When the Government Decides Who Lives and Who Dies

Should a few people have power over the lives of so many?

There is a story that has been making the rounds since WWII and has survived every attempt made to debunk it.

On 14th November 1940, the German army carried out the Second World War's largest and most devastating air raid. The location was Coventry, United Kingdom. Numerous sources have reported over the years that the British intelligence services warned Winston Churchill — the then prime minister of the United Kingdom — that the Germans were about to attack Coventry.

At this stage, British Intelligence agencies had cracked the ultra-secret German Enigma codes, which the German army used for encrypted communication. The Enigma codes were so complex that the Germans thought them to be unbreakable. Still, Alan Turing — the acclaimed British mathematician — had found a way to decode messages sent on the German Enigma machines. After the codes were broken, the British government was faced with a tricky problem; how to keep the Germans from learning that their encryption system had been cracked. If the British army thwarted every attack by the Germans, the German army would quickly learn that their communication had been compromised. The British government was thrust into the uncomfortable position of having to pick and choose which German attacks to thwart and when to look the other way.

It was in light of this cat-and-mouse game of pretence and make-believe that Winston Churchill got the warning from the Enigma decoding team at Bletchley Park. A German attack on Coventry was imminent. According to reports, Winston Churchill decided to let the Germans attack Coventry uninterrupted because marshalling the British defence forces to defend Coventry would have alerted the Germans that Enigma had been broken. This trade-off kept the Enigma situation a secret, but hundreds of people died in the air raids, and half of the city was destroyed. The British government has never confirmed nor denied that it knew about the German army’s plans to bomb Coventry and did nothing, so there is no official way of knowing if these reports are true or not.

Assuming that these reports are true, the implications are huge. The biggest question would be the legitimacy of the government to decide who dies and who lives, based on some arbitrary criteria. Even in a world where the government is founded on the principle of total utilitarianism, how does the government justify that allowing its citizens to die in their hundreds is a worthy sacrifice for the majority?

Let us for a second swap Coventry for London. If the Germans were planning the biggest air raid blitz on London instead of Coventry, would the British government deem that allowing the administrative, financial, and economic capital of the United Kingdom to be destroyed along with hundreds of lives is a worthy sacrifice for keeping their Enigma decrypting capabilities a secret?

Whatever the truth about Coventry is, it wouldn’t be the first or last time the government has played God over its citizens. During the recent Covid inquiry in the UK, it was revealed that the former British health secretary, Matt Hancock, wanted the power to decide who should live and who should die if the NHS became overwhelmed by Covid cases. From what we know now, he didn’t get the absolute powers he wanted — fortunately. The prospect that a government minister could have the authoritarian authority to decide whose life was worth saving and who was expendable is scary. We can only speculate what the criteria would have been for making this hefty decision.

The lessons from World War II and Covid are clear. Ancient Greeks created democracy as a system of government so that the people would have the power to choose their government and maintain control over it. Over the years, we have invested so much power in our governments that it has become a creature with a mind of its own. The implications of the almost bottomless power we have thrust on the government become obvious in times of crises and war. An opinion in the New York Times captured this succinctly. The US president — one man — has the sole power and control over the entire US nuclear arsenal. For context, the US government has over 3,700 nuclear weapons in its stockpile, a stockpile large enough to wipe away all human life on Earth. The US president has the sole authority to decide if, when, and where to launch a nuclear attack — the president doesn’t need to consult anybody, and no arm of government can act as a check or balance on the president’s decision. That any single government official — anywhere in the world — has the unchecked power to decide the fate of humanity is preposterous. Preposterous it may be, it is the case only because we — the people — have given the government that power, or at least haven’t done anything about it.

This should be a wake-up call to citizens all over. The time has come to have a broad and meaningful discussion about the limits of government power. An interrogation of the ethics of letting an individual or a few people in government decide which of the rest 8 billion of us lives or dies is in order.

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