World War IIThe Second World War is considered the quintessential total war of modernity. The sheer – indeed, total – level of national mobilization of resources on all sides of the conflict, the immense battlespace being contested, the massive scale of the armies, navies, and air forces raised through conscription, the active targeting of civilians (and civilian property), the general disregard for collateral damage, and the unrestricted aims of the belligerents marked the full and, to the present, final realization of the concept of total war.

Silly me then. But silly you too since frankly, even with the additional clarification, I think that what you actually said, even if you didn’t mean it, is what I wrote. I can largely agree with your comment as clarified though.

~ ~ ~
Final silly quibble. I don’t think Churchill assumed any office let alone a premiership ;)

…

I don’t think the war-shortening benefits of the bombing campaign are really in doubt, so the argument is whether the benefits were worth the cost. I guess different people will have different views on that because we will empathise with different victims. I empathise particularly with some friends of my mum that still had their special tattoos. Maybe without the firestorms they would have been cinders.

I have real doubts about the point of late in the war area bombing on any grounds, but chose to comments on the more difficult issues.

I did not say that Germans deserved to suffer because of the crimes committed by their Nazis and army. Rather, a total war necessarily involves everyone and an injunction to, say, not bomb kids gets a bit difficult with the technological limitations.

I said torture of terrorist subjects is the opposite of a no-brainer. It would only be a no-brainer if you could confidently and definitely rule either for or against torture. do I like the idea of torture? Nope. Would I torture a paedophile to get my kid back? Pass the electrodes.

By that logic torture of suspected terrorists was a no-brainer.

Also, note that the wrong complained of lay in the precise fact of shifting from the factories to the people that staffed them, a distinction obscured by your wording.

Finally, WWII was not, really, total war, not in Western Europe. That would be, eg, the Japanese in Asia, or the Germans in Russia.

The torture is clearly a different issue because this is not a total war. But one still has to ask what risk should the government inflict on the population to avoid causing suffering to the enemy? I’m glad I don’t face those decisions.

In this case however you get away with it since I agree that the torture was a disproportionate response. I disagree with the other sentences in that paragraph and indeed the other clauses in that sentence. I understand that there were a lot of people with combat experience involved. So the stupid phrase chicken-hawks seems even less useful than usual, and it never adds anything imho. Also, I suspect that however hard it might be to understand or relate to, they were trying only to fight a particular war. In this sense they were like the commanders who authorised bombing civilian areas.

So; I think the bombing was numerically and morally far worse, I don’t have significant doubts about the intentions of the torturers, and I somehow find it less despicable.

In the interests of full disclosure, I am, however, ashamed that my opposition was not clearer, earlier. (I was too ready to believe that there was no ‘real’ torture, very naive of me, and too ready to defer to the presumed greater appreciation of the risks faced, also embarrassingly naive of me.) Hopefully I can at least learn from that. I wonder how much of that, though, is hindsight.

I never sympathised in any way with the imposition of torture in the situation with the terrorists. This was chicken-hawks trying to act like some tough guy in a movie. I guess both acts were deeply wrong and perhaps you are right – certainly in numerical terms you are dead right that the bombing of Europe was much worse. But the systematic torture of a bunch of people when the US was never in any mortal danger – well there’s something especially despicably disproportionate about it.

As for most ‘frivolously declared war’, I guess that’s true, leaving aside most of the others. Falklands was desperately serious, Vietnam was a last-ditch defence of our mothers’ homes, etc. Getting into the century before that it becomes a bit farcical. But I guess it was more frivolously declared than WWI or II. After all in WWII the US waited to be actually attacked before declaring war…

I agree that WWII was far greater ‘extremis’ than at present. I agree that torture is wrong, and I don’t think the US should have done it.

I don’t think your case is improved by comparing the two – I don’t believe that there was no legal opinion prepared before Dresden, which as it happens, I think was deeply wrong and far worse than this torture. I understand that you may be contemptuous of the legal opinions but I hope you realise that the NYT was exagerating a little when they said that Obama would not prosecute interogators for having used now-illegal techniques. The exageration was the implication that anything except waterboarding is now ‘illegal’, or that Obama has promised not to do this.

Back to WWII I believe that I can understand how the decision to authorise fire-bombing happened (but maybe I just can’t imagine how I would react and so implicitly assume that any reaction is prima facie ‘legitimate’ – I think this is or at least was NG’s position), and I don’t even know if I would actually punish the decision-makers. I believe about the same with regards to the torture of presumed terrorists.

But at least this time around, even if our actions were deeply wrong and should never have happened, our victims were chosen for the appearance of guilt not chosen for the appearance of innocence. I think that is a central moral divide that is too often ignored (see eg Palestine v Israel; Muslim terrorists v us).

I don’t think anything in even the incredible ‘extremis’ of WWII justified broaching that divide, with the exception of Japan where I believe there was a genuine utilitarian calculus.

And whilst I don’t believe that torture was justified here, I don’t think it was ‘as’ grave a wrong as the firebombing of civilian populations, nor as frivolously entered into as you seem to think.