Matthew Yglesias, writing about war:
On the other hand, I more-and-more think that the mythologizing of World War II has been exerting a pernicious influence on American political culture. That it was a "good war" there can be no doubting. But it's worth recalling that it was also a bloody, savage mess not a splendid little victory. One would hope that a greater consciousness of what was actually involved in fighting and winning the war, thereby laying the preconditions for the reconstruction of Germany and Japan and the creation of the post-war order, would do a little something to ameliorate the militarism which seems to have gripped our society. War is not a pleasant undertaking, and inflicting it on a foreign population is not a nice thing to do. At times, it's preferable to the alternative, but the hair-trigger mentality we developed post-1991 is not serving the world well.Praise jeebus. I've been saying this here on this blog for almost a year now, and I've been waiting for someone else to. Wars are awful, bloody messes - and that's when they go well. Armies are not meant to police or liberate: they're designed to destroy with great speed, efficiency, and accuracy - in that order. The largely American myth of the new "clean" war with smart bombs that, as John Le Carre put it, can kill the bad guy without breaking the crockery, is one of the worst ideas to have gripped modern thinking. Going to war to prevent war down the road is idiotic, if you follow this line of reasoning. You should do every non-military thing possible to avoid combat, because the alternative is always worse. Neville Chamberlain wasn't wrongly motivated, he just guessed wrong on Hitler's intentions. Notably, Bush and company manifestly failed to do everything possible to avoid combat. Or let's consult people much smarter than I in the arena of international affairs:
"...preventive war is suicide from fear of death." - Otto Bismarck
"To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war." - Winston Churchill
"War for peace is like fucking for virginity." - Anonymous poster seen at anti-war protest.
You might think that last one a bit immature. I disagree. I think it's fundamentally far more mature than the foreign policy of the Bush administration.
Earlier in the same post, Matt makes a great point about WWII:
...however horrible Allied attacks on Germany were at times, the Germans had choices. Not only did Germany choose the war, while its adversaries had it forced upon them, but at any time the Germans could have surrendered. When they did, eventually, surrender they were treated extremely kindly by at least the western Allies.... It's easy to forget that for all the evil Hitler did, the true evil lay in what he would have done had he won.... It would have been an endless, infinite darkness. Under the circumstances, giving up was not an option. For the Germans it was. The guilt for Dresden has to be apportioned at least equally between its Allied perpetrators and the Germans who preferred enduring it to seeing Nazi dreams dashed.As always, Churchill said it better:
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."
1 comment:
"Matt makes a great point about WWII:...however horrible Allied attacks on Germany were at times, the Germans had choices. Not only did Germany choose the war, while its adversaries had it forced upon them,"
I do see the point he's trying to make here, but consider this: Great Britain had gone into places like Australia, South Africa and India, then slaughtered tens of millions of people amidst the native population. India alone lost tens of millions of people in the 1800's from British attacks and the artificial famines, and the aborigines were almost annihilated en masse. We haven't begun with Ireland or the Brit concentration camps used against the Boers and African natives.
In each of these cases-- especially in India, Australia and Ireland, which were brutally invaded by the British-- the British had choices, and it was the British who forced war onto the native peoples of those lands, prosecuting them oftentimes with far more brutality than the SS and Gestapo could have offered up. For this reason, I've known quite a few people in those countries who read with pleasure about how British civilians were slaughtered en masse by the Blitz, or by the IRA bombings or even the recent train attacks, saying it was "divine retribution" or well-deserved for past British crimes. I disagree totally.
Deliberate attacks against civilians have no justification. Sometimes civilians are killed in large numbers, and this happened in WWII, but Dresden was totally unnecessary. In addition to killing thousands of non-German refugees from Eastern Europe, it also weakened support for German resistance movements (like those of Count von der Schulenburg or Popitz) that had long been trying to overthrow Hitler, despite the tremendous personal risk and the knowledge of what their colleagues had suffered in the concentration camps. I weep for the innocent people of Dresden, just as much as I weep for those poor innocent souls who died in the train attacks in London a couple months ago. Many of the terrorists thought that the British civilians deserved it for British atrocities in Iraq-- I will never support this line of argument, however.
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