how many "just wars" have there been?

besides, violence is always the opposite of good, regardless of how it is dressed.

there are many complex reasons for a country to go to war, but the need to 'right wrongs' is way down the list.

there are many complex reasons for a country to go to war, but the need to 'right wrongs' is way down the list and, in reality, insignificant.

on reflection, rather than the simplistic 'power', i suggest 'immanent and overriding self-interest' best describes government actions, a mindset which often must negate ethical concerns.

February yes, October no.

i suppose it is a trite point that there are no selfless acts but it becomes worrying when horrendous when, for example, human rights abuses are ignored in pursuit of bucks (china yo), or genocide is allowed to occur because of a lack of personal corollary advantages are absent (rwanda).

The American Revolution was not a just war though.

Nor is the outcome of such wars often just, even when the resistance is successful and the invaders are expelled, because the successor government always passes into the hands of the most powerful and best-armed of the resistors and this basis of power does not often lend itself to justice.

this is (almost verbatim) one of my favorite lines in "Dazed and Confused".

I agree with Suspiria. No war is "just".

Also, the interest of the Colonials was to expand westward, encroaching on yet more Native American land and Britain didn't want that.

Anyone recall how the Koreans and the Chinese felt about the Russo-Japanese war?

The real question of a 'just' war is whether it can be used as a moral template to justify present or future wars and, while the past may sometimes teach us directly or in the form of analogy, about present and future circumstances, it behooves us to see how our circumstances differ from the past as well.

If there's anything that irks me more than someone with merely superficial knowledge of the 20th century and WWII applying the moral of the story of the lonely (but oh so perspicacious) Churchill against the lazy, deluded appeasers to evey fucking problem and conflict that arises, like some petulant child trying to win an arugument with his parents, I haven't encountered it recently.

oh ferchrissakes, now you're gunna go on about how Yalta was betrayal

it doesn't make any difference that the nazis were bad dudes. britain couldn't allow germany to maintain a stranglehold on europe because it would threaten their own interests.

Now, as far as the British government's motives go, that may or may not be the case, and it may or may not make someone feel like a badass rebel to say it. But it considerably sidesteps the question of "justice" by ignoring consequences entirely. I'd be perfectly fine in a just society whose government consistently attempted to do selfish and evil things but it just kept accidentally coming out as being for the welfare of all. So even if Churchill was just trying to secure his supply of fine Danish confections, let's review: World not conquered by Nazis: good or bad?

Now, obviously, we can start to get into some huge and interesting problems with regard to the use of force, and there are some good black-and-white cases lying around (especially those that involve indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets or what have you), and on some level you can say that all of this death and destruction was brought on the masses of the world by a few well-off men in drawing rooms treating human beings like chessmen. And that's true to a point, but you have to be some kind of rhetorical genius (or dipshit) to carry that idea forward to the point of forgetting who started the war in question. If Hitler had given Churchill a yes/no "Do you want me to try and conquer England," I'm pretty sure the answer would have been "no."

Another mind-bogglingly original approach to the age-old issue "who did what":

Silly Americans and Brits, they fought a war that gave 1/2 of Europe to Stalin and call it just.

Would you have preferred if they had kept to themselves and let Stalin have all of Europe? Nobody "gave" Stalin anything in this geopolitical sense - the Russians took Eastern Europe from the Germans who had recently conquered it. Through incredibly, horribly massive losses on all sides. Twenty-five million Russian dead, am I right? Before we can even begin to apply the question of whether any of this slaughter was just or not we at least need to have the basic facts of the situation straight.

apparently the brits and hessians were so brutal that wherever they went they turned loyalists into rabid revolutionaries. also, washington's core had a heavy black contingent, probably thinking that they were fighting for the abolition of slavery, but i guess history is full of sad ironies.

> "gave" Stalin anything in this geopolitical sense

totally debatable. see churchill's intentions to invade europe via the balkans and counter russian expansionism.

i don't think he was seriously considering fighting russia. rather, it was his desire to liberate eastern europe from germany BEFORE the russians arrived. military planning wasn't churchill's best suit, so maybe it was a bad plan, but there must have been another way to use russia against hitler without totally capitulating to stalin's imperial ambitions. a lot of people behind the iron curtain felt betrayed by the UK and the US, with some justification, i tend to think. it's ironic that the allies went to war in response to the occupation of poland, and when they ended the war, ta da, poland is still occupied, albeit by a different invader.

How? With what force? If the British had the military capability to just chew through Europe in the first half of the war, why did they ever retreat over the Channel in the first place? The Nazis weren't exactly pushovers. It's the Russians who took down the German army - again, at tremendous cost over the course of a couple of horrifying years...and that's with the US and Britain keeping Axis fronts open in North Africa and Italy! I find it impossible to imagine the Allies, minus Russia, doing all of that by themselves. I don't think they would have done it and I don't think they could have done it. Not without A-bombing the German army, which would leave Eastern Europe even more ruined, and anyway wouldn't have been possible or even particularly foreseeable at the time any of these decisions were made.

I'm not saying it's by any means a good thing that the Iron Curtain was drawn up - just that it was a historical inevitability from, I dunno, Munich, that this part of the world was either going to be taken over permanently by the Wehrmacht or by the Red Army.

maybe the official line is correct, i concede that it's possible. maybe everything played out in the best way, but i know there were major internal debates over how to run the war and who's to say that it couldn't have been conducted in different mannerm, one that used russia as a tool while thwarting their postwar desires.

I mean what kind of retarded calculus is this?!? Where would an Allied force have landed? How would they have dealt with the German Army having open supply lines close at hand, etc. ad nauseam?

In the end, September '39 wasn't about Poland being re-dismembered and the West, or at least it wasn't about Polish self-interest, it was about finally standing up to a mythomanical madman with whom they realized they couldn't negotiate. Let's also not forget in all your counter-factual speculation that Russia WASN'T our ally 'til after Hitler invaded, by which time we were already miles down the pipeline in terms of our plans.

britain could have defeated germany alone, with a neutral russia and america. if you throw in the bargaining power of teeming america and the nuclear bomb, we could have rewritten the map of europe but instead we allowed stalin to do the rewriting.

ww2 is a part of our culture. it's kind of like our iliad, and our grandfathers were like jason and the argonauts. it's so personal, so reverential that i think theres a natural reluctance to second guess how the war was conducted. but if the military establishment royally FUBARed everything just a few years later in Korea and Vietnam, why not assume that they made a lot of mistakes in ww2 and try to figure it out?

re: shakey i have a thick skin but there's a limit.

also, I'm not any kind of military history buff at all, but I've never heard anybody suggest that Britain could have defeated the Axis on its own.

have you been reading newt gingrich?

Dude, we should have totally gone all the way to Baghdad.

Well, there were those anthrax bombs he wanted to develop before FDR intervened.