At least for Americans, this war stands not as the "war that ended other wars" nearly so much as the "war that justified other wars". World War II shows, in the American "good war" mythology, that sometimes going to war is the best option when it comes to dealing with the "bad guys". So today is filled with all manner of folks who remember Pearl Harbor as part of the justification for engagement in "the good war" that became the foundation for a mythology to support all war.
Thing is, I'm a Christian. And, as a Christian, I am devoted to telling the truth. So today, for me, is less about remembering those who died and how their deaths justified our involvement as a nation in war. Today is a day for mourning the dead, yes, but also for telling the truth about World War II.
Unfortunately, seeing war as sometimes the best option leads to empowering the societal structures that are needed to prepare for those war -- and such empowerment has loosed on American society forces that have transformed what in the past seemingly was an attitude that you go to war as a last resort to our present attitude where so many conflicts throughout the world seem to require a militarized response. Hence, the extraordinary American military presence around the world, the extraordinary way the United States spends about as much on its military as the rest of the world combined, and the extraordinary situation that faced us just a month ago, in selecting a president where our choices were limited to two versions of militarism.
The "shock" of war in the 40s -- that began on December 7th -- led directly to the creation of a national mythology of "national security" through violence. At that point of vulnerability, permanent structures such as the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency and the nuclear weapons program were established. As a consequence of the transformative influence of these entities, in the US, all politics is a politics of war.
Representative Jeannette Rankin was the only member of Congress to vote against entry into World War II. Her logic was simple truth: "Killing more people won't help matters". Or, to put it the way Jesus put it, "Those who live by the sword, will die by the sword". Violence is never the way to peace. It only creates a cycle of violence.
Thing is, what I'm saying is incredibly unpopular in the US. To question World War II and whether it was just, is unheard of. Even historians who are willing to as question the War's justness for the US, almost invariably conclude that indeed the War ultimately was just -- even so running the risk of being dismissed by other historians simply for asking the question. The sentiment expressed by Eric Bergerud is typical for many: "I find it almost incomprehensible that anyone would claim to discover moral ambiguity in World War II. The vast bulk of the population [in the West] ... may regret the violence of the war but do not question for a minute its necessity. Machiavelli ... was quite right when describing a necessary war as a just war. If World War II was not necessary, no war has been".
Certainty such as that expressed by Bergerud, though, doesn't free us from critical moral reflection on World War II, especially given the impact of beliefs such as his on attitudes about militarism in the generations since that war. Though we don't see much evidence of it actually working this way, the just war tradition has at its core claims that should lead to a rejection of Bergerud's naked claim that a war stands as a just war simply because it is deemed "necessary".
The two basic categories of "just war theory" are cause and conduct. If we think in these terms, we're left with two questions: Did the US engage in World War II for a just cause? And was the conduct of the US in the War just?
First: Was it a just cause?
Well, this isn't as clear-cut as the national mythology of today wants to assume. It's true that the official entry of the US into the War as a full-fledged protagonist came about due to two events that few would question provided just cause: (1) the Japanese attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, on December 7th, and (2) the German declaration of war on the United States a few days later.
However, neither of those 2 events mark the US's entry into the War. We were anything but neutral on December 6, 1941. We were already strongly on the side of Great Britain against Germany, and of China against Japan. So the events in early December merely accelerated our activities in the War.
So what we really should be asking is whether the US's entry into the War prior to overt declarations had a just cause. And here's where it gets even murkier.
Our "good war mythology" tends to cite three main reasons why the US involvement in the War meets the criterion of just cause: (1) the need to protect the US from a direct invasion by Germany and/or Japan; (2) the moral imperative to stop the domination of the tyrannies of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in the cause of furthering democracy; and (3) the need to do all we could to rescue the Jews who were being annihilated by the Nazis.
Thing is, I'm not convinced any of these three played a role.
There's no evidence that Germany or Japan had a vision of invading the US. In fact, they were heading in the opposite direction -- Germany was heading toward Russia, and Japan toward China and the Mainland. Neither Germany nor Japan wanted to cross those oceans. The logistics of simply invading Normandy from Great Britain across the brief expanse of ocean separating Britain from France proved extraordinarily daunting, underscoring the impossibility of the infinitely more daunting task the Germans or Japanese would have faced in taking on the North American continent.
Surely, many Americans (including political leaders) unalterably opposed the tyrannical dynamics in Japan and, especially, Germany. However, the policies of the US showed little evidence of being fueled in a decisive way by the principled desire to defeat tyranny in the hopes of establishing democracy. The two nations whose invasions triggered the War -- China and Poland -- were already under tyrannical dictatorships. And even though the Allies won the War decisively in the end, both nations remained under tyrannical dictatorships.
This isn't even to mention that one of the major background motives for America's main ally -- Great Britain -- engaging the conflict was the sustenance of its vast empire, scarcely a quest for democracy. After the War ended, the US acted in several contexts to support wars on behalf of European colonialism -- France in Vietnam, Holland in Indonesia, and Britain in east Africa.
Even more obviously, the US and Britain joined in alliance with a regime equally tyrannical as Hitler's Germany -- the Soviet Union under the dominance of Josef Stalin. Insofar as this alliance actually helped sustain and even advance Soviet tyranny, we can scarcely say that the cause for the US engaging in the conflict was to defeat tyranny.
The issue with "saving Jews" is perhaps even more clear-cut than the other two. Many American and British leaders actually were somewhat positively disposed toward the Nazis when they first came into power in Germany in 1933 -- largely because the Nazis were seen as a bulwark against Communist influences. This was true even though dating back to Hitler's initial emergence a decade earlier, the Nazis were explicit about their antipathy toward Jews. And once the Nazis came into power they immediately began implementing anti-Jewish policies. As the violence toward Jews increased, humanitarian voices were raised to offer aid for the beleaguered Jews. Mostly the humanitarian efforts were thwarted by US and British political leaders. When the War actually began and the genocidal violence increased, political leaders continued to resist efforts to offer help. Even if this resistance reflected political realities and was not itself based on anti-Semitism, the fact remains that the western Allies simply were not motivated by a desire directly to save Jewish lives. In fact, the War's expansion likely had the impact of making the lot of Europe's Jews even worse.
(I would argue this fact alone serves to underwrite American support of Israel now, in ways that ignore the realities of international politics and Israeli war crimes. Simply put, America has a Holocaust guilt that it hasn't named and for which it tries to atone. In destructive ways. But that's for another day.)
So why did America engage in policies that made total war inevitable, and why did they engage in a total war against the Axis powers? I think there are 4 reasons.
- The US was involved in a clash of imperialisms with Japan dating back at least to the 1920s and accelerating with competing desires for dominance in China. The war with Japan happened because of a series of escalating moves taken by both sides in the conflict. The Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor (ultimately disastrous for them) was simply one move following upon many others. Even at the last minute, in the summer and early autumn of 1941, the Japanese Prime Minister wanted to meet with President Roosevelt to try to defuse the conflict -- and Roosevelt refused to do so.
- The US developed close ties with Great Britain, and so offered ever-increasing aid to the British after September 1939 and the outbreak of war in Europe. This aid took an ever-more overtly militaristic cast and involved the US in the conflict as a partisan ally of the British. The British war with the Germans initially most overtly stemmed from the British war-alliance with the Polish dictatorship, an alliance entered into largely due to British imperial concerns (not due to noble motives such as self-determination and disarmament as later claimed). Certainly, Nazi German was a ruthless, tyrannical, expansionistic power -- but German interests were mainly toward the east, not toward the US or even Great Britain.
- American business interests were heavily invested in Nazi Germany during the early years of the Hitler regime. Again, they saw the Nazis as a useful alternative to Europe moving in a more socialist direction. However, in the late 1930s the Nazis focused ever more on economic self-determination, and with the widening conflicts, Germany's usefulness to American corporations was lessening greatly. American business interests as a whole didn't necessarily advocate going to war, but they recognized that it was not good for them for Germany to become ever more an economic free agent.
- In time, it became clear that the US would benefit greatly from this war and that the forces within the United States who would benefit the most were the military and business elites. The War was an opportunity for the military to move into an unprecedented place of power and influence within the federal government, and it was an opportunity for American corporations to profit immensely from the US becoming the one global economic superpower.
So American entry into World War II was unjust in its causes.
Now: What about the US's use of just means?
What are "just means"? Basically, the two main criteria used to judge conduct are proportionality (that the damage caused by the fighting not outweigh the good the war accomplished) and noncombatant immunity (that those not engaged as soldiers in the conflict not be the direct object of military actions).
In both areas, the US crossed the line.
Shortly after the British declared war on Germany -- September 1, 1939 -- US President Franklin Roosevelt gave a radio speech broadcast throughout Western Europe that called upon the belligerents to, in effect, follow the just conduct criterion for waging war. Specifically, he asserted that there should be no aerial bombardment of civilians, no attacking of unfortified cities. This speech shows that the just conduct criteria were in the consciousness of political leaders.
At the same time as Roosevelt's speech, however, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) had at the center of its tactical philosophy the use of air war to terrorize its enemy's civilian population -- a doctrine first formulated at the tail end of World War I and implemented in various colonial situations in the 1920s and 1930s. Even before the conflict between Germany and Britain began in earnest in May 1940, the British strategy for defeating Germany relied on targeting civilians.
When the Americans joined the British, the Americans at first argued for focusing on military rather than civilian targets. However, the US did offer supportive actions when the British attack the inner city of Hamburg and intentionally created a firestorm that killed tens of thousands noncombatants. Near the end of the European war, the Americans cooperated fully with the attack on the defenseless German city of Dresden, a city with no military significance -- an attack that likely killed well over 50,000 noncombatants.
As the US turned its focus on Japan in late 1944, the scruples that limited the Americans participation in the bombing of civilians in Germany were nonexistent. The first of a series of attacks on defenseless Japanese cities -- March 9, 1945 on Tokyo -- created another firestorm, greatly surpassing the deaths caused in the bombing of Dresden.
The climax of the American attacks on Japanese civilian populations came in August, 1945 -- with the first use of atomic bombs -- first on Hiroshima, then on Nagasaki. With these attacks, any pretense of adhering to standards of proportionality and noncombatant immunity was ended.
I would argue the biggest factor that led to our abandonment of the just conduct of war was Roosevelt's demand for an unconditional surrender as the only end of the War. Just war philosophy assumes that wars are to fought in ways that inflict the minimal damage necessary in order to defeat the enemy. Part of this process is an openness throughout the conflict to a negotiated end to the conflict. When Roosevelt insisted on unconditional surrender, he assured that there would be no negotiations possible, short of simple surrender without conditions. This insistence, then, led directly to tactics that focused on the maximum damage possible. The nuclear holocaust visited upon Japan reflected the fruition of this approach.
Violations weren't limited to the US and Britain, either. The Soviets, of course, played a much greater role in defeating the Germans than did the western Allies (around 80% of German military deaths came at the hands of the Soviets). And their conduct was extraordinarily brutal. That is, in allying with the Soviets, the US actually empowered a spirit at least as vicious as the spirit of Nazism -- the spirit of Stalinism. As the Soviets turned back the German invasion and moved toward Berlin, their tactics were some of the most brutal violations of just conduct criteria that had ever been perpetrated upon enemy noncombatant populations -- murder, rape, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and more.
Badness actually had its day on May 8, 1945. Ruthless, pathological regimes came into international power (the US and the Soviet Union). And the world has yet to recover from its effects.
If I'm telling the truth about today, then, I'm forced to say that the War that "began" on December 7th was anything but just. Sure, the Axis powers were guilty of aggression. But that doesn't mean the Allies were devoted to ending the aggression. In fact, even if the Axis powers were ruthless, there's not justification for the ruthlessness with which the US and its allies engaged in the War.
So what? So what if World War II was an unjust war? What difference does it make? It's history, and there's nothing we can do about it.
True. We can't change what happened. But we can tell the truth about that War, and be honest about how that War has framed wars since.
In other words: The main issue related to how we now think about World War II is how this might impact our current disposition toward American military policies and toward warfare in general.
If I'm right -- War War II was unjust -- and if I'm right -- that we should never act unjustly or support unjust actions (which should be part of the set of assumptions just war philosophy affirms) -- then I'm also right to conclude: We shouldn't use War War II as a justification for the necessity of warfare. If we can't use World War II as justification for warfare, we're going to have a harder time in justifying lots of other wars. Certainly the wars in which the US has engaged since 1945 won't meet that criteria. (And they don't. I could spell out for each one why that's true, but I won't take the space here.)
If I'm right about what we really should remember about December 7th, it should leave us to mourn all the dead -- men, women and children -- and not just our soldiers.