Gary Sheffield | Published in History Today Volume 63 Issue 8 August 2013 Hitler was already dead, having A tank and crew from the 761st Tank Battalion in front of the Prince Albert Memorial in Coburg, Germany, 1945. This conclusion of course is highly debatable. After the War ended, the U.S. acted in several contexts to support wars on behalf of European colonialism—France in Vietnam, Holland in Indonesia, and Britain in east Africa.Even more obviously, the United States and Britain joined in alliance with a regime equally tyrannical as Hitler’s Germany—the Soviet Union under the dominance of Josef Stalin.
I was mainly trying to use the mainstream general understanding of the principles.As far as war against the civilian populations, you are incorrect about the origins. As early as 1923, in his memoir and propaganda tract "Mein Kampf" (My Struggle), Adolf Hitler had predicted a general European war that would result in "the extermination of the Jewish race in Germany. The War was an opportunity for the military to move into an unprecedented place of power and influence within the federal government, and it was an opportunity for American corporations to profit immensely from the U.S. becoming the one global economic superpower.None of these four dynamics come very close to satisfying the traditional criteria for just cause for going to war (e.g., self-preservation, defending innocent victims, serving the interests of the entire county, leading to a better peace than existed before the war).Many who write about World War II seem to assume that the causes were just—and then act as if that ends of the process of moral discernment. Over the next six years, the conflict would take more lives and destroy more land and property around the globe than any previous war. I hope to be able to continue to learn from Yoder, while being aware of this issue.I have a question with regards to the ‘Did the United States have ‘just cause’ section. That is, in allying with the Soviets the U.S. actually empowered a spirit at least as vicious as the spirit of Nazism—the spirit of Stalinism. Obviously that judgment cannot change the past (I will reflect in a later post on how we can imagine different policies, though, and the limited relevance of such imagining). Under attack from both sides, Poland fell quickly, and by early 1940 Germany and the Soviet Union had divided control over the nation, according to a secret protocol appended to the Nonaggression Pact. This aid took an ever-more overtly militaristic cast and involved the U.S. in the conflict as a partisan ally of the British. Mostly the humanitarian efforts were thwarted by U.S. and British political leaders. Therefore, when it comes to abortion, perhaps we agree, the sooner the better?I have been introducing myself to the work of John Howard Yoder (similar to you, it seems, I started with Preface to Theology, Christian Attitudes to War, Peace and Revolution and The Original Revolution), and recently found myself struggling with using his work in church given his violence towards women for a part of his life. It certainly was an unjust war.Your absolutism against war would make more logical sense if you were an absolutist against abortion as I am. With over 30 countries involved in World War II and the loss of over 50 million lives, war photography captured the destruction and victories of the deadliest war in history. As it stands I agree with you about World War II, but I am trying to think it through from different angles. The answers to these questions come from the school of philosophy called “just war” theory, which tries to explain whether and when war is permissible, and under what circumstances. Using the principles of just war theory to analyze the main combatants of WWII. And their conduct was extraordinarily brutal. Stalin’s forces then moved to occupy the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and defeated a resistant Finland in the Russo-Finish War. And it also does not actually appear that the Allies were motivated by the need to stop the atrocities—and in fact one of the three main Allies (the Soviet Union) had engaged in extraordinary atrocities itself in the years prior to the War.And even if the Axis powers did egregiously violate just conduct standards from the start of the conflict, that does not justify the violations by the Allies.