Dean Barnett’s recent outburst of moral insanity should not come as a surprise to those of us who have had the misfortune of following his writings over the past few years.  Barnett has prompted the last two installments in my (unfortunately) ever-longer list of posts on the (largely conservative) “argument from war crimes,” though technically Walter Williams also got into the war crimes-as-moral authority act in between Barnett’s two items.  Podhoretz, Krauthammer and Sowell were already leading the way in approvingly citing past war crimes to vindicate whatever bad policy they were trying to defend in the present.  On a slightly lower level you will even find Rabbi Daniel Lapin getting in on the act of invoking 20th century total war precedents to minimise whatever wrongdoing is going on at the time.  Who was it who was saying that conservative intellectual life was not gravely deficient?  Let him peruse these entries for proof of bankruptcy both moral and intellectual.   

Long gone throughout much of the movement (if it was ever there in the first place) is the wisdom of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, who wrote, almost to the point of obsession at times, about the evils of “strategic bombing” and attacks on civilians.  His novel Black Banners is an extended description of the evils of the bombing campaigns against Germany.  Such attacks were for him the ultimate expression of identitarian madness and the willingness to dehumanise the enemy according to abstract and collectivist categories.  Mass politics and mass warfare were for him equally enemies of civilisation, and mass warfare was a direct product of the democratic age.  It is depressing, but hardly surprising any longer, that those who now speak for mainstream conservatism would not only not understand what K-L had to say, but they would reflexively regard everything he had to say as treacherous and vile.  Just imagine–someone against democracy and strategic bombing!

It might appear as if one could hardly turn around lately without running into a conservative pundit who will drag out the hoary “what about Nagasaki?” argument or some other inappropriate WWII reference.  There are a couple reasons for this.  One is the tendency on the modern right towards unmitigated and rather unfortunate exaltation of everything related to WWII, and to shape their ideas about war and foreign policy accordingly.  Internment?  The pundit will probably reply: “I don’t know whether it makes it any sense or whether it’s really necessary, but they did it in WWII, and that makes it all right by me!”  Bombing civilians?  The pundit says, “We did it to Japan, so it has to be okay.”  The supposedly clinching argument in favour of the “plan” to rebuild Iraq was: “We did it in Germany and Japan, and we can do it agan,” asserting a continuity between the competence of the Marshalls and MacArthurs of the world and their own that did not exist.  Many of these folks seem to proceed from the assumption that if the U.S. did something during the Good War, that something must be good or at least reasonably defensible, because “we” know that “we” would never do anything comparable to the evils committed by those people.  When there are no obvious precedents for whatever it is they would like to do, they put on a show with the old “he’s a new Hitler” routine or wave their hands around while screaming, “Munich!”  The other reason is, I suspect, a total divorce of many conservatives from the moral traditions of Christian civilisation.  It is not exactly clear to me when or how this happened, and it certainly isn’t limited to conservatives in America (Westerners generally have lost touch with these traditions), but it seems likely that it was the experience of WWII itself that accelerated whatever dissolution was underway.  It provided a cause that needed to have its every act justified, and it was a total war that required the rationalisation of ever more outrageous crimes.  Perhaps had post-WWII governments not thrust us headlong into the Cold War and all of the morally dubious enterprises that entailed, the damage could have been contained and repaired, but instead all of the worst things that WWII had done to the country the Cold War magnified and exaggerated.  Once a generation or two has contemplated the nuclear obliteration of the world with a certain indifference, the mere firebombing of a few cities ceases to shock or concern.