Moral Equivalence - World War II Atrocities

World War II Atrocities

As in the other cases, the moral equivalence device is used by those who claim that the Allied side by definition was good and the Axis was by definition evil. The war was cast as a big picture struggle - that allowing the Axis powers to have their own way would be so horrible that anything done by the Allies became justified. World War II has become a favored example for those who use the device because of the magnitude of the Holocaust and the implications of the successful implementation of Lebensraum. It becomes a matter of suggesting that the present-day case (Israel-Palestine, Cold War) is one where the victory of Evil (Palestinians, Soviets) would be akin to allowing Hitler to win World War II. That such horrors happened thus make the possible worst-case scenarios seem more likely.

Suggesting a moral equivalence between a number of acts carried out by the Allies during the Second World War and the deeds of the Nazis, especially the Final Solution is a common strategy employed by apologists for the Nazis in Germany, such as politicians of the National Democratic Party of Germany. Forms of the argument are also found in the works of authors not sympathetic to Nazism, such as F.J.P. Veale, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Sobran, and Nicholson Baker. Commonly cited as examples are the Allies' aerial destruction of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden, the systematic murder and rape of East Germans by the Red Army, etc.

Their point is to say that though the implications of an Axis victory, in particular a German victory, would be horrible, that this did not justify Allied atrocities. Those who defend the atrocities say that even if firebombing Dresden, for instance, served very little military purpose, even the slightest purpose justified it and also, German people bore responsibility for the horrors of the war and that they had to be punished for that.

Notable in this context are Justice Jackson's comments at the Nuremberg Trials:

"If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us...We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well."

Read more about this topic:  Moral Equivalence

Famous quotes containing the words world, war and/or atrocities:

    ... women of the North, I ask you to rise up with earnest, honest purpose, and go forward in the way of right, fearlessly, as independent human beings, responsible to God alone for the discharge of every duty, for the faithful use of every gift, the good Father has given you. Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world will say, whether you are in your place or out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, do your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.
    Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)

    This people must cease to hold slaves, and to make war on Mexico, though it cost them their existence as a people.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.
    Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)