"First come, first serve." In a conflict, both sides can't be on the defensive. Someone has to be the aggressor. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." The Palestinians may have right on their side, but the Israelis stole a march on the all-important public relations front.
Strong words and unminced! But it doesn't obviate the truth of the assertion. In time this particular episode of genocide will be just another footnote to history, quite possibly as a precursor to a more far-reaching conflict. The fact that the rest of the world has not made any attempt to stop it - and shows no intention of doing so - supports this view.
Years and years of subversion from the Global North finally pays off. But you are forgetting the tolerance the world has shown in the past to atrocities, anywhere and everywhere. Rohigya genocide in Myanmar, or Tutsi genocide in Rwanda are some of the best examples of this.
Yes, Thank you! The North American propaganda about the "unprovoked" invasion of Ukraine and those dangerous Palestinians... about Israel's right to "defend" itself is so delusional. North American propaganda and its notion of freedom very well may be worse than Russian propaganda and its notions of freedom. The Chris Hedges Report is a great resource too.
The right to defend is grabbed by aggressives because they think it is the perfect shield to turn their outlook into a benevolent thing that will shut down any criticism. Thus Israel's very worn out use of the phrase, also used by gun owners ready to deal death but giving the urge a shine by talk of defending the home.
I may come across as defensive in this reply. I know it is quite popular these days to point out the extraordinary brutality of the German Wehrmacht during WW II. Was it really that different? When I was a graduate student at UCSB I studied European History with the late professors Joachim Remak whose specialty was the THIRD REICH which had personal experienced as a Jew in Berlin before being able to escape to the USA. He didn’t, as far as I can remember, emphasize a unique German brutality. Later studies in preparation for my own teaching I did some extensive reading which I am still doing in my retirement. While reading a biography of Otto Von Bismarck by professor Jonathan Steinberg I ran across a quote attributed to General Philip Sheridan (American Civil War). He was an American military observer during the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71). He said to Bismarck: „You know how to defeat an enemy better than any army in the world, BUT (my emphasis) to destroy him you have not learned. One must see the smoke from burning villages; otherwise you will never finish the French.“ Then there is a fascinating history of America (not available in English) DER MOLOCH - Eine kritische Geschichte der USA. In the section about America‘s conquest of Indian territories he remarked that „the U.S. military employed Gestapo methods fifty years before an actual Gestapo came into existence.“ American historian Caroline Elkins published in 2022 LEGACY OF VIOLENCE - A History of the British Empire in which she shows the extraordinary violence used by the British during their colonial conquests and administration of the conquered territories. The vast majority of western peoples don’t know that Churchill deliberately caused the death by starvation of three million Bengalese/Indians in 1934/44. „It is their own fault. They breed like rabbits“ he said. War is just plain evil, but using the evil of one particular country as a kind of historical model is misleading and, more importantly, has a tendency to avoid taking responsibility for ones own military brutality. The ignorance among Americans regarding was quite obvious to me after my immigration. Invariably the average person’s knowledge was of Hitler (Nazis) and German cars. The argument that Bibi controls America is from my knowledge of Israeli history is again very superficial. Israel was founded as an Anglo-American project! It has been funded by the combined West as a foothold for western interests. I am aware of Zionist/Israeli financial influence, but do not think that is the primary reason for the tolerance of Israeli violence. The elimination of the Palestinians would solidify the West‘s presence in the Middle East. A country that has had and does have „diplomats“ and politicians that were and are praised as examples of statesmanship like Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton has no empathy for those suffering from Western international ambitions. The death of 500.000 Iraqi children was worth said Madam Albright. Kissinger‘s remarks about Salvador Allende and Hillary‘s regard Libya‘s Muhammad Gaddafi are also infamous. Here are my thoughts regarding issues raised by this essay. (Any mistakes made are the result of worsening eyesight and typing with one finger on a iPad).
Karl, it's a complicated question. Focusing on the brutality of the Wehrmacht is necessary due to the "clean shield" myth (the idea the Germany military was largely free from the taint of the Nazi murder machine that was the Holocaust). That isn't to say the Wehrmacht was uniquely brutal in World War II. But it was often brutal on a large scale.
As Bartov notes. the Holocaust was unique because it was an industrial exercise in mass death against an entire people, the Jews, in which the most advanced minds in Germany more or less actively collaborated. (This isn't to say all Germans were evil; many Germans did resist or refuse.)
The Wehrmacht was especially brutal, as you know, on the eastern front, because they were under orders to be brutal, and because brutality bred brutality. We know, for example, the Wehrmacht captured roughly two million Soviet POWs and allowed the vast majority of them to starve or freeze to death. The Germans gave the Russians no quarter, so of course the Red Army reciprocated. Brutality bred brutality.
Certainly, there's plenty of evidence of U.S. brutality in Vietnam, for example, or against Native Americans. Again, brutality is part of the human condition; it's not uniquely German.
I made my point and stand by it. Unfortunately, the Holocaust is uniquely focused on the Jews six million of Jewish victims. The emphasis on Jewish victimhood has been used as a powerful tool to justify the brutality used in the establishment of a state of Israel. On that topic I suggest reading ZIONISM DURING THE HOLOCAUST, The Weaponization of Memory in the Service of State and Nation by Tony Greenstein, 2022. What is not known by most people is that there were another eight million victims. The attempt to white wash the Wehrmacht‘s behavior is not any different from the white washing of British behavior during their imperialist conquests and administrations. The same applies to America. Well, most Germans were considered evil! Read Sumner Well‘s publication of 1944 A TIME FOR DECISION. Where you can find his assessment of the German people as a nation that lacked „western“ values who needed to be guided for at least two generations to catch-up. The vast majority of Germans had to undergo de-Nazification in 1945! You were guilty until you proved your innocence. My parents had no illusion about a so-called clean shield nor did those young soldiers of the WHITE ROSE resistance organization. My dad had very good reasons for denouncing the re-establishment of the West German army - encouraged by the U.S. - in 1955. The new army was officered from top to bottom by veterans of the old Wehrmacht. The Israelis have been using quite effectively a „clean shield“ myth since 1948! I am a pacifist and have defended my stand. I could never understand why any person of conscience (not to speak of religious orientation) would consent to military service. I am well versed in the just war theory.
Yes. I'm not trying to attack your point but to contextualize it, as we historians say. Having taught the Holocaust myself, I know it has been used to explain, or explain away, or even to justify the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
But the fact remains the Holocaust was unique in history. No other nation has ever built death camps specifically for the industrialized mass murder of an entire people. Those death camps, as you know, were Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, with Auschwitz-Birkenau as the death camp part of the huge Auschwitz complex.
True, dead is dead, but the Nazi death camps, with their gas chambers and stress on efficiency of killing, remain unique in history. The Nazi vision was to kill all Jews, to leave none alive, whereas the other millions the Nazis killed (Poles, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, gypsies, etc.) were not singled out for total extermination.
Again, I believe you taught this course yourself, so this is not news to you.
I think the Nazis simply modernized/mechanized/systematized slaughter and as human beings the Germans are/were no more beastly than can be any other group.
As I have mentioned here before, my pacifist/Socialist father, an ordained Methodist minister, spent part of his 20's bicycling across Germany, speaking fluent German and staying overnight in the homes of Germans. He fell in love with the people and refused to fight in WW2, successfully submitting an essay that earned him CO status, not an easy thing to obtain at the time. The revelation of the holocaust was devastating to him, silencing him, but I always got the impression that he had a high regard for the Germans and a low regard for the French, he mentioning to me that in WW1 the Germans published in the NYT a warning that the Lusitania was at risk if it carried weapons in addition to passengers (it did and it was sunk by a U-boat). He also spoke of the arrogance of French border guards (French/German border) in the 1920's.
My point is that his personal experience, that of a kindly person who hated war visiting from a foreign country, in Germany did not leave him with wariness of evil, quite the opposite. What makes human beings capable of anything is raw power over other human beings. In WW1 both Germans and French showed how capable they were of making war into unending mechanized slaughter. Hitler simply took the next step of applying the brutality he had been exposed to in WW1 to helpless civilians. The US did so with Hiroshima and, earlier, with the firebombing of Tokyo.
I keep this lesson in mind as I have heard talk of the "axis of evil" and heard a relative who doesn't know a single Arab denounce them as animals. It is true that those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. That needs to be expanded to say anyone who is human should be extremely cautious in denouncing other humans. Also, the phrase "There, but for the grace of God, go I" should be amended to "There, but for the lack of absolute power, go I"
It would be hard to argue against the notion that in the last few hundred years the two most brutal Empires were that of the British, and now that of the Americans. There have been many other brutal empires, but way back then there were a lot less people around so the death tolls were lower. The US firebombed many cities in WWII that had no strategic importance to the military, including places like Dresden and Tokyo. Then they needlessly dropped two atomic bombs on defenseless civilian cities. You don't get a lot more brutal and callous than that, especially when you find out it was mostly a warning to the USSR to back off in the east and in the west, and leave the world to us. The part that people need to get a handle on is that the type of person who wants extreme power is exactly the type of person who should never get it. But people keep voting for "leaders" who talk of war as though it were a virtue. So it goes.
Perhaps you didn't notice Jeff, but the USSR and China did not ever have globe-spanning empires like the British and US. Neither did the Ottoman or Roman Empires, or the Mongolian. There have only been two globe-spanning empires where the misery and death was global in scope.
The US has killed many millions of people around the world since the late 1800s when we started killing the people of the Philippines by the hundreds of thousands. Most older, localized empires had high rates of killing over many centuries, but none of them come close to what the US has managed in only 130 years. You bring up China, the US invaded China very early on as Smedley Butler discussed in his book, War is a Racket. We killed quite a few Chinese, and I am fairly sure China has not invaded the US and killed anyone.
Trust me, John, i know all about America's Wars, starting with the Spanish-American War started after America's first 9/11: blowing up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. And are You referring to what we did in China during The Boxer Rebellion?
But again, You ignore the Question: How many people ~ specifically Russians, Eastern Europeans, and West Asians ~ were killed or starved to death under the USSR's Empire? Are You familiar with what the Ukrainians call "The Holodomor"?
And how many people ~ especially Chinese and other East Asians ~ were killed or starved to death under Mao's PRC Empire? Ever hear of "The Great Leap Forward"?
My impression is that the regular army, the Wehrmacht, wasn't any more brutal than armies typically are. The SS divisions (38 finally in total) on the other hand, took pride in their brutality. They were the cream of the crop after all. They had something to prove.
I’m a colleague of Omer Bartov, and it has been great seeing how his position has shifted over the last 20 years I’ve known him. I’m also happy to see what a positive impact he has been making. I thought his Guardian piece was very powerful on a number of levels. Glad to see his stance brought to attention here.
The Take’s Jon Miltimore 14 Sep 24 piece explains “WHY TROTSKY BELIEVED IT WAS MORAL TO MURDER THE TSAR'S CHILDREN”, and then totally, completely debunks him. One could raise the same issue with America’s and Israel’s murder of Gaza’s Children. And similarly debunk their “morality,” as well... :
Most of us have a sense of right and wrong. But if pressed to explain why we believe what we do, I suspect there would be a great many blanks stares and incoherent responses.
Justifying Murder
Much of this is attributable to the rise of emotivism, a philosophy that claims all evaluative judgments (even this one) are little more than expressions of preference or feeling, particularly with regard to moral judgments.
However, even if this is a philosophy many people today embrace in principle, it is one they reject in practice, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre has observed. For example, few people would accept the proposition that the statement “murder is wrong” is simply a preference. Most would accept this as a moral fact, even if they could not explain precisely why.
The idea of justified murder has intrigued great and devious minds alike for generations. Murder as a utilitarian good is the centerpiece of the plot of Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece “CRIME AND PUNISHMENT”, for example, one of the greatest psychological literary works ever written.
Raskolnikov’s decision to murder an elderly pawnbroker is the result of his view that exceptional men are not bound by the same moral conventions as ordinary men. This is a moral philosophy Dostoyevsky rejects, but his thoughts on utilitarian justifications of murder—that it could be a moral act if it led to a greater good—were quite prescient.
A little more than a half-century later, in his work “THEIR MORALS AND OURS”, the Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, a mass murderer, explained why murder in certain circumstances was quite justified— even rational.
“A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified,” Trotsky wrote. “From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, THE END IS JUSTIFIED IF IT LEADS TO INCREASING THE POWER OF MAN OVER NATURE AND TO THE ABOLITION OF THE POWER OF MAN OVER MAN.”
He continued:
“Primarily and irreconcilably, revolutionary morality rejects servility in relation to the bourgeoisie and haughtiness in relation to the toilers, that is, those characteristics in which petty bourgeois pedants and moralists are thoroughly steeped.
“These criteria do not, of course, give a ready answer to the question as to what is permissible and what is not permissible in each separate case. There can be no such automatic answers. PROBLEMS OF REVOLUTIONARY MORALITY ARE FUSED WITH THE PROBLEMS OF REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY AND TACTICS.”
Under such a philosophy, it made perfect sense for Trotsky to order the deaths of Tsar Nicholas II’s children—Olga Nikolaevna, Tatiana Nikolaevna, Maria Nikolaevna, Anastasia Nikolaevna, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich.
“It had been right (as Trotsky says elsewhere) to kill the Tsar’s children, because it was politically justified,” wrote the Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kołakowski in his book “MAIN CURRENTS OF MARXISM”.
The Ends Versus the Means
Trotsky, of course, famously fell out of favor with Stalin (a not uncommon phenomenon). As a result, Trotsky’s two sons were killed during Stalin’s purges, an atrocity Trotsky condemned.
“Why then was it wrong for Stalin to murder Trotsky’s children?” Kolakowski asked. “Because Stalin did not represent the proletariat.”
Trotsky’s murders were justified because he was truly on the side of the proletariat, you see, whereas Stalin was a mere pretender.
A moral philosophy such as this would have looked mad to most people throughout human history—as it does to many today—but it’s the product of several strains of modern philosophy that pervade our culture: emotivism, moral relativism, and utilitarianism.
THE LESSON? ASK YOURSELF WHY YOU BELIEVE WHAT YOU DO. AND BEWARE THOSE WHO WOULD JUSTIFY THEIR MEANS SOLELY BY THE ENDS THEY ACHIEVE.
Why don't I ever hear anyone say, "Palestinians have the right to defend themselves"?
Exactly.
"First come, first serve." In a conflict, both sides can't be on the defensive. Someone has to be the aggressor. "The squeaky wheel gets the grease." The Palestinians may have right on their side, but the Israelis stole a march on the all-important public relations front.
Screw that! If no one else will say it, I will.
Furthermore, the Palestinians have been on the defensive ever since the Balfour declaration in 1917.
Strong words and unminced! But it doesn't obviate the truth of the assertion. In time this particular episode of genocide will be just another footnote to history, quite possibly as a precursor to a more far-reaching conflict. The fact that the rest of the world has not made any attempt to stop it - and shows no intention of doing so - supports this view.
Years and years of subversion from the Global North finally pays off. But you are forgetting the tolerance the world has shown in the past to atrocities, anywhere and everywhere. Rohigya genocide in Myanmar, or Tutsi genocide in Rwanda are some of the best examples of this.
Yes, Thank you! The North American propaganda about the "unprovoked" invasion of Ukraine and those dangerous Palestinians... about Israel's right to "defend" itself is so delusional. North American propaganda and its notion of freedom very well may be worse than Russian propaganda and its notions of freedom. The Chris Hedges Report is a great resource too.
The right to defend is grabbed by aggressives because they think it is the perfect shield to turn their outlook into a benevolent thing that will shut down any criticism. Thus Israel's very worn out use of the phrase, also used by gun owners ready to deal death but giving the urge a shine by talk of defending the home.
I may come across as defensive in this reply. I know it is quite popular these days to point out the extraordinary brutality of the German Wehrmacht during WW II. Was it really that different? When I was a graduate student at UCSB I studied European History with the late professors Joachim Remak whose specialty was the THIRD REICH which had personal experienced as a Jew in Berlin before being able to escape to the USA. He didn’t, as far as I can remember, emphasize a unique German brutality. Later studies in preparation for my own teaching I did some extensive reading which I am still doing in my retirement. While reading a biography of Otto Von Bismarck by professor Jonathan Steinberg I ran across a quote attributed to General Philip Sheridan (American Civil War). He was an American military observer during the Franco-Prussian War (1870/71). He said to Bismarck: „You know how to defeat an enemy better than any army in the world, BUT (my emphasis) to destroy him you have not learned. One must see the smoke from burning villages; otherwise you will never finish the French.“ Then there is a fascinating history of America (not available in English) DER MOLOCH - Eine kritische Geschichte der USA. In the section about America‘s conquest of Indian territories he remarked that „the U.S. military employed Gestapo methods fifty years before an actual Gestapo came into existence.“ American historian Caroline Elkins published in 2022 LEGACY OF VIOLENCE - A History of the British Empire in which she shows the extraordinary violence used by the British during their colonial conquests and administration of the conquered territories. The vast majority of western peoples don’t know that Churchill deliberately caused the death by starvation of three million Bengalese/Indians in 1934/44. „It is their own fault. They breed like rabbits“ he said. War is just plain evil, but using the evil of one particular country as a kind of historical model is misleading and, more importantly, has a tendency to avoid taking responsibility for ones own military brutality. The ignorance among Americans regarding was quite obvious to me after my immigration. Invariably the average person’s knowledge was of Hitler (Nazis) and German cars. The argument that Bibi controls America is from my knowledge of Israeli history is again very superficial. Israel was founded as an Anglo-American project! It has been funded by the combined West as a foothold for western interests. I am aware of Zionist/Israeli financial influence, but do not think that is the primary reason for the tolerance of Israeli violence. The elimination of the Palestinians would solidify the West‘s presence in the Middle East. A country that has had and does have „diplomats“ and politicians that were and are praised as examples of statesmanship like Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton has no empathy for those suffering from Western international ambitions. The death of 500.000 Iraqi children was worth said Madam Albright. Kissinger‘s remarks about Salvador Allende and Hillary‘s regard Libya‘s Muhammad Gaddafi are also infamous. Here are my thoughts regarding issues raised by this essay. (Any mistakes made are the result of worsening eyesight and typing with one finger on a iPad).
Karl, it's a complicated question. Focusing on the brutality of the Wehrmacht is necessary due to the "clean shield" myth (the idea the Germany military was largely free from the taint of the Nazi murder machine that was the Holocaust). That isn't to say the Wehrmacht was uniquely brutal in World War II. But it was often brutal on a large scale.
As Bartov notes. the Holocaust was unique because it was an industrial exercise in mass death against an entire people, the Jews, in which the most advanced minds in Germany more or less actively collaborated. (This isn't to say all Germans were evil; many Germans did resist or refuse.)
The Wehrmacht was especially brutal, as you know, on the eastern front, because they were under orders to be brutal, and because brutality bred brutality. We know, for example, the Wehrmacht captured roughly two million Soviet POWs and allowed the vast majority of them to starve or freeze to death. The Germans gave the Russians no quarter, so of course the Red Army reciprocated. Brutality bred brutality.
Certainly, there's plenty of evidence of U.S. brutality in Vietnam, for example, or against Native Americans. Again, brutality is part of the human condition; it's not uniquely German.
I made my point and stand by it. Unfortunately, the Holocaust is uniquely focused on the Jews six million of Jewish victims. The emphasis on Jewish victimhood has been used as a powerful tool to justify the brutality used in the establishment of a state of Israel. On that topic I suggest reading ZIONISM DURING THE HOLOCAUST, The Weaponization of Memory in the Service of State and Nation by Tony Greenstein, 2022. What is not known by most people is that there were another eight million victims. The attempt to white wash the Wehrmacht‘s behavior is not any different from the white washing of British behavior during their imperialist conquests and administrations. The same applies to America. Well, most Germans were considered evil! Read Sumner Well‘s publication of 1944 A TIME FOR DECISION. Where you can find his assessment of the German people as a nation that lacked „western“ values who needed to be guided for at least two generations to catch-up. The vast majority of Germans had to undergo de-Nazification in 1945! You were guilty until you proved your innocence. My parents had no illusion about a so-called clean shield nor did those young soldiers of the WHITE ROSE resistance organization. My dad had very good reasons for denouncing the re-establishment of the West German army - encouraged by the U.S. - in 1955. The new army was officered from top to bottom by veterans of the old Wehrmacht. The Israelis have been using quite effectively a „clean shield“ myth since 1948! I am a pacifist and have defended my stand. I could never understand why any person of conscience (not to speak of religious orientation) would consent to military service. I am well versed in the just war theory.
Yes. I'm not trying to attack your point but to contextualize it, as we historians say. Having taught the Holocaust myself, I know it has been used to explain, or explain away, or even to justify the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza.
But the fact remains the Holocaust was unique in history. No other nation has ever built death camps specifically for the industrialized mass murder of an entire people. Those death camps, as you know, were Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, with Auschwitz-Birkenau as the death camp part of the huge Auschwitz complex.
True, dead is dead, but the Nazi death camps, with their gas chambers and stress on efficiency of killing, remain unique in history. The Nazi vision was to kill all Jews, to leave none alive, whereas the other millions the Nazis killed (Poles, Soviet POWs, homosexuals, gypsies, etc.) were not singled out for total extermination.
Again, I believe you taught this course yourself, so this is not news to you.
I think the Nazis simply modernized/mechanized/systematized slaughter and as human beings the Germans are/were no more beastly than can be any other group.
As I have mentioned here before, my pacifist/Socialist father, an ordained Methodist minister, spent part of his 20's bicycling across Germany, speaking fluent German and staying overnight in the homes of Germans. He fell in love with the people and refused to fight in WW2, successfully submitting an essay that earned him CO status, not an easy thing to obtain at the time. The revelation of the holocaust was devastating to him, silencing him, but I always got the impression that he had a high regard for the Germans and a low regard for the French, he mentioning to me that in WW1 the Germans published in the NYT a warning that the Lusitania was at risk if it carried weapons in addition to passengers (it did and it was sunk by a U-boat). He also spoke of the arrogance of French border guards (French/German border) in the 1920's.
My point is that his personal experience, that of a kindly person who hated war visiting from a foreign country, in Germany did not leave him with wariness of evil, quite the opposite. What makes human beings capable of anything is raw power over other human beings. In WW1 both Germans and French showed how capable they were of making war into unending mechanized slaughter. Hitler simply took the next step of applying the brutality he had been exposed to in WW1 to helpless civilians. The US did so with Hiroshima and, earlier, with the firebombing of Tokyo.
I keep this lesson in mind as I have heard talk of the "axis of evil" and heard a relative who doesn't know a single Arab denounce them as animals. It is true that those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. That needs to be expanded to say anyone who is human should be extremely cautious in denouncing other humans. Also, the phrase "There, but for the grace of God, go I" should be amended to "There, but for the lack of absolute power, go I"
It would be hard to argue against the notion that in the last few hundred years the two most brutal Empires were that of the British, and now that of the Americans. There have been many other brutal empires, but way back then there were a lot less people around so the death tolls were lower. The US firebombed many cities in WWII that had no strategic importance to the military, including places like Dresden and Tokyo. Then they needlessly dropped two atomic bombs on defenseless civilian cities. You don't get a lot more brutal and callous than that, especially when you find out it was mostly a warning to the USSR to back off in the east and in the west, and leave the world to us. The part that people need to get a handle on is that the type of person who wants extreme power is exactly the type of person who should never get it. But people keep voting for "leaders" who talk of war as though it were a virtue. So it goes.
What about the Empires of the USSR and of Mao's China, John?
How do their Death Tolls stack up in comparison to the British and American Empires over the last few hundred years?
Perhaps you didn't notice Jeff, but the USSR and China did not ever have globe-spanning empires like the British and US. Neither did the Ottoman or Roman Empires, or the Mongolian. There have only been two globe-spanning empires where the misery and death was global in scope.
i am aware, John, that the USSR and Mao's China did not have "global-spanning empires."
The question wasn't "How widespread were the Deaths?" It was "How Many Deaths were there?"
The US has killed many millions of people around the world since the late 1800s when we started killing the people of the Philippines by the hundreds of thousands. Most older, localized empires had high rates of killing over many centuries, but none of them come close to what the US has managed in only 130 years. You bring up China, the US invaded China very early on as Smedley Butler discussed in his book, War is a Racket. We killed quite a few Chinese, and I am fairly sure China has not invaded the US and killed anyone.
China has invaded us with a flood of cheap consumer goods, John, and we are defeated by them. :-)
Trust me, John, i know all about America's Wars, starting with the Spanish-American War started after America's first 9/11: blowing up the USS Maine in Havana Harbor. And are You referring to what we did in China during The Boxer Rebellion?
But again, You ignore the Question: How many people ~ specifically Russians, Eastern Europeans, and West Asians ~ were killed or starved to death under the USSR's Empire? Are You familiar with what the Ukrainians call "The Holodomor"?
And how many people ~ especially Chinese and other East Asians ~ were killed or starved to death under Mao's PRC Empire? Ever hear of "The Great Leap Forward"?
My impression is that the regular army, the Wehrmacht, wasn't any more brutal than armies typically are. The SS divisions (38 finally in total) on the other hand, took pride in their brutality. They were the cream of the crop after all. They had something to prove.
Omer Bartov is an important voice to hear! Thank you for recommending him and the link to the interview. I have all of three books as well.
This is a link to a recent Guardian article in which he talks about a visit to Israel and his thoughts and concerns. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/aug/13/israel-gaza-historian-omer-bartov?src=longreads
An excellent essay, Duncan. Thanks for posting the link.
I’m a colleague of Omer Bartov, and it has been great seeing how his position has shifted over the last 20 years I’ve known him. I’m also happy to see what a positive impact he has been making. I thought his Guardian piece was very powerful on a number of levels. Glad to see his stance brought to attention here.
The Take’s Jon Miltimore 14 Sep 24 piece explains “WHY TROTSKY BELIEVED IT WAS MORAL TO MURDER THE TSAR'S CHILDREN”, and then totally, completely debunks him. One could raise the same issue with America’s and Israel’s murder of Gaza’s Children. And similarly debunk their “morality,” as well... :
Most of us have a sense of right and wrong. But if pressed to explain why we believe what we do, I suspect there would be a great many blanks stares and incoherent responses.
Justifying Murder
Much of this is attributable to the rise of emotivism, a philosophy that claims all evaluative judgments (even this one) are little more than expressions of preference or feeling, particularly with regard to moral judgments.
However, even if this is a philosophy many people today embrace in principle, it is one they reject in practice, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre has observed. For example, few people would accept the proposition that the statement “murder is wrong” is simply a preference. Most would accept this as a moral fact, even if they could not explain precisely why.
The idea of justified murder has intrigued great and devious minds alike for generations. Murder as a utilitarian good is the centerpiece of the plot of Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece “CRIME AND PUNISHMENT”, for example, one of the greatest psychological literary works ever written.
Raskolnikov’s decision to murder an elderly pawnbroker is the result of his view that exceptional men are not bound by the same moral conventions as ordinary men. This is a moral philosophy Dostoyevsky rejects, but his thoughts on utilitarian justifications of murder—that it could be a moral act if it led to a greater good—were quite prescient.
A little more than a half-century later, in his work “THEIR MORALS AND OURS”, the Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, a mass murderer, explained why murder in certain circumstances was quite justified— even rational.
“A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified,” Trotsky wrote. “From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, THE END IS JUSTIFIED IF IT LEADS TO INCREASING THE POWER OF MAN OVER NATURE AND TO THE ABOLITION OF THE POWER OF MAN OVER MAN.”
He continued:
“Primarily and irreconcilably, revolutionary morality rejects servility in relation to the bourgeoisie and haughtiness in relation to the toilers, that is, those characteristics in which petty bourgeois pedants and moralists are thoroughly steeped.
“These criteria do not, of course, give a ready answer to the question as to what is permissible and what is not permissible in each separate case. There can be no such automatic answers. PROBLEMS OF REVOLUTIONARY MORALITY ARE FUSED WITH THE PROBLEMS OF REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY AND TACTICS.”
Under such a philosophy, it made perfect sense for Trotsky to order the deaths of Tsar Nicholas II’s children—Olga Nikolaevna, Tatiana Nikolaevna, Maria Nikolaevna, Anastasia Nikolaevna, Tsarevich Alexei Nikolaevich.
“It had been right (as Trotsky says elsewhere) to kill the Tsar’s children, because it was politically justified,” wrote the Polish philosopher and historian Leszek Kołakowski in his book “MAIN CURRENTS OF MARXISM”.
The Ends Versus the Means
Trotsky, of course, famously fell out of favor with Stalin (a not uncommon phenomenon). As a result, Trotsky’s two sons were killed during Stalin’s purges, an atrocity Trotsky condemned.
“Why then was it wrong for Stalin to murder Trotsky’s children?” Kolakowski asked. “Because Stalin did not represent the proletariat.”
Trotsky’s murders were justified because he was truly on the side of the proletariat, you see, whereas Stalin was a mere pretender.
A moral philosophy such as this would have looked mad to most people throughout human history—as it does to many today—but it’s the product of several strains of modern philosophy that pervade our culture: emotivism, moral relativism, and utilitarianism.
THE LESSON? ASK YOURSELF WHY YOU BELIEVE WHAT YOU DO. AND BEWARE THOSE WHO WOULD JUSTIFY THEIR MEANS SOLELY BY THE ENDS THEY ACHIEVE.
Source: https://jjmilt.substack.com/p/why-trotsky-believed-it-was-moral-4ee / EMPHASES added.