Libertarians such as Rothbard argue against aggression at all times, including in wars. However to me it is clear that collateral damage is unavoidable in many instances. Moreover the more you try to avoid it, the bolder your enemies become. Hamas terrorists discovered this weakness of Israel and started to shoot from hospital or school roofs, smuggle ammunition in ambulances and store it in mosques. So in my view avoiding collateral damage may actually increase causalities in the long run since a ruthless enemy will exploit it.
Regardless, how much loss should a person take in order to save innocent lives? Should he sacrifice himself or his family for that? Should he sacrifice his nation, his ideology, his property? What kind of personal sacrifice would you have made in order to avoid collateral damage? For example if you were a British prime minister in WW2, would you have accepted a defeat of Britain in the war in order to save German civilians? Wouldn’t you care more about British citizens as opposed to German citizens, fully knowing that the majority of Germans were terribly xenophobic and supported Hitler? How many British lives, how much of dear to you British property would you have sacrificed for the lives of Germans? If you had a choice to destroy a factory that produced tanks but there was no way to destroy it without civilian causalities, would you have done it? If you could save 10 British civilians by firing at a German tank while killing a German civilian, would you have done so? What if you could save only 1 British civilian by this operation?
you presume that governments exist to protect their citizens. the reality is the other way around. governments see the role of their citizens as protectors of the government.
what if Britain had had no government at all? do you believe that the Germans would easily have crossed the channel and occupied Britain and subjected the British to Nazi rule and its genocidal activities? the argument has been put forth that, given a choice, a state will always choose to attack another state, rather than a free society, because the structures for extracting wealth from the people already successfully exist in the enemy state. the cost of erecting and maintaining those structures in a formerly free society would outweigh the income extracted for many, many years, several generations.
plus, its no triviality that when you attack a state, which has already disarmed its own civilians, then you are dealing militarily with a known quantity, whereas, when you attempt to attack a free people, you have no idea, militarily, what you will face, or where. nor can you feel confident that you can secure your rear areas, which is essential to modern warfare, given the volumes of supplies required.
so, the conclusion is that if the British government had truly been interested in saving British lives, it would have dismantled itself and allowed Britain to become an anarchocapitalistic society.
What does it mean to sacrifice ideology or nation?
On the question of the factory producing tanks, are you familiar with Oskar Schindler? Would you bomb a factory making ammunition for the Nazi military? Well, would you bomb Schindler’s factory with the 1,000 Jews working there? What about other factories with Jews working? Sure, you might kill 1,000 Jews, but what if that saved 100,000 lives on the battlefield? Would you do it then?
Not me.
This is of course a terrible situation that rarely actually occurs in the real world. Your hypothetical has an immediate aggressor (the German tank driver). When you drop a bomb on a building, who is the immediate aggressor? I can certainly understand why someone might want to blow up a military target, but who is the aggressor? When you firebomb or nuke a city, who is the immediate aggressor?
Your hypothetical is also a false dichotomy. You assume that there is only the possibility of the 10 Brits surviving or the 1 German surviving. What about retreat? However, let’s assume that the German will kill you and your friends if you don’t kill him first. Why is it that the German civilian must die in order to save your life? If you blow up the tank in order to save your life, why is the civilian going to die? Is he in the tank? Why? Is he held hostage?
More importantly, why are you in the situation to begin with? How is it that the German tank could even threaten the 10 British civilians? Am I to believe the tank just floated across the English Channel and rolled to the nearest city?
Do you really believe Britain would have won the war if it completely avoided civilian casualities? I think this is just laughable. Every attempt to avoid civilian casualities costs time and resources. Avoiding civilian casualities completely is simply impossible in war, but even decreasing these casualities to a significant degree would have cost Britain half of its resources, resources that could have gone to smash the Germans. The outcome of WW2 was uncertain until 1944, and to spend precious resources on saving German lives would have been a huge risk to take and might have very well cost Britain their island. I doubt either people of Britain or of most other European countries would preferred Hitler to rule Europe.
If in order to save your family you need to kill a stranger, would you have done it? I definitely would have. Is it just? No. Does it matter? Not really. Now would you kill someone who hates you in order to save your friend? I probably would. In war the civilians of the enemy state usually hate you. Palestinians for example hate Jews. The Germans probably hated the Russians in WW2. If I were a Russian officer and I could have ordered to destroy a German military warehouse in which some German civilians worked, knowing that the weapons in this warehouse would probably be used against Russian citizens, would I do that? I probably would, not only because it will move Hitler one step away from victory, but also because Germans hate me, and Russians are my family, I care more for my family than my foes.
You’re saying that innocent people must die so that your own objectives can be fulfilled, its an evil way of thinking as its always been- there’s no advancement to society to be found here. I mean its a pretty common idea so nothing against you personally- but its certainly unjust and you’d deserve everything you get for killing any innocents no matter what reason you come up with to convince yourself that certain lives are more valuable than others.
I wouldn’t kill a stranger in order to save my family- that’s something my family would never respect anyway. It definitely matters, for a cycle of blood to stop at least one person has to try and find another solution outside of complete extermination of the other side, I don’t know why you’d say it doesn’t matter.
You keep talking about these guilty German citizens working in factories, but it’s strange how you don’t talk about the 12 million innocent victims of the Germans. Would you have killed these 12 million if it would have stopped Hitler?
You rather see someone else prevail and be involved in destruction of nations around the world like the british and US empires? Either way you’re giving me evil, at least don’t pretend to be on the side of justice when you feel that killing innocents is acceptable for your own view of the world to succeed. Call yourself the lesser evil, the necessary evil, or whatever you must- but as long as you believe that killing innocents gives an overall net benefit- you’re no better man.
There’s more fallacies in this question than I can shake a stick at. First, you assume a causal connection between murdering innocent German citizens and protecting British citizens. What connection is there?? The reality is that slash-and-burn total warfare - first introduced into the modern world by General Sherman during the American civil war - is a game of chicken, the decision-makers on each side are trying to get the other side to back down before his losses (in the form of reduced tax revenues, military production, and so on) are too great. It has nothing to do with “breaking the will” of the public, it has been repeatedly shown in history that direct attacks against the civilians of a territory do more than anything to harden their resolve! And that should be obvious given the fact that a major galvanizing force of British resolve against the Germans was Hitlers own bombings of London and other aerial attacks on British civilians! THINK! Stop parroting orthodoxy!
The prime minister, like any human being, ought to care about not murdering innocents, wherever they happen to live. And what higher expression of xenophobia can there be than that which you have just suggested a prime minister ought to have… “I don’t care how many Germans are murdered so long as no British get murdered.”
Very few of the civilian casualties in WWII were from bombings of factories. Please read about the British/American atrocity of the firebombing of Dresden.
The number of innocents saved is of no consequence to the question of justice. If you murder someone, you are liable for that murder. This is called “strict, individual liability.” It really doesn’t matter what was going on in your head at the time. You might have imagined that you were saving all of mankind from an alien invasion or something but that doesn’t justify the murder.
Stopping Hitler only delayed the inevitable; we now have the European Union. One way or another, the powers behind Hitler were going to get their way.
Britain didn’t need to “win the war”, it only needed to stop Hitler from successfully invading. Invading the English coast, if it were well defended, would have been pretty much suicide for the Germans. Instead of expending resources going into Europe, the British would have been much better advised to hold their ground. The same goes for the French. But it doesn’t really matter because the intentions of the respective governments were never to simply defend themselves. The war was the end in itself, all the European powers needed a war to cover up the grand mess they had created in WWI.
It matters to the stranger’s family and it is they who should be prosecuting you for murder. I won’t even acknowledge the rest of your drivel. As I pointed out once before, “Eugene”, your posts strike me as very ideological. You need to ask yourself whether you’re interested in truth for its own sake or are you carrying water for someone else’s agenda?
Oh boy, so much silliness. EU is as bad as Hitler, the allies were fighting in order to save face from the last war, etc…
Anyway, back to our subject. Dresden was an exception, I am not talking about that. I definitely oppose targeting civilians. I was talking about collateral damage. I will repeat my point. Trying to decrease collateral damage costs time and money. I believe even a decrease of 50% in WW2 would have cost enormous amount of resources. I doubt the allies could have won the war if they spent half of their resources trying to avoid civilian causalities. Now, can you imagine what would have happened had Hitler conquered Europe? He would have enslaved half of the people, murdered the rest. Europe would virtually cease to exist. Hitler had plans to kill all Muslims and blacks, would it have been smart to let him execute his plans because you wanted to feel good about yourself and avoid collateral damage? In fact what you are suggesting is that the good guys (those who try to avoid aggression) will have no tools at their disposal to fight the bad guys (those whose ideology is based on aggression). Take a guess who will rule the world in such circumstances. Now I’m not saying that to kill a civilian is a just thing to do, it is not, it is definitely injustice. But it is necessary if we want to stop people who, unlike us, have no problem targeting civilians, and unlike us, want to control/enslave other people.
OK, I can’t back those up and I should have left those remarks out since they’re not essential to my points… just more of a poetic expression of how ridiculously simplistic the orthodox view of WWII is.
Every side to a conflict always treats their atrocities as “the exception.”
I see no distinction between the two. Killing an innocent is killing an innocent. The nobility or grandiosity of your motives is irrelevant.
That’s ridiculous. NOT shooting or bombing costs money?? Just stop bombing things and you won’t be killing innocents. Stop ordering your troops into foreign territory and they won’t have the opportunity to kill innocents. And of course it’s cheaper to NOT shoot than to shoot and cheaper to NOT bomb than to bomb.
He would have summoned the Dark Lord and mankind would have entered 1,000 years of hell on earth. This isn’t DC Comics, it’s the real world. Hitler was an idiot, he blew it at Dunkirk, blew it on the air war against Britain, destroyed his economy with bone-headed public works like the Autobahn. Sure, he was a tyrant and a mass murderer but that’s par for the course for a 20th century national leader; Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot… all the same. And it’s not like stopping Hitler stopped any of Hitler’s ideas… we still have tyranny, we still have mass murder as government policy, we still have socialism wealth redistribution, concentration camps, rule of whim rather than rule of law… on and on and on.
What is this, Lord of the Rings?? “Good guys”? “Bad guys”? Seriously? Are you six years old? What, Germans are just born with genocidal tendencies? Is that it? Or am I to believe that the noble German culture was transformed by a lone maniac shouting slogans over radio and propaganda posters into a bunch of blood-thirsty, genocidal savages? This is absurd.
Why don’t you start at the beginning and deal with the question of what right the British or any government has to conscript (forced miltiary service)? It doesn’t matter that “everybody else is doing it.” It’s evil and conscription is one of the chief evils from which the millions of murdered innocents in the 20th century flowed.
“For the greater good” is never an excuse for murder. Committing a few million murders only changes things by virtue of the inability of any court to untangle the events and assign individual responsibility for the deaths. Economy of scale, I guess.
You’d be against fighting the Germans in Europe even if all British forces were voluntary. So what’s the point of arguing about conscription? And yes I believe Hitler is a bad guy and Churchill was the good guy. This is not precise, but it is a good approximation. Would you have rather lived under the rule of Hitler or of Churchill? I think the answer is obvious. I do not say that Hitler or the German nation are inherently evil or something of that sort. I am only saying that Hitler must have been stopped, even at the cost of civilian causalities. The British and American people were right to fight the war in Europe, they had to defend the peoples of Europe from the monster that was Hitler. Letting all those Europeans to deal with Hitler and his mass extermination plans alone would have been disastrous. I do believe the world would have entered a very dark period if Hitler was not dealt with, I also believe that once you reduce the tools at the disposal of people who appreciate freedom to CIA style assassinations, you let the world be ruled by people who don’t appreciate freedom, because they have a lot more tools at their disposal. They can use all that the modern military offers, from bombs to artillery and drones, and you are left with precision assassinations. You’ll lose.
You keep talking about these guilty German citizens working in factories, but it’s strange how you don’t talk about the 12 million innocent victims of the Germans. Would you have killed these 12 million if it would have stopped Hitler?
How far are you willing to take this?
If you want to hit the German factories, you would be killing many non-German victims of the Nazi regime. Wikipedia estimated that there was about 12 million people forced into labor for the Nazis. Would you kill those people in order to stop Hitler? You keep talking about how you would prefer killing Germans instead of Brits, but would you kill Brits to stop Hitler?
Yes, I would have killed British citizens in order to stop Hitler, but I would try to be more cautious. It would be simply disaster letting Hitler stay in Europe. He was in the process of anihilating Jews, Gypsies and handicapped people, and he enslaved the rest of the population. He must have been stopped. So you had to stop it, though not at all cost, but at a cost that seems lower than the cost would have been had he allowed to stay in power.
Having said that colleteral damage is unavoidable, there is still the question of degree of collateral damage I would have accepted. Naturally I would have preferred to decrease it but not spend too much resources on this, since resources are absolutely necessary to win the war. The other criteria is who is being hurt. First of all I would never let my family be part of collateral damage, as long as it is under my control. Then I would not easily accept collateral damage of my friends, acquintances, and I also would not want to kill people from my community or town. Why is that? Because every person has a certain network of people who are willing to support him even at significant cost to themselves. For example my community would probably support me if I had money problems. I am a Jew, so if I have to undergo some very expensive operation, I wager than other Jews will help me financially if I ask their help. So I would definitely care more for my family, friends, community and finally nation both in times of war and in peace.
Whatever you do in this scenario where you are the warlord deciding who is collateral damage and who isn’t- you should at least accept that the family of those you killed have every right to receive retribution from those who ordered the killing and those directly involved in it. The problem with collateral damage is that you wipe people’s hands clean of murder. I’m sure you can come up with endless reasons as to why it is unavoidable- but on the otherside, be a man and take responsibility for accepting the retribution you must receive. People have every right to kill you in return- again you are saying its unavoidable and the consequences can be much worse, but I think the issue is, are you innocent of murder and are you a “good” guy? Absolutely not, just a little Hitler.