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VE Day: A Tainted Victory? Or a Supreme Emergency?
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 2005-05-09 |
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