Carville: Wake up Democrats; you could lose

[Sea Skimmer]

Alright, thanks for the correction/addendum.

You know the extra strange thing is, even taking the attack at face value, ignoring superior American forces and whatever, Ichiki still just had a really stupid plan even by the standards of the IJA. Attacking directly along the coastline meant that his force had no room to maneuver on one flank, and it was the opposite of normal Japanese jungle fighting methods. Those were mainly, always attempt to outflank the enemy. Ichiki in fact had simply not expected American forces on the river, nor did he conduct any sort of reconnaissance that might have told him this and allowed him to find a different route for his tanks. He just rushed forward, found Americans, and then rushed directly at them by the shortest, most open route possible across the sandpit. Then Americans outflanked him and obliterated his command. Amazingly incompetent. I'd love to know more about what he did in China; he was assigned to the Midway landing in-between, a direct frontal assault on a heavily fortified position and I can't help but wonder if this was actually a move by his superiors to get him killed in action. The Japanese did underestimate the size of the garrison considerably but not to the point that they would have had any numerical advantage.

[Grumman]

If everyone was a pacifist there wouldn't be any need to try to avoid wars, would there?

True, but you don't need to go all the way to pacifism for that to be true. If everyone only fought in self defence, or if everyone only fought to protect the innocent and did not wage aggressive wars then you'd still have no need to try to avoid wars, because nobody would throw the first punch.

[Junghalli]

The tendency of the antiwar left to do this makes it a lot hard to get rid of active, aggressive, militarism. Because if I'm arguing against the Iraq War, I don't want someone who talks like D-13 or Bakustra on my side. They will fail to convince normal people. They will sound like self-righteous twits, because they're so busy establishing their holier-than-thou cred that they totally ignore basic facts and logic about the situations they're talking about.

On the other hand...

I touched on this earlier in the thread, but I have this niggling suspicion that the WWII popular history, the heroic myth if you would, has a really toxic influence on our culture's discourses about war. It just seems at once so big in our cultural memory and imagination and so convenient to militaristic narratives of saturday morning cartoon morality where you safeguard and make the world better by kicking the asses of villains with force.

If there's any truth to this deconstructing that myth might be rather significant to the project of making the culture less war-friendly.

True, but you don't need to go all the way to pacifism for that to be true. If everyone only fought in self defence, or if everyone only fought to protect the innocent and did not wage aggressive wars then you'd still have no need to try to avoid wars, because nobody would throw the first punch.

True.

I think D13's position is actually closer to the latter (only fight in self-defense), I remember him saying earlier in the thread that he was OK with killing in self-defense and his real problem is with pre-emptive aggression.

[Zinegata]

Isn't the first responsibility of a government to its own citizens, not foreigners?

Here's the thing however - securing a nation's economic prosperity and security should be the primary goal of any nation. It is the correct premise.

The problem is that Japan in the 1920s/30s lost sight of this. They instead became obsessed with the idea that to achieve economic prosperity, you need to dominate your neighbors, until "dominating your neighbors" became their premise instead of achieving economic prosperity.

Really, Japan's reaction to Chinese resistance wasn't to pull back and rethink its strategy. Japan instead decided to keep pouring more men and resources into China, and when that didn't work they started using biological and chemical weapons. And when the atrocities resulted in Japan losing its biggest supplier of war materials (via the US embargo), again rather than rethink their strategy they simply doubled down again and fought America.

Saying that a government's first responsibility is to its own citizens is thus a useless statement in this context, because Japan had simply gotten to the point that it no longer saw its first responsibility as keeping its own citizens prosperous and secure (why else would they go to war against the US knowing that their merchant fleet was totally inadequate to meet their needs?); and instead saw its first responsibility as "winning" in China.

I don't remember us going to war with Belgium over the stuff that was happening in the Congo Free State. Should we have?

Actually, there was widespread condemnation of the Belgian king's actions in the Congo Free State.

There wasn't a war, but the United States didn't go to war against Japan either. Instead, it was Japan who attacked the United States because the latter had the temerity to tell Japan to stop being a giant asshole.

So this is a pretty invalid comparison, and relies on (wrongly) painting the US as the aggressor during the Pacific War.

Moreover, the US has always had a pretty strong anti-imperialism bent in its politics. This is why the US eventually decided to give up the Philippines.

[Junghalli]

Saying that a government's first responsibility is to its own citizens is thus a useless statement in this context, because Japan had simply gotten to the point that it no longer saw its first responsibility as keeping its own citizens prosperous and secure

That might have something to do with the fact that "this context" is a tangent you went into that has little to do with what I was saying.

Simon Jester was talking about how if somebody didn't intervene the Japanese would continue to kill and mistreat Chinese. My point was that the first responsibility of the US government is to its own citizens (who would die in an attempt to help the Chinese by military force) and not to the Chinese (who would die by lack of intervention). So the question of "is it OK with you that the Japanese continue to kill Chinese if you don't do anything?" can be answered by saying it's legitimate for a state to consider bad things happening to foreigners not worth getting their own citizens killed over, and indeed they do so (hence my example of the Congo Free State).

[Zinegata]

Simon Jester was talking about how if somebody didn't intervene the Japanese would continue to kill and mistreat Chinese. My point was that the first responsibility of the US government is to its own citizens (who would die in an attempt to help the Chinese by military force) and not to the Chinese (who would die by lack of intervention).

Except of course I did address this - because the United States did not, in fact, send troops to attack the Japanese to save the Chinese (a few patrol boat incidents notwithstanding - but they were mainly out to save American citizens trapped in China).

Instead, the US sent letters of condemnation, followed by an embargo of strategic war materials. Neither of this really threatened the life of US citizens. It was the Japanese who chose to initiate aggression by attacking the US.

I am instead showing that the only people who lost sight of serving its own citizens is Japan and not the United States; making your question silly. The premise is wrong. The United States was not risking the prosperity and security of its people at all; it was Japan which failed to hold true to this goal because it became obsessed with defeating China.

The right question is this: Why was Japan continually risking the lives of its own citizens to kill Chinese? Is that fulfilling their primary responsibility as a government? And as I've shown, the answer is "No".

So the question of "is it OK with you that the Japanese continue to kill Chinese if you don't do anything?" can be answered by saying it's legitimate for a state to consider bad things happening to foreigners not worth getting their own citizens killed over, and indeed they do so (hence my example of the Congo Free State).

Again, what you fail to realize is that this question is irrelevant. America wasn't going to war against Japan over China. The United States strategy of the time did not revolve around sending US troops to China to save Chinese citizens from being killed by the Japanese.

What instead happened is that the United States imposed sanctions on the Japan, which essentially ground Japan's war machine to a halt. While it is true that this was in large part over moral grounds, ask yourself this: Would you continue selling guns and bullets to someone who you know is committing mass murder? Wouldn't you, in some way, end up being complicit in mass murder because you keep supplying the killers with the tools they need to kill?

That is the reality of the relationship between Japan and the United States before the Pacific War. You're trying (vainly) to compare this to more recent interventions, which is again very tiring irrelevancy because what happened in recent history is very different from what happened in the 1930s.

[Simon_Jester]

D-13, you've reached a level of rhetoric that can only be explained by two options I see. One is self-parody, the other is a messiah complex.

Thank you, D-13. You've finally convinced me to stop taking your notion of pacifism seriously, by proclaiming yourself a saint.

[Zinegata]

Answer: NO. Even though Americans are the pure embodiment of evil

See, it's this kind of outright prejudice that makes it impossible to take DXIII seriously. Rather than confront the reality that he is a just a moron with delusions of sainthood because he subscribes to a clearly hypocritical brand of pacifism, he goes out and accuses every American man, woman, and child as the pure embodiment of evil.

Your premise is wrong. Americans are not the pure embodiment of evil. Attempting to cop out by saying "Oh but there are good Americans too!" doesn't overturn the fact that your premise is based on fucked up prejudice. It's really that simple.

No race, country, or nationality has a monopoly on "pure embodiment of evil". This is as banal as the people who accuse Germans of being evil because of the actions of the Nazis and Hitler, or who accuse Muslims of being evil because of the actions of Al Qaeda and Bin Laden.

[Junghalli]

I am instead showing that the only people who lost sight of serving its own citizens is Japan and not the United States; making your question silly. The premise is wrong. The United States was not risking the prosperity and security of its people at all; it was Japan which failed to hold true to this goal because it became obsessed with defeating China.

I'm not talking about general arguments over whether the war was justified as a whole or who was in the right and wrong, I'm specifically addressing Simon Jester's questions about whether D13 is OK with the Japanese continuing to kill Chinese, and more generally questioning the idea of justifying war by appeal to humanitarian concerns.

The exchange here is really pretty simple:

"If the US government doesn't break the Japanese Empire by force the Japanese will continue to kill Chinese. Are you OK with that?"

"Yes*, because the responsibility of the US government is to its own people, not the Chinese."

That doesn't mean there aren't other, valid, reasons for war, e.g. involving the interests of the US citizenry, but they're outside the scope of the argument. All this about which government really failed the interests of their people is simply outside the scope of the argument, it doesn't matter to the question of whether US military action against Japan is justified by altruistic concern about the welfare of the Chinese.

* Not actually a position I'm 100% on-board with, but taken for the sake of argument.

Again, what you fail to realize is that this question is irrelevant.

Simon Jester sure seems to be talking about it as if it's relevant, as he seems to be implying that humanitarian concerns about Japanese treatment of Chinese would be a moral justification for military action against Japan. He's free to correct me here if I misread him, I don't want to put words in his mouth.

[Simon_Jester]

The tendency of the antiwar left to do this makes it a lot hard to get rid of active, aggressive, militarism. Because if I'm arguing against the Iraq War, I don't want someone who talks like D-13 or Bakustra on my side. They will fail to convince normal people. They will sound like self-righteous twits, because they're so busy establishing their holier-than-thou cred that they totally ignore basic facts and logic about the situations they're talking about.

On the other hand...

I touched on this earlier in the thread, but I have this niggling suspicion that the WWII popular history, the heroic myth if you would, has a really toxic influence on our culture's discourses about war. It just seems at once so big in our cultural memory and imagination and so convenient to militaristic narratives of saturday morning cartoon morality where you safeguard and make the world better by kicking the asses of villains with force.

If there's any truth to this deconstructing that myth might be rather significant to the project of making the culture less war-friendly.

Should we go out of our way to deconstruct discredit "myths," that we think are bad for our culture's moral development, by making up lies and inventing sloppy thinking? I reject that notion. Lying and fudging the data and plastering over cracks in an argument with rhetoric are a bad way to make your society healthier.

You can fight myths with myths, but I don't think you can win much of anything worthwhile that way. It's too hard to control where the myth-competition goes, because anyone can invent a myth. You can counter my myth of "righteous WWII with do-no-wrong American heroes" with "it's wrong to fight a war for the sake of other people." But I can then take that and spin a new myth like "This guy is a selfish cowardly louse who's trying to weaken the country, don't listen to him." And even if my counter-myth isn't true, it can still hurt you, especially if everyone on both sides is encouraging people to believe in myths.

If myths are wrong you should be able to prove it without bullshitting. And you should have little trouble breaking up narratives that modern wars are like this super-righteous past wars. it is really not hard to prove that Moammar Qaddafi was not Adolf Hitler, for example.

I'm not talking about general arguments over whether the war was justified as a whole or who was in the right and wrong, I'm specifically addressing Simon Jester's questions about whether D13 is OK with the Japanese continuing to kill Chinese, and more generally questioning the idea of justifying war by appeal to humanitarian concerns.

The exchange here is really pretty simple:

"If the US government doesn't break the Japanese Empire by force the Japanese will continue to kill Chinese. Are you OK with that?"

"Yes*, because the responsibility of the US government is to its own people, not the Chinese."

That doesn't mean there aren't other, valid, reasons for war, e.g. involving the interests of the US citizenry, but they're outside the scope of the argument. All this about which government really failed the interests of their people is simply outside the scope of the argument, it doesn't matter to the question of whether US military action against Japan is justified by altruistic concern about the welfare of the Chinese.

* Not actually a position I'm 100% on-board with, but taken for the sake of argument.

There are two counters to this.

One is, what if I had a way to make the Japanese quit killing Chinese people at small cost to my own countrymen? If my responsibility to avoid losing huge armies fighting Japan overrides my obligations to the Chinese*, what if I could stop Japan without losing huge armies? What if I could just drop a huge bomb on Japan? Would your counter-argument still hold? Suddenly there is no real cost to my own people- the cost is paid by Japan, and by your own argument I'm no more responsible for the well-being of Japan than I am for China. If I wish to help China at the expense of Japan, your argument doesn't tell me why I shouldn't do that.

*Note that contrary to your claim, that obligation is not just humanitarian. By this point in the war, the US had signed treaties with China promising to help and protect them, and not to abandon them. It's not only a matter of handwringing about dead Chinese people motivating me to kill Japanese people. It's about the Chinese having fought against outside aggression, and against a common enemy, and us having prior agreements with them. To say "screw you guys, I'm going home" would be to abandon these agreements, in a way that some (me included) would view as callous and cowardly.
_______________

The second thing is, if we do accept your premise, that humanitarian interventions are bad because no government has a duty to anyone except its own people... what are the consequences? What if I think my duty to my own people is best served by a war that will kill thousands of foreigners? Under the argument you're using, I have no duty to them. If they get killed by earthquakes or invading armies or my own damn bombs, they should go crying to their own government, and ask them for help to save them from this disaster.

So under your argument, while humanitarian war become bad ideas, things I might call... inhumanitarian wars* become less bad. Because my government's perceived responsibility to my people overrides their responsibility not to get thousands of foreigners killed.

That can't be right. Clearly, I should not start a war that kills thousands of foreigners. That would be wrong. So we can't just throw away the idea that the state SHOULD have moral obligations to people living in other states.

Which undermines your argument.

*Thanks to Shroom Man 777 for the word, but in this case I'm using it to refer to wars of aggression, greed, revenge, or paranoid fear.

---

Again, what you fail to realize is that this question is irrelevant.

Simon Jester sure seems to be talking about it as if it's relevant, as he seems to be implying that humanitarian concerns about Japanese treatment of Chinese would be a moral justification for military action against Japan. He's free to correct me here if I misread him, I don't want to put words in his mouth.

You can call it moral if you want.

My point is that if we're going to do something because it's always right, we should always be willing to embrace the consequences. If we have misgivings, if we ask ourselves "are we sure this consequence is good," then we need to stop and think more carefully. We need to examine our assumptions about whether this thing is always right, or only sometimes right. If horrible disasters result predictably from doing X, maybe we should think twice about doing X, and weigh it against the consequences of doing Y or Z instead.

Certainly, we should hesitate to do anything that predictably causes a disaster. We should not blindly charge forth and say "I know the answer! Because I sat down and thought about it for fifteen minutes in my armchair! I HAVE A POLITICAL EPIPHANY, GUYS!" That kind of excitable, sudden idea is not the product of mature, considered thought. It has no place at the table when we're talking about serious issues.

Whether the Big Idea is "just shoot all the lawyers," "depose the king," "nuke Mecca," "exile and dispossess all the rich and give everything to the poor in small equal slices," or "abandon the war with Japan now that they can't actually hurt us any time in the next couple of years, because meh, we're done and it's not worth killing any more Japanese people over it..." Which of those ideas it is doesn't matter very much- what matters is that the kind of thoughts an excitable college sophomore comes up with in five minutes as soon as they look at a political problem are usually wrong, and always weak on the details.

So we have to think about these things, rather than just smugly assuming that everything we believe justifies our radical course of action, and that everything we don't know about the situation is unknowable and unimportant anyway. Bakustra demonstrates time and time again that he does not know much about the Pacific War- this undermines his opinions about the war, how and why it was fought, and so on. The things he doesn't know can hurt him. D-13 demonstrates time and time again that he expects any bad thing that would happen because of his actions to be no worse than what would have happened anyway... without really bothering to provide evidence.

I reject this kind of thinking. If you want to change the world you have to be able to embrace the world's complexity, not reject it and put on blinkers to keep yourself from seeing anything that doesn't fit into your narrow vision.

So when we say "it would have been better to walk away from Japan in June 1945, and not to drop the atomic bombs," that is a specific claim. We should be able to think carefully about this, gauge the probable outcome, and see that it would have been better to walk away.

That's what I was hoping to get D-13 to do, and in my opinion he failed the test miserably.

[Junghalli]

Should we go out of our way to deconstruct discredit "myths," that we think are bad for our culture's moral development, by making up lies and inventing sloppy thinking?

No, but I think it may be an important conversation. I think there can still be value in a questionable or incorrect argument if it starts a conversation that wouldn't have existed otherwise.

I can't remember the last time there was a discussion like this on this board (though I don't follow it very closely so I might have missed a lot).

There are two counters to this.<snip>

I'm not actually a big fan of "a country may commit whatever horrors it wishes as long as they stay in their own borders" either, and I do think "a country's first responsibility is to its own citizens, not foreigners" is a potentially problematic formulation.

The thing is, justifying military action on the grounds of "those people are doing terrible things over there" strikes me as a potentially problematic thing on a couple of levels. First, that it seems like the kind of thing that could be really easily co-opted by propaganda to justify policies that have little to do with humanitarianism. I think one might well be able to make an argument that this has in fact happened; wasn't one of the selling points of the Iraq War that Sadaam Hussein was a really bad dictator and we'd be doing the Iraqi people a favor by toppling him? I suspect if we look at the record of dodgy military actions you'll find plenty of examples of them being sold on humanitarian grounds. On a deeper level, it seems dangerously close to a missionary policy. A right and duty to intervene militarily in the affairs of foreign countries on fundamentally moralistic grounds (they're doing stuff we consider immoral) is assumed. Have a bunch of countries with different ideas of morality taking up such a right and duty ... sounds like a recipe for a lot of conflict. It also sounds a little too close to the White Man's Burden for comfort, which sort of ties back into the point that it sounds like something that could really easily be co-opted by propaganda to justify far less altruistic policies.

[Simon_Jester]

In the case of the US and China in WWII, there was a specific, almost contractual obligation. Hence why I keep calling it "cowardly, callous" and so on. You can't just go around saying "yeah, we'll help you defend yourself" and then just walk away as soon as you get bored and it looks like it might be hard work. Not least because if you go and get someone's hopes up that way, they'll fight on when they might otherwise have been wiser to surrender and spare themselves the trouble.

I'm usually opposed to military interventions on moral grounds unless it's something really horrific and urgent and specific. Like "all members of this ethnic group are being butchered by mobs with machetes, if we land some troops we can put a stop to this and end the mass machete murders, even if we can't make the country a good place to live in an absolute sense." If you can actually make something like that work it's probably worth a try- not least because sending troops into a place like Rwanda to prevent a genocide doesn't actually get that many people killed. The locals with machetes won't try to fight foreigners with guns just so they can kill a lot of their neighbors, so you can leave the troops around for a while, do a basic reorganization of the government, and leave without really wronging anyone all that badly.

But once you're already in a state of war, and wars are going around all over the place whether you like it or not, and once you have commitments and ties of friendship and loyalty to other people around you... it gets complicated. And you can't justify just making active decisions without considering the costs of those decisions to others.

And I do mean "active" decisions. That's a big deal. It's one thing if you look at something and go "meh, not my business" and just stay out of it. Life would be impossible if we didn't do that, even given that it makes a lot of problems worse. No one can be everywhere all the time, and things would probably stink anyway even if they could.

But when you go out of your way to decide on a specific course of action, something considered and deliberate that you sat down and worked out in detail ahead of time... you don't have any excuses. When you show physical agency by doing things, issuing orders and having them carried out, you also accept some degree of moral agency for the predictable consequences of your actions.

We accept this sort of responsibility in daily life all the time. When we think about international politics and war and strategy and avoiding genocide, we should continue to accept that responsibility. If someone does evil somewhere else and you're not involved at all, you can maybe say it's on their head and ignore it. But if you yourself are planning a course of action and evil results, you have ownership of that evil. And you have to be able to decide in an adult way whether this evil is worth whatever you were doing.

Most of the time, thinking this way means not fighting wars. But if there are already wars on all over the place and you're already involved and there are huge high-stakes events going on as a result of all this, you don't have as much leeway to duck out of responsibility, and you may be committed to continuing a war you'd really rather have avoided needing to fight in the first place.

[Junghalli]

Well, I'm not going to pretend to understand the full complexities of that situation.

Though I'll go out on a limb and venture that I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Allies would have dropped their commitments to the Chinese in a hot minute if they thought it was the most geopolitically advantageous thing they could do.

Which sort of touches on a more general suspicion I have - that the framing of WWII as some kind of moral crusade is deceptive because insofar as the good guys were good it was largely by historical accident. They were fundamentally reacting to the Axis as geopolitical and military threats, not the fact they were evil.

I wouldn't be surprised if a version of Hitler that was less territorially ambitious might have been able to get away with the Final Solution and stay in power until he died peacefully of old age (consider this the other side of the coin to that counterfactual I brought up earlier about an equally militarily adventurous but less "evil" Axis).

[Zinegata]

I'm not talking about general arguments over whether the war was justified as a whole or who was in the right and wrong, I'm specifically addressing Simon Jester's questions about whether D13 is OK with the Japanese continuing to kill Chinese, and more generally questioning the idea of justifying war by appeal to humanitarian concerns.

Except you made the major mistake of comparing the situation in the 1930s with the Belgian Congo, or with more recent interventions like say the Somalian intervention. What happened in the 1930s between Japan and the US, or even in 1945, were completely different situations.

That's why I keep pointing to the historical realities - the most important of which is that it was Japan which started the aggression. Any discussion on the Pacific War must start with this premise. You cannot pretend the US started the fight, or was even aiming for a fight. Which is again totally not the same as any of the other incidents you mentioned; which is why I am contesting them.

Also...

"If the US government doesn't break the Japanese Empire by force the Japanese will continue to kill Chinese. Are you OK with that?"

"Yes*, because the responsibility of the US government is to its own people, not the Chinese."

Actually, putting aside "moral" arguments - the US was obligated to break the Japanese Empire. Because the United States had already effectively allied with China by this point, and therefore they were obligated to follow through on their agreements.

While the primary responsibility of a US government is to safeguard its people, that doesn't mean it should betray and backstab its allies. Single-mindedly believing that your ONLY concern should be your own people at the expense of all other concerns is frankly stupidity.

To elaborate further...

Simon Jester sure seems to be talking about it as if it's relevant, as he seems to be implying that humanitarian concerns about Japanese treatment of Chinese would be a moral justification for military action against Japan. He's free to correct me here if I misread him, I don't want to put words in his mouth.

Simon Jester is simply pointing out the "moral" consequences of leaving the Japanese alone. But you also make the very major (and I would frankly say dishonest) mistake of deliberately ignoring the core of the issue - does pursuing the "moral" choice fulfill the primary premise of the state - which is to safeguard its people and ensure their prosperity?

And the answer in this case is most resoundingly yes.

Because no nation lives in a vacuum. You cannot act cruelly towards other nations and expect them to trust and respect you. Making your nation trusted and respected actually goes a long way towards ensuring that your people remain safe and prosperous.

People do not want to trade with regimes that commit war crimes, denying them economic development and prosperity. People do not want to forge security agreements with criminal regimes, making these regimes less secure.

Fulfilling your legal obligation as an ally and fighting to prevent atrocities are thus actions that do improve the prosperity and security of your nation. Yes, some of your citizens may die fighting the Japanese - but that sacrifice ultimately serves a "greater good".

The lesson of the Pacific War therefore is not this stupid historical revisionism being peddled by prejudiced idiots like DXIII or Bakustra, who are well on their way to denying the existence of Japanese war crimes simply to regurgitate pointless anti-US rhetoric.

The lesson is that Japan should not have tried to act an aggressive military power unilaterally. They discarded all common sense and tried to conquer China and other territories that they had no right to. When the people in those territories resisted, they committed mass atrocities. When other powers like the United States was horrified and sanctioned them, they doubled down and waged war on the United States despite the latter having ten times the economic power. They made George W Bush's unilateralist approach to international diplomacy seem straightforward and sane.

That is why Japan was rightly opposed by so many nations. That is why Japan remains loathed in many parts of Asia - even to this day - despite having already renounced war and donated generously to international causes. There is a reason why some people in Asia protest the very existence of the Yakisune Shrine, whereas the United States gets very little flak for its actions in WW2 throughout Asia (except for the Japanese, particularly their ultra-nationalists who are busy denying their war crimes).

Nations do not live in a vacuum. You cannot cover your ears and pretend a genocide isn't happening because "some of our soldiers may come to harm!" - because the effects of such actions will have far-reaching consequences that will in fact directly affect the safety and prosperity of your nation.

[Zinegata]

Which sort of touches on a more general suspicion I have - that the framing of WWII as some kind of moral crusade is deceptive because insofar as the good guys were good it was largely by historical accident. They were fundamentally reacting to the Axis as geopolitical and military threats, not the fact they were evil.

Richard Overy, in his book Why the Allies Won, ends one of his chapters with the following words:

"The embattled democracies of 1939 led a world crusade just six years later".

This is real and historical fact. Sound strategic judgments are not necessarily incompatible with moral judgments. Just because the Allies made sound strategic choices doesn't mean that the "moral" factor never came into play.

Like it or not, the crimes committed by the Axis powers were on a truly enormous scale - resulting in the legal term "crime against humanity" by the end of the war during the Nuremberg trials. This is why there is such massive revulsion against their actions even to this day. This is why countries that could have been their allies instead ended up fighting against them.

It seems to me that what you're doing is attempting to re-interpret actual historical facts in order fit your (incorrect) suspicions, which is poor revisionism.

[Grumman]

Tell me, do you physically beat children, or do you completely ignore their bad behavior?

Is the child armed and murdering other children? If so, I'd consider beating them into submission fully justified if that was the most effective way of stopping their rampage.

[Grumman]

but "most effective way" implies there's other ways too!

I agree - if possible, it would be preferable to shoot them rather than getting that close.

BTW beatings aren't particularly effective in any case. You'd be more likely to increase the child's violent tendencies than to decrease them.

When the child is already at the stage where they're murdering other children, how are they going to get more violent?

Of course, beatings are a lot easier to dish out than a comprehensive child rearing policy of support, positive reinforcement, education, empathy, finding safe and acceptable outlets for their desires, and moderated negative reinforcement on an ongoing basis.

That "moderated negative reinforcement" is what caused Pearl Harbour, remember? The US told Japan to go to its room without oil for robbing the French after Germany beat them up, and got shanked by Japan for its trouble.

[HMS Conqueror]

idk if I have entered the twilight zone for people to be saying US is "embodiment of pure evil" for attacking Iraq or Iran, while defending the actions of Japan. If the cold historical facts don't cut it, how about this:



Japan caused more civilian casualties in its occupation of Indonesia - which was not even a combatant - than the total US, Commonwealth and French military casualties in all theatres for the entire war.

Those guys weren't just evil, they were ridiculously evil. Old Testament-style evil. Once they finished killing PoWs, they started killing random bystanders just for fun. Then they re-introduced slavery on a massive scale. The anti-racism lot in the US seems to think Japan was badly treated, but personally I think the only reason Hirohito didn't end up at the end of a rope is because we don't care so much about all those dead "coolies" as about dead artists and scientists living in the civilised West.

[Simon_Jester]

D-13 is still a babbling joke, and I have nothing to say to him.

Well, I'm not going to pretend to understand the full complexities of that situation.

Though I'll go out on a limb and venture that I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Allies would have dropped their commitments to the Chinese in a hot minute if they thought it was the most geopolitically advantageous thing they could do.

Which sort of touches on a more general suspicion I have - that the framing of WWII as some kind of moral crusade is deceptive because insofar as the good guys were good it was largely by historical accident. They were fundamentally reacting to the Axis as geopolitical and military threats, not the fact they were evil.

They posed geopolitical and military threats because of their evils. Wanting to conquer a continent and unleash destructive wars on its people is evil. Germany, Italy, and Japan all had this aspiration- over Europe, Africa, and Asia respectively. Italy was IMO the least bad of the lot because they weren't really planning to be much worse to Africans than the people already ruling them were. Japan and Germany were pretty damn bad about this, though.

Now, were the Allies "reacting to the Axis as geopolitical and military threats?" Yes- why else would you start a war? Any reasonable person would be loath to start a war, if there isn't already one going on, just over "I don't like your government, your dictator is a meanypants." Executing the odd thousand dissidents here and there is terrible, but it's small potatoes compared to war. It's only when a government starts butchering people by the hundreds of thousands or millions that foreigners really become justified in fighting a typical war to put an end to it, and the Allies had no such justification that came close to motivating war in 1938 or earlier.

But this didn't prevent Allied politicians from recognizing that these regimes were committing great evils, saying so openly in speeches, and contemplating measures to limit their spreading power. It just wasn't enough to declare war over- to take the responsibility of starting a war that will kill millions, which is a great responsibility indeed.

But once events had changed and it was plain that the Axis nations did want to start wars, large ones sweeping up tens of millions of people... well, now the war is already on. The damage is done. And just as a responsible leader hesitates to start a war, the responsible leader must now think very carefully about how to limit the damage of war. And how to ensure that the eventual "peace" at the end of the war doesn't involve as much ongoing killing and pain as the war itself did.

The Allies had very good reasons of this nature to keep fighting the Axis. It's never going to be possible to decide just how much this influenced their thinking, but they certainly believed and understood it while they were fighting.

I wouldn't be surprised if a version of Hitler that was less territorially ambitious might have been able to get away with the Final Solution and stay in power until he died peacefully of old age (consider this the other side of the coin to that counterfactual I brought up earlier about an equally militarily adventurous but less "evil" Axis).

A Hitler who hadn't tried to conquer Poland (that was the real critical point, when Hitler actually did start a war to get what he wanted instead of just stomping around threatening to start one)... hm.

For one, the "Final Solution" would never have existed. It was a reaction to the sudden conquest of huge territories in Poland and Russia, with large numbers of Ashkenazim that the Nazis saw as implacable racial enemies, but couldn't get rid of without killing them. If Hitler had remained within a fixed boundary of territory and not started any wars, the German Jews would, over time, have naturally tried to emigrate out of the country as best they could. Even if for whatever reason he started throwing them in concentration camps to die, he'd have killed only a few hundred thousand people in that way, not millions upon millions.

Much of the worst evil perpetrated by the Nazis was associated with their conquests, their occupation policies, their looting of captured nations, their imposition of racial policies on those nations... you get the idea.

Had they not been warmongers, the Nazis would have been slightly less evil by default, and much less capable of perpetrating evil and spreading it across the land. People could escape their tyranny, and based on their pre-1939 track record, the Germans would probably let them. It might be slow and painful (Jewish refugees were not always granted asylum, I know this so please don't prance about waving it like a banner), but it would at least be possible.

Wartime restrictions on travel in the west, and wartime occupation of huge "untermenschen" populations in the east, made escape from Nazi racial tyranny impossible, which made that tyranny far, far worse.

[Junghalli]

That's why I keep pointing to the historical realities - the most important of which is that it was Japan which started the aggression. Any discussion on the Pacific War must start with this premise. You cannot pretend the US started the fight, or was even aiming for a fight.

I never claimed the US started the fight. If I were making any implicit "claims" along those lines it might be that kicking the Japanese out of China would be a war of choice.

That may actually be false, maybe removing the Japanese from China was totes vital to US security, idk, it's not an argument I'm up to having. Here's the thing though: Simon Jester was presenting the situation in terms of a war of choice. If you walk away the Japanese will keep killing Chinese, are you OK with that?, with the implied framing of the problem of walking away in moral terms (those poor Chinese) rather than strategic or security ones.

That and only that was what I was addressing. Who started the war is irrelevant to that. Who's fault the situation was, which government was more "rational", all that stuff is beside the point. Oh, some of it may be topical in that it suggests negative consequences to walking away other than "Chinese people suffer", but that is itself a tacit concession; you don't feel up to defending we need to kick the Japanese out of China for the sake of the Chinese as a stand-alone moral argument, so you're trying to shift the discussion to other consequences.

Actually, putting aside "moral" arguments - the US was obligated to break the Japanese Empire. Because the United States had already effectively allied with China by this point, and therefore they were obligated to follow through on their agreements.

I wonder how long these "obligations" would have lasted if, for some reason, it was geopolitically or strategically advantageous to drop them?

Which sort of gets back to my point about deceptive framing and the Allies being good guys by accident: you're presenting this as if it was a matter of the Allies nobly upholding their alliance with the Chinese, and D13 would be an oathbreaker for wanting to walk away. I'd bet a chunk of change what was really going on was the Allies were supporting the Chinese because they had a common enemy, and if somehow the situation changed so that upholding their alliance with the Chinese would have caused more sacrifices than gain (e.g. if the Japanese Empire was strong enough that from a politico-military viewpoint breaking it would be more trouble than it was worth) those obligations would have been dropped. If I'm right about this the question can then be changed from "why is it OK to break obligations for the sake of peace?" to "why is it OK to break obligations for the sake of national self-interest but not for the sake of peace?" Your framing implicitly gives the pro-war side a moral high ground which I find questionable.

If somebody thinks he's got a good case that the Allies would have kept up the war if the only reason to do so was their obligations to China of course I'm open to hear it, but ... really, when was the last time a country kept up a massive war for a purely altruistic cause, with nothing in it for them?

[Junghalli]

They posed geopolitical and military threats because of their evils. Wanting to conquer a continent and unleash destructive wars on its people is evil.

The British did a lot of conquering in Africa and India, were they evil?

I'd say probably yes, though less so than the Nazis (they didn't have eliminationist racial ideology as a major policy platform for starters) ... but it does put the question of the Axis's evil in a new light when you realize that massive conquest motivated by a combination of greed and racial ideology was hardly unique to them, in fact prominent Allied powers maintained huge empires built on such as of WWII.

I'm going to tie this back to that counterfactual I mentioned earlier. Postulate a version of Nazi Germany that wants to conquer and colonize Europe's east, but isn't into ethnic cleansing - what they want is basically to do to Russia what the British and French had done to Africa and India. Such an alternate Nazi Germany would still be "evil" in the sense of wanting to unleash destructive wars and oppress people, and I bet would be met with a pretty similar military response to the OTL version ... but in that universe, really the main difference between what the Nazis were doing and what the British and French had already done was they wanted to do it to white people instead of brown ones.

I'm not denying that the Axis was "evil" and worse than the Allies, my point is the formulation of WWII as some brave heroic stand against Mordor is problematic, both from a historical accuracy perspective (I suspect most historians would agree with me there, though they might disagree with or correct some of my specific ideas), and more importantly in terms of the impact it has on our culture. It encourages us to downplay the degree to which the evil of the Axis represents ideas and practices common in contemporary Western culture of the time, maybe taken a bit farther than most others did, and hence discourages cultural self-examination, and it is friendly to a saturdary morning cartoon militaristic narrative of morality and politics where you protect and safeguard the world by opposing and destroying villains with military force. A quick look at US foreign policy 1945-onward and it looks to me littered with the fallout of the latter kind of thinking...

There's a reason this thread has been derailed to a massive discussion of WWII. It's that when D13 started talking about his ideas of non-aggression people started bringing up WWII and the Nazis as some grand rebuttal to them. When people try to justify warfare their go-to example is WWII.

[Simon_Jester]

They posed geopolitical and military threats because of their evils. Wanting to conquer a continent and unleash destructive wars on its people is evil.

The British did a lot of conquering in Africa and India, were they evil?

Sure, why not?

I will make three statements in mitigation, which you may wish to dispute.

One, it takes much less evil to hold an empire than to conquer it in the first place. Holding empires usually doesn't involve much in the way of slaughter; conquering them does.

Two, gradual conquests are, in my opinion, less evil than rapid ones. It's a question of policy. For example, most of the wars by which Britain wound up ruling India and much of Africa were not elaborate, preplanned surprise assaults meant to turn a native state into a British province. There would be a border skirmish or a minor squabble over trading rights or a local would do something unpleasant to some annoying British citizen. The British government would detail a relative handful of ships and men to go sort it out- and they would, blasting aside the native ruler and setting up a puppet in his place. There was a lack of... you might call it "criminal intent" in the minds of a lot of the people involved in the conquests, although there was certainly enough to condemn them. This is purely a matter of degree, and perhaps not an important one.

Third, we should look at intent... well, put it this way. Reread my post here, it sums up my third reason pretty well.


So if I contrast the 1938 British government (among whom war was unpopular and there was growing ambiguity about the idea of holding onto colonies against their will at all, with India being the prime example) to the 1938 German government (which was planning a huge war and wanted to turn a vast tract of land inhabited by roughly two hundred million people into a colony as soon as possible)... there is, to me, a really significant difference in moral standing.

I'd say probably yes, though less so than the Nazis (they didn't have eliminationist racial ideology as a major policy platform for starters) ... but it does put the question of the Axis's evil in a new light when you realize that massive conquest motivated by a combination of greed and racial ideology was hardly unique to them, in fact prominent Allied powers maintained huge empires built on such as of WWII.

I'm going to tie this back to that counterfactual I mentioned earlier. Postulate a version of Nazi Germany that wants to conquer and colonize Europe's east, but isn't into ethnic cleansing - what they want is basically to do to Russia what the British and French had done to Africa and India. Such an alternate Nazi Germany would still be "evil" in the sense of wanting to unleash destructive wars and oppress people, and I bet would be met with a pretty similar military response to the OTL version ... but in that universe, really the main difference between what the Nazis were doing and what the British and French had already done was they wanted to do it to white people instead of brown ones.

Yes- on the other hand, I don't think you could really get the sheer, determined aggression Nazi Germany had without a very degree of eliminationism and cruelty. The colonial conquests of Britain and France were gradual because there was no sudden case of a new government tumbling into power in London and setting out to make all of India utterly British- no moment in the history of the British conquest of the subcontinent that compares to the invasion of Poland as a "cross the Rubicon" moment.

I'm not denying that the Axis was "evil" and worse than the Allies, my point is the formulation of WWII as some brave heroic stand against Mordor is problematic, both from a historical accuracy perspective (I suspect most historians would agree with me there, though they might disagree with or correct some of my specific ideas), and more importantly in terms of the impact it has on our culture.

Yes, yes, I understand that- but I don't think we should be in denial about what did happen, could have happened, should or should not have happened, simply because it may cause some people to come to the wrong conclusions.

Lying to ourselves for the sake of making sure we don't fool ourselves is a losing game.

It encourages us to downplay the degree to which the evil of the Axis represents ideas and practices common in contemporary Western culture of the time, maybe taken a bit farther than most others did, and hence discourages cultural self-examination, and it is friendly to a saturdary morning cartoon militaristic narrative of morality and politics where you protect and safeguard the world by opposing and destroying villains with military force. A quick look at US foreign policy 1945-onward and it looks to me littered with the fallout of the latter kind of thinking...

There's a reason this thread has been derailed to a massive discussion of WWII. It's that when D13 started talking about his ideas of non-aggression people started bringing up WWII and the Nazis as some grand rebuttal to them. When people try to justify warfare their go-to example is WWII.

There's another reason, for me at least.

See, I try to think the way physicists do, and one thing a physicist does when you hand him a theory is look to see how it behaves in the extreme limiting cases. Fine, we have a theory that describes how this material behaves. Does it work when we dip the material in boiling water? Or in liquid nitrogen? If not, why not? Can we expand and refine the theory to incorporate these strange, 'pathological' cases? Or does the theory's breakdown in a pathological case indicate a weakness in the theory itself?

When I'm talking to a person who has some really strongly held idea, I do the same thing. For me, it's a tool to diagnose whether this person is in touch with the facts. Will they understand the realities I'm talking about? Or will they use wishful thinking and make up 'facts' to fit their prejudices? In the latter case, maybe their grand sweeping ideas are actually not well informed- they don't know as much as they think they know, and what they don't know may indicate holes in their ideas.

Will they have a coherent explanation for how their idea works under circumstances they haven't thought of? Or will they bluster and babble? In the latter case, maybe they are not thinking clearly- they don't know how to handle an objection to their ideas, except to treat it as a cartoonish straw version or assume that the person they're talking to is some kind of evil stereotypical monster who likes murdering babies for fun.

Watching D-13 and Bakustra talk about World War Two has given me a lot of this kind of information. Being able to tell whether a person knows the difference between practical and impractical, between true and false, whether they are capable of understanding nuances and differences in degree, what sorts of wishful thinking they are susceptible to... All these things tell me whether to take a person seriously, and whether to consider them a meaningful advocate for the ideas they talk about.

So I do that a lot.

[Junghalli]

Simon, I don't really have all that much more to say at the moment if you don't mind.

I'll just say, I don't advocate lying to ourselves, but I will repeat what I said earlier that I think even objectively wrong arguments can have value if they open valuable conversations that might not have existed otherwise. I believe sometimes there is something to be said for an argument that maybe isn't the most rigorous, or correct, or informed, but is thought-provoking. This doesn't mean I think such arguments shouldn't be refuted, but rather that the process of discussing and critically evaluating them may be itself valuable, and they may serve as springboards to genuine insight.

I'm not really knowledgeable enough to comment on D13 and Bakustra's historical arguments, but even if they're as bad as you say an interesting conversation (IMO) is happening that wouldn't have happened without them.

[eyl]

Like I said earlier, in the real world, using the military solution, the majority of European Jews were massacred. The Holocaust happened, at best despite the war, and the war may have even accelerated it - the mass exterminations didn't happen until after the war had begun, though granted that might be coincidence.

Nevertheless, it is undisputed fact that that WW2 did not turn out good for tens of millions of people. The only justification you have for the action we took is speculation as to what would have happened if we made different decisions.

You are speculating that if there was no war, the exterminations would have still happened and would not have stopped before surpassing the real world result.

You don't know that today about WW2. There's too many variables and too little information. Churchill and Roosevelt, etc., most certainly didn't know it back then.

And, most importantly, you don't know that about future war X, where this will argument surely come up again, and actually has the potential to change things.

Of course, the same can be said for your own prposed solution.

[Grumman]

Like I said earlier, in the real world, using the military solution, the majority of European Jews were massacred. The Holocaust happened, at best despite the war, and the war may have even accelerated it - the mass exterminations didn't happen until after the war had begun, though granted that might be coincidence.

Are you really this bad at historical analysis, or is it all an act? The war and the exterminations had a common cause: Hitler invading other countries.

Because Hitler invaded Poland, he had a whole lot of undesirables he wanted to get rid of.
Because Hitler invaded Poland, his victims and future victims tried to stop him.

Even in the absence of the second fact, the first would still be true. Refusing to fight to stop a genocidal madman taking over the world does absolutely nothing to stop the genocidal madman having his way with the countries under his control.