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There was a great change in peace settlements after World War I. Not only were the Central Powers supposed to pay reparations, cede territory, and submit to new rules concerning the citizenship of their former subjects, but they were also required to deliver nationals accused of violations of the laws and customs of war (or violations of the laws of humanity, in the case of the Ottoman Empire) to the Allies to stand trial.

This was the first time in European history that victor powers imposed such a demand following an international war. This was also the first time that regulations specified by the Geneva and Hague Conventions were enforced after a war ended. Previously, states used their own military tribunals to enforce the laws and customs of war (as well as regulations concerning espionage), but they typically granted amnesty for foreigners after a peace treaty was signed.

The Allies intended to create special combined military tribunals to prosecute individuals whose violations had affected persons from multiple countries. They demanded post-war trials for many reasons. Legal representatives to the Paris Peace Conference believed that “might makes right” should not supplant international law; therefore, the rules governing the treatment of civilians and prisoners-of-war must be enforced. They declared the war had created a modern sensibility that demanded legal innovations, such as prosecuting heads of state and holding officers responsible for the actions of subordinates. British and French leaders wanted to mollify domestic feelings of injury as well as propel an interpretation that the war had been a fight for “justice over barbarism,” rather than a colossal blood-letting. They also sought to use trials to exert pressure on post-war governments to pursue territorial and financial objectives.

The German, Ottoman, and Bulgarian governments resisted extradition demands and foreign trials, yet staged their own prosecutions. Each fulfilled a variety of goals by doing so. The Weimar government in Germany was initially forced to sign the Versailles Treaty with its extradition demands, then negotiated to hold its own trials before its Supreme Court in Leipzig because the German military, plus right-wing political parties, refused the extradition of German officers. The Weimar government, led by the Social Democratic party, needed the military’s support to suppress communist revolutions. The Leipzig trials, held 1921-27, only covered a small number of cases, serving to deflect responsibility for the most serious German violations, such as the massacre of approximately 6,500 civilians in Belgium and deportation of civilians to work in Germany. The limited scope of the trials did not purge the German military as the Allies had hoped. Yet the trials presented an opportunity for German prosecutors to take international charges and frame them in German law. Although the Allies were disturbed by the small number of convictions, this was the first time that a European country had agreed to try its own after a major war.

The Ottoman imperial government first destroyed the archives of the “Special Organization,” a secret group of Turkish nationalists who deported Greeks from the Aegean region in 1914 and planned and executed the massacre of Armenians in 1915. But in late 1918, a new Ottoman imperial government formed a commission to investigate parliamentary deputies and former government ministers from the Turkish nationalist party, the Committee of Union and Progress, which had planned the attacks. It also sought to prosecute Committee members who had been responsible for the Ottoman Empire’s entrance into the war. The government then held a series of military trials of its own accord in 1919 to prosecute actual perpetrators of the massacres, as well as purge the government of Committee members, as these were opponents of the imperial system. It also wanted to quash the British government’s efforts to prosecute Turks with British military tribunals. Yet after the British occupied Istanbul, the nationalist movement under Mustafa Kemal retaliated by arresting British officers. Ultimately, the Kemalists gained control of the country, ended all Turkish military prosecutions for the massacres, and nullified guilty verdicts.

Like the German and Ottoman situations, Bulgaria began a rocky governmental and social transformation after the war. The initial post-war government signed an armistice with the Allies to avoid the occupation of the capital, Sofia. It then passed a law granting amnesty for persons accused of violating the laws and customs of war. However, a new government came to power in 1919, representing a coalition of the Agrarian Union, a pro-peasant party, and right-wing parties. The government arrested former ministers and generals and prosecuted them with special civilian courts in order to purge them; they were blamed for Bulgaria’s entrance into the war. Some were prosecuted because they lead groups of refugees from Macedonia in a terrorist organization, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. Suppressing Macedonian terrorism was an important condition for Bulgaria to improve its relationship with its neighbor, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes. In 1923, however, Aleksandar Stambuliski, the leader of the Agrarian Union, was assassinated in a military coup, leading to new problems in Bulgaria.

We could ask a counter-factual question: What if the Allies had managed to hold mixed military tribunals for war-time violations instead of allowing the defeated states to stage their own trials? If an Allied tribunal for Germany was run fairly and political posturing was suppressed, it might have established important legal precedents, such as establishing individual criminal liability for violations of the laws of war and the responsibility of officers and political leaders for ordering violations. On the other hand, guilty verdicts might have given Germany’s nationalist parties new heroes in their quest to overturn the Versailles order.

An Allied tribunal for the Armenian massacres would have established the concept that a sovereign government’s ministers and police apparatus could be held criminally responsible under international law for actions undertaken against their fellow nationals. It might also have created a new historical source about this highly contested episode in Ottoman and Turkish history. Yet it is speculative whether the Allies would have been able to compel the post-war Turkish government to pay reparations to Armenian survivors and return stolen property.

Finally, an Allied tribunal for alleged Bulgarian war criminals, if constructed impartially, might have resolved the intense feelings of recrimination that several of the Balkan nations harbored toward each other after World War I. It might also have helped the Agrarian Union survive against its military and terrorist enemies. However, a trial concentrating only on Bulgarian crimes would not have dealt with crimes committed by Serbian, Greek, and Bulgarian forces and paramilitaries during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, so a selective tribunal after World War I may not have healed all wounds.

Image Credit: Château de Versailles Hall of Mirrors Ceiling. Photo by Dennis Jarvis. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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Traveling through Scotland, one is struck by the number of memorials devoted to those who lost their lives in World War I. Nearly every town seems to have at least one memorial listing the names of local boys and men killed in the Great War (St. Andrews, where I am spending the year, has more than one).

Scotland endured a disproportionate number of casualties in comparison with most other Allied nations as Scotland’s military history and the Scots’ reputation as particularly effective fighters contributed to both a proportionally greater number of Scottish recruits as well as a tendency for Allied commanders to give Scottish units the most dangerous combat assignments.

Many who served in World War I undoubtedly suffered from what some contemporary psychologists and psychiatrists have labeled ‘moral injury’, a psychological affliction that occurs when one acts in a way that runs contrary to one’s most deeply-held moral convictions. Journalist David Wood characterizes moral injury as ‘the pain that results from damage to a person’s moral foundation’ and declares that it is ‘the signature wound of [the current] generation of veterans.’

By definition, one cannot suffer from moral injury unless one has deeply-held moral convictions. At the same time that some psychologists have been studying moral injury and how best to treat those afflicted by it, other psychologists have been uncovering the cognitive mechanisms that are responsible for our moral convictions. Among the central findings of that research are that our emotions often influence our moral judgments in significant ways and that such judgments are often produced by quick, automatic, behind-the-scenes cognition to which we lack conscious access.

Thus, it is a familiar phenomenon of human moral life that we find ourselves simply feeling strongly that something is right or wrong without having consciously reasoned our way to a moral conclusion. The hidden nature of much of our moral cognition probably helps to explain the doubt on the part of some philosophers that there really is such a thing as moral knowledge at all.

In 1977, philosopher John Mackie famously pointed out that defenders of the reality of objective moral values were at a loss when it comes to explaining how human beings might acquire knowledge of such values. He declared that believers in objective values would be forced in the end to appeal to ‘a special sort of intuition’— an appeal that he bluntly characterized as ‘lame’. It turns out that ‘intuition’ is indeed a good label for the way many of our moral judgments are formed. In this way, it might appear that contemporary psychology vindicates Mackie’s skepticism and casts doubt on the existence of human moral knowledge.

Not so fast. In addition to discovering that non-conscious cognition has an important role to play in generating our moral beliefs, psychologists have discovered that such cognition also has an important role to play in generating a great many of our beliefs outside of the moral realm.

According to psychologist Daniel Kahneman, quick, automatic, non-conscious processing (which he has labeled ‘System 1′ processing) is both ubiquitous and an important source of knowledge of all kinds:

‘We marvel at the story of the firefighter who has a sudden urge to escape a burning house just before it collapses, because the firefighter knows the danger intuitively, ‘without knowing how he knows.’ However, we also do not know how we immediately know that a person we see as we enter a room is our friend Peter. … [T]he mystery of knowing without knowing … is the norm of mental life.’

This should provide some consolation for friends of moral knowledge. If the processes that produce our moral convictions are of roughly the same sort that enable us to recognize a friend’s face, detect anger in the first word of a telephone call (another of Kahneman’s examples), or distinguish grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, then maybe we shouldn’t be so suspicious of our moral convictions after all.

In all of these cases, we are often at a loss to explain how we know, yet it is clear enough that we know. Perhaps the same is true of moral knowledge.

Still, there is more work to be done here, by both psychologists and philosophers. Ironically, some propose a worry that runs in the opposite direction of Mackie’s: that uncovering the details of how the human moral sense works might provide support for skepticism about at least some of our moral convictions.

Psychologist and philosopher Joshua Greene puts the worry this way:

‘I view science as offering a ‘behind the scenes’ look at human morality. Just as a well-researched biography can, depending on what it reveals, boost or deflate one’s esteem for its subject, the scientific investigation of human morality can help us to understand human moral nature, and in so doing change our opinion of it. … Understanding where our moral instincts come from and how they work can … lead us to doubt that our moral convictions stem from perceptions of moral truth rather than projections of moral attitudes.’

The challenge advanced by Greene and others should motivate philosophers who believe in moral knowledge to pay attention to findings in empirical moral psychology. The good news is that hope for the reality of moral knowledge remains.

And if there is moral knowledge, there can be increased moral wisdom and progress, which in turn makes room for hope that someday we can solve the problem of war-related moral injury not by finding an effective way of treating it but rather by finding a way of avoiding the tragedy of war altogether. Reflection on ‘the war to end war’ may yet enable it to live up to its name.

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To say that Austrian playwright, Peter Handke is a man of few words is truly an understatement.

In fact he has written a play entitled, "The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other" to be performed at the National Theatre from March 31 to April 12 for 30 performances. What makes his play "special" is that not one word will be spoken by the actors.

For 1 hour and 40 minutes, 450 characters will be silent.

According to a blurb on the National Theatre site:

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/thehour

The play is best described: "For a moment, a bright, empty town square. And then a figure darts across, and another and another – businesspeople, roller-bladers, a cowboy, several street-sweepers, a halfdressed bride, a film crew, a line of old men, a tourist, a beauty in a mirrored dress, Abraham and Isaac, a family of refugees, a fool – more and more people, the bizarre and the humdrum, fleetingly connected by proximity alone."

The idea apparently came to Handke as he sat at a cafe on an Italian piazza watching strangers come and go. Even if not a word is spoken, the play is not sound-less. The silence is punctuated by snatches of music, the occasional scream and the recorded sounds of an aeroplane or workmen drilling.

A National Theatre spokeswoman said: "It is a great piece of work, challenging and something that we should be doing. Tickets are selling well - not like hotcakes, but they are doing well. It is appealing to younger people. We think our more traditional audiences will wait until the reviews."

If this is a success, I shall re-read and re-edit my plays with the possibility of eliminating the dialogue. Perhaps I'll re-name the wedding play, "Make Me a Wedding and Let's Keep It Between Ourselves." Given that it's a comedy, there will be lots of body language and gesturing. Since my play has a mere 9 characters, it shouldn't be too difficult to fill the various roles.

If anyone attends this play, please pass on your impressions and review.


Writers & Friends
www.jrslater.com/forum

It is exciting to have another young adult author visit my site and share a little bit of herself with us. We have a lot in common and I am pleased to introduce this week's interviewee: young adult author, Grace E. Howell.

True Friends is Grace's latest YA novel and is available from Echelon Press at http://echelonpress.netfirms.com/Ech... or via e-book from Fictionwise at http://www.fictionwise.com/servlet/m... .

Also, coming soon from Echelon Press is Grace's fiction e-book, Severed Bond, a short story for grown-ups.

Check out her website at http://www.graceehowell.com/ to find out all the latest on this wonderful YA author.

I am thrilled to welcome Grace to my website.

Check out our interview below:

1. Tell us a bit about yourself, the genre you write, and about your latest project.

Answer:
I have loved reading and writing since my earliest school days and would curl up in the corner of the couch lost in a book until my mother said, "Get your nose out of that book and . . ." Naturally when I thought about writing for publication I knew I wanted to write for children and young adults because I want to share with young readers the same joy that I had reading a good book. As a classroom teacher and a school librarian nothing gave me greater pleasure than finding the right book for the right reader. My first published novel, is True Friends released in 2005 by Echelon Press. It is the story of 1918 Annie who must give up her tomboy days with the boys and become a proper girl. As she worries about her brother overseas in the army, Annie must deal with accusations and prejudice at home until the Spanish flu unites the neighborhood with tragedy and loss.

2. Did you choose your present genre; or did the genre choose you?

Answer:
In a way True Friends which is historical fiction chose me. I had heard many stories of World War I and the flu epidemic from people who had lived through it, or their parents had. This became a story I had to write. I don't think I prefer one particular genre because I like to read and write in various genres. I still have a number of historical stories in my head, but now I am working on a contemporary, realistic fiction series about three seventh grade misfits who reluctantly develop a friendship.

3. What would be a typical day for you, as a day in the life of a writer?

Answer:
I like to get to my computer early, after breakfast and exercises. I may get there on time, but then they start, the interruptions by phone, family, doorbell, etc. until all creative thoughts are battered and bruised trying to compete for my attention. What I would like to say is a typical day would begin with answering emails, then writing undisturbed for a couple of hours when I would break for a walk outside in my garden with a cup of coffee or tea. Back to the computer, writing until hunger pangs announced lunch time. After lunch would be another undisturbed time of writing. Is that a dream or what? That's my schedule, but it seldom happens that way.

4. Have you always wanted to write?

Answer:
Yes, since the day I learned to read.

5. Where do you get your ideas for your stories?

Answer:
Ideas spring up from everywhere constantly, so many I can't begin to pursue them all. I get ideas from whatever I see, hear, read, experience in some way, a person, an animal, a newspaper article, an overheard conversation, on and on.

6. Are any of your characters based on real people?

Answer:
Most of my characters are strictly invented using bits and pieces of people I've seen or met combined with my imagination. But the Bolman family in True Friends is patterned after my grandparents and their children. My mother would have been Rose.

7. If you could be any one of your characters, which one would you be and why?

Answer:
I know and love all my characters, but I'm not sure I would want to be any one of them any more than I would want to be somebody else I know. I would like to meet and interact with the characters I write about. But invented characters as well as real people have problems and quirks that may be harder to handle than what I'm blessed with. So I guess I'll have to be my characters, and they are part of me, only as writer and reader.

8. Do you do research for your novels? What was the most interesting person, place or thing you have researched?

Answer:
I do a lot of research, especially for historical fiction, but a contemporary story also involves a great deal of research. Before writing True Friends, I pictured people listening to the radio for news of the war. A little research taught me that radios did not exist for the public during World War I. The story I'm working on now is a contemporary story, Unlikely Alliance—DOGS!, and I studied Siberian Huskies, phobias, dogfights, cerebral palsy, and many other topics for it. In Severed Bond, a short story with a touch of the supernatural soon to be released by Echelon Press as an e-book, I had to research mounted police and nursing homes. I may do more research than necessary, but I have a horror of a reader finding a mistake in one of my books and losing respect for me as a writer.

9. Have you ever had writer’s block? And what do you do to overcome it?

Answer:
Not really. If I start wondering how I should write a scene I can either take a walk or a shower and the ideas and words begin to flow.

10. Do you have any advice for the young writer just starting out?

Answer:
Write what you know and have fun with your writing.

11. And just for fun, if you could be a Transformer, which would you be? An Autobot (the good bots) or a Decepticon (the evil bots)?

Answer:
As I want nothing to do with machines smarter than I am, I would avoid Transformers with all my power. But since you asked, I'm always on the good side in the battle against evil so I'd have to be an Autobot.

Thx so much, Grace!

Stay tuned! And check back regularly for a new interview!

Each month we feature a person included in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography who was either born in the United States, and made their name in the UK, or came to the US from the British Isles. This month we feature the actor and director Sam Wanamaker, born in Chicago on 14 June 1919 and best known in Britain as the inspiration behind London’s Globe Theatre.

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