Re: Further costs of war

[Tim May <tcmay@got.net>]

At 1:43 PM -0700 11/23/97, Jim Choate wrote:
...
>Any particular methodology you might care to share on stopping WWII?
>Being an avid amateur historian concerning WWII I am very much interested in
>any insight you might have.

Not entering the war. There's ample evidence that the U.S. provoked the
Japanese in various ways. (I'm not saying the Japanese were blameless, or
lily-white, or"nice," etc., only that most historians agree--and Japanese
archives support--that the Japanese were motivated to attack Pearl Harbor
in the hope that a devastating first blow would sink enough ships, etc., to
cause America to back off in its actions in the ironically named Pacific.)

Had the U.S. concentrated on its own affairs, on just trade, it is unlikely
that what the Japanese were doing in Malaysia, Manchuria, Korea, Indochina,
and the Phillipines would have had any major interest for us.

As for Europe, this was even less our war than the Pacific war.

In a sense, so _what_ if some army from some nation was rolling over other
armies?

(The "evilness" of Hitler is not the issue, either. Else Stalin and Mao
would have been cause enough to go to war.)

(And the issue of "alliances" is even murkier. The states of the U.S. have
little to fear from Canada or Mexico, so what use have "alliances" ever
been? Much could be said about the pros and cons of alliances, but I am
persuaded that the U.S. should avoid them. And certainly the monarchic
alliances which led to the First World War--a war fought over the Hapsburg
Dynasty and assorted intrigues==were completely absurd. Even the proximate
cause of the U.S. entry into the war, the sinking of the "Lusitania" and
related events, was duplicitous on the part of the U.S. government...the
U.S. gov't. was "taking sides" by shipping munitions on the L.)

As for the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem...not my war.  A tragedy
and a horrible atrocity, to be sure, but so were the forced starvation of
the Kulaks and others, the decision by the PRC government to deliberately
sacrifice a region of 30 million peasants, the "killing fields" of
Cambodia, the Rwanda massacres, and so on.

Just as invading Cambodia to save a million Cambodians was not justified,
just as invading Rwanda to stop the killing of a million Hutus or Tutsis or
both, so, too, was an invasion of Europe to save some Frenchmen or some
Jews or Gypsies unjustified.

If the U.S. had not become "policeman to the world" in the early part of
this century ("...but carry a big stick"), or, more to the point, if the
United States were (emphasis on the plural "were," not "was") highly
authonomous and decentralized, it is hard to imagine Illinois or New
Hampshire deciding to send their men to die in the Pacific for some
abstract notion of "stopping Japanese imperialism." Ditto for the war in
Europe, although no doubt many with relatives in Euope would be pressing
for mandatory action. Understandable, but ignorable in a free society.

Those who wanted to liberate the death camps, or to push Hitler back into
Gerrmany, or to kick the Emperor's butt could, of course, simply go over
and volunteer. In a free society, mercenaries are legal.

The last justifiable war the American states were involved in was,
arguably, the War of 1812. Every war since then has been unjustified.

--Tim May

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