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Hitchens On Morality And War

What, then, does that make our bombing of German cities, especially the deliberate targeting of densely-packed working class areas (where opposition to Hitler was concentrated) with the deliberate intent of killing as many people as possible? I cannot see the logic here. If we are right (as we are) to be outraged about the Nazi […]

What, then, does that make our bombing of German cities, especially the deliberate targeting of densely-packed working class areas (where opposition to Hitler was concentrated) with the deliberate intent of killing as many people as possible? I cannot see the logic here. If we are right (as we are) to be outraged about the Nazi tyranny’s loss of morals when it attacked our civilians, how can we defend our own decision to follow (and redouble) their example? Had our attacks been effective, I suppose a case could be made out for them. But they diverted valuable aircraft from the Battle of the Atlantic, the gravest single threat to our survival in that war once the Battle of Britain was won. The idea that our bombing of German civilians saved us from the Nazis seems to me to be entirely false. How did it do this? What did it prevent them from doing which they would otherwise have done?

This is emphatically not hindsight. The military scientists Henry Tizard and Patrick Blackett, among others, argued strongly in Whitehall that Arthur Harris’s bombing of civilian homes would not destroy German morale or do much damage to their war industries. Equally importantly Bishop George Bell of Chichester, a far from naive man who had before the war been in close touch with anti-Nazis in Germany and who intervened to help Jewish refugees reach Britain from Germany, attacked the bombing of unarmed women and children as early as 1941, and continued to do so throughout the war. He also argued that the bombing, by failing to distinguish between people and regime, doomed German opponents of Hitler to fail in their 1944 plot. He was in a position to know.

I think the argument remains a valid one, and we should not be afraid to have it. If you do things to others when you are strong, you licence those others to do the same to you when you are weak. We may, at present, be a relatively strong and stable country protected by effective armed forces and alliances from predators. The incompetence of our current government, its bungled foreign policy, its mishandling of the economy, its rundown of our military and naval capability and its unbelievable neglect of such things as education, the family and social order mean that Britain may – in the lifetimes of some now living – sink in status. It may cease to be one of the strong countries which does things to others, and become one of the weak and vulnerable countries to which things are done. I suspect that, if we are prepared to face the facts about our own actions honestly, we are more likely to remain strong and free than if we wrap ourselves in myths. ~Peter Hitchens

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