[BRIGADE] PJB: Morality -- Trotskyite vs. Christian
Published: Tue, 06/24/08
We have several new pieces posted on
http://www.patbuchananbooks.com :
-- Teutonophopbia by Paul Gottfried
-- Churchill, Hitchens, and the Unnecessary Smarm by Michael Stahl
And two from Taki's Magazine:
-- Patrick Buchanan and the Necessary Book by John Zmirak
-- The Court Historian of The Neoconservatives by Tom Piatak
See Pat's column below and remember you can post your comments on
his website!
For the Cause, Linda
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Morality -- Trotskyite vs. Christian
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Did Hitler's crimes justify the Allies' terror-bombing of Germany?
Indeed they did, answers Christopher Hitchens in his Newsweek
response to my new book, "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary
War": "The stark evidence of the Final Solution has ever since been
enough to dispel most doubts about, say, the wisdom or morality of
carpet-bombing German cities."
Atheist, Trotskyite and newborn neocon, Hitchens embraces the
morality of lex talionis: an eye for an eye. If Germans murdered
women and children, the British were morally justified in killing
German women and children.
According to British historians, however, Churchill ordered the
initial bombing of German cities on his first day in office, the
very first day of the Battle of France, on May 10, 1940.
After the fall of France, Churchill wrote Lord Beaverbrook,
minister of air production: "When I look round to see how we can
win the war, I see that there is only one sure path ... an
absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers
from this country upon the Nazi homeland."
"Exterminating attack," said Churchill. By late 1940, writes
historian Paul Johnson, "British bombers were being used on a great
and increasing scale to kill and frighten the German civilian
population in their homes."
"The adoption of terror bombing was a measure of Britain's
desperation," writes Johnson. "So far as air strategy was
concerned," adds British historian A.J.P. Taylor, "the British
outdid German frightfulness first in theory, later in practice, and
a nation which claimed to be fighting for a moral cause gloried in
the extent of its immoral acts."
The chronology is crucial to Hitchens' case.
Late 1940 was a full year before the mass deportations from the
Polish ghettos to Treblinka and Sobibor began. Churchill had
ordered the indiscriminate bombing of German cities and civilians
before the Nazis had begun to execute the Final Solution.
By Hitchens' morality and logic, Germans at Nuremberg might have
asserted a right to kill women and children because that is what
the British were doing to their women and children.
After the fire-bombing of Dresden in 1945, Churchill memoed his air
chiefs: "It seems to me that the moment has come when the question
of bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the
terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed."
Churchill concedes here what the British had been about in Dresden.
Under Christian and just-war theory, the deliberate killing of
civilians in wartime is forbidden. Nazis were hanged for such war
crimes.
Did the Allies commit acts of war for which we hanged Germans?
When we recall that Josef Stalin's judges sat beside American and
British judges at Nuremberg, and one of the prosecutors there was
Andrei Vishinsky, chief prosecutor in Stalin's show trails, the
answer has to be yes.
While Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were surely guilty of waging
aggressive war in September 1939, Stalin and his comrades had
joined the Nazis in the rape of Poland, and had raped Finland,
Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia, as well. Scores of thousands of
civilians in the three Baltic countries were murdered.
Yet, at Nuremberg, Soviets sat in judgment of their Nazi
accomplices, and had the temerity to accuse the Nazis of the Katyn
Forest massacre of the Polish officer corps that the Soviets
themselves had committed.
Americans fought alongside British soldiers in a just and moral war
from 1941 to 1945. But we had as allies a Bolshevik monster whose
hands dripped with the blood of millions of innocents murdered in
peacetime. And to have Stalin's judges sit beside Americans at
Nuremberg gave those trials an aspect of hypocrisy that can never
be erased.
At Nuremberg, Adm. Erich Raeder was sentenced to prison for life
for the invasion of neutral Norway. Yet Raeder's ships arrived 24
hours before British ships and marines of an operation championed
by Winston Churchill.
The British had planned to violate Norwegian neutrality first and
seize Norwegian ports to deny Germany access to the Swedish iron
ore being transshipped through them. For succeeding where Churchill
failed, Raeder was condemned as a war criminal and sent to prison.
The London Charter of the International Military Tribunal decided
that at Nuremberg only the crimes of Axis powers would be
prosecuted and that among those crimes would be a newly invented
"crimes against humanity." This decree was issued Aug. 8, 1945, 48
hours after we dropped the first atom bomb on Hiroshima and 24
hours before we dropped the second on Nagasaki.
We and the British judiciously decided not to prosecute the Nazis
for the bombing of London and Coventry.
It was an understandable decision, and one that surely Gen. Curtis
LeMay concurred in, as LeMay had boasted at war's end, "We scorched
and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of
March 9-10 than went up in vapor in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined."
After the war, a lone Senate voice arose to decry what was taking
place at Nuremberg as "victor's justice." Ten years later, a young
colleague would declare the late Robert A. Taft "A Profile in
Courage" for having spoken up against ex post facto justice. The
young senator was John F. Kennedy.
SOURCE: http://patbuchananbooks.com