The twentieth century was the most democratic in human history. It was also the bloodiest, and these two factors are inextricably linked. For it is the rise of mass democracy during the nineteenth century and into the twentieth that led to wars not between sovereigns, but between entire peoples which, even in the darkest depths of stalemate (as during the First World War) leaders dared not sue for peace, because a propagandized electorate would not accept negotiations with an enemy it had been told was sub-human.

In many ways, the period from the defeat of Napoleon to the First World War was the last (or rather, pray, merely the latest) golden age of Western civilization. Great leaps were made in art, science, technology, and learning, while at the same time (with some notable exceptions) the all-important traditional forms were maintained. But steaming beneath this last breath of the Old World, was the rise of large-scale mass democracy.

In Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and the nascent Germany, electorates which had started out limited and aimed at the upper and upper-middle classes, those with a stake in society, gradually but continually expanded to include the merchant, smallkeepers, and eventually working classes. (Though every European country denied women suffrage until into the twentieth century). The growth of the electorate weakened the power of both the king and the aristocracy and changed the composition of the ruling classes. In order to maintain its domination, the political class, spanning both “left” and “right”, had to take mass culture into greater consideration, in order to manipulate the masses and thus control increasingly democratic political structures.

It was not always so. In the age of monarchs, king warred against king. Armies went to war because their commander, the king, told them to, or because they were, often handsomely, paid to, and this was largely enough in a more rigidly hierarchical age. One king defeated another, terms were decided upon, perhaps a province or some other bit of territory was handed to the victor, and peace was restored.

A superb rendition of this is Velazquez’s painting “The Surrender of Breda”, painted 1634-35, depicting an event that took place ten years earlier. Nassau, the Dutch commander, hands his sword to Spinola, the Spanish general who has just reconquered the city for King Philip IV. Spinola leans towards Nassau and places a gentle reassuring arm on the defeated general’s shoulder. The scene is a splendid composition of recently-warring parties now at peace. The Dutch on the left are obviously not very enthusiastic about the situation, but try to hold themselves well. The victorious Spaniards on the right, meanwhile, are content with their victory, spurn any triumphalism, and treat the surrendered with grace and dignity.

While no doubt “The Surrender of Breda” is not a strictly accurate portrayal of the handover — it is not a photograph, after all — it gives an insight into civilised people’s idea of war and peace, of victory and defeat; And, by all historical accounts, the Spaniards did treat defeated Breda with grace and dignity.

The increase of popular power in the time between the Surrender of Breda and the First World War meant that war now had to be “sold” to the masses in order to ensure their support and prevent domestic unrest. Reasons for war that may have been convincing enough for the upper echelons may not have been convincing enough for the masses to whom they had partly abdicated their authority. The simple war of A versus B was replaced with the of a war between Good and Evil. The result of this demagogic shift in concept was for humanity to be restricted to our own side and the enemy to be downgraded to subhuman status.

The unprecented forcible conscription of the First World War meant that all British subjects (in England, Wales, and Scotland, but, pragmatically, not Ireland) were liable to fight and die. America’s introduction of conscription during the Civil War fifty years before had produced spontaneous open rebellion on the streets of New York, with class tensions exacerbated by the legal provision allowing the wealthy to buy their way out of the obligation to serve. (The mob took out its anger not only on the upper class but on blacks as well, destroying a home caring for black orphans).

1910s Great Britain, meanwhile, was more careful than 1860s America in crafting an efficient propaganda machine to stir up a bigoted hatred of Germany and Germans in order to deflect any large-scale resistance to conscription. The British and Americans denied the enemy their rightful status as human beings with ultimate co-equal status. Mass meetings were held decrying the menacing Hun and posters frequently depicted the Germans as subhuman ape-like monsters. The British propaganda had the unintended effect of coming back to hit the establishment. The Royal Family, after all, were almost entirely German themselves, their dynastic name was the decidedly un-English Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and many of the extended relations of the Royal Family held numerous German titles as well.

George V responded by issuing a proclamation declaring that the dynasty should be from then on known as the House of Windsor instead. In a most ungentlemanly act, the Government required all German titles and styles held by members of the Royal Family or other Britons to be relinquished, and for authentic German surnames to be replaced by made-up English-sounding equivalents. His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg found himself reduced to the Rt. Hon. Sir Louis Mountbatten on July 14 1917, though three days later the King compensated him by re-enobling him as the Marquess of Milford Haven. The titles of family members who fought for their native Germany were deprived by a special Act of Parliament, and the flags and armorial plates of German Knights of the Garter were removed from St. George’s Chapel at Windsor.

The very apotheosis of this dehumanization, however, was during the Second World War. The Nazis (partly inspired by American eugenicists) attempted to create a science of determining which men were humans and which were subhuman. Millions of not only the conquered but even their own German citizens were helplessly slaughtered in consequence, while the citizens of London and other cities were forced to brave the Blitz. The Anglo-American response was scarcely any better. The RAF Bomber Command employed scientists to determine how best to inflict harm upon the enemy populace, not the enemy armies. The result was the firebombing of large urban centers, including purely residential districts, with the directed aim of creating firestorms powerful enough to suck the air from basement raid shelters, thus suffocating innocent women and children in their only protected place.

The Soviets, meanwhile, massacred 21,768 Polish citizens in the forest of Katyn. These, admittedly, were military prisoners of war, but they were particularly aimed at the extermination of the Polish elite. According to Polish law, every university graduate became a reserve officer in the military. Among those murdered at Katyn were 20 professors, 300 doctors, over a hundred writers and journalists, and several hundred teachers, lawyers, and engineers. Half of the officer corps of Poland were massacred in a single day.

Not a single pretence of the special nature of civilians was upheld by the Nazi, Soviet, British, and American forces. Furthermore, the defeated were brought to trial for violating laws which did not exist when the acts were commited. Ex post facto law is an abomination unthinkable in Anglo-American jurisprudence but nonetheless employed at the Nuremburg tribunals.

Germans were prosecuted, by an Allied panel which included Soviets, for invading Poland, despite the Soviet Union having invaded Poland simultaneously in accords with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Admiral Erich Raeder was charged with waging unrestricted submarine warfare (indeed a barbaric thing) but the charge was dropped when his attorneys submitted an affadavit from Admiral Chester Nimitz of the U.S. Navy admitting that the Allies had waged unrestricted submarine warfare themselves.

The Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone, didn’t mind that retribution was exacted upon the Nazis but derided the trials as a “high-grade lynching party” and claimed the idea that the Nuremburg trials were a proper court according to common law was a “sanctimonious fraud”.

The Nuremburg court presaged the indictment and trial of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes. Milosevic was originally indicted for crimes allegedly committed during the Kosovo War, but charges were later added alleging crimes during the Bosnian War. (The entirely separate International Court of Justice, on the other hand, absolved Serbia of responsibility for genocide during the Bosnian war). When the case against Milosevic finally came to trial, it was a complete farce. Witness statements extracted under torture were admitted as legitimate testimony (the judge dismissed the method of interrogation as “irrelevant”, in contravention of the court’s own rules). Milosevic, conducting his own defense, pointed to documents presented to the court by the prosecution as evidence which directly contradicted the prosecution’s own charges.

While in America a “speedy” trial is a right enshrined in the Constitution, no such protections existed in the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. The prosecution took two full years to present the case against Milosevic, and the defendant died before the trial was anywhere near its conclusion. Furthermore, the 1999 NATO war against Serbia (in which civilians, and indeed even journalists, were considered legitimate targets by NATO) easily qualifies as an “aggressive war” under the terms by which the Allies had charged the Nazis at Nuremburg fifty years earlier.

Like the Nazis, Slobodan Milosevic was widely, and correctly, identified as an evil man. But because even an evil man is just that — a man — the dignity of his humanity must be respected, and justice must not be blithely replaced by a spirit of vengeance. Acts of injustice committed against the evil, the defeated, or the merely unpopular, undermine the very concept of justice itself and constitute an assault on the dignity of man which international tribunals and the human rights establishment purport to protect.

The very foundation of the dignity of man is the Incarnation of Christ. God so loved Man that He sent His only Son to be born of Mary, an actual human being, and to take up, in full, an actual human nature — Jesus Christ was every bit a human being as any saint or sinner, including Slobodan Milosevic. Christ’s condescension to our humanity elevates our fallen nature with an intrinsic dignity that must not be violated. Christ’s love and our love of Him is the very foundation of our defense of the unborn, the sick, the poor, the hungry, the imprisoned, the oppressed, and the forgotten. Just as it is important that we try and judge the guilty, or fight to defend our homes, it is even more important that we recognize the humanity of the guilty and the enemy and respect their human dignity, lest we fall victim of becoming the guilty ourselves.