How to Fight Savage Tribes

Abstract

In the April, 1926 number of this Journal, Professor Quincy Wright remarks, apropos of the Damascus bombardment: Does international law require the application of laws of war to peopleof a different civilization? The ancient Israelites are said to have denied the usual war restrictions to certain tribes against which they were sworn enemies, the ancient Greeks considered the rules of war recognized among Hellenes inapplicable to barbarians, and medieval Christian civilization took a similar attitude toward war with the infidel. An English writer in1906 draws attention to “ the peculiarly barbarous type of warfare which civilized powers wage against tribes of inferior civilization. When I contemplate,” he adds, “ such modem heroes as Gordon, and Kitchener, and Roberts, I find them in alliance with slave dealers or Mandarins, orcutting down fruit trees, burning farms, concentrating women and children, protecting military trains with prisoners, bribing other prisoners to fight against their fellow countrymen. These are performances which seem to take us back to the bad old times. What a terrible tale will the recording angel have to note against England and Germany in South Africa, against France in Madagascar and Tonquin, against the United States in the Philippines,against Spain in Cuba, against the Dutch in the East Indies,against the Belgians in the Congo State.” Possibly the emphasis, in most accounts of the recent bombardment of Damascus, upon the fact that relatively slight damage was done to Europeans and Americans indicates the existence of this distinction in the moral sense of western communities.

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