Subscribe"Was it ‘‘a noble crusade’’? For the liberation of western Europe, maybe so. Was it a just war? That tricky theological concept has to be weighed against very many injustices. Was it a good war? The phrase itself is dubious. No, there are no good wars, but there are necessary wars, and this was surely one."As for the attitudes of the Allies - how can they complain moral superiority when they proceeded to use those methods after the war?
"Within a decade of British troops liberating Belsen, they were running their own concentration camps in Kenya to crush the Mau Mau. The Gestapo's torture techniques were borrowed by the French in Algeria, and then disseminated by the Americans to Latin American dictatorships in the 60s and 70s. We see their extension today in the American camps in Cuba and Diego Garcia."I have to say that, as bad as it is, 10,000 rapes did sound like a low number. Probably it is because I have been reading about Nanjing and the war in China recently, and know about the Red Army coming into Germany. Certainly it reflects that the Allies were failable humans - it was not systematic rape, but neither was there no violence against civilians, and to deny it would be to deny truth and have only whitewashed history.
Defeating Hitler was necessary...Bombing Dresden was not. Bombing the hell out of Vichy France was not. Placing Japanese-Americans in internment camps was not."Good" and "just" are not words that apply to wars, though "necessary" might be. How much does one evil outweigh another evil? You can never know - the decision to go to war, I would hope, would always be a difficult one, taken in great sorrow and regret, though sometimes it must be taken.
Stinnett rests his argument that Roosevelt wanted to provoke the Japanese into firing the first shot on a memorandum that he says he found in McCollum's personnel file. Dated October 7, 1940, and addressed to Anderson, at the time director of naval intelligence, and Dudley W. Knox, chief of the ONIlibrary, it "suggested" giving all possible aid to China and embargoing "all trade with Japan," among other proposals. "If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better," McCollum wrote. Stinnett does not mention or seem to realize that McCollum's points about aid to China and the embargo of Japan reflected longstanding American policies in support of China and opposition to Japan's aggression and fascism. Stinnett admits that he has no record of Roosevelt's having seen McCollum's document, but says that the fact that its eight points were put into effect—as most of them were—proves that Roosevelt did see it and follow it. But it is much more likely that McCollum was following national policy and adding his own view on the risk of war than that Roosevelt was taking guidance on American policy from a mid-level Navy officer.
Any history of WWII written before the 1970s will completely ommit the Enigma decrypt. Any history of the Cold War writen before the 90s will ommit the Venona code break. We're learning more about these periods every day as sources are declassified and the best histories of both of them are yet to be written. Sources from right after the war are interesting reading, but give you only a tiny part of the picture. Conversely, good histories written today will take into account the experiences of a very large number of eye-wittnesses, because the professional historian who wrote it will have already read all the relevant books for you.About books versus articles - I was especially thinking of fields that are changing very rapidly (late Cold War, for instance, which is just being declassified) - my own field (c.1500-1800) is much slower (there was a big shift in theory and methodology, though, circa 1970, which may be why I fixed on that date). I don't know if it's possible for the general public to always be absolutely up to date - few professional historians are outside of their niche fields. One way might be to watch the university presses - or to look for historian's publications on university webpages. Those books will be available from Amazon. If you live near a university library, it might be worth it to find out if they allow private researchers to pay for borrowing priviledges.
Today, standing at the end rather than the beginning of this half-century, some of us see certain fundamental elements on which we suspect that American security has rested. We can see that our security has been dependent throughout much of our history on the position of Britain; that Canada, in particular, has been a useful and indispensable hostage to good relations between our country and British Empire; and that Britain's position, in turn, has depended on the maintenance of a balance of power on the European Continent. Thus it was essential to us, as it was to Britain, that no single Continental land power should come to dominate the entire Eurasian land mass. Our interest has lain rather in the maintenance of some sort of stable balance among the powers of the interior, in order that none of them should effect the subjugation of the others, conquer the seafaring fringes of the land mass, become a great sea power as well as land power, shatter the position of England, and enter—as in these circumstances it certainly would—on an overseas expansion hostile to ourselves and supported by the immense resources of the interior of Europe and Asia.Also see sections 1 and 2 of the McCollum memo, describing the situation as it was seen in October 1940.
... As a result of this policy, Germany and Italy have lately concluded a military alliance with Japan directed against the United States. If the published terms of this treaty and the pointed utterances of German, Italian and Japanese leaders can be believed, and there seems no ground on which to doubt either, the three totalitarian powers agree to make war on the United States, should she come to the assistance of England, or should she attempt to forcibly interfere with Japan's aims in the Orient and, furthermore, Germany and Italy expressly reserve the right to determine whether American aid to Britain, short of war, is a cause for war or not after they have succeeded in defeating England. In other words, after England has been disposed of her enemies will decide whether or not to immediately proceed with an attack on the United States.I'm afraid I'd have to say that Chomsky isn't a mainstream historian. (He's more like a radical-left activist; my advice to anyone reading Chomsky is to check his references very carefully.)
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posted by ericb at 9:58 AM on May 11, 2005