“War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it” (William Tecumseh Sherman)
I personally am a pacifist at heart. I hate the concept of war and violence for any reason. I recognize that there are times in human history that people of conscience and decent governments must stand up to violence. World War II, unlike World War I, has long been considered one of the few fully justifiable wars in history. It was justifiable from the Allied perspective.
The Allies certainly were justifiable in standing up against Nazis and Fascists. Nazi atrocities are well known, but the Allied militaries and governments committed their own atrocities during the war. American internment camps for Japanese Americans dimmed the beacon of light of American democracy. The Allied governments ignored or, at least, did not react decisively enough to stop the Holocaust. That is hindsight analysis. In the moment, the Allied governments and their militaries were focused on defeating the Nazis. In Europe, Allied bombers leveled Hamburg and Dresden at times when it seemed such destruction, especially with regard to civilians and civilian infrastructure, was unnecessary. In Japan, it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki that paid the price of war.
I am not trying to justify Allied atrocities. It is a simple fact of war that military strategists focus their attention on operational efficiency and effectiveness. If we try to sanitize war to make it anything but atrocious, we doom ourselves to endless war. I am an old Star Trek original series fan. One of the best episodes is “A Taste of Armageddon.” In this episode the Enterprise visits a solar system with two planets that have been at war for hundreds of years. Their war is theoretical, however, and not fought with bombs, guns, and missiles. Computers fight theoretical battles and calculate the casualties on each planet. The victims then report dutifully to suicide chambers, but the civilizations go on without charred buildings or cratered highways. Everything was neat, clean, and pretty, which is why the war had gone on for hundreds of years.
Again, I am not trying to advocate for more violent war. I am trying to advocate for no war. When people get whipped up into a xenophobic or ideological frenzy and rush to war, they think that their glorious armies will put the war on their enemy’s ground and keep the atrocities there. If they had to think that they might suffer the same fate as their enemies, they might not beat the drums so loudly.
That is what the Nazis promised Germany in the 1930s. In the early days of the war, the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe put the war on the soil of its enemies and kept it there for several years. That gave Germans a false sense of security and fueled their xenophobia. German atrocities in Poland, France, the Low Countries, Greece, and the Soviet Union grew more and more outrageous as the myth of German invincibility grew.
Germany was not invincible. When the Luftwaffe could no longer fend off Allied bombers and whole armies of the Wehrmacht were swallowed up at places like North Africa and Stalingrad, Germans were gob smacked. They couldn’t understand why Allied militaries were destroying their homes, schools, and hospitals. They simply could not believe that Hitler had lied to them, and they conveniently forgot that they had built the bombs, tanks, planes, and shells that had leveled much of London.
I am an historian first. I look at modern wars and international diplomacy through the glasses of millennia. Whether it was Greeks leveling Troy or Allied bombers leveling Dresden, war is indeed hell. People who start wars rarely consider the consequences of their actions. People like Vladimir Putin might think they and their armies are invincible, but they are not. His day of reckoning is coming, and it will be all of Russia that will have to pay the price for his atrocities.
The fundamental problem is that our international system doesn’t work. The United Nations and World Court have little enforcement capability. We can charge Putin and his cronies with all sorts of war crimes, but how is that going to be enforced? We can have all the treaties we can negotiate that respect the boundaries of defenseless populations, but who exactly is going to stop a future Putin (or Putin in the future) from violating those boundaries? It is unreasonable to think that one country, such as the United States, can act as the defender and gendarme of the world.
The United Nations charter is the logical place for a solution. It should be revised to make the organization an alliance of enforcement. This could only work if the UN gets rid of the Security Council veto. Then, when a member state wantonly invades another member state, that rogue state would have to answer to the rest of the world. The goal should be not to make war more humane, but to make war illegal. Humanity has a long way to go to get to this point. I hope we make it.
The Allies certainly were justifiable in standing up against Nazis and Fascists. Nazi atrocities are well known, but the Allied militaries and governments committed their own atrocities during the war. American internment camps for Japanese Americans dimmed the beacon of light of American democracy. The Allied governments ignored or, at least, did not react decisively enough to stop the Holocaust. That is hindsight analysis. In the moment, the Allied governments and their militaries were focused on defeating the Nazis. In Europe, Allied bombers leveled Hamburg and Dresden at times when it seemed such destruction, especially with regard to civilians and civilian infrastructure, was unnecessary. In Japan, it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki that paid the price of war.
I am not trying to justify Allied atrocities. It is a simple fact of war that military strategists focus their attention on operational efficiency and effectiveness. If we try to sanitize war to make it anything but atrocious, we doom ourselves to endless war. I am an old Star Trek original series fan. One of the best episodes is “A Taste of Armageddon.” In this episode the Enterprise visits a solar system with two planets that have been at war for hundreds of years. Their war is theoretical, however, and not fought with bombs, guns, and missiles. Computers fight theoretical battles and calculate the casualties on each planet. The victims then report dutifully to suicide chambers, but the civilizations go on without charred buildings or cratered highways. Everything was neat, clean, and pretty, which is why the war had gone on for hundreds of years.
Again, I am not trying to advocate for more violent war. I am trying to advocate for no war. When people get whipped up into a xenophobic or ideological frenzy and rush to war, they think that their glorious armies will put the war on their enemy’s ground and keep the atrocities there. If they had to think that they might suffer the same fate as their enemies, they might not beat the drums so loudly.
That is what the Nazis promised Germany in the 1930s. In the early days of the war, the German Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe put the war on the soil of its enemies and kept it there for several years. That gave Germans a false sense of security and fueled their xenophobia. German atrocities in Poland, France, the Low Countries, Greece, and the Soviet Union grew more and more outrageous as the myth of German invincibility grew.
Germany was not invincible. When the Luftwaffe could no longer fend off Allied bombers and whole armies of the Wehrmacht were swallowed up at places like North Africa and Stalingrad, Germans were gob smacked. They couldn’t understand why Allied militaries were destroying their homes, schools, and hospitals. They simply could not believe that Hitler had lied to them, and they conveniently forgot that they had built the bombs, tanks, planes, and shells that had leveled much of London.
I am an historian first. I look at modern wars and international diplomacy through the glasses of millennia. Whether it was Greeks leveling Troy or Allied bombers leveling Dresden, war is indeed hell. People who start wars rarely consider the consequences of their actions. People like Vladimir Putin might think they and their armies are invincible, but they are not. His day of reckoning is coming, and it will be all of Russia that will have to pay the price for his atrocities.
The fundamental problem is that our international system doesn’t work. The United Nations and World Court have little enforcement capability. We can charge Putin and his cronies with all sorts of war crimes, but how is that going to be enforced? We can have all the treaties we can negotiate that respect the boundaries of defenseless populations, but who exactly is going to stop a future Putin (or Putin in the future) from violating those boundaries? It is unreasonable to think that one country, such as the United States, can act as the defender and gendarme of the world.
The United Nations charter is the logical place for a solution. It should be revised to make the organization an alliance of enforcement. This could only work if the UN gets rid of the Security Council veto. Then, when a member state wantonly invades another member state, that rogue state would have to answer to the rest of the world. The goal should be not to make war more humane, but to make war illegal. Humanity has a long way to go to get to this point. I hope we make it.
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