 ouyangwulong says: Yes. Even though I'm a Buddhist. As a pacifist, of course, I believe that killing can never be morally justified, and even while it can be necessitated, we still will suffer the moral consequences of life-taking. However, I would be willing to accept those serious moral consequences for myself in the scenario of stopping the Holocaust. What disturbs me about WWII is that it never would have happened simply to end the Holocaust. In fact, I suspect many allied politicians were sympathetic to Hitler in general, and specifically anti-semetic. Think Lucky Lindy. Could it have been averted? Yes, by not creating a belt of failed states. It wasn't the harshness so much as the indifference, as Germany and Eastern Europe spiraled out of control, despotism was bound to take hold. Irresponsibility made the crimes of the Nazis possible, and now those like Buchanan advocate to even greater global irresponsibility. I should note, although the Holocaust is the centerpiece of the after-the-fact justification of WWII, stopping genocide has been a historically unpopular reason for going to war. Most of the time, people may go so far as to protest, but the systematic extermination of a group of people based on their ethnicity or race has rarely stirred a nation to war. Thus it seems somewhat insincere that many jingoists argue that their actions during WWII are justified by ending the Holocaust, since I have no reason to believe that was a goal of theirs during the war. On Churchill's behalf, he might not be as diabolical as his isolationist American detractors. I believe Churchill would have gone to war ... I doubt that the British Empire would have survived even if Britain had accepted peace with Hitler (and some how Hitler had chosen to coexist with the British Empire). Well, and that opens up another can of worms... Why does Buchanan (and some others) presume that the British Empire surviving would be a positive thing? Further more, what makes the case that the West should control the world? Do we simply take that for granted? And even more fundamentally, how come in his world view East and West merely spans from white people in England to white people in Russia? No matter how he tries to dress it up, Buchanan is an isolationist, with selfishness and xenophobia at the core of his ideology. We should just remember that the same ideology that is behind Buchanan's support for a border fence to keep out Mexicans is also behind his unsettling conviction that WWII was a war we shouldn't have fought. My thoughts are similar: "How the West lost the world" is a repulsive, arrogant thought. More appropriate might be "How the West was forced to return stolen goods." Zinn has argued (I think it was Zinn) that the Nazis lost the war on the Eastern front, and that they would never again have dominant power, regardless of US action. One word "Eurocentrism" or the idea that Europe is the center of the world and must dominate. It has in one form or another for the past 500 years, but now that power is fading, in part because former Imperial servants are using the very global political and technological structures created by "Western" cultures to dominate the planet against them. All Empires fall since they are based on the constant and predatory acquisitions of wealth. Eventually Cost-Benefit curve reverses and it cost more to keep what you have than whatever you gain by conquest.[url=http://blip.tv/file/339... LOL, what a question. Intriguing analogy, ratilfar - I stood beside Hadrian's wall once, and the tangible sense of vanished empire was haunting. |
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