"A War Worth Fighting"

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141501?tid=relatedcl

Dear Newsweek,

In the recent article "A War Worth Fighting," I was bothered by Christopher Hitchens' side comment that after the Allies discovered the horrors of the Final Solution, it somehow retroactively justified their carpet-bombing of German cities. I for one still believe in "The Good German", and do question the wisdom and morality of such a policy, where innocent Germans who may have even been opposed to Hitler's wartime leadership were indiscriminately made to suffer, even though they played no active role in the Holocaust apart from voting the Nazis to power in 1933. The Nazis won but only gained 49% of that vote, so clearly there were plenty of Germans who disagreed with Hitler. So in no way could that result be construed as a nationwide endorsement of the secretive Final Solution that was to come a decade later. It is possible that many German civilians were cruel to Jews and other persecuted peoples, but the punishment for bigotry is not murder.

I suppose some Allies felt that the Germans deserved to see their cities burn after the Blitzing of England and atrocities on the Eastern Front. But American journalist Oswald Garrison Villard said, "What was criminal in Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw, and London has now become heroic first in Dresden and now in Tokyo." So not only was the hypocritical bombing of German civilians excessive and irrelevant as punishment for the Holocaust, it also made the targeting of population centers during wartime more "acceptable", especially for the US against Imperial Japan (at least 500,000 dead). Horrible barbarism by the Axis and Allies during WWII probably opened the door for future wartime atrocities against civilians during the Cold War, and more recently, in the Balkans and Iraq.

http://japanfocus.org/products/details/2414

Also I thought this Newsweek article on Churchill, Chamberlain, and the political myths of appeasement/confrontation was interesting:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/141502