There are many problems in the world today: rampant corruption, disease, inequality, hunger, poverty. But the worst by far is war. Warfare destroys the very foundations of what makes us a civil society. Indeed, war is the negation of civil society. War demolishes the things we build, it disrupts our lives; it destroys the environment. It results in the theft of other people’s rights and property and resources. It also kills people: horribly, painfully, and brutally.
When we consider the enormity of the Second World War and all of its victims it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation caused by that horrible tragedy. Hindsight allows us to overlook the profound ways in which the war forever changed peoples’ everyday lives: sometimes in ways which were impossible to predict.
Herodotus – the ‘father of history’- used oral accounts to compile his early Greek chronicles. Today many museums collect personal narratives along with physical artifacts, ensuring that events can be more fully interpreted. Personal accounts continue to be a vital tool for historians in capturing the voice of a person who actually experienced an event or time period. This sometimes brutal, often deeply-personal perspective puts a ‘human face’ on the misery of war.
Since the end of the Cold War, historians have begun to raise more difficult and controversial questions regarding the motivations and conduct of both sides during World War II. The history of the conflict is still being written more than seventy years after the war’s end. Major motion pictures are still being produced about it. The most recent example of Hollywood’s infatuation with the topic is Fury starring Brad Pitt.
From a philosophical perspective, an established framework was created long ago to evaluate the virtue of a given conflict: the Just War Theory (JWT). JWT is a doctrine of military ethics advocated by theologians, politicians and military leaders in the conduct of war. The concept dates back to the Mahabharata from the early ninth century. The purpose of JWT is to sanction war as morally justifiable through certain criteria which must be met in order for it to be considered just. The doctrine postulates that war, while terrible, is not always the worst option.
JWT was developed within the Christian Church by St Augustine of Hippo, who played an enormous role in codifying religious doctrine. Nine-hundred years later Thomas Aquinas used Augustine’s arguments to clarify the conditions under which war could be justified.
JWT posits that there are certain situations when countries and individuals are morally bound to fight.
The subject of WW2 becomes infinitely more complex and troubling the closer one examines it. No simple answers are forthcoming. Horrific atrocities were committed on both sides. If the Holocaust were removed from the equation, the allies would be guilty of far worse crimes than the axis. Civilian casualties were many times higher in axis countries than they were among the allied nations. That is a truly shocking fact.
From a moral standpoint, it’s clear that the Second World War was far more complicated and convoluted than it appears to be on the surface. There is a tendency in the MSM to portray the war in morally simplistic terms of black and white. The actual realities on the ground were far messier and more nuanced than most people realize.
Historians will probably never know the full truth about the most important military conflict in history. Many documents pertaining to the war still remain locked away from prying eyes; immune from FOIA requests.
The primary lesson to be learned from WW2 is that there is no such thing as a “Just War.” Countries rarely declare war for the reasons they claim. World War II was not so much a case of democracy versus fascism or good versus evil. It was ultimately a struggle between the major superpowers to divide up the globe for their long-term benefit.
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