Posted on 05/09/2005 8:24:48 AM PDT by metesky
‘‘NO ENGLISH SOLDIER who rode with the tanks into liberated Belgium or saw the German murder camps at Dachau or Buchenwald could doubt that the war had been a noble crusade.’’ Forty years ago the historian A.J.P. Taylor eloquently expressed what has become a universal belief. Other wars are looked back on with horror for their futile slaughter, but the conflict that ended in Europe in May 1945 is today seen as what Studs Terkel called his famous oral history of it: ‘‘The Good War.’’
In one way it will always remain so. A revisionist case, that defeating Hitler was a mistake, would be not only perverse and offensive, but simply absurd. And yet we have all been sustained since V-E Day, 60 years ago today, by what Giovanni Giolitti, the Italian prime minister of a century ago, once called ‘‘beautiful national legends.’’ By ‘‘we’’ I mean the countries that ended the war on the winning side (the Germans and Japanese have some national legends of their own).
Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
Even though I enjoy the quality of the film images, the History Channel's "Color of War" series never fails to irritate me. It's full of leftist race/class drivel.
After watching it, I said, "Hell, I thought the good guys won World War II!!"
I know better, of course, but what about young folks who didn't have dads and neighbors who actually were there?
Thank God he came home.
One of my uncles was a pilot and his brother a tail gunner. Thankfully they came home too.
Towards the halfway part of the article I started feeling queasy as the bitter bile built up in my gut. Luckily I managed to stop there and thus avoided having to clean out chunks of projectile vomit from between the keys on my keyboard. Others might not be so lucky and as such, the "Barf Alert" is needed.
Thank You very much for you kind attention.
Could you please mention it again, I missed it the first time. You know the part about the Jews and ovens.
Also feel free to address the accuracy of the second part of my post, you know about the benevolent defenders of the Fatherland, the SS.
I was a very young lad during "the big one". There was an old cannon in front of the neighborhood American Legion hall and I still remember lying in bed and fantasizing about running down and "manning" that gun should the need arise. ;o)
But I somehow came out of that horrific time without any inclination to demonize the enemy.
Neither did I ever know irrational hate for those of different races or religions.
I'm no angel, never have been, but whatever unnecessary anguish I have been delivered from by bypassing this hate I know I owe to my mom and dad ... intelligent, sensitive, poor, undereducated Christians.
I'm not sure where you're going with this, would you care to elaborate?
Couple other points: the firebombings of Hamburg & Dresden (as Tokyo & other Japanese cities) came because both the Nazis and IJA/N were outsourcing munitions/materiel production away from easily targetted plants and into the midst of their civilian populations. In the case of Japan, Dunnigan of the Strategy Page estimates this production was about 30-40% of that nation's total. Put bluntly, these locations were targets - and inasmuch as the horror of war can be such that innocent civilians would die in conflict, still more horrible is the thought that to NOT have destroyed these production points would have meant a longer war at more cost in American and Allied lives.
Given the choice above, even a thousand times, my friend... I say we bomb 'em back into the Stone Age. Every. Damned. Time.
See Nos. 26 and 46 on this thread. That's Twenty-six and Forty-six in case those numerically dsiplayed numbers are too confusing for you.
Also feel free to address the accuracy of the second part of my post, you know about the benevolent defenders of the Fatherland, the SS.
Also already done. Don't you read anything?
Thanks for your kind words. Read your personal page. Very interesting. Liked the T.S Elliot poem quote. I'll have to buy a collection of his poems and brush up. I just know a few lines from "The Wasteland."
As for my father, he was still flying with his unit (442 BS (Heavy))on VE Day. Afterward, they redEployed their B-24s to the US. Just landed in upstate New York and walked away from them. The unit demobilized but, once again, being regular Army bit him in the back side. He was waiting at the Presidio in San Francisco to ship out for the Pacific air forces and the invasion of Japan when VJ Day occurred. So I guess you could say he (and I and my two siblings) were lucky twice.
Wow. I've heard that story from others. How wonderfully providential .... and makes me think the those terrible bombs did great good for a lot of our fellow Americans.
Thank you very much.
It is most unfortunate, that such exaggerated stories still circulate on both sides of the Pacific. We were allies. My granddad still has warm memories of Americans he met at the shores of Elba river. Such things should not be forgotten. Pity, that there are a lot of such "fairy tales" on both sides. Like not so long ago, on a Russian boards I had to fight myths that were in the Cold War times perpetrated about American troops, which are still alive today - the "mass rapes" by US troops of Okinava civilians, which "were never punished", of course, and that the Himeyuri Corps girls were deliberately murdered and raped by marines, and another particularly funny one, about Omaha landing never in fact occuring - some people there stated that there were never any German resistance on Omaha, and that the landing battle was a myth. I hope I've managed to displel those quite effectively, at least among the communities of these boards. It was not easy though.
US is also producing some serious BS sometimes, like a year and a half ago I had to send an angry email to "US Naval Institute Proceedings" magazine, that published an article stating that Yuri Gagarin was not the first man in space. It was corrected, of course. Or this "Berlin mass rapes" tale. But I wonder, whether such incidents on both sides will ever end. Pity.
The practice is unlikely to end. In times of war (or high anxiety, (i.e., the Cold War)), it is convenient to turn the opposing side into "the Other" and attribute all sorts of really disgusting behavior to them AS A GROUP (as opposed to individualizing the real offenders). It makes it easier to convince the troops to fight hard and kill without limit if they have an image of their enemy as a race of subhuman fiends instead of say... a collection of fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters with many of the same feelings, hopes, desires, and the same pride in their country that you have. That complicates things and you, above all, don't want soldiers to begin to dwell on such things and become confused about where their duty lies.
bump
Yes, but I've had my full of your Nazi propaganda.
Goebbels would be proud...
Whatever.
The trouble with that argument is the refusal to acknowledge that we are already on a 4-lane superhighway of slaughter. Your way would expand it to 12 lanes on each side.
This kind of consequentialism can't be supported: because once you say "I may, without moral blame, deliberately kill an innocent person if I have a sufficiently good reason," then you have no moral argument against any deliberate shedding of innocent blood; all you have is a calculus about consequences which neither of you can control.
If what I do will have no effect on the consequences thereof, then it is neither moral nor immoral. But no such act is possible because every act has consequences -- and therefore it follows that in choosing for or against committing an act, I do have SOME control over the consequences. To suggest otherwise verges on nihilism.
The calculus of consequences is impossible. Can I murder 3 to save three? Can I kill a homely twin to give his kidneys to his handsome brother?
You are muddying the water by assigning arbitrary, frivolous motives to the killers. If they are twins, then they are either both homely or both handsome. But aside from that humorous observation, you are really getting nihilistic, or at least relativistic by implying that motives are irrelevant to all moral calculations, i.e., the goal of ensuring survival of a free, democratic and Godly nation and civilization is no more valid or important than the goal of ensuring the survival of a handsome man over that of his homely brother.
How about if I murder 4 to save three, if the 4 were relatively worthless?
In this particular example you are strangely giving us no context or scenario for the murder of 4 to save three. You keep the definition of "worthlessness" deliberately vague so the focus is only on the act, so that the act of killing the 4 sensationalistically upstages and obscures what the 4 are doing that make them "worthless". This is a typical media tactic, further explained below.
Suppose these 4 are men are holding 3 children hostage, using them as sex slaves and threatening to kill them if we do not let them continue to do so. I say it is time to position 4 snipers around their hideout; you say they haven't killed anyone so it would be the murder of 4 innocents to save 3.
The media tactic you have used would bring millions in emotional support to your position and unjust rage against the police without bothering to ponder the facts of the incident. They saw on TV the snipers firing into the building and the bodies being carried out. They DID NOT see what the 4 men were doing to these children all this time that led to their deaths. So because there is no video of the children being sodomized, etc., in the minds of the soccer-mom viewing public, it is an abstraction. They didn't see it on TV so it didn't really happen...not REALLY really anyway, whatever that means.
So therefore I ask that you give us the WHOLE picture, including context, circumstances, specifics, etc., any time you want to pose a 'what-if' for us and don't try to fool us with deliberately vague, sensationalistic scenarios.
I am not talking about killing to give vital organs to better looking people. I am speaking strictly on the scenario of war, which is about the somewhat less frivolous motive of survival and the prevention of genocide, enslavement and oppression, which the jihadists very much have in mind for us. Unfortunately it is impossible to stop them without killing at least some innocents. Stray bullets and bombs, you know.
If an enemy of ours were to ever discover that we would never kill an innocent under any circumstances then he will be sure to chain innocents to every military target and march down Pennsylvania Avenue with innocents strapped on the front of their tanks. This would absolutely guarantee victory for them and the grave or the labor camp for us.
How about if I kill a bunch of Spanish people on commuter trains on the gamble that it might or might not get Spanish troops out of Iraq and save an equal or greater number?
Here is the worst part, that you are implying in a most morally obtuse way that the cause of the jihadist in blowing up the World Trade Center and commuter trains in Spain is morally equal to the cause of the USA waging war on the organization that did it and on its jihadist fellow travelers and jihadist-sponsoring nations. All context, motivations and circumstances are equal and therefore irrelevant to you; it is only the act that matters.
As for the biblical end of it, you perhaps need to re-read the Old Testament wherein God deliberately orders King David to go out and kill Philistines and others. There were certainly those among the Philistines who would have qualified as "innocent". There were also innocents in Israel and Judah when Nebuchudnezzar came marching in (on God's orders, however unwittingly) to burn Jerusalem to the ground and haul all the able-bodied off to 70 years captivity in Babylon.
Don't forget Abraham who was to kill his son Isaac on God's orders. God ultimately told him nevermind, it was a test of your loyalty, but the implication hanging in the air is that someday we may have to follow orders from God that may very well involve the death of innocents, which was fulfilled in the examples of David and Nebuchadnezzar above.
Maybe -- a jihadist who agrees with you might say --
Stop right there -- no jihadist would ever agree with me about anything, except maybe food and water.
...once the whole world submits to Islam, there will be no more war, no more crime; and thus any number of 9/11's is justified if it brings the West into submission.
You're confusing what someone thinks with what is. Just because the jihadist THINKS subjugating the West is the right thing to do doesn't make it so.
Virtually all killing, private and public, legal and criminal, piecemeal and mass-murder variety, is done by somebody who thought he had a sufficiently good reason.
That is painfully obvious and irrelevant. The question is not whether someone THINKS they have a "sufficiently good reason", only whether they ACTUALLY HAVE a sufficiently good reason. If you are suggesting that the term "sufficiently good reason" is so subjective that it cannot be objectively calculated, then...
This isn't a moral code. It's moral chaos.
...you are right. But I believe you can in most such extreme cases decide whether someone killed someone else justifiably. And that what you suggest is morally chaotic:
You believe in putting such moral restrictions on self-defense that it makes self-defense impossible, and renders useless even the most effective military and guarantees a 24-lane mega-highway of slaughter of us by anyone who doesn't like us or wants our land or our children for human sacrifices, etc. Your prescription for the US or any nation that would rightfully defend itself is that of a woman deliberately bent over naked in Central Park waiting to be raped for fear that in lashing out against her attacker she might scratch an innocent bystander.
This would have guaranteed that all of Europe would speak only German to this day, the completion of the genocide of the Jews (and any other non-Aryans) from all of Europe if not the whole world, endless repeats of the Rape of Nanking throughout China, etc., etc.
Unfortunately because the way life is, NONE of this could have been prevented without accepting the horror of German and Japanese civilians killed in bombing raids and city sieges. Let's see...the killing of thousands of German and Japanese civilians vs. letting them and their leaders kill tens if not hundreds of millions of others (remember Germany had its own atomic weapons program): It's not a pleasant set of alternatives, but it seems a pretty simple moral decision to make to me.
The only way to avoid spilling innocent blood is to never defend yourself.
At the end of all calculations, I think it would cost the human race more grief than we can possibly imagine.
It certainly would.
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