Of all human actions, war is the affair least likely
to maintain a moral standard. War is messy-morally messy. Like a tornado, it
leaves a trail of destruction in its wake. There’s plenty of blame to go round
for moral inactions, moral failure. This applies to good guys and to bad guys
and to folks in-between. Many modern
scholars take this fact and conclude that there are no more good guys in war.
Instead, nations and individuals do good and bad stuff, with some leaning more
to the good and others more to the bad. But none are totally innocent or
totally to blame. There’s no black and white, good and evil scenario. Yet, it
is fascinating to watch how this ‘method’ of categorizing war-morality actually
pans out in the comments of modern scholars. What starts of as a sliding-scale
evaluation of war becomes a full-on frontal attack on traditional good guys.
So, scholarship, with its modern notion of the sliding-scale between good and
bad, thinks that the Allies had a lot of blame to bear in WW2, so much so, that
you cannot truly say who was to blame, or who was the really bad guy compared
to the really good guy. But, scholars don’t stop there. They go beyond their
own measurement, beyond their sliding-scale of morality, and reason that
because the Allies are in part to blame, then we should really go to town to
dismantle the notion that they were the good guys. So, scholarship spends most
of its time destroying (deconstructing) the traditional belief that the US and
the UK were the good guys in the War. It is then but a micro-step to the
practice that focuses only upon the Allies and their ‘blatantly’ evil ways. We
have this:
There
were traditional good and bad guys
There
are now no traditional good and bad guys
We
are going to demonstrate that there are no traditional good guys
The
traditional good guys were evil
This is the postmodern ‘180’, but it is more than
postmodernism- it is its evil offspring, for it devours all opposition and
everything that claims to be truly good. It devours tradition and truth.
A relatively
recent book evaluating WW2 came out, written by Patrick J. Buchanan. It is
called, Churchill, Hitler, and “The
Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the Word.[1]
Unsurprisingly for our modern climate, it was a New York Times bestseller. Its core argument is that the British in
particular, but its allies too, precipitated the war and its atrocities.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Holocaust, the pogroms in Russia, all could have been
avoided had Britain, urged on by a belligerent Churchill, not guaranteed the
safety of Poland.
The book is a shameful
piece of writing…but not unexpected. What was unexpected was that it came from
a so-called conservative-Republican, Pat Buchanan, a self-proclaimed
evangelical Christian. This tells us that the ‘right-wing’ is anything but
conservative, morally speaking.
In response to Buchanan’s
claims, there is a clear-cut difference between good guys and bad guys. It
wasn’t Churchill who harassed Jews, enacted Kristallnacht,
invaded Czechoslovakia, united Austria with Germany, and attacked Poland. The
Nazis were spoiling for war. They always wanted lebensraum in the Soviet Union. It was the Germans who bombed
British cities and citizens. And it was Hitler…no one else…who exterminated the
Jews. It was not Churchill who created Japanese militarism. It was the Japanese
who invaded China and ‘raped’ Nanking- the forgotten holocaust. It was the
Japanese who brutally slaughtered military prisoners and citizens in their
millions. The Germans had their own SS death squads, the Einsatzgruppen, and the Japanese had Unit 731. The Allies, on the other hand, had no such groups, nor
any such aims. The Allies reacted…or
do you forget Pearl Harbor? They fought to stop evil, not to enact it. The
British and the Americans dropped bombs on citizens to bring an end to the War, not to enact an ideology of supremacy
and purification. Thousands upon thousands of American soldiers had died and
been injured whilst island-hopping to Japan. The message was clear: Japan was
going to fight to the last person- never mind soldier! So the bombs were
dropped. The aims and attitudes of the Allies were far different to the aims
and motives of the Axis. If this were not so, the Allies would not have built
up both Germany and Japan after the War. Can you imagine Hitler or Togo, if
they had won, building up Britain or the US? Were there evil things done by the
Allies? Yes. There was no excuse for them. But this does not take away, for one
moment, from the sheer evil of Axis in its full responsibility for starting the
War and its unspeakable ideological atrocities.
The same thing is
happening in regard to 9/11. At first, most agreed Islamic terrorists were to
blame. Then it was ‘terrorists’ who were to blame, not Islam. Now it’s
Americans who were to blame- if you take seriously the premise of The Looming Tower, a recent book and now
a major TV show. The big bad CIA dropped the ball. Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize winning book is aware of
the evils done by Al Qaeda, and
Buchanan acknowledges the evils done by Hitler. Even so, the context is the
relativity of evil, and in that setting the wickedness of the CIA and Churchill
is as great, if not worse, than the nastiness of Al Qaeda and Hitler.
What is the next step in
this lunacy? It is self-destruction. After you’ve eaten up others, who else is
there to eat but yourself? The Existentialists advocated suicide due to the
belief that life was meaningless, even an absurdity. The West is on a suicide
course. It is committing self-cannibalism, committing hara-kiri. Deconstructionism, in other words, is an end in itself.
And when you have torn everything down, you have to tear yourself down. It is
the next step, so watch this space.
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