Do You Believe In War?

[AmbiguousGuy]

They could have treated refugees in a humane way for starters.
Look at Stalin's response to the Warsaw uprising and tell me liberation of the oppressed was his motivation.
Look at the fire-bombing of Dreseden and tell me that was a just and noble war against tyranny.
Politics and humanity was the answer. Instead they got old men ordering mass death.

So you agree that war was the right move for the Allies, but you are unhappy with the way it was handled?

Hey, join the crowd. Most everyone thinks they could have done a better job. I think so myself.

 

[Clarity]

No of course not, but their response resulted in the deaths of many, many millions.

In my opinion, those deaths were the direct result of the law passed by Congress that prohibited Roosevelt from entering the war.

In the 1940 election, Old Joe Kennedy (and others) were still crisscrossing the country bloviating about being Germany's friend and keeping out of the war. Roosevelt hated his &^*^)& guts. On the night he won that election, FDR was heard saying to Elenor, "Get rid of that son of a --you know what--" and that was the beginning of FDR's escalating involvement in the war.

By that time, Winston Churchill had already been doing everything he could, both moral and immoral, to get the US involved because England was the last nation standing against Germany's advance, and they were losing.

(Pearl Harbor happened 13 months later.)

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

In my opinion, those deaths were the direct result of the law passed by Congress that prohibited Roosevelt from entering the war.

I agree. Many fewer lives would have been lost if we'd gone to war sooner. I think we learned our lesson and started interfering more in the affairs of other powers, to try and stop the trouble before it escalated. (Or to just plain have our way, however one prefers one's spin.)

 

[Alceste]

While I applaud and agree with your revulsion of armed conflict, I cannot say the same for your offensive words towards soldiers. In WW1 and WW2 people didn't exactly have much of a choice to resist conscription did they?

The fact that you would conflate an innocent 18 year old boy forced to take up arms and go out into a battlefield to get his testicles blown off and a sociopathic killer is frankly disgusting to me.

No-one is forced. They are told to enlist, so they enlist. They're told to kill, so they kill. That anyone would voluntarily reject their own free will and moral responsibility because of a few stern words, a legal threat or the possibility of imprisonment, is an utterly alien world view to my own.

Do I have sympathy for the kids that do the fighting because they think they have to? Sure I do. They're idiots, like all kids. Like I was, when I was a kid. They're confused and half-formed. Open to manipulation. That's why every profiteer and power-monger in the world prefers to feed kids to the meat grinder of war when they want to reap a fortune off the corpses - only kids, steeped in hormonal confusion and delusions of immortality, are willing to die for nothing. Our kids kill their kids to make a few rich ******** richer. That's war in a nutshell.

I have sympathy for them, but I'm not going to pretend they're not as dangerous as any other idiot with a gun in his hand. The difference is that perhaps, if they live, they may one day grow out of it.

I detest war. It thwarts the best instincts of human nature and leaves its victims, both soldiers and civilians, emotionally scarred thereafter - men and women left unable to forget the horrors of war.

If I ran over a cat with my car, would I forget that little "bump" as that cat dies? I would probably remember it for the rest of my life. Can you even imagine what it would be like to have to blow a man's head off? The trauma? Would you forget that? And yet people have to go through this unnatural terror day in and day out.

Fighting in a war is not an accident. If you chose one day of your own free will to go massacre a few cats in the animal shelter because some rich ******* told you to, you'd probably be scarred, but not really undeserving of the scars.

Soldiers are mostly normal people with empathy like you and me. Please have some understanding for the plight of young men and women in such terrible situations.

Even without conscription, in a world full of armaments and danger, armies sadly have to exist unless some kind of idealistic world federation can come into being and end the chaos of "every country" for itself and survival of the fittest. Until that time, which I pray comes one day, armies are necessary to defend us from invasion and attack.

I feel empathy for everybody. Even the "terrorists". I also think they're all idiots. I can feel empathy for a pigeon with a clubbed foot, and I can feel empathy for a soldier. However, I'm not willing to pretend soldiers don't choose their suffering. It's real suffering, sure, but it's suffering they specifically decided to suffer by electing to be fed into the meat grinder of war.

For myself, I subscribe to the concept of a highly organized peace keeping force, which can be borrowed by other countries to protect the innocent whenever possible, or assist in recovering from humanitarian tragedies, but I don't believe in a permanent armed force specifically for the purpose of waging war. When you give those rich ******** a deadly, expensive toy, all they can think about is making an excuse to use it up so they can make a fortune replacing the parts.

If someone punched you in the face, would you defend yourself? If someone tried to rape another person before your eyes, would do you nothing? Why then does that same ethic, which surely you must admit on the individual level, not likewise apply to communities of people?

As I said, if attacked, I would defend myself. If someone near me was attacked, I would defend them. That isn't what war is though. A Bosnian friend told me their war involved angry young men sneaking over the river and murdering and raping a bunch of innocent civilians. Then the angry young men on that side of the river would "retaliate" by doing the same. The angry, young men rarely even bothered trying to kill each other. It was just "retaliate, retaliate, retaliate", and on and on forever. Nobody knew or cared what it was about.

You want to defend your community? Don't put weapons of mass destruction into the hands of idiotic kids. You might get a new ruling elite and they might talk funny, but rich ******** - with a few notable exceptions like Hitler, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Un and Stalin - are basically the same everywhere. You probably won't even notice as far as your day to day life is concerned.

To be honest, I would be happy if you disagreed entirely with this because I sympathise with pacifism and admire conscientious objection, especially if the person even gives up their life rather than take the life of another human being. However, to express no sympathy for the plight of soldiers and to judge them as on a par with sociopathic killers Is just plain distasteful to me.

I am sure it's distasteful to most people, but I judge a person by their actions, not their justification for them. Anybody can justify pretty much any behavior when they feel the need, and killers have their reasons too.

 

[sandandfoam]

So you agree that war was the right move for the Allies, but you are unhappy with the way it was handled?

No, I don't think war is ever the answer.

 

[sandandfoam]

No-one is forced. They are told to enlist, so they enlist. They're told to kill, so they kill.

One of the things that gives me great hope for humanity is that armies find it so hard to train people to kill other people.
I can't remember the stats off the top of my head but the proportion of soldiers in both world wars who would aim high rather than shoot another person is surprisingly high

 

[LuisDantas]

So you agree that war was the right move for the Allies, but you are unhappy with the way it was handled?

Hey, join the crowd. Most everyone thinks they could have done a better job. I think so myself.

The only "right" way to handle a war is to stop it from happening in the first place.

 

[Vouthon]

Like I said, look at Gandhi - the most effective answer to those who would use violence is nonviolent resistance.

I agree that Ghandi's example is the best one for humanity. He renounced violence at all costs as a means to solving disputes and saw passive resistance as the only true "fight back" option. Nonetheless, the British Empire - while founded on exploitation and repression of native countries as with all imperial powers - still had some notion of human dignity. That became apparent with the public outrage after the atrocities committed against the Boers in the South Africa conflict, when Kitchener created camps for civilians that led to malnourishment and lethal typhus outbreaks from overcrowding. The public reaction in Britain was one of horror and a commission was set-up to investigate. It led to the condemnation of what the British had done - from their own people and attempts to do more to shield non-combatants from arbitrary treatment.

Ghandi knew that Britain was concerned with its public image. It tried to present itself as a "good" imperial power (of course there isn't such a thing!). Non-violent protest was an effective means of exposing the injustice of British rule, while at the same time exploiting their Western humanitarian "values" and desire to appear "noble".

The problem with a country like Nazi Germany, when it attempted to create a European Empire by invading Poland in 1939, was that it had surrendered as a society any semblance of a moral system. Unlike Britain, it truly did not care how the rest of the world viewed it because the National Socialist ideology was prefixed around the necessity for "racial warfare" and the elimination of inferior peoples through Germanization.

This is illuminated by Hitler's words to British Foreign Minister Lord Halifax, when the issue of Indian rebellion against imperial rule was brought up during a diplomatic meeting in 1937.

As the historian Michael Burleigh records:

'Shoot Gandhi,' Hitler said, 'and if that does not suffice to reduce them to submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that doesn't suffice, shoot 200 and so on until order is established. You will see how quickly they will collapse as soon as you make it clear that you mean business'.

Halifax looked at Hitler after this with disgust, although he kept quiet about it when in front of the dictator himself.

The British of course did not do this because the UK itself was a democracy fearful for its public image in trying to juggle freedom at home but the denial of it to Indians, but the point is that Hitler actually explicitly said that Gandhi's tactics would not have worked with him and his regime.

What does a passive resistor in Poland do in the face of a man like Hitler?

The Nazi regime had no free press because it was a totalitarian state, so there was no outcry during the Holocaust from the public as there had been from the British during the Boer Wars.

As a totalitarian racialist state, with an ideology founded on war, would passive resistance by foreign peoples have achieved anything? It would have to come from Germans themselves.

This is what Ghandi did not understand. He conflated his struggle against Britain with the Jews under the Nazi Empire:

During World War II, Gandhi penned an open letter to the British people, urging them to surrender to the Nazis. Later, when the extent of the holocaust was known, he criticized Jews who had tried to escape or fight for their lives as they did in Warsaw and Treblinka. “The Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife,” he said. “They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.” “Collective suicide,” he told his biographer, “would have been heroism.”

Do you not see a problem with the above? The Holocaust was a genocide committed by an ideologically motivated regime desiring to eradicate the Jewish people in Europe. Ghandi was resisting an exploitative empire which needed Indians to exist to exploit their labour in the first place and furthermore had a conception of their legal right to exist as human beings. It was motivated by practical concerns for the maintenance of its world power status. The situations are inherently different.

This was a mistake that his fellow Indian nationalist against British rule and friend Jawaharlal Nehru, did not make. Read:

Jawaharlal Nehru (Hindustani: [ˈdʒəʋaːɦərˈlaːl ˈneːɦru] ( listen); 14 November 1889 – 27 May 1964) was the first Prime Minister of India and a central figure in Indian politics for much of the 20th century. He emerged as the paramount leader of the Indian Independence Movement under the tutelage of Mahatma Gandhi and ruled India from its establishment as an independent nation in 1947 until his death in office in 1964.[5] Nehru is considered to be the architect of the modern Indian nation-state; a sovereign, socialist, secular, and democratic republic...

When World war II started, Viceroy Linlithgow had unilaterally declared India a belligerent on the side of the Britain, without consulting the elected Indian representatives. Nehru hurried back from a visit to China, announcing that, in a conflict between democracy and Fascism, "our sympathies must inevitably be on the side of democracy...... I should like India to play its full part and throw all her resources into the struggle for a new order."

Jawaharlal Nehru - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Why were these two men, both so crucial to Indian Independence and committed to passive resistance at home, disagreeing with each other on how to deal with Hitler? Nehru believed that India, despite its passive resistance to British rule, had a moral obligation to support the British war effort against Hitler. Ghandi, on the other hand, wrote a letter to the British people asking them not to resist Hitler in the Battle of Britain when the Luftwaffe tried to gain air superiority over the island and was bombarding the civilian population during the Blitz, so as to invade Britain and occupy it.

In some respects, I think Nehru was simply more of a realist when it came to Nazi Germany and totalitarian regimes.

George Orwell noted this about Ghandi in 1949: "there is reason to think that Gandhi, who after all was born in 1869, did not understand the nature of totalitarianism and saw everything in terms of his own struggle against the British government. ... he believed in "arousing the world," which is only possible if the world gets a chance to hear what you are doing. It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary. Is there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment?"

I think that 20th century Totalitarianism represents a problem for passive resistance as a universally applicable model. Your thoughts?

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

No, I don't think war is ever the answer.

But since you can't come up with any other answer for FDR and Churchill, then I can only see your argument as nonsensical.

You declare that war was not the answer for FDR on 12/8/1941.

But you can't say what FDR should have done instead of declaring war.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

The only "right" way to handle a war is to stop it from happening in the first place.

Governments are always trying to stop wars from happening. Look at Chamberlain. He's the poster boy for failed efforts at appeasement. But the question of the OP is whether 'we believe in war.'

I believe in the necessity of war, despite my yearnings that we stop it from happening in the first place and avoid it at all costs.

How about you? Are you saying that a country should never go to war, no matter the circumstances?

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

No-one is forced. They are told to enlist, so they enlist. They're told to kill, so they kill. That anyone would voluntarily reject their own free will and moral responsibility because of a few stern words, a legal threat or the possibility of imprisonment, is an utterly alien world view to my own.

I'm pretty sure that simply isn't true. My guess is that a young German would be executed if he refused to fight.

Certainly Japanese young men would have been just shot and thrown in a ditch.

 

[AmbiguousGuy]

Why were these two men, both so crucial to Indian Independence and committed to passive resistance at home, disagreeing with each other on how to deal with Hitler? Nehru believed that India, despite its passive resistance to British rule, had a moral obligation to support the British war effort against Hitler. Ghandi, on the other hand, wrote a letter to the British people asking them not to resist Hitler in the Battle of Britain when the Luftwaffe tried to gain air superiority over the island and was bombarding the civilian population during the Blitz, so as to invade Britain and occupy it.

Wow. I didn't know Gandhi had written such a letter. All our heroes have feet of clay, if only we study them closely enough.

Very good message. You sound like an historian.

 

[sandandfoam]

I think that 20th century Totalitarianism represents a problem for passive resistance as a universally applicable model. Your thoughts?

Kurlansky eloquently outlines an argument as to why this is not so in this book Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Modern Library Chronicles): Mark Kurlansky, Dalai Lama: 9780812974478: Amazon.com: Books

I agree that Ghandi's example is the best one for humanity. He renounced violence at all costs as a means to solving disputes and saw passive resistance as the only true "fight back" option.

Not so, nonviolence as advocated by Gandhi, Badshah Khan and others is active, not passive.

Nonetheless, the British Empire - while founded on exploitation and repression of native countries as with all imperial powers - still had some notion of human dignity

I'm not sure I agree - Qissa Khwani Bazaar massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[LuisDantas]

I'm pretty sure that simply isn't true. My guess is that a young German would be executed if he refused to fight.

Certainly Japanese young men would have been just shot and thrown in a ditch.

I take that bet.

For better or worse, things simply aren't quite that simple.

Edited to add: the crux of the matter is that far too often we let our cultures rely on dehumanization of our supposed "foes", be they British, Nazis, Fascists, Japanese, Iranians, Jews, Muslims or whatever. It seems that it has even become accepted military practice to flat out state that "foreign" lives are not worth as much as "our troops'".

That mentality must be destroyed, for it is bloody, shameful, and honorless.

 

[Vouthon]

Kurlansky eloquently outlines an argument as to why this is not so in this book Nonviolence: The History of a Dangerous Idea (Modern Library Chronicles): Mark Kurlansky, Dalai Lama: 9780812974478: Amazon.com: Books


Not so, nonviolence as advocated by Gandhi, Badshah Khan and others is active, not passive.


I'm not sure I agree - Qissa Khwani Bazaar massacre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thanks Sand, I will read your links and buy the book so as to ponder this :bow:

I would agree that peaceful resistance is actually "active", in the sense of "actively" but non-violently disrupting an unjust system, such as the bus boycott in America in the 1950s. By 'passive' I'm merely using the common name for it.

My point about Britain in 1939 was not that it could not be guilty of human rights abuses then and in its imperial past but rather that there was a grave difference between it and German society at the time, which had abandoned not only democracy but any semblance of human dignity.

How could Jews have adopted peaceful resistance to the orchestration of the Holocaust, effectively? Any passive resistance from them would have been futile, since the Nazi regime simply wanted to annihilate the population and would not be coerced, unlike Britain, with damage to its public image or internal outrage from the public in a heavily censored press.

 

[sandandfoam]

But since you can't come up with any other answer for FDR and Churchill, then I can only see your argument as nonsensical.

You declare that war was not the answer for FDR on 12/8/1941.

But you can't say what FDR should have done instead of declaring war.

Hold on a second - The war 'answer' of FDR and Churchill contributed in large part to a conflict in which 50 or 60 million people died. It is taken as gospel by many that this was a just war and it was unquestionably right.

I am saying that any decision which contributed to the deaths of 50 million or more people was a bad one.
Flying aeroplanes into buildings is a bad idea, war is a bad idea - the alternative is non-violence. The exact historical details of how FDR might have non-violently resisted Japan are beyond my capacities. My argument is one of principle. Churchill might have considered his options and come up with something better than war.
There are always options.

 

[Vouthon]

I take that bet.

For better or worse, things simply aren't quite that simple.

Yes, that is precisely my point. I am not certain that absolutes are useful when dealing with the shades of grey in human nature and actions.

 

[sandandfoam]

Thanks Sand, I will read your links and buy the book so as to ponder this :bow:

How could Jews have adopted peaceful resistance to the orchestration of the Holocaust, effectively? Any resistance from them would have been futile, since the Nazi regime simply wanted to annihilate the population and would not be coerced, unlike Britain, with damage to its public image or internal outrage from the public in a heavily censored press.

I'll look forward to discussing the book with you so

Re the Jewish people I just had a quick flick through said book in which the author makes the point that more Jewish people survived via non violent resistance in Denmark than in other places such as Poland where resistance was violent.

Another crucial point is that if the USA, Britain and other countries had accepted more Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism far less people would have been murdered.

 

[Vouthon]

I am saying that any decision which contributed to the deaths of 50 million or more people was a bad one.

On that, I cannot possibly disagree with you. War is inherently unjust and there is no such a thing as a "good war", as some Americans crassly called WW2, especially if it causes such a torrent of death and destruction on a worldwide scale. Nevertheless there can be "just" causes for armed response to aggression, just as their can be just causes for personal self-defence of bodily integrity and property. However the consequences of the action must also be taken into regard and the consequences of W2 were indeed catastrophic. However hindsight is a great gift but also deceiving; not everything is foreseeable to the actor. Whether "armed response" is the wisest option is certainly debateable but I think it is difficult to argue, as Alceste does, that it cannot be justified under any circumstances at least in theory.

 

[Alceste]

One of the things that gives me great hope for humanity is that armies find it so hard to train people to kill other people.
I can't remember the stats off the top of my head but the proportion of soldiers in both world wars who would aim high rather than shoot another person is surprisingly high

I agree, that was heartening, but it was mostly the case in WW1, which was the last battle that relied almost entirely on untrained, entrenched conscripts shooting at other fighting men - people exactly like themselves. New techniques of war and military training ensure that there is little risk of the soldiers doing the killing feeling too much empathy for their largely civilian victims. Why shoot another young man and be haunted when you can torch an entire city from the sky?