My problem isn’t that I “grovel at the feet of American mass-murderers…”, but that I’m angry they committed mass murder of innocents to win the damn war, and then, when they had the ability to actually deal directly with the people who were actually benefiting from the Nazi regime, and behind it all…? They did nothing at all. The indiscriminate killing is what bothers me; the Nazi party membership? They knew what they were signing on for, and gleefully stuck both hands out to receive the goodies. If they’d have been victorious in the East, they’d have turned everyone who wasn’t German into slaves, and gradually exterminated them.

Dresden was a case where you can reasonably argue military necessity; the abandonment of principle, when it came to dealing with the Nazis? Not so much. And, mark you, the Soviets weren’t much different: Who manned the Stasi? Who did the Soviets take into the fold, so long as they renounced both national socialism and capitalism? Oh, yes–The f**king Nazis. The whole thing on both sides reeked of expediency, and instead of cutting out the cancer entire, they killed their millions of innocents to get at them, and then let oh-so-very-many of them go.

To put the Allied effort post-war into perspective? Imagine a terrorist hostage scenario; the counter-terrorists come in and shoot the hostages (the innocent civilians) and then, once they’ve removed the hostages and taken the terrorists prisoner, they release the terrorists, give them a pat on the head, and then tell them “Hey, if you fight for us, you’re gonna be OK…”.

Totally immoral. You’re gonna kill the hostages to get at the terrorists, then by God, you’d better kill the terrorists, too. Plain and simple.

I’m going to go to my grave convinced that we should have done unto the Nazis what they did unto others, and that the Communists should have been dealt with in a similar manner. Unfortunately, the Russians love their mass-murdering totalitarian leadership, and worship their murderers, grovelling at their feet.”

It sounds to me like you are groveling at the feet of American mass-murderers. You are willing to worship the men who incinerated Dresden, but you scorn the Russians who resemble you.

1. They were wrong about Hitler’s anticipated aggressions. Yes, they were. I can only end that by saying that without foreknowledge their expectations of him or the situation were not insane, and we who have gone berserk in the opposite direction several times in the last few generations should recognize that. We are wrong to see so many crises as the next Munich, as they were wrong to not see theirs as the first, so to speak.

2. The Jews of Europe and everything else Hitler was doing domestically. The structure of my comments notwithstanding, this is obviously the moral rub.

Here the distinction between the prewar and wartime eras is not trivial. The moral calculus is pretty clear- it was obvious and public that Hitler was building a tyranny, and it was just as obvious he was oppressing Jews in particular by disabling them from society, having his bully boys steal their property and beat them and [IIRC] kill some in the streets. Nobody cared enough to do anything about it. And they could have- these countries had raised such issues diplomatically with countries like Russia in the past, and had taken refugees in the past. They just didn’t care enough in the 30s. Or at least, they took some, but they didn’t care enough to make a point or to take all. The case of the St Louis stands out here, but certainly not alone.

I suspect two things are true for the prewar era.

a) They didn’t care about what they knew the Jews and others were suffering in Germany. They could have, and Britain and France had been better on this point in the past. But they didn’t.

b) They didn’t anticipate the Holocaust. I genuinely can’t say how doing so might have changed their attitude. It speaks poorly of them that it might not have. But I doubt they anticipated it. Not even with past massacres elsewhere like the Armenians, or wartime atrocities in 1914-18. This was a society that could both be bigoted as hell and completely not comprehend the idea of something like the Holocaust. Few people even seemed to know of or believe what Stalin was already doing, even among classes predisposed to dislike him. I have no trouble believing they could not envision Auschwitz or its like.

That’s a mental universe we can no longer access.

For the war era, I agree. They could have taken that intelligence seriously. They probably could not have stopped it. But who can be sure- sustained bombing focused on the camps rail networks maybe. I don’t know. The Germans were willing to devote huge resources to that until the very last minute, and the camps were only just under half of victims, I think. But something could have been done. And they could have publicized it.

I can’t quite figure out an explanation, even from expediency. If they actually believed it, what would they have lost and what not gained by using it as part of their propaganda effort? Homeland bigotry notwithstanding, such a cause would have fit well into the Four Freedoms, United Nations, Democracy, proto-Human Rights language that had evolved to be the main line of the Allied message by 1942.

With that last in mind, I can’t quite find the satisfactory explanation in Allied anti-semitism or in political expediency.

In Canadian press over the last 30 years or so, sometimes letters to the editor have appeared from representatives of the Canadian Jewish Congress or maybe B’nai Brith or both, just lightly puncturing Allied self-regard by citing many of your points. Ultimately it boiled down to one basic point- the allied war effort may have been ultimately necessary to end the Holocaust, but the Allies weren’t fighting for that, didn’t claim they were, and shouldn’t claim it now in retrospect.

That’s fair as both criticism and simple description.

I suspect this is something Jews everywhere and the Israeli state are all well aware of, still. In their place, I would be.

When I used the term “old America”, I was thinking more along the lines of your earlier post sounding a bit Kennedy. Not that he and his family and Administration weren’t capable of considerable expediency, themselves.

To expand the thought, I’m well aware there was never any old Britain quite like that. If in some other context I were to cite the idea of an “old Britain”, I wouldn’t exactly be alluding to a fire-breathing international crusade for liberty and humanitarianism. They did have those aspects, and some of Britain’s actions in the 19th-20th centuries are hard to explain without it, but it was never the dominant feature of their statecraft. Not even rhetorically. Churchill was all about Britain and Britons’ liberty, with some extensions for allies, not necessarily liberty in general.

On the deeper moral problem you raise eloquently, some semi-sequential thoughts-

I’ve struggled with it in passing for 30 or so years. I say in passing because I admit it troubles me but not constantly or regularly. There are so many mass murders in history, including the 20th century, and so few if any elicit decisive action in response.

I concede the Holocaust troubles me the most not so much for scale as for occurring in the heart of Europe by Europeans against other Europeans. Many people I know would not accept a moral hierarchy based on the events occurring within what I consider to be my own civilization or kindred cultures, depending on whether you accept either of those terms. But for me that makes it more important and more horrible. Others’ from other cultures mileage will vary.

I equally struggle with the mindset of the 30s. Not the expediency as such. More what they knew and what they expected. We judge them rightly, but we can let hindsight take over too much.

They should have expected Hitler to be militarily aggressive. But they would have expected a wide variety of German governments could emerge that would challenge Versailles after the passage of time and some rebuilding, and tended to think Hitler’s early moves fair. None of them would tolerate permanent demilitarization of territory in their own countries’ comparable in size to the Rhineland. Without hindsight, I can’t seriously imagine either Britain or France in 1936 using force to uphold that, or either having the least public support at home for doing so. Yes, they almost certainly could have done it easily and almost or entirely bloodlessly. Whether or not the governments believed that, their publics would have balked sharply at any initial moves to challenge German re-entry. The governments may themselves not have had a sufficient grasp of German weakness, but even if they did it ultimately amounted to threatening force to uphold one of the least likely elements of VErsailles.

At that point you get onto the treadmill before you realize it. It’s hard not to think it’s possible most Austrians want anschluss, although I don’t recall what evidence we ever had for that. Presumably they were fine with the Austrofascists and independence for the most part, but I have no idea. Only once you get to Munich and Czechoslovakia do you really start to see more clearly, and even then I have the benefit of more information. It’s not impossible to imagine looking at Czechoslovakia like one of the ramshackle states of Africa today and wondering about the justice of its borders. A Wilsonian era creation to give the Czechs and Slovaks a state free of German-speakers’ rule, now with a large German minority in coherent territory.

The possible moral/legal case in that era for the Sudeten claims was as strong as any. If anything, Munich was a battle of two versions of expediency. I say it would have been more expedient to bolster the Czechs, preserve defensible borders and their military industry, and gamble Germany was still too weak to win. There is plenty of scholarship to suggest that is right. On the other hand, the French were also stronger than Germany in the spring of 1940 and went down just the same. I can’t quite assume 1938 would have been so much better. Probably, but not so certainly.

Now all that is on the strategic issues, from the Allied point of view. And the expedient point of view. In rterospect, they all look like fools. We all note it was all there in Mein Kampf. Or something like it was in Mein Kampf. They should have known his ambitions were unlimited. But their historical experience had not taught them to think like that. They had plenty of examples of aggressive imperialist rhetoric, military bombast and so on. They didn’t have the example of such a [sort of] 1 to 1 attempt to actually follow such a script, as their failure now gives us.

So their expediency was ultimately inexpedient in the extreme, and so we call them fools. Ever since, we treat everything as another Munich. Even that ruling class in Britain did. Eden’s motives in Suez in 1956 were varied and included some cynicism, but he seems to have genuinely, and insanely, believed he had to act to stop Nasser becoming the next Hitler-level threat to peace.

The moral question for the Allies was more like:

- we agree in retrospect parts of the Versailles settlement were unreasonable and we want to rectify it before it blows up in our faces
- the initial German claims are consistent with what we would do or want for ourselves and with key elements of the Versailles settlement concerning ethnic self-determination, or at least need to be considered in that context
- what can the Germans do that justify us committing to a possible second Great War and risking millions of our own, if we can avoid that?

We underestimate the power of that last point over them. We might consider that too to be expediency, or selfish. They considered it a moral matter, to the people for whom they were responsible.

More to come. This was long.

1400 years of ‘holy’ bloody conquest by Mohamed’s many edicts and the worldwide publication of officially translations of the Quran spelling out the intent of this barbaric ideology of world supremacy have not sufficed as evidence to convince world leaders today of a threat, nor to warn of coming mass attempts at xenocide by Muslims. The Europeans have gone so far as to make it illegal even to speak truthfully, with direct quotes and histories, about Islam and those who follow it.

The deaths of many millions will result as surely as any massive ideology of murder will produce them, and our leaders today are culpable in supporting this anti-civilizational force, indeed funding and developing it willingly and proactively. Will they ever stand trial for their overt acts of treason? Highly unlikely.

Perhaps, as has been reasonably suggested in Kirk’s post, like the leaders preceding and during WWII, our leaders today secretly want the slaughter to take place. Or perhaps they simply don’t care, so long as they can conduct business with Muslims that will enrich themselves.

Watching the course of the Muslim invasion by emigration (euphemized as refugee asylum seeking) of Europe, England, and USA and elsewhere is like watching an Alfred Hitchcock movie in which everyone in the audience knows what’s about to happen and wants to scream to the main characters in harm’s way to, “LOOK OUT!” …but of course the danger strikes.

It was the “old America” and “old Britain” that essentially let the Nazis go. Truman, Churchill, all those “great leaders”.

Same-same as the asshats who allowed Hitler to attain power in the first place–Had his “explorations” in the Rheinland and Sudeten been properly dealt with, we’d have never had WWII to worry about.

Personally, I think that there should have been a full-on post-war reckoning of all the leadership–I’d have put the crew that were running the show back in the mid-1930s on trial right next to the clowns in the dock at Nuremberg, with special attention granted the sorry individuals who signed off on blocking the MS St. Louis from docking here in the US. There were so many bad decisions made, and lousy policies–The bravest man in WWII was probably Witold Pilecki, who infiltrated Auschwitz as a prisoner, and then escaped to make a report to the Allies, who didn’t do anything effective with that information. Had they even bothered to inform the German government that they’d be held accountable, root and branch? One wonders if lives would have been saved. Widespread broadcast of that information would have been invaluable, but it wasn’t done.

The prelude to WWII, the war itself, and the aftermath saw so much “moral expediency” that it’s disgusting. The Allies knew what was going on in those camps, and yet… Did nothing effective. Hell, to tell the truth? I think that the Allies were effectively complicit in the Holocaust, top to bottom, on all sides. They wanted those Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs exterminated, and that fact can be ascertained by virtue of the fact that they waited until our troops had overrun the camps themselves, and the evidence was irrefutable about what the Germans had been doing. At one time, I thought that the Germans had done all that in secret, but after a lot more reading, I think that the assholes running the Allied effort just didn’t care to do a damn thing about what they had to have known about. Pilecki’s report was damning, and his reports from inside Auschwitz, by radio no less, were forwarded to the Allies at least as early as 1942. Think about that, for just a moment–There was a Polish Home Army officer making reports from within the camp, and the Allies were still officially insisting that they couldn’t corroborate any of the “rumors” that were circulating in the UK and US Jewish communities…

“Old America”…? It is to laugh–There never was such a thing as you imagine, nor was there an “old Great Britain”, either. Expediency ruled the day, and millions died. One reads the histories, and you rather start to wonder if they didn’t want it that way, on both sides.

I’ll grant you that there’s damn little the Allies could have done, besides publicize the whole thing, but they couldn’t even be arsed to do that. How many Jews boarded those trains, thinking that such a thing could not be happening to them–After all, wouldn’t the BBC have warned them…?

Bastards, one and all. The ones on our side were only slightly less morally culpable, in that they weren’t actually signing the death warrants for millions–But, they stood by while those that did came to power, and then effectively ignored and enabled the mass murder of millions. All they might have done was warn the victims of what to expect, but they didn’t even bother to do that. You wonder how many Jews would have lived, were they aware and chose to resist? Hell, there were a few camp inmates I’ve met over the years who still felt a sense of betrayal over that very issue, much like the Poles in Warsaw who rose before the Soviets stopped their advance. The Germans had a much easier time running their little game on the Jews and others, because their victims had no real idea beyond what they took as wild rumors about what was going on. Pilecki told the Allies; they should have been warning the victims in every broadcast, and telling the Nazis that they would face judgment, as a warning.

Apparently, ’twas too much trouble. Or, as I mentioned above, the obvious surmise is that they wanted the world rid of those people.

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