Morality—Trotskyite vs. Christian
by Patrick J. Buchanan
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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.”
[amazonify]030740515X[/amazonify]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.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
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1 Comment by Fred Breisch on 24 June 2008:
Thank you, Mr. Buchanan. The hypocracy of our leaders continues to this day. You have made a valuable contribution to humanity by writing your book, “Churchill, Hitler and the Unecessary War,” and Chronicles is to be commended for carrying your commentary.
Please continue your excellent work.
2 Comment by robert reavis on 24 June 2008:
Why does a hateful, fool with English accent like Christopher Hitchens, deserve a response from any thinking human being ?
If anyone in America had written, espoused the hateful bilge, or attempted to digest the regular Hitchen’s husks designed for swine; If anyone, I say, had directed the same towards native americans, black americans, jews, earnest pagans, vegans or wickens that Hitchens has vomited on the television screens of America toward the Christian religion, ( one time during a funeral , of all God Awful Times !!! )he would have been instantly identified as the drunken reprobate he is. Yet here a decent defender of the Tradition like Pat Buchanan gets bogged down with a nobody, making a nobody a somebody in the process.
God Bless Peter Hitchens for bearing the beams of love for a brother like Christopher. But for Pete’s sake Pat, there are some that only prayer and fasting can help. To attempt more is surely against the mental patient’s bill of rights.
3 Comment by Grumpy Old Man on 24 June 2008:
The modern “total war” including war against civilians, goes back to Mr. Lincoln and Gen. Sherman.
Unfortunately, bombing of civilians, “smart” or random, has become the norm, both among those with good airplanes and those who are limited to stolen trucks and the like.
I don’t concur fully with Pat Buchanan on all this history, but awareness of our own side’s guilt for war against civilians, and questioning its morality, is essential to any assessment of modern war.
4 Comment by james on 24 June 2008:
Maybe we should start at the beginning and review how un-Russian the Russian revolution really was and the ethnic makeup of the Soviet government.
The Hitchens brothers are former Trotskyite communists maybe the first mass murderer of the Soviet Union so I wouldn’t look to them for moral guidence on issues.
Christopher Hitchens tends to have a dual morality on issues. During the 90’s Hitchens was a big supporter of muslim fanatics in the balkans yet when they protest cartoons of the prophet mohammed as a terrorist he seems to have a problem.
The Milosevic trail was as much a farce as Nuremberg. Alleged atrocities commited by Serbs turned out to be lies and our justification for bombing Serbia becomes unwarrented. Key witnesses were proven to give false evidence like Paddy Ashdown and civilian deaths in Kosovo were a result of KLA terrorism and NATO bombings. During the Bosnian war Serbs were fighting international terrorist insurgents who were killing hundreds of Serbs and from that spawned the mythical Al Queda terror network.
Maybe Pat’s next book should be Clinton, Milosevic and the Unnecessary War.
5 Comment by Charlemagne on 24 June 2008:
Grumpy @ 3
Where do you disagree with Mr. Buchanan?
James @ 4
Excellent observation. The adage “might makes right” transcends the ages.
6 Comment by diego d on 24 June 2008:
I read somewhere once that St. Paul said, in a moment of weakness about his enemies, “Don’t worry, God will get them”. Thank God for judgement day.
7 Comment by Joaquin on 24 June 2008:
This article reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five.
Vonnegut had witnessed the bombing of Dresden and called it strafing of people by fighters afterward as essential to the war effort.
8 Comment by James Kabala on 24 June 2008:
Just a note: The Hitchens brothers disagree on almost everything, and Peter is nearly always (maybe even always) right. I don’t know if he is a “former Trotskyite” (I’m not familiar with his biography), but even if so, unlike his brother, he has left such views behind long ago.
9 Comment by Allen Wilson on 24 June 2008:
If we finally accept the undeniable fact that the Nuremburg trials were a total sham, and the obvious fact that the Milosevic trial was complete farce, then where does that leave the Saddam trial? I smell not just one, but an entire horde of big, stinking, filthy rats in that trial as well.
10 Comment by Nebojsa Malic on 25 June 2008:
Yep – which is why writing a book about the Milosevic trial (”Travesty”) John Laughland wrote a follow-up dealing with some other modern show trials.
11 Comment by andy on 25 June 2008:
Thank you, Pat, for writing the truth about WWII.
Isn’t it strange that it is difficult to write the truth about WWII even now, more than 60 years after the war ended?
12 Comment by Robert Bruce on 26 June 2008:
Nebojsa,
How far along are you with your book, and do you have a time frame of when it will be published?
13 Comment by No joke on 27 June 2008:
“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.”
Yes, of course he was. The vast majority of Norwegians would have welcomed the English and, under the circumstances, considered their presence to be an important safeguard against German aggression. Only Vidkun Quisling and a few other traitors would have dreamt of calling it a “violation” of Norwegian neutrality.
Yes, and now also Mr Pat Buchanan, it seems.
Distinguishing between the help from an ally and the aggression of an enemy – it ought to be elementary. The fact is that the legally elected Norwegian government took a stance against the Nazis from day one. Only ignorants and people with hidden agendas still talk about Norwegian ‘neutrality’ before the German invasion.
14 Comment by Allen Wilson on 27 June 2008:
I suspect that if the British had invaded Norway, the Norwegians would have taken up arms, and would have used German aid in fighting the British, much as the Baltic peoples and Finns did in the face of the Soviet menace.
15 Comment by Boyan K. on 27 June 2008:
@ #13 No joke
Right on. Thanks for injecting a shot of the WW2-reality into this discussion. Since I haven’t read Mr. Buchanan’s latest book, I’ll abstain from the pointless labeling; though the fact that there are quite enough of his other writings and views to be appreciated, hardly helps his cause here. Simply, it’s next to impossible to redefine the allied victory of Soviets and Western nations (as well as all the other resistance movements worldwide!) over the utmost evil of Naziism other than the greatest human accomplishment of the modern age. Of course (as #3, Grumpy Old Man, pointed), showing awareness of one’s own side’s crimes against civilians is an honorable thing. Apart from that, it is gigantically inaccurate and unfair to dismiss the Nuremberg as the “show trial”. Since it was not. The Nazis were rightly punished for their crimes, and the only thing to regret is that so many of them fooled the justice by escaping from Germany (and the bulk of its friendly mass-murdering satrapies). The VERY fact that the Allies’ crimes against civilians are KNOWN of, testifies that the good had prevailed. If the other side had won, many of us wouldn’t have lived to hear the victor’s version of history (and I can say that with a certain legitimacy, being a member of a nation considered “subhuman” in Nazis’ eyes, and mercilessly treated as such, during the WW2)
As for Stalin’s “rape” of Poland, what exactly could he have done, facing the threat from the increasingly aggressive Hitler, than to buy a year or two before the inevitable war? Mind you, Checkoslovakia was handed over to Hitler just a year before Poland, and the West played the ball. The fact that Stalin’s regime was brutal and tyrannical is a self-evident fact. But, I can’t help thinking that Mr. Buchanan act a tad bit too one-sided, moaning over the discredited morality of the West, sitting with Vishinsky at the same table. His disgust is not completely unlike the one, hypothetically expressed by some old USSR-nostalgic version of himself, who would undoubtedly resent the fact that the Dear Comrade Vishinsky was sharing the same courtroom with the evil imperialist
Brits and Americans, who (in their own countries) were, at the time, judging people by the color of their skin rather than the crimes they’ve committed, and who were the parts of the judicial systems which legally ghettoed, interned and otherwise discriminated their own citizens, based solely on their ethnic profiles
16 Comment by Mike Ezzo on 27 June 2008:
Pat seems to focus on political controversies which are popular with broad, general audiences. So that might explain why C. Hitchens is of interest to him, while the Balkan situation might be less so. The book James asks for may be handled better by someone like Srdja Trifkovic.
Mr. Kabala is correct — the OTHER Hitchens (Peter) is, from what I can tell, a conservative, and as unlike his brother “as chalk and cheese” as the English would say.
Diego, the realization that Hitchens will face judgment should remind us to pause and reflect that we will all experience such. Salvation/damnation is not pre-determined.
17 Comment by SKR on 28 June 2008:
@15
It is precisely your beliefs about the war that the book attempts to refute. Portraying Nazism as all things evil incarnate, while the Soviets were something much less, is a perverse interpretation of the facts. Before WWII Stalin had murdered far more than Hitler ever would. They were two peas of the same totalitarian pod, and to have one sit with the U.S. in judgement of the other demonstrates a twisted morality. In addition, to try to equate Soviet crimes with American racism of the day is the evidence of a morally bereft individual. It doesn’t matter what the Soviets might have said in their defense. They had the blood of tens of millions on their hands, American racism did not.
18 Comment by Boyan K. on 29 June 2008:
Well, there are some remnants of an, once great, population to be found in the reservations on the US soil, that might be permitted to politely disagree with your notion from the closing sentence. However, I wasn’t mentioning ONLY the shadowy parts of the American history, but the shameful British colonial experience as well. And I certainly am not a part of the posh bring-on-a-dictatorship-as-long-as-it’s-leftist-crowd. Plus, I don’t think that it would be a sane approach to burden any nation with the ceaseless sense of guilt for their ancestors’ faults. Furthermore, both countries I mentioned, were solidly built upon the traditions of liberty, and the position of their citizens – at the time discriminated for their ethnic identities – was bound to change for the better. And that happened. And many brave Americans and Britons did the remarkable things in helping their unjustly discriminated compatriots to gain the full rights they deserved.
As for the WW2, I do think that there are no reasonable excuses (except for the sheer ignorance) for ANY attempts to legitimize the tiresome old tune of: “see, the Soviets were evil, so the poor ol’ Germans didn’t have much of a choice: who knows what might have happened if those darn Bolshies somehow just have vanished”.
Soviet regime (before, during and after Stalin’s era) was a living nightmare for the most of its people, no argue about that. On the other hand, the Western democracies were endlessly far at the time from the high standards they preached (of course, in comparison to the totalitarian USSR, they were, for all their faults, far better places). I just objected to the moral high-ground position that Mr. Buchanan took on that subject of Britons and Americans sharing the same court with Vishinsky and his ilk. I just said that, from strictly legal point of view, the Soviets could’ve also objected the twisted morality of the Western allies. You know, Churchill personally was not far from Hitler in his belief in eugenics, and there was a certain thing called “the Jim Crow laws” in the US.
But, my point here is that one just CANNOT dismiss the Naziism (which WAS all things evil incarnate, if you like) as just another totalitarianism, because it was much, much worse than that. For starters, it was a set of the wicked ideas whose very PREMISE was the extinction the whole peoples and races, and subjugation of.. well, pretty much the rest of the humanity, in order to set the rule of “the master race”. You cannot bargain or coexist with such a thing, not in the long term. Which is exactly why it was necessary to fight against it. You can like or dislike the fact that the Russian army was the key factor in defeating the Nazis (and the country that payed the biggest price), but that’s the history you cannot change.