| Submit your comments on this article | |
| Home Front: Culture Wars | |
| Bringing Back the Good War | |
| 2014-08-09 | |
[SultanKnish] During WW2 our understanding of a moral war was not a war in which we did not kill any civilians (we killed a lot of civilians), it wasn't even a war in which we did not kill any civilians on purpose (we killed a lot of civilians on purpose), it was a war in which we did not kill civilians without having a good reason.
Until recently, those were considered good reasons for killing civilians. The moral context for these actions, snipped away from anti-war works such as Slaughterhouse-Five or Grave of the Fireflies which reduce the American bombings of Dresden or Kobe to the senseless acts of brutal monsters, is that we were fighting Germany and Japan using their own tactics against them. ...Mutuality makes morality and immorality in war self-regulating. If you firebomb someone else's cities, someone else will firebomb your cities. If you want your prisoners of war to be treated well, you have to treat the prisoners you take equally well. Such mutuality is the only international agreement that truly matters. It takes humanitarian behavior out of the realm of idealism and into the realm of rational self-interest. It creates a direct and working program for rewards and punishments that does not rely on a League of Nations or United Nations. ...But the era of the free lunch arrived with terrorism. We unilaterally extend protections to terrorists that they do not reciprocate. Terrorists are excused from the laws of war, while everyone else has to abide by them. This only incentivizes terrorism and makes fighting terrorists a grim and impossible business. Israel's fight against Hamas shows how unilateral humanitarianism decontextualizes warfare creating a completely impossible standard for a good war. With no context derived from what the other side is doing all that is left is the necessity of meeting a completely impossible standard in which no civilians on the other side ever die, even while the enemy uses them as human shields. The Londoners who heard Lloyd George, the New Yorkers who heard George W. Bush and the Israelis who heard Benjamin Netanyahu understood the context in which the next phase of the conflict would be taking place. It was a context created by the tactics of their enemies. But context is no longer acceptable in warfare. All wars must be fought to the same impossible standard. | |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #8 ...note that after we bombed the hell out of both countries and sat on them for a couple of generations, the Prussian* and Japanese militaristic cultural streak of a couple hundred years seems to be seriously abated. * Germany wasn't so much unified as annexed by Prussia. The Kaiser rejected an offer in 1848 for an arrangement similar to England's king and parliament. Instead Bismark proceeded with his pan-Germanic union subordinate to the Kaiser. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2014-08-09 19:50 |
| #7 Hitler's shifting of the focus of German strategic bombing away from RAF facilities and towards population centers ensured that Germany lost the crucial "Battle of Britain." And yet the allies bombed Germany around the clock and it crushed and dispirited them. Dresden, an art center and largely a city of little strategic importance, was fire-bombed which resulted in nearly as many deaths as the bombing of Hiroshima. We bombed the Japanese around the clock towards the end of the war and they still resisted until we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That brought about unconditional surrender. At some point the pain of war brings about surrender or complete destruction. Nation-building can come later (or not). |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2014-08-09 19:03 |
| #6 Hitler's shifting of the focus of German strategic bombing away from RAF facilities and towards population centers ensured that Germany lost the crucial "Battle of Britain." Morality aside, it was a dumb move (fortunately). But the most important point is one the article makes succinctly: "Mutuality makes morality and immorality in war self-regulating.... Terrorists are excused from the laws of war, while everyone else has to abide by them. This only incentivizes terrorism and makes fighting terrorists a grim and impossible business." |
| Posted by: Odysseus 2014-08-09 18:13 |
| #5 In the end soldiers clean up the messes created by politicians. It is not cleaned up until one side wins decisively. Unfortunately, the price of winning often has terrible cost. Unless, people want to live under the boot of tyranny, the cost of war must to be paid. We have screwed around with these a$$holes (Islamics) for far too long. We have been far too patient. They no longer have any respect or fear of us. |
| Posted by: JohnQC 2014-08-09 15:39 |
| #4 "Until recently, those were considered good reasons for killing civilians." Still are, by any serious person. Libtards, not so much. |
| Posted by: Barbara 2014-08-09 13:44 |
| #3 Even he greatly distorts the historical record in making his case about WWII. There was a gigantic gulf of difference in every single aspect of the way the war was prosectued between the Allies and the Axis (the Soviet/German unpleasantness was full-on savagery from both sides, sort of a separate topic). Dresden was a major rail nexus of importance to the eastern front, and center of high-end military production (optics, what today we would call electronics). Hitting it was as rational and militarily justified as any attack of the war. German bombing of Allied cities never once even bothered to pretend to be linked to military targets or operations. Japan's cultural capital was placed off-limits to bombing, and promptly saw (naturally) significant industrial capacity moved there as sanctuary. Ground operations of course saw a near perfect inversion of behavior. German and Japanese forces, almost without exception, behaved with unprovoked and illegal cruelty and even barbarism towards civilians in (lawlessly conquered) areas. Massive murder, torture, and rape, looting, wanton destruction, forced labor. Allied forces by contrast were Boy Scouts - cases of misbehavior were criminally prosecuted (this continued into occupied Germany, where the US at one point had to borrow the British hangman to carry out capital sentences from courts martial of rapist and murderer GIs). We friggin set up special units, which in some cases actually affected combat decisions, to protect, recover, and restore precious art and cultural treasures in Europe. We invented the modern concept of humanitarian aid and used it to help our former enemies and their victims. Even granting the glib and erroneous assumptions of those who try to get preachy about WWII, the inarguable result of doing it without all the icky Allied behavior would have been ..... the same outcome, but with a much, much, much larger death toll among the Axis populations, their victims, and Allied military personnel. |
| Posted by: Verlaine 2014-08-09 12:18 |
| #2 Both horse lovers, I believe General Sherman entered Savannah with a personal stable of some 70 horses. General Lee surrendered with Traveler and one other. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2014-08-09 08:57 |
| #1 They set the rules with their actions, Respond in kind. As William Tecumseh Sherman said to the people of Atlanta, You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2014-08-09 06:40 |