I’m in total agreement with you that Christians are not called to pacifism. While I understand the humanitarian sentiment, I would agree with those in the US (in my case), and New Zealand (your case), who would say “But this is not our war!” The examples you provide appeal to our correct moral intuition to help our neighbors. I would certainly intervene if I saw the man next door beating his wife, or if I saw a man being mugged in the street. The problem is that these people are not our neighbors in the sense that they are being victimized in our neighborhoods and communities. While I would feel compelled to defend my neighbor’s wife or a mugging victim in my street, it would be odd if I heard of these things going on in the next town 100 miles away and rushed to that town to stop beating/mugging. I might feel sympathy for the victims, but normally I would expect that community to take care of the situation. It would be even more odd to intervene on crime victims on the other side of the globe.

There are other concerns. When does this kind of humanitarian motivated intervention stop? Should Western forces and allies intervene against Boko Haram? Saudi Arabia beheads people and funds terror too. Do they get a pass just because of their ties with powerful American oil tycoons? My biggest concern is whether Western intervention is even effective. After 14 years of the War on Terror, Iraq and Afghanistan have become worse rather than better. While Sadaam was an evil and sadistic tyrant, when the US removed him from power the void was filled by people who were even worse–especially for Iraqi Christians. As a US Marine combat veteran who participated in the overthrow of the Hussein’s Baathist regime, I was surprised at the relatively large number of Christians. Since Sadaam was overthrown most of them have faced intense persecution and most have left their homeland. The war on terror also cost many US military servicemen their physical and mental health. Many of my Marines I served with suffer from PTSD if not from physical disabilities and only function in civilian society with great difficulty.

It has only become more complicated with US intervention in Syria and Libya, since we have now decided to arm the very ones who fought us in Iraq and Afghanistan. The longer the war on terror continues, the more clear it is that we are not backing good against bad guys, but one group of bad guys against another group of bad guys. The US is war weary, and most of the people in the Middle East didn’t want us to intervene in the first place. New Zealand should learn from American mistakes and stay out of the Middle East.

I realize that the comment didn’t fit. I just had trouble fitting all the essential points into one comment. Also, if my second post doesn’t seem to be reverent, that is because I wasn’t responding to you in that post. Only my first post was engaging your argument. I would, however, have to say that I think your argument is guilty of the same oversimplification and historically inaccurate characterization of the Second World War. We didn’t intervene to stop the holocaust; that wasn’t even taking place in 1939. We went to war because of a maddeningly stupid belief that we could prevent Hitler from taking further territory through a Polish war guarantee, which ended up destroying Europe and nearly cost us our existence. I don’t see how the Second World War is a good example of a humanitarian intervention.

It is implied in your comment that you believe that the holocaust was unavoidable and that if we didn’t intervene then Germany would have conquered all of Europe and extinguished all of Europe’s Jews. Is this not your position? If this is an accurate representation of your view then I stand by my statement. The problem with that position is that it implies that the holocaust is unconnected to the war itself. I would just deny this. There is undoubtedly a connection between the war and the genocide in the concentration camps. Many credible historians doubt whether the holocaust would have occurred at all if there had been no declaration of war on Germany. You can’t view the holocaust in isolation. That is the oversimplification I referred to.

Clearly, Mien Kampf is filled with anti-Semitism, and Hitler was a savage social darwinist. However, the Final Solution was not even proposed until 1942. The killing of the Jews begins after Hitler invades Russia on June 22, 1941. As the leading Hitler historian Ian Kershaw writes, “The German invasion of the Soviet Union triggered the rapid descent into full-scale genocide against the Jews.”

After the Wansee Conference in January 1942, during which the policy of eliminating the Jewish population was first discussed as an official policy, we have Geobbels writing in his diary, “World Jewry will suffer a great catastrophe… The Fuehrer realizes the full implications of the great opportunity offered by this war.” It is in this diary that the phrase “final solution” first appeared. After giving his account of the deportation that had just begun to take place in Poland, Geobbles writes the following: “The fact that Jewry’s representatives in England and America today are organizing and sponsoring the war against Germany must be paid for dearly by its representatives in Europe-and that’s only right.”

If Britain had not declared war on Germany, there probably would have been no invasion of France or Greece. Why would he have invaded France? There was nothing that he wanted in the west. Hitler never demanded Alsace Lorraine back. He was content to leave the West alone as I have explained in my previous post. It is also unlikely that Poland would have been invaded since they already had a nonaggression pact with Germany that could easily have been renewed. The reason that it wasn’t is because Churchill assured them that Britain would come to their aid if Germany invaded. This, of course, was a lie, and it gave the Polish confidence in their new ally that wasn’t warranted. This is why they refused to negotiate over Danzig. We were not prepared for war in 1939 and could not defend Poland as every British statesman knew.

Even if Hitler did turn west after expanding into Russia, how could the holocaust have been any worse than it was? We would have been more prepared to defend France if we stayed out of the conflict in the east and built up our then hopelessly inadequate military. It is also possible that war would have been averted altogether, and that the holocaust, which seemed to have been motivated by the need to scapegoat someone for the cause of the war among other factors, may not have occurred, or at least not on as large of a scale as it was. And how did Poland end up as a result of our policy? It got invaded by Germany, and when the time came we weren’t there to defend it, and it had to endure half a century of tyranny under Stalin. Mission accomplished!

Well, I agree that you did not explicitly say that Britain intervened to stop the holocaust, but your statement that “the holocaust alone would have justified such intervention” must mean that our intervention is unconnected to the holocaust itself, otherwise this statement wouldn’t make any sense, unless of course, you intended it in a purely hypothetical sense. I honestly did not intend to misrepresent you here, but it sure seems as if you’re saying that the holocaust was a reason for war, not the result of the war itself. This was the comment I had in mind in my last post. When the holocaust began is not really the point.

“As for your apparent view that the consequences of successfully stopping Hitler were worse than the consequences of simply letting him have his way, I think that it immoral nonsense.”

I am honestly surprised that I even need to make that case. Communism claimed more lives than any other ideology. Do I really have to argue that the death of one hundred million Europeans under communist tyrannies was worse than having Hitler in power? Hitler’s crimes, although horrendous, pale in comparison to the numbers killed under Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin. It is not as if the Poles wanted to live under a Stalinist dictatorship, but we had to sell out Poland in order to appease this dreadful tyrant and get him on our good side. How is that noble? If we had told the Poles the truth, that they are alone and isolated, they probably would have agreed to do a deal with Hitler over Danzig and six million would have been spared. There is also no reason to think that Hitler’s war with the west was inevitable, and so far you haven’t given any arguments to the contrary. By the way, I never said that we should of just let Hitler do whatever he pleases. That is a grotesque caricature and suggests that you didn’t even read my whole argument. I am not saying that under no circumstances would intervention be justified, only that the way we intervened in 1939 was reckless and incredibly foolish.

Communism was always the more dangerous ideology. Since it wasn’t rooted in nationalism and racist ideology, it was far more seductive than Nazism. Churchill knew the ruthlessness of the Bolsheviks better than anyone, and yet he ended up ceding Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and eastern Germany to the Soviet Empire. The Third Rich was also not primarily defeated by America and Britain, but by the Red army. Those who liberated Poland ran concentration camps much larger than Hitler’s’. This was not a war that brought freedom and democracy, but Soviet slavery and mass killing fields. If you want to defend the argument that tens of millions of deaths in Asia and Europe was worth defeating Hitler, be my guest, but I wouldn’t want to be in your position.

“If a man is savagely beating his wife, then it is morally right to stop him, even if it turns out that his wife may go on to do terrible things.”

Of course it would be morally right to stop him. I have no where suggested that I hold to any pacifist ideals. The problem with such analogies is that, in the case of war, it is not as if you can destroy an aggressor without sacrificing your countrymen and killing civilians. It’s not as if bombing countries only kills the people you intend to kill. This does not make war automatically wrong, but it does make it more ethically debatable than the example you gave. My position is that war is so costly that the bar should be set much higher in terms of justification. It seems to me that only direct self-defence and possibly humanitarian intervention, provided we can intervene effectively, which clearly wasn’t the case in 1939, could be justified.

As for the consequences of WWII, I think your analogy in this case fails as well. It would, of course, be absurd to suggest that unforeseen consequences could render an action morally wrong quite apart from the persons’ intentions. This was clearly not the case with Churchill and FDR, though. They knew perfectly well that Stalin was a murderous ideologue. Churchill wrote more eloquently than probably anyone else at the time about the barbarism of the Bolsheviks. Churchill had expressed his admiration for Finland in its resistance against the Soviets during a public broadcast. Later he would declare war on Finland to appease Stalin. He knew about the deliberate starvation of the Ukrainians and the Soviet concentration camps, which were invented by Lenin. Yet Churchill lied to the British people about Stalin, telling Parliament that ” He is a man of massive outstanding personality, suited to the sombre and stormy times in which his life has been cast; a man of inexhaustible courage and will-power, and a man of direct and even blunt speech…. Stalin left upon me the impression of a deep, cool wisdom, and a complete absence of illusions of any kind.”

In order to defeat a devil, we had to align ourselves with a devil, which is never a good thing. There was no other way the war could be won, and that meant merely substituting one dictatorship for another. Churchill said that “if Hitler invaded Hell, he would at least have made a favourable reference to the devil.” This is not, in fact, far from what happened. In order to defeat Hitler, Churchill appeased the cruellest, most murderous tyrant imaginable. And Chamberlain is the great fool of history? What Churchill did at Tehran and Yalta in ceding Eastern Europe and the Balkans to Stalin was infinitely worse than what Chamberlain did at Munich. The Poles hated Stalin, and they had fought the Soviets in the 1920s, whereas the Sudeten Germans longed to return to their homeland. It would have been futile to fight a war to keep the Germans under the Czech rule that they so despised. Hitler never conquered Czechoslovakia; he merely broke it up, where as Stalin demanded it be given to him on a platter, and Churchill capitulated. Churchill, not Chamberlain, was the great appeaser of history.

There are so many sources on the Second World War that are worth studying. I already mentioned one of the most important scholarly books, A.J.P Taylor’s “The Origins of the Second World War”. This is the book that got me to rethink WWII and ultimately lead me to change my position. He gives a very thorough account of Hitler’s real ambitions, how they have erroneously been embellished, and how Hitler desperately tried to end the war with Britain once it started. He viewed Hitler as far less ambitious in his territorial aspirations than most historians, and he argued that Hitler’s foreign policy was formed in response to threats from Russia, and later Britain and France, not driven by ideology.

Paul Johnson is another historian I would recommend reading. His “Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties” deals with the historical build up to WWII. He is more sympathetic to Churchill than I am, but he makes many of the same points I have tried to make with respect to the failure of British diplomacy. He argues that the 1939 war guarantee, which misled the Polish into thinking that Britain would come to their aid when Britain could not have possibly fulfilled such a guarantee, was a “hysterical response” by British statesmen who had an “irrational determination to resist Hitler at the next opportunity, irrespective of its merits.”

This article by Peter Hitchens is a very succinct summary of how Britain destroyed itself by entering WWII and how the course of events might have been different if we hadn’t gone to war. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1209890/PETER-HITCHENS-If-hadnt-fought-World-War-2-British-Empire.html

The article I cited does deal with the spread of communism in the aftermath of the war. I’m not sure what you mean by “created communism”. If you mean that communism spread throughout Europe and Asia as a consequence of defeating Germany and Japan, then yes, Hitchens does make that case. The territorial concessions Churchill made to Stalin already gave half of Europe to communism, and that is just given as a fact of history. But there is also the argument that if Germany had not been defeated, and the balance of power between Germany and Russia was not disrupted, Russia would have been unable to expand as it did without coming into conflict with Germany. If Hitler had not been diverted by war with Britain and France, Stalin could not have made the territorial gains in Eastern and Central Europe.

It is unclear what you mean by “protecting Hitler’s victims was evil”. Do you mean the Chzechs and the Poles? We never did protect either and were not even in a position to do so. My argument was that the war guarantee led to an unnecessary conflict with Germany that would have been avoided if we had instead encouraged Poland to resolve this dispute over Danzig diplomatically.