitably a certain randomness and a certain barbarism that occur and you try as you might and I think we must try to channelize war and if it doesn't sound too paradoxical even to civilize war, but try as we might to do that, there will always be atrocities, there will always be mistakes, there will always be civilian casualties and of course soldiers themselves are largely innocent, a handful of people are warrior class who from birth almost train themselves to be professional warriors and I have great respect for them because I think that these

are actually men who bring a certain engineering and a certain restraining energy to the horrors of war, but then there are inevitably a majority of mere soldiers who are not trained to be warriors, they are willing to be warriors because they're patriots, they're willing to carry arms on behalf of their communities, but they're naturally farmers and peace loving people who are called into war by emergency and these people in some sense are inevitably casualties. It's a form of barbarism that we would kill a farm boy who because he's a patriot leaves his plough behind and goes into battle and suddenly even if it's done under proper rules of engagement, he's dead and his corpses either taken home to the farm or he's buried in a battlefield somewhere, this reminds me of the great definition of soldier from Jonathan Swift's treatise, Gulliver's travels in book four of Gulliver's travels, Swift talks

about European institutions and one that he examines in some depth as war and he finally has Gulliver saying to his winem hosts, the trait of a soldier is held in them as the most honorable of all others in our society and then here's his definition because a soldier is a yahoo hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species who have never offended him as possibly he can. If that is a fair, although satiric definition of soldier, then in a sense all war deaths are barbaric. Mr. Jefferson, let me understand you're saying that there's two classes, the warrior and the soldier, what is the difference in training of between a warrior and a soldier and how does human nature play into both of these? I mean no disrespect when I say that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton were professional warriors, they knew something about the history of strategy, they had studied the history

of warfare, they knew about engineering, they were masters of weaponry, they knew how to march, how to feed troops in the field, they knew a whole range of battle tactics, some of which were ancient and others which depended upon more recent warfare that was observed in our own time, but these were professional warriors. Now, what I loved about Washington is that he was a reluctant warrior and as soon as he had the opportunity, he broke his sword and went back to his farm. I have less respect for Colonel Hamilton because I think that Hamilton thirsted for war, but both of them are professionals in the sense that they were well trained in leadership and well trained in the history of battle and when they went to war, they did so. I won't say with a thirst for it because that certainly wouldn't characterize George Washington, but they went into war with a certain avidness that comes from knowing what is to be done, having mastered a certain set of problems, whereas the soldier who is a farm

boy from New Jersey or a farm boy from Boston is just there because he feels it is his patriotic duty and he's trained, he's not a master of anything, he is trained by somebody else to be a good enough field soldier. So somebody, a warrior who understands the history of war, who's maybe read literature about war, some of the Greek and Roman literature is more prepared for the atrocities or more prepared to not commit war crimes. I would say more prepared not to commit war crimes because that's why we train officers. That's why officers were gentlemen in my time because the sense was that an officer was a person who would civilize war to the extent possible, he would meet his enemy and they would do so under fair terms and that there would be rules of engagement and there would be periods of ceasefire to collect and bury the dead and that there would be a deliberate

holding back of the bloodlust that is sometimes released in war. I think soldiers feel that even more than leaders do but it's in leaders interest to be professional and therefore to be restrained and restraining. I don't think that atrocities are inevitable in war but what I'm suggesting is that from an enlightenment point of view, from the point of view of Jonathan Swift or my own quasi-ipassifism all war is a form of atrocity because most wars are fought for nothing. They are fought for perceived abuses and perceived tensions that are more real and rhetoric or in the mind of great ones than they are in truth and most wars inevitably spill over beyond combatants on the field and even if they remain just for combatants on the field, the victims are average farmboys who are just rising to the level of patriotic duty and then when the war is over, we've lost 5,000 men or 100,000 men and these are young men

in the prime of their lives. Their families are never quite the same. The farm is probably a falter and profit less without that young energy and the war is patched up and in the peace treaty almost invariably through human history. To status quo antebellum, the state of things before the war is simply restored and so in the enlightenment we have profound anxiety about the legitimacy of war. Mr. Jefferson, that's very interesting. However, what happened in your time when you came across a nation that didn't have the same reality or agreement of the rules of engagement or the rules of war? For the most part, the British did, if the British were here, they would probably say these Americans are guerrilla warriors because we were a rag-tag army and we didn't march in the same way that British armies did and our soldiers often hid behind trees and picked

off the British regulars who were in tight and disciplined formation and so from the British point of view they would probably say that this was a guerrilla war and that the Americans fought barbarically. We would certainly not agree with that. We were fighting for our own homeland and our own liberty but certainly we had somewhat different tactics from the British. Eventually Washington did produce a professional army and there were some set battles in the course of the war but the fact is we tended to lose the set battles when we won it was by guerrilla tactics or by quick strikes and then fleeing somewhere else and engaging on another day and Washington was often criticized for that and the British, I'm sure, had legitimate claims but when we talked about atrocity in my time we normally meant things that occurred on the borders and often involving Indians and as I said in the Declaration of Independence the British stirred up the Indians of the West to commit acts of barbarism and actually

I love Indians and greatly admire their cultures but I did say in the Declaration of Independence that the British had stirred them up to become, quote, merciless savages and by that I mean they urged Indians to kill families, women and children and to scout people and to torture people on our borders as a way of breaking American resistance to the British tyranny. Mr. Jefferson can you tell us a little bit about Sir Henry Hamilton? Yes, this is, this is an interesting subject you know I just was speaking about Indian atrocities and this is really one of the problems when one culture, I mean I start by saying that all wars barbarism and all wars is a failure of civilization and I mean that that's not just a piece of preliminary rhetoric but having said that when there is a war it's in our interest to limit the havoc as much as possible and when one culture is a civilized culture with rules of engagement like ours and another culture is a different one based on fundamentally

different principles say the Iroquois or the Shawnee or the the Wyendot or the Huron. I mean these peoples had a different concept of war and in their culture perhaps it wasn't considered barbaric to tear the heart out of your enemy or to kill the whole family but in our system that was seen as an atrocity. I'm sure the Americans committed atrocities against the Indians during my time but we tended to see Indian atrocities against our white settlers and this was extremely upsetting to us and especially upset me because I don't think that Indians were disposed to treat us this way I think they were incited to this sort of atrocity by the British and the worst offender in my opinion during the Revolutionary War was a British leader by the name of Sir Henry Hamilton.

Sir Henry Hamilton was out in the western country and he had been stirring the Indians up to hate us he was called the Hairbuyer because he actually put a bounty out on American white skelpes and he was finally captured at the Battle of Vincen the Battle of Vincen occurred in your Indiana and it was won by our great Hannibal of the the American Revolution George Rogers Clark and when Clark captured this Hairbuyer this man who was sponsoring atrocities Sir Henry Hamilton he had him marched back to Williamsburg you know is a distance of about 1200 miles and Hamilton was brought in chains to Williamsburg I at that time was the governor of the state and it so offended me that Hamilton had engaged in atrocities and encouraged atrocities that I treated him rather shabbily I had him I kept him waiting for they had been on this immense journey I kept him waiting for half an hour or an hour outside which an officer in a gentleman would not expect I mean he would be he would expect

to be treated like a visiting gentleman as if he were the ambassador from Switzerland and I kept him waiting and he was cold and hungry and dirty and and then when he was brought in I had him clapped into chains and he later complained that the heaviest of of all of the the chains were upon him they weighed 18 pounds eight ounces and that he had he was kept in a dungeon which is not really true but kept in a in a damp and cold basement jail with some what he called some common prisoners and it was true that officers normally were not treated this way officers normally had special care they often were on on what you would call house arrest and were were given fashionable homes to stay in and in temporary use of servants and vineyards and so on but I I felt so angry that I wanted to show him a little bit of what he had been doing and so we clapped him in chains and kept him in this dank space for a time eventually this became a kind of embarrassment for George Washington

because of course the British were very angry about the way I as the governor of Virginia was treating Sir Henry Hamilton and they felt either that that this should be apologized for and Hamilton exchanged as a prisoner or they felt that they might have to retaliate and I for an I and do and treat our officers in a in a barbaric way and so eventually George Washington who admittedly was a much greater war leader than I could ever have been wrote to me and so this is Mr. Jefferson you know enough is enough this is getting a bit embarrassing you've made your point with with Sir Henry Hamilton now I think it's time to to treat him the way a British gentleman and officer would be treated as a as a captive and then eventually he was exchanged but I felt very I mean I very seldom got angry but this really upset me I mean you have a family living out somewhere in the Indiana country and this British hair buyer Sir Henry Hamilton is putting his paying cash payments for Indians to go

into a hut and slaughter men, women and children who have done him no injury whatsoever I that made me lose control of my normal evenness of temper thank you Mr. Jefferson you are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour where today we are discussing war crimes and the atrocities of war we realize that this is a very complex subject and we are asking Mr. Jefferson for some of the history back in his time and before his time Mr. Jefferson there was also another group when you were president the pirates of Tripoli I believe did not have the same rules of engagement as the Americans excellent question that is exactly right what the first cabinet meeting of my administration in the spring of 181 was about the Barbary pirates and the pirates of the North African states the Burbers so called Barbary pirates did not accept our concepts of free travel on the high seas and they believe that any ships that came

into their territorial waters and they read their territorial waters essentially as the entire Mediterranean and in the opening in the Atlantic were taxable and so they would they would raid these ships and board them and take prisoners and torture them and put them in unspeakable conditions for immense lengths of time and ransom them which is a violation of codes of civil behavior and we then would have to ransom our soldiers and they would they would be upping the ransom all the time and in blackmailing us you know so we had to face the issue of paying the price for their unjust demands or letting our own American citizens rot in Islamic jails in North Africa and so where they were tortured and sometimes star and so my first cabinet meeting was about this crisis because the posh of Tripoli had actually instructed his men to cut down the the flagpole in front of the American consulate which is a way of declaring war in that culture and so we had we'd been bearing

with these humiliations and depredations for a quarter of a century ever since the really ever since the revolution because before then we were protected by the immense British Navy but once we were free the British Navy no longer protected our ships and so suddenly they were easy prey for these pirates this enraged me too and I believe in fairness but when fairness breaks down fundamentally then I sometimes lose control of my own equanimity and I know that's that's one of the consequences of living in a world of barbarism and I regret these moments where I flared up but I had a cabinet meeting we decided to send an expeditionary forced to North Africa and we did and we had an undeclared naval war between 1800 and 1815 really it came and went several times but we eventually did sign a peace treaty with the the barbarous states and they never then offended us again after 1815 but that's a long period and during that time one of our brave men was trying to to run a raid

on Tripoli and his ship the Philadelphia actually ran aground and and these tripolotons boarded the ship and took more than 300 men including the captain of the ship prisoner and they tortured them and we tried a rescue mission that failed luckily we were able at least to burn our own ship so that they couldn't use it as a propaganda piece or use it against us but we had the hardest time liberating these sailors and here's the here's the the basic truth of all this they were just sailors delivering commodities agricultural commodities into the Mediterranean they weren't spies they weren't warriors they didn't have double assignments they were just free men in free ships delivering goods in free trade and we had to face this Mr. Jefferson we have to go for a quick break but let me ask you in just 30 seconds or more

can you tell me what is the difference between in your opinion between being a soldier and just being a free commercial sailor well the sailor is just some poor fellow who was born in Baltimore Boston and he signs on as a merchant sailor and it's his job to to be a part of a crew that gets a commodity of goods from one side of the Atlantic to the other he's just mining his own business you know he probably doesn't have a musket but he knows by going into those waters at least the chance of being captured is there does he not well he wouldn't be captured in in France he wouldn't be captured in pressure he wouldn't be captured in Spain he wouldn't be captured in Portugal he's only captured by barbarians who don't accept the civil code of human behavior Mr. Jefferson we will return in just a moment thank you very much. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour I'm Janie Guilde producer of the program and seated

across to me is Thomas Jefferson our third president today we have been discussing war crimes in the atrocities of war Mr. Jefferson you were kind enough to give us some of the history that occurred during your lifetime and I have a question because you were talking about the enlightenment and you were saying sailors would not expect to be captured in any of the enlightened countries in England or France or Germany what's the difference between the enlightened countries and the unenlightened countries the enlightened countries have through a series of diplomatic exchanges and exchanges of students and businessmen and traders have engaged in a continuous dialogue about the nature of life and they have either deliberately formulated

a set of common codes or they have tacitly come to an agreement about common civility for example if I am a French merchant and I order a hundred hogs heads of Virginia tobacco and then the Virginians send those hogs heads in a ship I have to pay for that if I refuse to pay when the ship comes into the port then that is a breach of contract whether there's a written contract or not that's a code of civil behavior that if I order a commodity and someone goes to the trouble to supply it and the quality of that the timing is right and the quality of the supply is good but I have a moral duty to pay for it so that's a basic code of contract if I commit a crime in France I know that I will be punished under the French penal system it might be different from the system in Virginia but I know that it will be there will be a set of protocols so that my

rights are not utterly disregarded I'm not going to be thrown into jail for the rest of my life in France and if I am that means that France has violated a code of civil behavior if I am a diplomat in France and I say something disagreeable to the French crown they might give me my passport and ask me to leave the country but they're not going to clap me in chains and torture me and these are basic codes of civil behavior and some of them were codified by treaty but many of them were just understood as how civil people behave towards each other so in Tripoli or the pirates of Tripoli why weren't the African states included in this dialogue they were that's what we were saying we were saying look we're sending boats filled with goods into your waters and we want to work out with you what what are territorial waters and what are international waters and you know most nations agreed that that that one's territorial zone was either three or 15 miles away from the

coast but but every but these but through bilateral agreements or through ongoing conversation or diplomacy you can usually agree that if you put a boat within one mile of New York harbor that's invading our territorial waters but if it's 15 miles out you're free to sail up and down the Atlantic Coast at will that these are these are agreements that that one comes to but you can't you can't make an agreement with the barbarian because the barbarian doesn't want to live by civil codes if they were willing to treat with us and and they said well look where we are we regard our territorial waters is running 40 miles out we might not like it but we would then be in a position to adjust we would then keep all of our boats at 41 miles out because we would know that this was their system but if they if they're capricious and they and they allow boats through one day but the next day they they capture the boat and and ransom everybody then you can't do business as a nation certainly can't do business in commerce with people who won't agree to play

by certain rules of exchange exchange rates the rule of contract the exchange of prisoners the that not everything has to begin a shooting war that if there's an incident there can be international arbitration or negotiation so these are these are codes that have been worked out from time immemorial they go back to Roman the Roman Empire and Roman law and most European nations adhered to them not always one of the causes of the War of 1812 was that the British were impressing our sailors meaning that they were boarding our ships illegally and taking our American citizens and and impressing them that is pressing them into British naval service and our soldiers couldn't defend themselves because they didn't have American passports and they spoke English and the English spoke English and so it was very confusing but English were clearly violating codes of civil behavior which is one reason that led to the War of 1812 the war was an expression of a problem that couldn't be solved through negotiation so there will be wars but even then when there is a war there's a system of exchange you don't just go in and slaughter everyone in London you know you try to you try to kill enough people in

their army so that they sue for peace but you don't engage in indiscriminate slaughter thank you mr. Jefferson I understand at one point you wrote a letter to Patrick Henry and on each of our shows we try and highlight one of your letters so we would like to use this letter as our highlight today could you please read us and tell us also when you wrote it and why you wrote the letter I'll just write a piece of it it was before I was the governor of Virginia it was written to the to our governor Patrick Henry on March 27 1779 it's a long letter and I won't read all of its details but but it was basically an enlightenment articulation of of rules of civil engagement in war and it was in some regards it was the predecessor of the Geneva Convention that which rules warfare in in your own time in other words I know this sounds absolutely insane but there will be wars and so it's in our interest to civilize them as much as possible and so I

wrote to Patrick Henry and said it is for the benefit of mankind to mitigate the horrors of war as much as possible so that's really what this letter is about and what I meant was that you have exchange of prisoners that you agree to treat each other's prisoners in the same way and in a way that it allows them food and basic comforts you don't starve them to death you don't you don't put them where there are lights or vermin or rats you know that you that there is some level of basic decency for how you treat prisoners I think farmers and certain types of sailors should be exempted from from war drafts there should be every attempt to to make sure battles are fought on neutral ground in other words not in cities not in towns but out in fields so that you can limit that what in your time you call collateral damage but damage to buildings civilian damage that if you go if if I invade London that I don't burn St Paul's Cathedral to the ground that

you know that you pay respect to important buildings or to all buildings for that matter and so that that there is war and war is bloodshed in mayhem and barbarism and destruction and violence but you nevertheless try to restrain it as tightly as you can so that there is some sort of protocol of basic humanity even in war and I wrote to Henry this was basically about the exchange of prisoners but it's also about you know keeping for example keeping farmers out of battle if you if you if you start fighting perpetual wars and and your farmers are called away from their fields to fight them then who grows your food so I think we should if we have drafts or if we have if we if we have emergency calls for soldiers we should exempt farmers at least farmers who are actively engaged in the seasonal harvests and I think that professors scientists should be exempted from fighting in wars because we need Isaac Newton what good would it do to have Isaac Newton carrying a gun in battle that's to waste him and you know this is a slightly off

focus but my great friend David Rittenhouse who was the self-taught mathematical genius and astronomer eventually became the master of the mint in Philadelphia and I wrote him a letter of rebuke saying this has beneath you you this is this is throwing Newton away on the occupations of a crown you know lots of people can be king but there's only one written house there's only one Newton and we need our geniuses to be exempted so that they can continue to do the real work of civilization so I this letter was was an attempt to create what you might call a series of of protocols or a series of principles about how war can be made as little barbaric as possible and Patrick Henry was you know he wasn't he was not an enlightenment figure in the same sense that Dr. Franklin was no he was more of a typical American but even Henry realized that this was true and what what came of this what was the achievement of this letter well nothing really like many of my letters it was

stating the ideal of the thing and and culture moved towards that and and by the time the 20th century appeared most civilized nations had adopted a set of conventions that that are loosely nominated the Geneva conventions in your time but there are as a set of conventions on whether the Red Cross will have access to prisoners of war and under what conditions prisoners can can write letters to their relatives or communicate with with their own armies you know what sort of basic health and and and eating protocols will be in place in prisons how do you avoid killing innocent bystanders and if you do are there are there mechanisms of compensation and apology and so on and the set of codes were being just the enlightenment first began to look at

these things we weren't the we weren't the only people who had ever looked at them there have always been rules of engagement but the enlightenment really for the first time tried to abolish war by civilizing it so greatly that it would turn out to be in a sense it would turn out to be an extremely violent football game I mean that's sort of the notion that you could you could you could you could restrain it so severely that it would cease to be madness but at the same time Napoleon was marching through Europe and and and and creating modern warfare which was much more uh wide spread than the kind of wars that were fought in the middle ages so you have you have new technologies which are more dangerous than previous technologies you have madmen like Napoleon who have access to mass movements of troops and and yet at the same time you have this set of enlightenment principles which have horror war and they're all competing for human affection is it not true that during Napoleon's time that is when the term guerrilla warfare was coined and it was coined when Napoleon went into Spain and the Spanish were actually

hitting Napoleon's troops and then melding back into the culture into the everyday life well this is this is what was happening in the United States during our revolution too you know people who are fighting for self-determination on their own homeland that is people who are fighting against occupation or against invasion usually don't engage in war in the same way that that European armies might do in in Holland so that it's true that that that the term guerrilla warfare originated during this time but there was uh there was a there's a natural propensity in in the ancient world when when Caesar was waging war against the goals in modern France they were fighting guerrilla warfare I mean he he was they were committing atrocities against him hit and run campaigns and burning crops and so on and he was trying to fight Roman style Legionnaire warfare and they were fighting more of a hit and run kind of guerrilla warfare and this was very frustrating for Caesar and eventually he

had to adopt some tactics that to a certain degree barbarized Roman war and so this is the problem if you can't agree on the rules of engagement you know in a in a court of law we agree on the rules of engagement and if one lawyer cheats then the other lawyer objects and the judge sits in judgment of this and decides and the judge keeps an order you don't have this person on a battlefield so you have to have bilateral agreements or international agreements and then if if somebody violates those agreements if you mistreat prisoners then the other nation calls attention to this and in either in the court of world opinion or in the pressure from from the allies on either side are meant to restrain the the nation that is misbehaving Mr. Jefferson if you don't have agreed upon rules of engagement and one side is going further than what the other side is used to what does this do to human nature you were big on natural law what happens to the human that's involved in this well what happens is what happened to me on a very gentile scale I was so angry about

Sir Henry Hamilton that I clapped him in fetters and I and I mistreated him to a certain degree and I would never have mistreated him if he hadn't been so barbaric but his barbarism enraged me and it led to a sort of counter barbarism and not proud of it as I look back on it it was a natural human response to want to be vindictive towards him but I would not have been victim vindictive towards him had he been a gentleman if he hadn't been calling for scalps and paying bounties I would have treated him much better I treated a whole range of German officers very well and I had dinner parties with him at Monticello and they played the piano forte and we we we talked about wine and European literature and philosophy and because these were these were gentlemen warriors Hamilton wasn't but well what what what worries me is that his barbarism released some in me although at a very low level and then there was this man named Josiah Phillips who was a Tory terrorist in the western parts of Virginia and we couldn't stop

him and he was terrorized he was not an Indian he was a white man but he was terrorizing our frontier homes and we couldn't stop him and so eventually I wrote a bill of a tinder which is a it's when a legislature condemns a man to death and I'm against bills of a tinder they were misused in British history in the 17th and 18th mostly 17th and part of the 18th centuries and our constitution prohibits bills of a tinder in the United States and yet I wrote one because we couldn't stop this this terrorist by normal means and so his terrorism his barbarism again released in in the state in this case I was the principal draftsman but it released in me and in the state a vindictiveness which doesn't look good it doesn't put us in the best possible light but one nation moving into a darker view of life leads the next nation into the darker view and then there's a counter thrust and you begin to descend into Dante's inferno until you reach some state of bestiality and somebody has to stop it somebody has to restrain it but it is almost

inevitable that if if you come in and butcher my wife that I will try to butcher you and return when I get my hands on you and human nature is very strong in this regard if you read Escalus the ancient Greek tragic playwright in his famous trilogy The Oristaya he talks about the two the two energies of justice on the one hand there's the Athenian abstract system of crime and punishment which is basically what the American judicial system is it's dispassionate the judge doesn't slap anybody the judge doesn't beat anybody up it's dispassionate it's it's nonviolent it's abstract but says Escalus that's not enough if you only have an abstract system people don't feel there's justice they have people are not satisfied in the term he likes to use a satisfaction unless there is vindictiveness so if you murder my brother it's not enough for you to go to jail I'm not satisfied until I feel that there has been Lex Talionus an eye for an eye and says Escalus in this brilliant Greek tragedy that a society cannot exist if there's bloodlust at its center

but says Escalus you cannot have a system that's merely abstract there has to be some emotional satisfaction for the victims and if they don't feel some that there's been a writing of the wrong or there's been a some kind of justice then if they don't feel that their rage will destabilize the state and so this is a problem that all cultures face and all wars face because you can't have one side misbehaving in the other side behaving civilly in the long run both sides will be degraded by this mr. Jefferson do you believe that religion plays into this at all no absolutely not no I think that you know for some people religion might be a restraining matter but you know Christ was clearly a pacifist and yet there have been holy wars throughout the history of Christendom the crusades were holy wars the church has burned heretics at the stake there have been religious wars between different brands of Christianity if Christ had been

universally persuasive there would have been no more war after his time and Christianity does not seem to meet to be a very good restraining mechanism on human mayhem in fact it seems to give a certain kind of energy to certain to some barbarians thank you very much mr. Jefferson we have 45 seconds left for this section of the Thomas Jefferson hour are there any other thoughts that you want to put on the board well the last thing I would say is that you know this is not just Indians against whites I've been trying to make the case that all of us are capable of this and when I've talked before about Logan the famous mingo chief who had been a friend to white men and during Lord Dunes Moore's war because of a border depredation the government of Virginia sent out a reprisal party and murdered all of Logan's family without a single exception and they were all innocents men women and children they none of them had done anything against us and we murdered them so this was an atrocity committed by the government of my own commonwealth Virginia against innocent Indians atrocities happen on all sides thank you mr. Jefferson we

would back in just a moment to talk to the scholar behind Thomas Jefferson clay jinconson welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson hour I'm Janie will the producer the program and seated

across me is clay jinconson the scholar behind Thomas Jefferson clay what a difficult subject today oh my goodness Janie you know this is the hardest of all subjects because as everyone who's listening knows American soldiers have been accused of committing atrocities against Iraqi prisoners and at the time that we recorded this program the secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld had apologized many times and with great appearance of sincerity for this he said that it had happened on his watch and it wasn't clear when we recorded this that he would survive a secretary of state it wasn't really even clear that the current administration led by president Bush can can survive this this scandal and and as we recorded it we were being told that more is coming that the however bad it looks so far more is coming and I actually saw Senator David Rockefeller

on the Charlie Rose show the other night and Rockefeller was not being at all political and he said this is one of the this is one of the defining moments of American history because terrible thing has happened and the world is wondering first of all why it happened but the world is also wondering what the unipower the world's great superpower the only one remaining is now going to do about this and how we respond to this crisis this calamity is one of the most important moments in the history of the American Republic I think I think he was right I was I mean literally I got chills running up and down my back as I heard him talking and I thought oh my god you know all of this time I have been I was born in 1955 I saw Watergate and Vietnam and Monica Gate and you know this and that and I've always I've gotten more skeptical and and I've gotten a little jaded

about American ideals but I still have been a believer at my core and when you see this something like this it is so appalling to your sense of what America is that you have to ask yourself who are we and how do we define ourselves and what do we stand for and are we different are we no better than others are we just the same as others are we worse than others you know I think that that that something like this is understandable through the perspective of the humanities and the history of warfare and I think Jefferson offers a very interesting clarifying lens on all this but even so I can't believe there is a single American who's not deeply deeply troubled by these revelations clay that might be true however let's just take a quick turn and tell me what's the difference between discourse and being opinionated on this particular topic because I think that this is going to be a key to getting through this well I

want all of our listeners to know that we're not making any judgments in fact as a humanities scholar I would be more likely to make the case that this is inevitable in warfare that you know see piece know the Great British novelist wrote a novel in the 1950s I think called a thin coat of varnish and what he meant was that civilization you know cathedrals and libraries and and universities and public discourse is a thin veneer of civility over a vast cauldron of human angst and bestiality and darkness and that civilization is always a tiny coating over something much much more elemental and dark and that we civilization struggled to be good but but there is something just beneath the surface that's constantly trying to get out and I'm sure that that Carl Jung or C.P. Snow or Freud or any competent

psychologist would say if you send people into extremely exotic foreign places to fight people for whom there's a perceived fundamental difference of basic identity either racial identity as in say Vietnam or religious identity as in Islam versus the West and you hot house these people far away from their usual restraining and support mechanisms and you make them tired and angry and frightened and and and having a sense of the nihilism of of life or the nihilism at least of the war that you're going to you're going to punch some holes through that thin coat of varnish and it will not be surprising if some really dark things start to emerge even in good people and you know and Janie what you read about is that some of these soldiers who are being accused of these crimes were beloved in their communities back in Texas or wherever they

came from and and that they were seen as ideal citizens and yet suddenly under these extraordinary pressure cooker conditions of warfare something broke play I realize something broke but one topic that you didn't hit in your list was that there probably haven't been any rules of engagement that were agreed upon in this war well there there were some but what I'm what I've learned and believe me we're at the very beginning of understanding all this but what I've learned so far is that the prison personnel in Iraq were not adequately trained in that work that there was a certain kind of ad hocness to there being even in that situation that they had not gone through the rigors of training to prepare for what it is to to manage prisoners of a very different culture under such extraordinary conditions and so probably there are ways to restrain this I mean I think that's that that this is a this is a burbling up of something deep but

fundamental in the human character but that there are I think Jefferson is right there are ways to channelize us there are ways to restrain this that that's why you have supervision that's why you have video surveillance that's why you have reviews and training and furloughs and that's why you have lots of peer review and so the no one's in in the same room at the same time that's why when a doctor goes in a room with a with a in a gynecological exam with a with a woman there's a nurse present it's not because you think the doctor is a sexual predator but you want that helping peer guarantee of proper behavior and we do that all over culture my sister used to say to me keep an honest man honest and so if you're going to get your house cleaned put your wallet aside in Shakespeare's last play at the tempest Prospero is this is America Prospero is a Renaissance prince and he represents the very best of European Renaissance culture and he is on this island it's probably an American island of some sort this is at the time really of the European discovery of

America and there's this kind of bestial savage Caliban and in the course of this this play Prospero gets more barbaric he becomes less civilized than he was he's being drawn down into barbarism by the conditions in this place but there's this great moment one of the greatest moments in all of literature towards the end when he he's talking to some new people who've just arrived on the island and he turns to this Caliban who's basically the symbol of bestiality of raw man without civilization admittedly there's some cultural bias here but he turns to this Caliban and he says to the to the new European observers this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine and that's what we have to say now in Iraq we can't be saying we shouldn't be saying this is a tiny handful of people who did something awful and they'll be prosecuted that we have to say that but that's not the only thing we say we should be saying this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine that yes even America even some of our best and brightest young people are capable of acting in bestial and savage ways under certain conditions and that we have to acknowledge this not only as part of

American culture part of the American spirit perhaps not not the highest part not the only part but a light motif and we have to say that this is part of the human condition and that we Americans however great are software our constitution our bill of rights our our crime and punishment systems our education etc however great American software is even we are capable of behaving in this way under certain conditions and it should sober us Clay you told me a story just a couple hours ago in the car when I picked you up from the airport about a story that you were told oh it was told me by a dear friend of mine named Lisa Wallace and it was about one of the last capital punishment executions in Texas and there was there was a pick there was a picket line protesting the the use of capital punishment and and a a person who believes strongly that there should be capital punishment when by this group of protesters enrolled down as window

and said yeah well what if it had been your mother or your sister that this guy killed and the the man who was protesting said well I would have wanted him to fry but I would have hope that my friends and my community would have restrained me from doing that and so that's the idea of the peer that the culture is better than the individual all of us are capable of you know lust and rage and raping and mayhem and slaughter and murderousness and self-destructiveness and so on we know this I mean if you consult yourself if you've read the great humanities texts you know that Terrence was right the the the Roman poet Terrence said I am a man and what is human is not alien to me and that's what you have to be saying in this condition I am a man if a if a if a splendid young woman from a community in in middle America can be one of the women in one of these pictures basically committing a form of atrocity against Iraqi prisoners then you and I could be that person too and we have to see this as common humanity and we have to say we can do better we have to find

better mechanisms to restrain ourselves and we now have to prove to the world that even if this happens we will not tolerate it so we have to show deep understanding of the source of this well we have to show an even deeper condemnation a swift fair and certain condemnation of this sort of behavior so that the rest of the world can say well at least America knows how to respond rightly when it does something this stupid Clay thank you I'd like to switch the subject over to the Lewis and Clark expedition just quickly and talk about one when Lewis was completely met a more post out in the field because this applies and also what did Jefferson ask Lewis to do in case of coming up against an opponent well this is really an interesting question it comes right out of all this you know Lewis and Clark had really good relations with more than 50 tribes on the whole there were some moments of terrible tension but on the whole very successful

and that's better their record on these questions is much better than that of other explorers if you read the journals of captain cook out in Tahiti and the Hawaiian Islands and he was doing a lot of mayhem and really doing some barbaric things with respect to the native peoples and Lewis and Clark by the standards of most exploration history get extremely high marks for goodwill and good behavior but Jefferson's part of that and this is from his instructions on June 20th 183 he said in all your intercourse with the natives treat them in the most friendly and conciliatory manner which their own conduct will admit a lay all jealousies as to the object of your journey satisfy them of its innocence make them acquainted with the position extent character peaceful and commercial dispositions of the US and of our wish to be neighborly friendly and useful to them and he said if you get into a like a moment of supreme tension come back don't fight don't push too far if you get to that point turn back because then at least you bring back data and we can we can we can start again and maybe things will go better but don't let yourself be drawn into a real struggle and Lewis

followed that especially with the titan su and what's now South Dakota where there could easily have been a blood bath there were some incidents however Lewis is Lewis is enlightened this is very apropos of what we're talking about in Iraq because Lewis went out with a full a full head of enlightenment notions that were taught to him by Jefferson and his own real humanity but by the time he got to the Pacific coast he'd run out of patience and on the way backs things started to happen and the Indians were doing a lot of pilfering of their of their metal tools and in the Columbia basin Lewis became so angry at an Indian individual who pilfered a socket of metal socket that he beat him severely and threw him out of camp and then Lewis's dog Seaman was kidnapped by some Indians and Lewis sent out a party to bring back Seaman and and said they could shoot the Indians if they had to and then on the in Montana on July 26th and 27th of of 186 Lewis had an encounter with eight black feet four four of Lewis's party eight of the black

feet party and when Lewis when they when the black feet tried to steal Lewis's horses and guns Lewis's men flew into a rage and they wound up killing two of the black feet Ruben field knife to one to death and Lewis shot another one presumably killing him but what's so interesting here Janie is that the key moment is not this killing because they were I suppose that you could say they're acting in self-defense they're in upper Montana on two medicine creek but the key moment is that Lewis's men George Drulyar and the field brothers begged Lewis to allow them to kill the rest of the black feet two were dead six more are out there they could easily have killed them all they begged Lewis to that he would allow them to kill them and Lewis said no there's been enough killing so Lewis became the restraining mechanism this active barbarism had unleashed the dogs of war and these men were prepared to to to kill all these Indians in in rage but Lewis the the Jeffersonians said no we've done too much already and we're not doing more and he restrained these men and that's what civilizations do they do that with torture

they do that with killing with rapine with sexual harassment with all forms of abuse they they provide peer restraint as gentle as possible but as forceful as necessary to maintain certain standards of civilization and they apologize for their abuses Clay thank you very much we're out of time let me remind people they can visit our website at www.thifenjefferson.org www.thifenjefferson.org for a schedule of Clay's upcoming public performances good day good day to you citizens the Squaw Valley Congregational Church just a short drive from Reno Nevada is sponsoring a dialogue between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the topics of war and peace this will occur on July 17th 2004 please call 530-581-4011 again the number is 530-581-4011 and ask for extension one Jane Carlson for ticketing information

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