It was on that day, and this date interests me because I might well have been reading about Calley that month, too—I’d like to look up the clippings, I don’t remember it specifically. When I read that day on September 30, I said to myself, I’ve been part, for 15 years, 3 in the Marine Corps and 12 in the Executive Branch, part of a system that uses violence in secret and lies about it as a matter of course. That’s got to stop for me. I can’t be a part of that anymore. It was then, really, that I decided to give the Pentagon Papers to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and I did so very shortly thereafter. So these dates bring back anniversaries that are very important to me.Well, the other piece that I read on the way here was the Honeywell Project literature that is put out. Some of you may have seen this. There are some other pieces on Honeywell—a passage here that really brings together a lot of this describing the automated battlefield. It describes the automated battlefield as a new kind of weapon, parts of a total killing machine which will require a minimum of human decision and will also minimize—this is their description of it—“human perception of and feeling of responsibility for what is being done to the victims.” A good description, of course, of the way really any bureaucracy works, but especially a homicidal bureaucracy, such as in a prison or in the Department of Defense that I’ve been a part of. Where responsibility is spread very widely, the bureaucracy is almost a device for relieving each individual from feelings of responsibility for what he’s doing and protecting him from the sight of what’s happening on that battlefield so far away, and what’s happening as the result of the orders that he puts out on those pieces of paper, so he won’t feel responsible for it. He won’t feel the need to ring any bells or charge anybody or anything, and the automated battlefield is just one step further in that, where you don’t have a man in that machine doing the gook hunting. Just sensors on the ground, rockets, automated planes of various kinds, drones, perhaps, mines that are made here in Minneapolis, and to be exploded at very long distance, 10,000 miles. In effect, no responsibility.What’s the effect? The effect in Attica is one thing. The effect in Vietnam is the same thing. Of course, we take it one step further. The system operates in a way that is structurally and in part mechanically similar to an automated factory. The products of this automated factory are corpses. Well, we have heard of such factories, not fully automated but pretty close to it in the past. It’s a past actually that doesn’t, isn’t in the direct experience of all those people who raised their hands but it is in the minds of your parents, brought back this very week by two people who are on trial in Austria for having designed the gas chambers at Auschwitz. The story was in the New York Times just the other day. They’re finally being brought to trial. What they had designed were rooms that looked like shower rooms. In place of the shower heads were gas jets. There were signs on the wall saying “This way to the disinfectant” to imply that after the shower you would go into the next room—and they were going to a crematorium, with was efficiently laid out right next to the chamber.The defense, and this was last week in the paper, the defense of the two officials who had designed this was twofold. One was, “We were only obeying orders.” The other was, “We had no idea what these structures were designed for.” Can designers of the guava bomblets at Honeywell in Minneapolis here tell us or their children, or tell a court, if it ever comes to that, that they had no idea what those were designed for? It’s not only Honeywell, it’s not only the Department of Defense. Can Congress tell us before next November—the congressmen who will vote for the defense appropriations which our president has told us are in large part called for to keep the economy buoyed up and which will take the form of American products like napalm, B-52s, Honeywell bomblets, fuses—will the congressmen tell us they did not know what those appropriations were to be used for? Will the Honeywell people who fill the orders, into whom the appropriations go tell us in November or next year or 25 years from now, “We were only filling orders”? Because that’s what they do have to say right now. “We were only taking orders and filling them and sending them out.”The Honeywell Project literature implies that the Honeywell type directors run the country, and that other directors like that run the country and are the real power behind the president. I’m not sure that’s fully true. It’s a part of the truth, but it may not be entirely true. I’m not sure that the people who wrote those—who wrote them very well, and they’re very well worth reading and have a great deal of relevant information—but I’m not sure they fully know all the angles of the way this system works and the role of politicians vis-à-vis pressure groups, businessmen, military, bureaucrats. And whatever failure after failure of resistance has suggested to me, that in part it’s a problem of failure of understanding and that we don’t, that no one knows all the answers. Certainly I don’t feel I do. The web of complicity is very far, runs very far, and certainly Honeywell is included in it.If we ask, not does Honeywell control the war, run the war, and people like Honeywell, which is perhaps hard to answer, in my opinion. But if we ask are they part of it, are they part of the automated war machine? No question. They can’t deny that—just like those designers at Auschwitz, just as though they were designing electric chairs or gas chambers en masse. And I think we can as neighbors, brothers and sister of those Americans in that factory, and the designers, ask them about whether they have thought hard about whether they have a right to obey those orders or fill those order or make those designs, whether they have asked themselves what it is they’re doing, what those things are being used for. It’s not hard to answer once you ask the question. And why are they spending their lives that way, and whether that is a way for a man, a human being, a woman, to spend one’s life—and if they’ve thought about it. Whether the directors have asked, have looked into the question, have they asked their general counsel of Honeywell or IBM or Ford or any of these places to give them an opinion on whether the war is a legal war, for one thing. Whether the president has the right to have gotten a declaration of war or the equivalent of it out of Congress by fraud and act on it and then to ignore Congress entirely when Congress takes back the declaration. Whether that’s a legal war. Whether they are right any more than Calley, the one man out of the dozens here that the Peers panel recommended be tried who was tried, was right to follow the orders that he got. Or the people in Auschwitz. Or what does it really mean for them to be spending their lives that way, which is a way quite different from Frank Kroncke, for example, or many other people here. And well, {say that }they have to do it?A book that had great impact on me was by a man named Raul Hilberg, his book called The Destruction of the European Jews, a very long detailed book which says at the outset this is not a book about Jews, it is a book about Germans. And the question is, How did the Germans come to cooperate in the large-scale detailed way that so many thousands of them had to cooperate to carry out the destruction of the European Jews? And it comes out in the end with a list of bureaucratic answers that could be fitted to the Vietnam War without any trouble and do explain how officials see their roles. The question is, should they be satisfied with those answers?
One quote in that book is from Himmler to his SS generals in 1943, which I thought about very often. He said to his generals in a secret session, which was captured with the Nuremburg documents used in the war crimes trials, “Each of us here has seen the bodies, has see fifty bodies, a hundred bodies, five hundred bodies. That is our triumph. That is a page of glory in our history that has never been written and will never be written.”Is this then what an executive or a designer at Honeywell has to tell himself when he looks at the pictures of these bomblets and then the pictures of the humans on which these bomblets are dropped? Another German, Van ?Schoer?, who spent two years in Schwangau prison and wrote a very powerful autobiography at the end, suggests that rehabilitation is possible—which you’ll be glad to know, Frank—and even suggests… I know people I used to work for that it would seem 20 years in Schwangau prison would do them a world of good, judging from this book. But maybe Schwangau is not Attica, and there are no Americans that I would put in the Attica of our country, and that’s most prisons that we have. So I think the issue is not who should go to prison, but what we should learn from the crimes of the past. And what Schoer learned was, he said, and he says it quite convincingly, that he did not know in any real detail or specifically what was being done to the Jews. What makes that plausible is that he comes on very hard though from a conclusion after it. He said, “I did not know because I did not want to know.” He described hints that were given to him—hints that might take the form of a pamphlet like this Honeywell (Project) pamphlet passing through the hands of a worker or a secretary at that plant. He said, “I didn’t follow them up—I didn’t want to hear anymore because to hear and to know of course is to be responsible, is to be challenged to something about it.” He said, “I was like a man following bloody footprints in the snow and not recognizing that a murder has been committed.” And finally he said, “I did not know, but I was in a position to know. It was my duty to know. There is no excuse, and I am fully responsible for everything that happened.”