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WW2 military responce justified?
Hey there people 
.
I have always said that in my eyes the responce from the ALLIES in WW2 was justified and one of the only wars that was needed as there was a real threat to freedom and mankind as a whole and the terrible things that were occuring in occupied europe needed to be stopped. Only this year being interested in Buddhissm, I wonder if you guys agree that violence in return to bring hitler down was justified and DDAY through to the end was needed. If the core motive SIMPLY was to ensure freedom for people and stop the suffering of those under occupation. Lets not get into an argument about how it wasnt simply about those things and say if it was occuring now and the allied leaders were all Buddhist and this was 1940 after France had fell.
I don't think peaceful negotiation with Hitler would be possible althought it could be pursued but just like occured in real, his demands would grow and grow. The fire bombings of german cities etc should not have been done but what about actual military action such as bombing the ruhr where production of german tanks occured and on the ground combat. Looking back at the conflict, it is obvious that many people still suffer from the effects but most germans being 1/4 german myself understand the removal of hitler was necessary. It would be obvious straight away that the average german soldier was simply doing his job and much of the german population for instance were told Poland attacked germany. Compassion would be needed but the simple fact is, fighting surly would of been needed?
Love to hear your thoughts on this one
Chris
.I have always said that in my eyes the responce from the ALLIES in WW2 was justified and one of the only wars that was needed as there was a real threat to freedom and mankind as a whole and the terrible things that were occuring in occupied europe needed to be stopped. Only this year being interested in Buddhissm, I wonder if you guys agree that violence in return to bring hitler down was justified and DDAY through to the end was needed. If the core motive SIMPLY was to ensure freedom for people and stop the suffering of those under occupation. Lets not get into an argument about how it wasnt simply about those things and say if it was occuring now and the allied leaders were all Buddhist and this was 1940 after France had fell.
I don't think peaceful negotiation with Hitler would be possible althought it could be pursued but just like occured in real, his demands would grow and grow. The fire bombings of german cities etc should not have been done but what about actual military action such as bombing the ruhr where production of german tanks occured and on the ground combat. Looking back at the conflict, it is obvious that many people still suffer from the effects but most germans being 1/4 german myself understand the removal of hitler was necessary. It would be obvious straight away that the average german soldier was simply doing his job and much of the german population for instance were told Poland attacked germany. Compassion would be needed but the simple fact is, fighting surly would of been needed?
Love to hear your thoughts on this one
Chris
0
Comments
If your land is taken by force and people around you are being murdered, you have a responsibility to fight back.
The debate really here though is what would of been acceptable and what would of not, the scale of what Hitler had done and the fanatical Nazis needed to be stopped and I think the cycle of violence occuring here does not matter as there was no excuse or valid demands for what Germany was doing. In other conflicts though, if you have people murdered, simply responding with murder is not the solution at all.
Huh? What history have you read? I think the tens of thousands of guys who died on the western European front between June 1944 and May 1945 might beg to differ with you.
The Soviets made excellent progress from the east, but even Stalin admitted that they could not have defeated Germany alone most likely.
Anyway, the war was what it was. It played itself out, people were liberated, the murder and atrocity scaled down dramatically.
I think what you're trying to get at is some kind of fairness. If you call lashing out in retaliation fairness then it was. Some of the retaliation did serve to restore a 'balance' in some perverse way but many acts were not called for and did not create any fairness. It was simply one cruel blow for another with some unrelated party bearing the brunt.
But we also have to remember the more personal accounts. If you have not already done so you may perhaps want to check out 'letters from iwo jima' (the book, NOT the film) Consider resistance movements such as the Bielski brothers that managed to save hundreds of lives and created a small functional community in the process.
I don't want to get into a huge thing about it, but I find your initial comment highly disrespectful to all those who participated and the enormous sacrifices they made. And I think you'd have a *really* hard time finding any student of military history (of which I consider myself one) who would agree with you on that, I don't care where they come from.
I don't think Buddha ever suggested we roll over and let ourselves be slaughtered in the face of invasion.
I edited the post for you.
"Kathavatthu Sutta: Topics of Conversation (1)" (AN 10.69), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu. Access to Insight, July 4, 2010, http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an10/an10.069.than.html
Another good book on this topic is Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. It is a kind of history of the lead up to WWII, told from the perspective of the pacifists who resisted it. It ends with the following text:
"I dedicate this book to the memory of Clarence Pickett and other American and British pacifists. They've never really gotten their due. They tried to save Jewish refugees, feed Europe, reconcile the United States and Japan, and stop the war from happening. They failed, but they were right."
To anyone who thinks bringing these kinds of questions up is "disrespectful" of people who fought in the war: Shutting down dissent with such a blatantly false dichotomy is disrespectful to the human capacity for critical thought. Such rhetoric blinded US citizens to the folly they were agreeing to as they submitted to the prosecution of the Iraq war.
I'm uncertain whether this is entirely accurate but I think it captures the gist of the situation and adds a little credibility to Fivebells post.
....Pardon....?
Given that America only entered the 2nd world war 2 years in, because they took distinct umbrage at a little spot of bother from the Japanese, I don't feel any American is at all justified in putting forward any hypothetical comment on the whys and wherefores on who did what when and how, in Europe, two years earlier.
She said. :poke:
Hurling the cat amongst the pigeons....:hiding:
Besides, when you consider the upbringing Hitler had, I think his parents should have been shot. That would have saved Europe ans awful lot of trouble.
Both of the authors I cited are American, but they were not motivated by anti-British sentiment. Both books are a reaction to the Churchillian doctrine and rhetoric used to justify America's disastrous occupation of Iraq. They want to show the bankruptcy of that doctrine, and how it bankrupted Britain.
Neither book has positive things to say about America's conduct in the war. Despite Pearl Harbor, the Pacific theater was essentially a war of choice for America, in as much as the US oil embargo on Japan presented the Japanese with a dilemma between drastically scaling back their empire or taking the oil from somewhere by force. A pre-emptive attack from Japan was a predictable outcome of this policy. In fact, as Britain scaled back its own navy, it initially cooperated with Japan's navy to enforce British Imperial interests in the Pacific. This relationship ended because America pressured Britain to back out of it. It wanted dominance of the Pacific to itself, and it wanted Japan isolated for this reason.
Both books make it clear that America made out like a bandit from its involvement in WWII. Britain only finished paying back the WWII loans it took from the US this century. Pacifists at the time predicted the windfall the US would make from WWII.
Here are some perceptions... ...not a coherent historical theory, just some perceptions.
- Pearl harbour wasn't just "a little spot of trouble" and from what I understand, conflict was brewing for a while.
-I may have distorted perception being half Jewish, and hearing the stories first hand. The means of extermination and the bureaucracy involved was uniquely horrific, and had to stopped at any cost. I have read that mass extermination began with the mentally handicapped. There were kids with Downs Syndrome being herded into death chambers. Having said this, that is not why the Nazis were stopped. It was only after the war that the cause of stopping the persecution of unlikable people was invoked.
-The Third Reich can be seen in different ways and I also can't help having an Art history lens that looks at their notions of Truth and Beauty as evidenced in their Arts. Their views on "Degenerate Art" and their vision of a corrected world, was uniquely appalling and dangerous to human creative spirit.
-The Soviet project was doomed to fail from the start because it had a false vitality. The Nazis had real ancient vitality, and looked like a mechanized throwback to ancient war. They wanted blood and could have gone on for a long time, but not a thousand years
The accelerated processing of Jews, was just that accelerated. My guess is that if Britain did not go to war with Germany, it would eventually have been given the choice between an alliance based on an acceptable racial affinity, or war, anyway. If they did not go to war the Nazis would would have thrown all their resources into the east and may very well have establish their living space by enslaving or killing all of its inhabitants.
....I can't see how war could have been avoided.
-The second world war is the spanner in the works in terms of pacifism. It would have been immoral to not fight the Nazis.
-The Allies committed war crimes, clearly.
You can make a pretty strong case that the root cause of WWII was imperialism. In the Pacific theater, it's very clear, and the tendency for Germany to be treated as a client nation by the victors of WWI played an immense role in destabilizing civil society. Certainly the initial British strategy of trying to bomb and starve the Germans into submission had its roots in methods developed when suppressing colonized peoples.
Mein Kampf makes it clear that Nazism was a hateful regime and that many vulnerable people were bound to get it in the neck when Hitler achieved control of the German government. Certainly tens of thousands of people were going to die as a result. However, the wholesale systematic extermination of Jewish people wasn't even considered until the British blockade began to seriously degrade Germany's ability to support its citizens. There were Nazi plans to move Jewish people wholesale to Madagascar, and there were negotiations between Nazis and Zionists to train Jews in preparation for moving them to Palestine. These plans were still ethnic cleansing, still abhorrent, and still bound to lead to tremendous suffering and loss of life. But they pale in comparison to what actually happened.
You're right. In fact, throughout the war, the British were turning back ships carrying Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe to Palestine. I believe there was even a rumor that they sunk one such ship. They were more interested in maintaining smooth relations with the Arabs, to ease the extraction of oil from the Middle East. And Roosevelt was pretty clearly an anti-Semite, or at least beholden to anti-Semitic interests. (That story so flabbergasted me that I looked up Morgenthau's memoirs about it. Roosevelt told the story in the context of explaining to Morgenthau that he wasn't going to increase the Jewish immigration quota despite the crisis in Europe, because to do so might be invidious for other races.)
The Russian defense strategy was sound, and devastating to the Germans: give them nothing on the land they take, attenuate their supply lines, and wait for Winter. Without the Western front, it would have gone on a lot longer, and hurt Russia a lot worse, but we wouldn't have wound up with the Eastern Bloc. We wouldn't have wound up with decades of risk of nuclear annihilation from a conflict between the US and the USSR. And enslavement under the USSR doesn't seem much different from enslavement under the Nazis.
The US and Britain had the option of supporting Russia with logistics and material, at far less cost to themselves. They could have played the two tyrannies off against each other for years, until they were completely played out. But you don't get to look like a big man doing things like that...
And I don't agree that Hitler initially had designs to the West of Germany. When he remilitarized the Rhineland, he built defensive fortresses, not means of invasion.
It would have been immoral to do nothing to help those vulnerable to the Nazis to escape (exactly what happened. In fact, attempts to escape were actively impeded by the Allies.) It would have been immoral to give aid and comfort to one of the worst tyrannies in history (exactly what happened: the USSR was one of the big winners of the war.) Both these immoral outcomes could have been avoided without military involvement by the US or Britain.
Yes. No colonialism, no war, by the looks of it. But the Colonial Cause seems overplayed. This not a denial, just a question, around causes. What problem wasn't caused by colonialism? And with whom does the buck stop?
All I can say is that this is a very different history than what have been taught. The extermination was not just considered ,but an article of faith. The Jews were vermin, the Nazi vision was global ( cosmic in some minds), and they, along with homosexuals, the genetically corrupt, and others were excluded from the Nazi vision of bright clean world. It does bother me when history is up in the air, not because our assumptions shouldn't be questioned, but because history is then a function of ideology. ...but then maybe it is anyway.
...except enslavement under the Nazis would be race based. Which IMO would have been more vicious
That is a gruesome scenario though.
I don't know Hitlers long term plans and strategies, but the Nazi vision was global in the long run, like any superpower.
I agree, if your assertion that the Nazi's would not have engaged in mass killing of "inferior" people is true. I don't belive it is true. Nazi Ideology was pernicious. The Soviets for all their crimes (along with their deluded supporters in the west) had at least the germ of a notion that was not beyond redemption.
But. I'm no historian, my limited knowledge has accumulated over time from any number of sources.
In other words, if the world went to war against Nazi Germany (and Hitler saw Jews behind the decisions of opposing nations) he would exterminate them.
Considering Hitler's original plan was to conquer the Soviet Union, he knew his actions would lead, inevitably, to war. Blaming this inevitability on the Jews was part of the plan from the very beginning. Sending Jews to Madagascar was one of the options I heard about, before they came up with the camps idea, of course that was also a death sentence as the plan was simply to dump them on the beach with no food, water, shelter or medical supplies. Some might have survived, most wouldn't.
Either way the cause of the Holocaust was not the war method of the Allies, it was planned from the beginning.
And your position just doesn't match up with the chronology of what happened. Forced emigration of Jews was the policy up until the Wannsee Conference, and plans for a policy of systematically murdering Jewish people weren't requested by Goering until the Summer of 1941, when the war was well underway.
I don't understand this? I am english for one unless I am misunderstand your comment.
Chris
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No matter how much you'd like to believe it, Great Britain and the Allies weren't responsible for the Holocaust, the Nazi's were. Trying to spin it to make Hitler look like he wasn't responsible, that we forced him into it, is simply re-writing history.