Collateral Damage

Over the radio last Monday morning July 25, while on EDSA going to Cubao, Quezon City‎, a commentator was talking about a protest rally of a group criticizing the police indiscriminate killings of innocent people who had nothing to do with drugs. The rallyists were protesting DU30 war on drugs. In times of war the deaths of civilians are labeled as collateral damage and claimed to be justified. The government’s reason is because the war on drugs is a just war.

The infamous First and Second World Wars were defended as justified. Their defenders cite Catholic moral teaching that inflicting pain, suffering or death on another is justified when the positive result of the harm surpasses the ne‎gative effects which are called collateral damage. There are Catholics, including me, who disagree and hope that someday the Church would change this moral principle which is attributed to St. Augustine of the fourth century.

I shudder when I reflect on the millions of innocent Jews who were poisoned to die in Dachau, Germany, and Auschwitz, Poland German concentration camps. The thousands of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were destroyed by the American atomic bombs. I too at age 9 have personally witnessed Japanese soldiers cutting heads of children, women, ‎and men civilians in our hometown Leon during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines.

Does killing the innocents intended or not, constitute the use of the principle – the end justifying the means?‎ Is collateral damage justified?