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| Europe |
| VE Day: A Tainted Victory? Or a Supreme Emergency? |
| 2005-05-09 |
| I apologize for abusing my moderator status to call your attention to this, but I didn't want to abuse Fred's bandwidth with the long post. Here's a short excerpt ... click on the link for the whole thing if you want to read it. Armed Liberal raises some important issues regarding WWII and our judgements about Allied behavior. I thought you, our readers, might want to reflect on an excerpt from Michael Walzer's Just and Unjust Wars -- and also to apply your thoughts to the current war on terror. For as this excerpt shows, the issues have not gone away ..... and this discussion has relevance to recent and future decisions in our own time. From Chapter 16, "Supreme Emergency", which discusses the firebombing of Dresden. Everybody's troubles make a crisis. "Emergency" and "crisis" are cant words, used to prepare our minds for acts of brutality. And yet there are such things as critical moments in the lives of men and women and in the history of states ... Churchill's description of Britain's predicament in 1939 as a "supreme emergency" was a piece of rhetorial heightening ... but the phrase also contains an argument: that there is a fear beyond the ordinary fearfulness (and the frantic opportunism) of war, and a danger to which that fear corresponds, and that this fear and danger may well require exactly those measures that the war convention bars. Now a great deal is at stake here, both for the men and women driven to adopt such measures and for their victims .... |
| Posted by:rkb |
| #12 Pretty well from what I've heard, Sea. AB, I went over to the club and cleaned up my mess. (embarassment) |
| Posted by: rkb 2005-05-09 16:08 |
| #11 Both sides were in a TOTAL WAR. That means your total country and its interests will be wared upon. Including civies. As Sherman said, "It is good that war is so horrible, lest we grow too fond of it." The post-war hand wringing does no one any good and devalues what was fough and died for during that conflict. |
| Posted by: mmurray821 2005-05-09 15:46 |
| #10 "It is good that war is terrible, lest we grow too fond of it." - General Robert E. Lee |
| Posted by: mojo 2005-05-09 15:44 |
| #9 Robin, you're needed in the Club, STAT. |
| Posted by: AutoBartender 2005-05-09 15:31 |
| #8 Robin, I "saw" the 60 Minutes piece on West Point yesterday. (Actually "heard" it on WCBS radio as I drove south on the Jersey Turnpike.) As I heard it, the piece was nicely done, except for a few typical snide jabs at the President and I thought the cadets handled themselves magnificently. When he was asked about insurgent warfare, the cadet said, "I will need to study harder so I'm ready when I get to Iraq." Bravo to them. How was it received at the Point? |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2005-05-09 15:25 |
| #7 Walzers book is used (or at least was until recently, can't swear to this past year) in the ethics class at West Point, by the way. It's generally regarded as one of the best discussions of various issues in warfare and goes into difficult, detailed case studies for that purpose. Dave pretty much nails the reason I posted this. I personally agree with Walzer that we should never become comfortable with doing what is needed .... but that when enough is at stake, necessity overrides the rules I would otherwise hold myself to. The difficulty always is: when have we reached that point? |
| Posted by: rkb 2005-05-09 15:11 |
| #6 Robin's excerpts from Walzer's writings are well worth reading, as are Armed Liberal's refutations of Niall Ferguson's steaming pile of crap in the Sunday LA Times (next post down from Robin's at WoC). The notion that there can ever be any such thing, in practice, as an "immaculate" war-- or that we should hang our heads in shame because our war against Hitler and Tojo wasn't immaculate-- is fatuous nonsense; war is Hell. May as well get used to that simple fact, or else get used to dying in the likes of a Nazi concentration camp, or a Soviet gulag, or being shot in the back of the head by some dirty raghead because he's decreed you an "infidel". |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2005-05-09 15:01 |
| #5 These guys are making academic points. To me, the question here is whose lives are worth more to us - our soldiers and civilians or their soldiers and civilians. From my perspective, my relatives and friends are more important than their relatives and friends. Period. |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2005-05-09 14:59 |
| #4 This debate distills quite nicely why liberals cannot be trusted with national security. They are usually stuck in one of two mindsets (some times both simultaneously): 1. There is no real threat. You have a greater chance of getting struck by a car then getting killed by a hijacker, Hitler wasn't that bad, blah blah blah. or 2. There is a threat, but, well, what can we do? If we fight, then they'll get mad and fight even more, and even if they don't get mad, then we'll hurt innocent civilians, and that will make them mad and then they'll fight against us, and we've made the problem worse. Maybe we can get the UN to pass a resolution? How about an arrest warrant on that Mussolini chap? That'll show him we mean business. Where do we sign the surrender papers? |
| Posted by: Dreadnought 2005-05-09 14:54 |
| #3 More 9/10 belch. There's a certain segment of academia or thinktankademia that's paid to agonize over whether victory's "tainted." Sorry. I'll take mine straight. Why argue the inarguable? "This is not an easy argument to make, and yet we must resist every effort to make it easier ..." simply doesn't make it for me. All the agonizing should have been completed by 9-12-2001. I prefer the cold-blooded approach to the current war: You have attacked me and mine; you may surrender, or you and yours are at risk. |
| Posted by: Fred 2005-05-09 14:33 |
| #2 The salient point here is that the Germans and Japanese fought like hell and damned near won the war. The question for Churchill et al. was not: how can we win this war in the most morally responsible manner possible?, but rather: are we going to win this war at all? Moral judgments made by those who know the outcome of the war and have had sixty years to ruminate on it, IMHO, should be approached with a large grain of salt. |
| Posted by: Matt 2005-05-09 14:19 |
| #1 No victory against the Nazis is tainted, no matter how much post-modern, relativist hand-wringing we might want to indulge in. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-05-09 14:11 |