Overly abstract.  Partisan war and atomic war are in completely different categories, despite the fact that they both usually involve the targeting of civilians.  Napoleon got it exactly right: “With a partisan, you must fight like a partisan.” That does not mean becoming “evil” like the “evil enemy”.  There is no reason why we must view the enemy as evil at all, regardless of how he views us.  Experience shows that states can use partisan tactics--assassination, kidnapping, etc.--without becoming morally degraded.

Exiting the tube yesterday I passed a group of schoolchildren, probably 30-40 of them. At most 3-4 were indigenous English or British. The English are almost certainly a minority in their capital , and with 10million more immigrants/offspring slated for the next two decades, they will be reduced to about 2/3s of the entire population of England. The law abiding citizens are under constant survellance , soon they will be subject to a government that can lock them up for 42 days with no charge. They can be arrested for ‘racist’ and ‘Islamophobic’ comments.

Given all this, perhaps it would have been better had Hitler won. At least the English biological heritage would have remained—now they are losing both their political and biological heritage.

Ploni Almoni,

Yes, Napoleon was after all extremely successful in his war against partisans.

Unless we are willing to employ methods amounting to genocide, we should stay out of places we have to fight guerrillas.

Live by the fascism, die by the fascism:

McCain is ineligble to run-by his own argument!

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2008/06/13/politics/fromtheroad/entry4180901.shtml

If Guantanamo Bay is not to be considered U.S. soil for jurisdictional purposes, than neither is the military base in Panama where he was born. According to the U.S. Constitution, only “natural born” citizens are eligible to be President. Citizens born elsewhere (like California Governor Arnold Schwarzennegar) are ineligible.

The guy is digging his own legal/political grave.

Joe,

McCain is a natural-born citizen because both of his parents were.  The “issue” with Obama arose because his father was not American.

Not so fast, Mr. Cusack. I grant you everything insofar as your history goes, but I’m not going to permit you to get off that easy.

Are you saying that if Country A nukes Country B, that Country B should defend its humanity, or what’s left of it, by destroying its own nuclear stockpile? Clearly Country B would have no use for them, since 1) having nuclear weapons has been spectacularly proven to be a useless deterrent; and 2) launching its nuclear arsenol on Country A’s population would be an unacceptably evil and wicked thing to do.

Poor, incinerated Country B would seem to be in a bit of a quandary if it wishes to stay on the side of angels, no?

You may be right, Fletcher, but the term “natural born” is not legally defined in the constitution, nor has there ever been a test case to establish precedent.
McCain’s eligibility will be challenged if he wins and the SCOTUS could decide against him.

Americans need to get over the idea that they are morally superior to those they fight. Whatever atrocities the Germans may have committed in World War Two(and that does not include a mythical “six million” in very dubious “gas chambers")they did not make war by firebombing civilians to death. The Germans at least had the excuse that they were fighting the most brutal regime the world had ever seen in Soviet Russia; Americans had only the excuse of a president trying to use war to cure a depression his New Deal had failed to solve.

Conservatives were once, as Mr. Cusack reminds us, opposed to the crimes their government committed in winning the war. They were also opposed to that kangaroo court in Nuremberg whose perjured testimonies, fake documents and moral self-righteousness laid the foundations for so much of what Americans now accept as valid WW Two history.

“Yes, Napoleon was after all extremely successful in his war against partisans.”

Touche.  But his failures don’t invalidate his maxim.  States have learned that the only hope for any measure of success against partisans--and they do sometimes have limited success--is to fight “unconventionally”, i.e., without regard for conventions that were developed for a world order which passed into oblivion a century ago.  And anyway these conventions defined the partisan as outlaw, outside of the law.

Another fine piece by the estimable Mr. Cusack. Thanks to him for calling attention to an excellent film. It’s very much worth renting, particularly since its focus is on the most profound, enduring evil of Nazi bioethics--the one which has survived and triumphed in postwar Europe. In the film, which I saw at Film Forum in NYC some years ago, the evil which awakens people to the nature of the regime is the same one which Catholic bishops condemned in Germany in 1938--while secular regimes were appeasing Hitler--the euthanasia of the handicapped. Given that some 80% or so of Down’s Syndrome children are now murdered in the womb in the “free” West, I ask the same question I’ve asked before:

Which side really won World War II?

“would our current enemies—the “global terror” against which we currently wage “war”—therefore be justified in employing a dirty bomb or even a regular nuclear device against New York or Los Angeles? I think not.”

This is a fallacious argument in the extreme.  It somewhat matters, does it not, that in WWII America was acting in legitimate self-defense against two extreme regimes that showed little regard for the law of war.  The use of impure and even immoral means is regrettable and in hindsight can and should be criticized, but our enemies now would not be justified in using so much as a pea-shooter and high Napoleonic “line” tactics on open fields because their ends are Satanic and the farthest cry from “just war” since the Nazis waged a racist war of annihilation on the Poles and Slavic peoples.  We’re not in a war of existential survival, but are at war with the lowest scum imaginable who deserve no quarter and the only tactic that they could legitimately employ would be mass suicide in their caves.

“...the Nazis waged a racist war of annihilation on the Poles and Slavic peoples”

Try telling that to the dozens of holocaust deniers who troll around here

I second Mr. Roach’s reaction to that outrageous argument of Mr. Cusack’s.  I’m not especially interested in World War II history.  But Mr. Cusack, with his abstract moralism (if it’s OK when A did it, it would be OK for B to do it), displays an astounding lack of concern for particular, concrete reality.

Mr. Cusack’s application of abstract symmetry would have been somewhat justified if we were all living in a 19th century Europe of modern sovereign states with professional armies.  That inter-state arena was quite symmetric, juridically at least.  But like it or not, internationally speaking we’re now living in a nihilistic epoch lacking both order and orientation.  To ignore this nihilistic situation, and to party like it’s 1899, would be the most deluded course imaginable.

You Christians (and Muslims, Jews, etc) need to grow up. 

From the link in the article:

http://norumbega.co.uk/2008/06/02/dehumanizing-the-enemy/

The very foundation of the dignity of man is the Incarnation of Christ. God so loved Man that He sent His only Son to be born of Mary, an actual human being, and to take up, in full, an actual human nature — Jesus Christ was every bit a human being as any saint or sinner, including Slobodan Milosevic.

Can you please base your morality on something other than religious fairy tales?

Your on par with Scientologists with your delusional fantasies.

The Monarchist,

I trust that a country which has been devastated by a nuclear attack will have more immediate and important concerns than the destruction of their own stockpile.

It seems to me that the only legitimate uses of nuclear weapons are 1) against purely military targets and 2) that their mere existence acts as a war-preventing deterrent.

Part of my point is that just to have evil inflicted upon you does not give you the right to inflict evil upon others.

Mr. Roach,

America was certainly acting in legitimate self-defense during World War II. Can you explain to me how this exempts us from complying with the moral law, specifically the deliberate targeting of innocent civilians?

“We’re not in a war of existential survival, but are at war with the lowest scum imaginable who deserve no quarter and the only tactic that they could legitimately employ would be mass suicide in their caves.”

I am afraid that our enemy, however lowly, despicable, and condemnable they are, are nonetheless human beings, and by virtue of this fact they deserve a certain level of dignity despite their obvious flaws. This doesn’t mean we bake them cakes and pat them on the back, but it does mean we treat them with a basic level of dignity.

“But Mr. Cusack, with his abstract moralism (if it’s OK when A did it, it would be OK for B to do it), displays an astounding lack of concern for particular, concrete reality.”

Ploni Almoni,

It seems bordering on the hubristic to claim it is perfectly legitimate for one warring party to kill innocent civilians but not for the other warring party. If killing innocent civilians is a legitimate act, it is a legitimate act, full-stop. You, however, are arguing “Do as I say, not do as I do”.

Asymmetrical warfare does complicate things greatly but, again, I can see no real argument for exempting those who wage asymmetrical warfare from the moral law.

“This doesn’t mean we bake them cakes and pat them on the back, but it does mean we treat them with a basic level of dignity.”

I’m all for giving them last cigarettes and distilled water for their water-boarding, but what do you propose exactly?

At my age, I have been over this ground MANY, MANY times before. But many younger find the temptation to be moralistic irresistible.

Question: Would killing 200,000 “enemy” civilians be justified by the saving of 85,000 Allied POWs? Remember, these POWs were soldiers, sailors,airmen and marines of many countries fighting FOR OUR SIDE.

At the 25th anniversary of the bombings, a Japanese survivor had a road show going around the world deploring the act. In response, Laurens van der Post, a survivor of the Singapore surrender and subsequent imprisonment wrote a book in 1970 (The Prisoner and the Bomb) telling his story of the POW camps and what happened because of the bomb.

Col. van der Post, was the Chief of Staff of the POWs at a camp with mostly fellow British prisoners. Through contacts, principally with a christian Korean Major serving on the Japanese camp Administration’s staff, they knew of the Japanese plan in the advent of looming defeat to kill all the prisoners and retreat to the Malayan jungles to fight on.

The prisoner’s plan in response was Plan A (if at day time) and Plan B (if at night) to be implemented upon notice from the Korean Major that the Japanese decision to implement their plan had been made, and the extermination of the prisoners was immanent.

The prisoners, filthy, ravaged, sick, shrunken, many wearing by then only loin clothes, were going to respond by “attacking” the Japanese garison’s machine gun positions with sticks and rocks. They would all die; but, the TRUE purpose was that a few of the most fit had been chosen to attempt to scale the walls and escape during the commotion of the attack. The sole reason for this was that the prisoners desperately wanted the world to know what had happened to them, and what they had endured. This would given their deaths meaning.

But everything changed one day in August of 1945. The senior British officers were called in to the Camp Commandant’s office. Incredulously, the Japanese Commander surrendered to them. Why? BECAUSE OF THE BOMB!

I think you’re onto something, dear friend.

You are taking the position that if Country A nukes the dense population nodes of Country B, the government of B does not thereby have a free hand to retaliate in a similar vein.

We may not have been trained to think that way at the height of the Cold War (i.e., Mutually Assured Destruction), but I do think that is a perfectly defensible, moral and humanely intelligent position to take. A despicable evil like unleashing a nuclear holocaust upon a civilian population cannot be justified under any circumstance.

That said, let’s be honest about what kind of enemy just deliberately incinerated millions of my fellow citizens. In that circumstance, I’m sure even the Pope would dehumanise the perpetrator and admit that it’s the work of the Devil. So let’s not be afraid to call the Devil by his real name. We’re only human, after all.

If killing innocent civilians is a legitimate act, it is a legitimate act, full-stop.

That’s exactly what I mean by universal abstractions.  The conventions against killing civilians evolved in particular times in particular circumstances in parallel with other particular assumptions.  In the Middle Ages, for instance, there was a clear distinction between killing Christians and killing heathens.  In the modern period, there were strong states, professional armies, war as a “duel” between sovereigns, the illegitimacy of civilian resistance, etc. etc.  To arbitrarily raise a particular historical convention to a universal principle, “full-stop”, is hubristic.

You, however, are arguing “Do as I say, not do as I do”.

Not at all.  I don’t really have an opinion on the bombing of Japan.  I do think that it’s sometimes legitimate, even honorable, to target civilians.  I’d tentatively suggest the American Indian resistance to the European settlers as an example.

What I’m saying is, let’s try to limit the evil of war, but not by pretending we live in the good old days, or in a Human Rights Watch world.  The “arrangements” between Israel and Hizbullah in the 1990s are a good example of how to limit civilian suffering in a postmodern, nihilistic world.

Isaiah 1:15-17

“No matter how much you pray, I won’t listen.  You are too violent.  Wash yourselves clean!  I am disgusted with your filthy deeds.  Stop doing wrong and learn to live right.  See that justice is done.  Defend widows and orphans and help those in need.”

So is the movie worth watching, then?

“...the Nazis waged a racist war of annihilation on the Poles and Slavic peoples”

Try telling that to the dozens of holocaust deniers who troll around here

Try telling that to the Ukrainians, Croats, Bulgars or any other Slavic people aligned with the Nazis.

Surely you know, Stari, that many of the Nazi “volunteers” were fleeing starvation conditions in the POW camps.  Many were committed anti-communists too, but from a purely military standpoint Hitler’s mistreatment of the Ukranians and other ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union was a major strategic mistake, as many would have happily joined the anti-Bolshevik cause.

A most excellent article, Mr Cusack.  But as you can see from some of the responses you have your work cut out for you in trying to teach people that “two wrongs don’t make a right”.

The common human failing (and sin) called “pride” has reared its ugly and creepy head into most of the negative responses to your brilliant piece.  And the red herrings are certainly being flung about.

Just keep up the good work anyway.

To borrow from Graham Greene, poor Peter Pan America, convinced that our happiness makes the day.  In 1853 our gunboats sailed into Tokyo Harbor and informed the Japanese, a feudal people with a warrior ethic, that they would trade with us---or else!  By 1905 they were strong enough to defeat Russia, and the American people, who admire pluck when not deceived by the elite, admired them.  But then the proto-neocon Rick Johnsons of their day began spreading their poison, and John P. Marquand’s estimable Imperial secret agent Mr. Moto became the Hollywood caricature, an international police agent, portrayed by the oily Hungarian Jew Peter Lorre.  Why did our Marines despise the Japanese soldiers, who despised the Marines for surrendering?  Because they would not surrender and kept fighting.  Mr. Marquand, speaking through his creation Mr. Moto, said it best:  You Americans are so sentimental, when you are not using napalm and flamethrowers.  If I wandered through Harlem at 1 A.M. and got my head bloodied, I would not blame the locals, I would blame myself for sticking my nose in their turf.  Why must everyone else measure up to our standards, whether they like it or not?  For the same reason that Mr. Heaslop criticized Dr. Aziz:  He forgot to wear a back collar stud.  Zounds!