Moral Fog of War

[Valin]

Standpoint:

Paul Johnson
June 2010

Michael Burleigh has written an unusual account of the Second World War, which focuses on its moral outrages and dilemmas. This is an excellent idea and on the whole he carries it out successfully. If he reaches no general conclusions, he does give us detailed glimpses of the terrible events that took place over six years, and we emerge from his book, if none the wiser, at least considerably better informed.

Human beings seem always to have possessed some kind of rudimentary conscience, and nearly all of them require, for their own ease of mind, some kind of justification for what they do in wartime, however atrocious, or indeed for going to war in the first place. This is the principle of retaliation, and Burleigh's book illustrates it in action time and again. Hitler launched the Second World War in retaliation against the hidden forces which, he believed, had undermined Germany from within and lost her the First World War, and which were still at work, making it impossible for him to avoid another one. His policy of exterminating the Jews, something which could only be done under the darkness of war, was itself, as he saw it, an act of retaliation. The attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was, as Japan's military commanders saw it, an unavoidable and essentially defensive war of retaliation against the Western policy of denying her resources, especially oil. British "area bombing" of German cities was, among other things, retaliation for German bombing of British ones. The American use of nuclear weapons against Japan was a retaliatory act to shorten the war against a people who had started it in the first place.

There are some indications that the retaliatory principle operated in prescriptive and savage societies, and represented for them a form of justice. As Francis Bacon wrote, "Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." Yes: but what if retaliation, the ordered form of revenge, is the law? This was true of most early civilisations and, as Burleigh's book shows, was still the governing principle in the mid-20th century. In antiquity, however, there was less humbug and the law was explicit and honest. The Hebrew Book of Exodus (21:24-5) states: "Eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe." Note that this law itself was intended to be to some extent a restraining force: only one eye was to be exacted in return, not two. The early Greeks, especially the poets, were not so restrained. Hesiod, whose
quasi-religious authority was second only to Homer's, wrote: "If he starts it, by some wicked words or deed, pay him back twice as much." That tremendous tragedy of Euripedes, the Medea, first performed in Athens in 431 BC, shows an overwhelming exaction of revenge as a form of justice. However, by this time the more sensitive and virtue-conscious Greeks were beginning to have second thoughts about the matter. Medea is made to say that she had "dared to do a most impious deed".

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Moral Combat: A History of World War II
This title will be released on March 22, 2011 in America. Already out in the UK

[Valin]

AmazonUK Reviewer

 

Masterly overview, 27 May 2010

By Brian Butler "Brian the Bookman" (Bournemouth, UK)

 

This review is from: Moral Combat: A History of World War II (Hardcover)

In reviewing this book nothing is more important than placing it in the right perspective. (Perhaps the publisher is at faujlt for putting "A history of World War II on the front of the dj) This is not a straightforward

history of WWII (like Roberts' superb "The Storm of War"). It focuses on one vital component of WWII history, namely (as the title suggests), its moral aspects. So while roughly chronological in approach, the overall detail is concerned with the decisions, both by the Axis Powers, and the Allied forces, in their moral impetus and consequences. And as such, recognizing the parameters which Burleigh sets himself, it is, I think, a superb pice of work. The sheer magnitude of evil which swept across Europe (The Nazi war machine, and expecially 'The Final solution'), and Asia (The Japanese) is sometimes so horrifying that the reader wonders whether he can take any more. The sheer numbers of deaths, the misery, the cruelty, the horror mount up page after page. (The chapter on 'The Rape of Poland' was a real eye-opener) Burleigh is an excellent historian in that he allows the facts to dictate the sweep of narrative--but he is not above making comments which show where his sympathies lie. An example of his balance is in the discussion of the moral dilemmas faced by those responsible for developing (and using) the atomic bomb.

 

Having read other books by Burleigh, I have a great admiration for his skill and authority as a historian. I believe that read rightly (i.e. bearing in mind the perspective from which he writes), this is a deeply moving and sombre account of the terrible and tragic storm that engulfed the world during those war years.