http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/06/pjb-morality-%e2%80%94-trotskyite-vs-chris=
tian/
PJB: Morality =97 Trotskyite vs. Christian
posted by Linda
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Did Hitler=92s crimes justify the Allies=92 terror-bombing of Germany?
Indeed they did, answers Christopher Hitchens in his Newsweek response
to my new book, =93Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War=93: =93The
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.=94
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: =93When I look round to see how we can win the war, I
see that there is only one sure path =85 an absolutely devastating,
exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the
Nazi homeland.=94
=93Exterminating attack,=94 said Churchill. By late 1940, writes historian
Paul Johnson, =93British bombers were being used on a great and
increasing scale to kill and frighten the German civilian population
in their homes.=94
=93The adoption of terror bombing was a measure of Britain=92s
desperation,=94 writes Johnson. =93So far as air strategy was
concerned,=94
adds British historian A.J.P. Taylor, =93the 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.=94
The chronology is crucial to Hitchens=92 case.
Late 1940 was a full year before the mass de****tations 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=92 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: =93It 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.=94
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=92s judges sat beside American and
British judges at Nuremberg, and one of the prosecutors there was
Andrei Vi****nsky, chief prosecutor in Stalin=92s 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=92s 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=92s ****ps arrived 24 hours
before British ****ps and marines of an operation championed by Winston
Churchill.
The British had planned to violate Norwegian neutrality first and
seize Norwegian ****ts to deny Germany access to the Swedish iron ore
being trans****pped 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 =93crimes against
humanity.=94 This decree was issued Aug. 8, 1945, 48 hours after we
dropped the first atom bomb on Hiro****ma 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=92s end, =93We scorched
and boiled and baked to death more people in Tokyo that night of March
9-10 than went up in va**** in Hiro****ma and Nagasaki combined.=94
After the war, a lone Senate voice arose to decry what was taking
place at Nuremberg as =93victor=92s justice.=94 Ten years later, a young
colleague would declare the late Robert A. Taft =93A Profile in Courage=94
for having spoken up against ex post facto justice. The young senator
was John F. Kennedy.
http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/06/pjb-return-of-the-censors/
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