Things Used to Be Worse
Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, Japan (wikimedia)
Isaac Chotiner reads one rosy tale too many about how the British responded to the Blitz without resorting to torture, and points out that humanitarianism was hardly the rule of the day in the 1940s:
Let’s just take one example: The Bengal Famine of 1943. Scholars still dispute what exactly caused the famine–and whether there were in fact sufficient amounts of food, amounts which went unused–but there can be denying that the Churchill government’s response to this disaster was, in the historian Peter Clarke’s word, gruesome. Upon learning that people were dying at a rapid rate (the total death toll was around 3 million) Churchill simply asked, in an infamous letter, why Gandhi had not yet starved. Eventually the government responded adequately, but this was of little solace to the millions of dead Indians.
Part of the story here is just Churchill’s boundless hatred for Gandhi. But it should be said clearly that today’s sense of outrage about the depredations of the Bush administration is in part about the nature of the depredations, and in part about the fact that our ethical senses have become more refined. World War II was something like the nadir of humane conduct in world history. Back then you could be deliberately targeting enemy civilians for mass death and still be the good guy in the war. Heck, you could be Stalin and still be the good guy. It was a bad time. What’s so disturbing about Bush isn’t so much that his misdeeds have reached an unprecedented level of badness, it’s that much of his conduct seemed to reverse a trend toward better behavior developing over time.
59 Responses to “Things Used to Be Worse”
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June 29th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
Well put. Well put indeed.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
What?
June 29th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
What’s so disturbing about Bush isn’t so much that his misdeeds have reached an unprecedented level of badness
Making torture “legal” reaches an unprecedented level of badness. That Bush didn’t even face 1/1000 of the threats FDR or Churchill had to deal with only makes his crimes more unique.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
I think what you are missing is that, rightly or wrongly, many (most) people now and (certainly) in the mid-20th century would have rated torture as more morally reprehensible than bombing civilian military targets.
Part of the reason for that (and why it’s hard to completely ignore arguments about the efficacy of torture) is that torture has in recent history (correctly) been seen as a having no utility aside from as a method of coercing false confessions. Whereas bombing civilians has been seen (incorrectly, IMO) as advancing legitimate war aims.
Not in either case would efficacy justify the practice IMO; I’m simply suggesting that that is one of the reasons why torture was regarded as barbaric even by peopel who had no problem intentionally killing civilians.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Torture of slaves was legal for decades in this country, and happened to tens, maybe hundreds, of thousands of people.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
Indeed. I was reading about the kidnapping of Aldo Moro, and some bigshot or other said (according to wikipedia, anyway), “Italy can’t torture and remain Italy.” This, when the prime minister was kidnapped! And when all their politicians was being assassinated by the mafia and by commies. And we torture because our uniformed troops are occasionally bombed? sheesh.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
“Isaac Chotiner: I mention this story not because it should distract us from the torture issue, but because it is worth keeping a little perspective. We do not need to idealize the past in order to make clear moral judgements.”
I don’t think we’re idealizing the past when we’re impressed by the Geneva Conventions (of 1949) which Chotiner conveniently ignores.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Seems to fit well with Choitner’s conclusion:
“I mention this story not because it should distract us from the torture issue, but because it is worth keeping a little perspective. We do not need to idealize the past in order to make clear moral judgements.“
June 29th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
On the last sentence:
-Baudrillard
There is no end to history. No betterment. No progression or evolution towards godhood. There is only human.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Poptarts
Don’t know why Issac’s “conveniently ignoring” a piece of international legislation from 1949, when his article was expressly about the period of 1941-1945.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:33 pm
It had little or nothing to do with Churchill’s hatred of Gandhi. To argue that is to that to personalize and trivialize the situation.
The “great democracies” as Churchill referred to Britain and the USA did not include Empire’s non-anglo-saxon subjects.
The British reaction to the Bengal famine was due to the all pervasive colonial racism prevalent in the day where the “natives” needed to be “civilized”.
Churchill is remembered as Britain’s savior in World War II, but take away those 6 years of his 70 until 1945 and the other 64 were committed to the preservation of the Empire, with India as the greatest jewel in the His Majesty’s Crown.
You forget that George VI was “Emperor of India”.
The moral force of the Gandhian movement was his opposition to the human rights excesses of the British Empire – be it racism in South Africa, the Rowlatt Act of 1919 (where the “natives” were required to crawl on their bellies in the presence of Englishmen on the streets of Amritsar) and many others – back breaking taxation of poor farmers was so pervasive that it need not even be mentioned. Add to this a trade policy which was rooted essentially in plunder.
Lets not gloss over glaring facts.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
and in part about the fact that our ethical senses have become more refined.
So much so that the US can manufacture lies in order to attack an unthreatening country and kill thousands of innocent people.
There has been a definite movement to make Israel and the US “exceptional” and therefore justified in committing heinous acts
June 29th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Don’t know why Issac’s “conveniently ignoring” a piece of international legislation from 1949, when his article was expressly about the period of 1941-1945.
Well, there was an earlier version of the Convention re. POWs in place from 1929. Didn’t you watch Hogan’s Heroes?
June 29th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Bush took the “sole superpower” rhetoric to heart. US actions during his presidency can be understood if he thought there were no consequences, no chance of losing anything significant(the lives of our soldiers, and certainly the lives of the Iraqis not being significant to his thinking), and no competitors.
By the way Patrick, Jonas Salk, Martin Luther King and William Wilberforce are going over to your house to kick your buzz kill, gloomy afternoon, all is vanity, ass.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
“Back then you could be deliberately targeting enemy civilians for mass death and still be the good guy in the war.”
Attrition Warfare is legitimate tactic, a one that every general should consider as a normal part of any military intervention (to win a war, we have to kill people and put them to the point of capitulation, just like Germany in the Great War or Japan in WWII).
We should never exclude attrition by pure ideology.
The american Army put themselves in a great trouble in the 80s after Vietnam era when they pretended that we could win a war only by maneuvers and through technology : actually, the battles won by maneuvers are the exception (the Japanese in Singapore, Bonaparte defeating Austria in Ulm,…).
The Army has greatly diminished its own intellectual and practical understanding of the war by multiplying the theories, particularly from the 80s.
Theories do not win wars ; soldiers are well trained and well-conducted well-equipped armies that do. And they do so by killing effectively.
More often than the reverse, an exaggerated confidence in a daring maneuver operative campaign to win fast led to great disillusionment, and finally even disaster. In 1914, we thought war will be short. There is no alternative to the blood of the enemy !!! Actually, Desert Storm was ruined because we, the international community, “only” put Iraq out of Kuweit instead of destroying it completely (this fundamental error put us on the defense during the 13 years to come, because the enemy – and all our enemies over the world – were not afraid of us anymore, hence Saddam Hussein violations and 9/11, finally).
This is thanks to the Bush administration that they operated an ideological shift in 2001, in the weeks before operation Infinite Juste/Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.
And Iraqi Freedom, one of the most successful military campaign in history, was designed as a new kind of war of maneuver, in which air strikes were to “shock and fright” an opponent forced to surrender while ground forces were a secondary role. But rather than rely on technology in motion, the 3-week war was fought and won – so triumphant – by soldiers and marines employing both aggressive operational maneuvers and power of tactical devastating fire. We must concentrate on killing the enemy. With fire. With the movement. Now we are in the Global War against Terror (a.k.a. the Long War), faced with implacable enemies who would kill every man, woman and child in our country and approve of their death (the ultimate war of attrition), we must be willing to use that power wisely, but without remorse. We will learn the lesson in pain, because terrorists do not give up. The only solution is to kill and continue to do so: a war of attrition.
“Heck, you could be Stalin and still be the good guy.”
Maybe from the point of view of the communists and their american democratic friends like Roosevelt (who offered half Europe to Stalin, the former ally of Hitler). What was the point to launch a war against Germany to liberate Poland and Romania if at the end it was to have communist regimes everywhere (regime even worse than the german labour/national-socialists) ?
June 29th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Note that Fleur is a torture proponent.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
Your own crimes and the crimes of your allies-du-jour whitewashed, the crimes of the official enemies-du-jour trumped up.
This has been and will always remain the standard M.O. of every friggin nation-state on earth, and it can’t be any other way. This is a law of nature.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
@15 You are a viscous moron. Grown ups are talking. Go haul your fat ass off somewhere and play Panzer Leader and shut up.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
And Iraqi Freedom, one of the most successful military campaign in history
Not surprising to celebrate the horrifying war tactics of the past when Iraq is your idea of a success. I guess not enough people have been killed in the Middle East yet for Fleur to be happy.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:52 pm
“Point”:
“Don’t know why Issac’s “conveniently ignoring” a piece of international legislation from 1949, when his article was expressly about the period of 1941-1945.”
No his article wasn’t about 1941-1945, it was about idealizing the past which is what he was accusing Andy Sullivan of doing, with Andy’s story of the British not torturing Nazis. (A story by the way which Obama mentioned in an impassioned argument against torture he told to a national audience.)
June 29th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
This last comment by Mr. Delacour — perhaps a new pen-name for Stephen Den Beste, given the faux military know-it-all-ness — comes close to achieving winger bodhicitta. Well done, sir! Amusingly, the Wikipedia entry that he cites, on attrition warfare, gives Vietnam as a “prime example” of the genre. And that worked out so well, too! Or it would have, if Harry Truman and Sonia Sotomayor hadn’t capitulated to Stalin at Munich.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
I am shocked and awed.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
I don’t think MattY is thinking this through. Certainly we consider the indiscriminate death of civilians to be worse today than we did in the past. At the same time, during WWII, the mission to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto’s plane while he was traveling through Indonesia was considered extremely controversial because it seemed a little too akin to a targeted political assassination rather than killing combatants in the course of battle.
What this points to is not that our norms have changed or that they’ve gotten better. What this points to is the possibility that the “civilized norms” we adhere to when it comes to the treatment of prisoners and our moral and legal injunctions against torture are conscious choices we make for specific groups, and we can turn these sentiments on or off depending on who the target is. This means that maintaining these civilized norms is not something we will follow by default but rather that those in power have to be held back and restrained from deviating from them, because the temptation is so great and the ability to deviate from them so easy.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Now we are in the Global War against Terror (a.k.a. the Long War), faced with implacable enemies who would kill every man, woman and child in our country and approve of their death (the ultimate war of attrition)
Not only that, but an Islamo-fascist is hiding under your bed at this very moment. Run, Fleur, run!
June 29th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Comments 15-19
Don’t feed the troll!
Ryan
I’ll admit, I’m not much for old television shows.
Poptarts
Point taken — Issac said “the past”, which includes both WWII and 1949.
June 29th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
‘Human Smoke’ is a nice little rebuttal to the idea that Britain and US were anything but reckless murderers in World War 2.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
21, 22, 24
Again, DFTT
June 29th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Isaac Choiter quoting Andy:
At a time when German bombers were coming through in the daylight over London, when the Germans were expected on the beaches the first foggy morning, the House of Commons, which might have been destroyed with all its members by one well-placed enemy bomb, devoted two days to discussing the conditions under which enemy aliens were being held on the Isle of Man. For the House of Commons was determined that, though the Island fell, there would be nothing resembling concentration camps in Britain, and the rights under law of enemy aliens would not be abused. That is what the British collectively believed.
Isaac Choiter:
I salute Andrew’s harsh and frequent condemnations of torture, and I respect the point he is trying to make. But if you really want to compare the British between 1940 and 1945, and America during the Bush administration, you come across some ugly facts.
The more I think about it the more I think this is an unnessary bitchy post by Choiter. By all means lets not get carried away idolizing Churchill for his morality.
Andy and Obama’s point still stand, despite being under existential threat, the British didn’t compromise on their values regarding torture and the treatment of prisoners and America should be able to do the same.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
“Your own crimes and the crimes of your allies-du-jour whitewashed, the crimes of the official enemies-du-jour trumped up.
This has been and will always remain the standard M.O. of every friggin nation-state on earth, and it can’t be any other way. This is a law of nature.”
Spoken by a true cynic. There is no “law of nature.”
“By the way Patrick, Jonas Salk, Martin Luther King and William Wilberforce are going over to your house to kick your buzz kill, gloomy afternoon, all is vanity, ass.”
Seconded. Lately there is the civil society developments of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, etc. who can try to do objective reporting on the “crimes on both sides.” (Pinchet was detained, etc. )
Of course the cynical paranoid section of the left consider them handmaidens of humanitarian intervention.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Oh, please. Millions of people have died in Iraq, according to the epidemiologists, and many millions have died in the ongoing (but somewhat calmer) wars in Sudan and the Congo. Our sensibilities are now what they were then: if they’re different enough and distant enough, they don’t count. Maybe that’s an unavoidable aspect of human character, but to claim that we have shown more compassion for the dead of Iraq than we did for the dead of Bengal is pathetic.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
It’s also worth pointing out that all the guys who did this stuff LOST when they did it.
I am befuddled as to why people who defend torture point to the British in India, or the French in Algiers. The point of torturing people is to win. But the British no longer rule India. The French don’t control Algiers. The relevant lesson here isn’t “this is okay because our friends did it.” The lesson is also not “you can do horrible things and still be better than someone else.” The lesson here is “this is dumb because it’s evil and also it doesn’t work.”
Jesus, it’s like having a friend who knocks over a 7-11. You can still like the guy, he could be a hero aside from this one dumb thing, but you know, knocking over the 7-11 was WRONG and it is why he is going to go to jail! So, if you don’t want to go to jail, emulate him in every other way than the knocking over the 7-11 part!
This isn’t rocket science.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Terror famines were standard British imperial operating behavior. Ireland in the 40s, India from the 1870s until 1910, then again in the 40s – it is how they governed, over millions of the dead. Much like Stalin in the Ukraine. In fact, the British notion that problems could be solved by famine (the school of providentialists who saw it as a blessing that Ireland was depopulated) might well have given Stalin his ideas. The providentialists of the 19th century were ardent capitalists, Stalin an ardent communist, and both were willing to shed any amount of blood for their systems.
On the other hand – Roosevelt was not mr. Humanitarian, but he was blunt that Britain had to do some thing about the Bengal famine. A moral point of view was available.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Per Matt: Heck, you could be Stalin and still be the good guy.
No, you couldn’t. Stalin was rotten to the core, as bad as Hitler. Worse, in fact. Arguably responsible for deaths of more human beings. In prewar Germany, one could be a member of armed forces officer corps, the ruling party, or a former opposition politician, and have a reasonable expectation of not getting shot in a purge.
Joe’s only redeeming quality was that he hadn’t (yet) subjugated any countries that “mattered”. From our pov, he was useful while keeping the Wehrmacht busy. As Henry Kissinger would have said, it’s too bad they couldn’t both lose.
June 29th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
#21 “Amusingly, the Wikipedia entry that he cites, on attrition warfare, gives Vietnam as a “prime example” of the genre. And that worked out so well, too!”
There are many many other examples. But… What do you exactly know of the moral of the enemy during Vietnam operations ? Of the willingness of the fathers and sons of Vietnam to sacrifice to their Grand Leader Hoh-Chi-Min ? Don’t you think that they have families too, that they inspired more to go to school, have a career, a future, family, kids, live peaceful and be happy…? The Viets could not win on the military front, and could finally come to the conclusion that capitulation was in their best interest, if we had continue to fight. We in the West tend to make this other error : to project on the enemy (Viets, Fascists, Islamists,…) that they always are some kind of irrational. They are not necessaraly irrational and suicidal (Hitler maybe,… but even in those cases we do not know how the rest of their societies will react to their leaders). They know our power and theirs.
#19 “I guess not enough people have been killed in the Middle East yet for Fleur to be happy.”
I am not an apologist of George W. Bush. Even if I praise his strategic decisions : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfhxEW4zrgc
The problem of losses (both civilian and military), is crucial because of how the Bush administration has defined the war.
During the Second World War, a war was regarded by all his fighters as one of national survival, whole countries without distinction were legitimate targets. Large numbers of dead civilians, or one-off horrors such as Dresden or the burning of Tokyo, were seen as unfortunate, but they have not brought the participants or historians to change their assessment of the moral status of the parties involved.
During the first Gulf War, without any further acceptance of “total war” was amended by the fact that Saddam Hussein was a bloodthirsty despot, and many of its soldiers from rural conscripts. But because Iraq had invaded Kuwait, there was a tacit sense that Saddam and his army deserved what they received.
In the current war, however, Iraq did nothing to provoke an attack – apart from Saddam’s long quest for weapons of mass destruction, which it must meet alone. Moral rules that apply to selected wars are far more stringent than those of wars of self-defense. Moreover, the explicit statement of President Bush that this is a war of “liberation” for the Iraqi people, and its assertion that the only real enemies of America are Saddam Hussein and his family, render essential both for world opinion – and after the Iraq war – to reduce civilian casualties as much as possible.
Purists of ethics would argue that the Iraqi military casualties should also be minimized, but as soon as hostilities begin, the uniformed personnel of a hostile army – regardless of their willingness to fight or not for their tyrannical leader – is generally considered a legitimate target.
One of the central concepts used by researchers working on what makes a just war is the concept of “proportionality”, or the proportion of fatalities compared with spared.
By entering in those deliberations, by calling the war a war of “liberation” to please the purists of ethics (who are overwhelmingly seen favorable by the media, so by the public opinion), President Bush tend to avoid what happens in Vietnam (a great military campaign ruined by the horrific humanitarian conditions of the populations). His intentions were noble. But he diminished the success, which could indeed have been greater (if it is what you meant). It is hard to have the two (either the soldiers accomplished their missions, either they want to preserve their life and civils and take less risks etc.).
June 29th, 2009 at 5:58 pm
Well into the 60s our own Indians (Native Americans) were still under attack- after a long history of genocide had decimated and displaced their tribes. So y’all can just climb down from your high horses.
In 1943 the British had been at war, literally under siege, for four years. The Germans had already killed ten million people in eastern Europe. I’m thinking some people are simply not grasping the scope of this, or how it might effect what was done.
In contrast, while we maxed out our credit cards, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died because they had no clean water to drink. Not seeing the big advance in sensitive feelings in all of this.
June 29th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
“But… What do you exactly know of the moral of the enemy during Vietnam operations?”
I assume you mean “morale.” But actually I do know quite a lot about it, having interviewed dozens of people there. Obviously, things were desperate and they wanted the war to end. But they weren’t giving up. Well, except in the South Vietnamese army (ARVN), where desertions were very high at the end. The problem with morale in the South was that they hated both the Communists and their own government. They had nothing to fight for, only two things to fight against.
“Of the willingness of the fathers and sons of Vietnam to sacrifice to their Grand Leader Hoh-Chi-Min ?”
Ho Chi Minh was very popular, but the Vietnamese tend to be very practical people. If a mother had two sons, she’d send one to fight for the North, and one to fight for the South. The theory was that eventually one side would win, and the family would have a member on the winning side that could help the rest of the family. Ultimately, any sacrifices were made to preserve their family, not any government.
“The Viets could not win on the military front, and could finally come to the conclusion that capitulation was in their best interest, if we had continue to fight.”
The Vietnamese do not have any history of capitulation. They have throughout their history made the invader’s lives miserable. Now, perhaps if they were offered a reasonable choice, they might choose the way we would prefer. Had they been given a choice between capitalism and communism, I’m sure they would have chosen capitalism (they have now). But we made them choose between colonial feudalism and communism. It’s either fight or live like a slave. They have been given that choice before, and they always chose to fight.
June 29th, 2009 at 7:07 pm
The only reason the Germans captured were treated somewhat decently was because they were European. On the other side of the world, captured Japanese were treated with unfiltered savagery until they were well to the rear of hostilities. This has almost always been the case; captured combatants who are seen as culturally foreign are almost always subjected to severe mistreatement. Charming accounts of captured Japanese being used for target practice, or of wounded Japanese having their gold teeth removed by bayonet are not uncommon.
In the case of the American military, a deliberate propaganda campaign was embarked upon, approved on the highest levels, to indoctrinate American military personnel into thinking that the Japanese soldier was on the moral level of a insect, and could be legitimately treated as such. After the war, Nazis and Japanese militarists were hung for engaging in the same propaganda that Roosevelt and Stimson approved. I’d be surprised if Churchill did not do the same. Note that I think Roosevelt and Churchill were on balance great leaders, and Hitler, Stalin, and the Japanese militarists very evil. War turns everyone into a bastard, however.
June 29th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
In my eyes, Matt is having a tough posting day today, what with commenting on “Hoduras” without seeming to know anything about it, and now discussing WWII a bit sophomorically. And there are a few too much right-wing myths in the comments on this page for my taste, so i’ll put something else on it.
First, “our ethical senses have become more refined?” I think the opposite position is more defensible. We have grown so comfortable with our depradations that not even our smart young commentators appear to recognize them. How exactly our are ethical sense more refined? We have air force pilots in Las Vegas sitting at simulators/monitors launching predator drones at suspicious people in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, blowing them to kingdom come without even missing lunch (and who in the Swat valley doesn’t look suspicious to somebody in Las Vegas?). There’s nothing morally refined about that, and the country hasn’t exactly ground to a halt because everyone is so repulsed by the practice. We have been engaged in torture, secret prisons, aerial bombing of civilians, prison for suspected “terrorists” without trial, and god knows what other misconduct that hardly qualifies as ethically “more refined” than much. Do people today really feel that as a people we have “more refined” ethical senses than others in the past? That strikes me as hubris.
“World War II was something like the nadir of humane conduct in world history.” Well, Hitler and the Nazis certainly brought their own horrific style to genocide, and World War II certainly was full of appalling horrors, including by the United States (which firebombed hundreds of thousands of residents of Tokyo, dropped nuclear bombs on two cities killing hundreds of thousands more civilians, dropped bombs on countless thousands civilians in many other German cities) but considering that most of human history has consisted of barbarism, slavery, torture, genocide and other unspeakable horrors, that seems to me to be the kind of statement favored by people who enjoy thinking about The Greatest Generation.
Ask an Armenian what the nadir of human conduct was. Or a Cherokee. Or a West African who was put in irons and sent across the Atlantic to be whipped and starved and worked to death as a slave in Virginia. Or a resident of Baghdad when Genghis Khan arrived. Or a Jew in Jerusalem when the Romans destroyed the Second Temple. Or somebody in Ireland when Cromwell came around. Or somebody in China when the Brits, and some New Englanders too, were winning the Opium Wars and turning China into a giant opium den full of addicts. Or the tens of millions of Asians who died of famine throughout the Victorian Era because of British colonial policy that consisted of large doses of bureaucratic mass murder. (Read Mike Davis’s Late Victorian Holocausts if you want the facts on that charge.)
“Back then you could be deliberately targeting enemy civilians for mass death and still be the good guy in the war. Heck, you could be Stalin and still be the good guy.”
Is this a serious remark arising out of the fact that we’re so much “more refined” now that we can’t slaughter people like in the good old days and still feel proud of ourselves? I really don’t know what to make of that statement, but then maybe it’s just a lead-in.
“What’s so disturbing about Bush isn’t so much that his misdeeds have reached an unprecedented level of badness, it’s that much of his conduct seemed to reverse a trend toward better behavior developing over time.”
For many people, the Bush/Cheney years did shatter the illusion of moral progress. But that perception was largely an illusion, one favored by Americans who tend to assume, without much broad knowledge, that everything we have done since WWII has been justified, if not downright noble. Bush’s misdeed was not in reversing a trend toward better behavior. Granted, we haven’t had a world war with tens of millions of casualties since WWII, but we’ve had plenty of horrific slaughter since then, much of it by the United States. Any change in behavior by Bush/Cheney was well within the standard deviation. Bush’s great misdeed was in lifting the curtain over American misbehavior. That was probably intentional. The jingoes and the vulgar don’t see anything especially ugly behind that curtain, and I sense that many, especially Cheney, felt the change in attitude was vital to the national interest. Basically, the jingoes think we need to be a nation of ass-kickers to meet our responsibilities in the world, since we are the world’s indispensable power, a hyperpower, or the only power chosen by God to have full spectrum dominance, whatever the preferred formulation. Jane Mayer in The Dark Side quoted General Boykin as saying about the country, “she’s soft, too soft,” if I remember right. That was the problem.
To the hard core hard liners, a kick-ass attitude is just what the doctor ordered. But not for most of us. The illusion of moral progress, or at least of moral improvement, is very psychologically protective to those of us who don’t have the comfort of Salvation on our minds. The realization that we’re just as savage as the next country, now or in the past, and that with some regularity we have done things that would win some admiration from Nero or Genghis Kahn or Hitler– that’s a bummer to your average non-fanatic.
Of course, there is an even better method of psychological self protection than the the illusion of progress, and it’s one which the jingoes certainly have mastered, but which plenty of other people have mastered too:
Ignorance is bliss.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Will Allen’s support for the torturing Bush administration rather undercuts any whining he may do about Roosevelt. After all, we already knew that Bush and Cheney had approved torture and Will Allen decided to vote for them anyway.
Then again, they had also committed American troops to an unprovoked war of aggression, which may have been more important to the famously bloodthirsty Will Allen.
Hey Will, how many Iraqis have to die before you think that maybe “giving them freedom” by dropping bombs on their heads was a good idea? Oh, and no bullshit about how I’m oppressing people – not unless you explain how what you are doing to free the rest of the world that doesn’t have oil to warm your 400 pound ass. So far the only “principle” to be found is that you approve of mass murder when done by Republicans and oppose any action, good or ill, if done by Democrats. Which is why you consider yourself “non-partisan.”
June 29th, 2009 at 9:04 pm
Even with preview I used “was” instead of “wasn’t”
(how many Iraqis have to die before you think that maybe “giving them freedom” by dropping bombs on their heads wasn’t a good idea)
Still, by not being a cheerleader for mass murder I can remain no where near as stupid as Will “Kill them brown people for me” Allen.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:23 pm
“Do people today really feel that as a people we have “more refined” ethical senses than others in the past? That strikes me as hubris.”
I’d say yes, but I have to qualify that pretty severely. It’s not as if humanity has been on the path of ever increasing ethics. Humanity has had its high points and low points, and we are at neither. But I would say this: our attitudes in America about genocide have certainly improved. We used to think genocide was a good policy that should be pursued aggressively. Now, we at least think it’s a bad thing. We will obviously do nothing to stop genocide, and we will sometimes even carry it out. But at least we find it mildly embarrassing and will make an effort to change the subject.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
On the other side of the world, captured Japanese were treated with unfiltered savagery until they were well to the rear of hostilities . . . Charming accounts of captured Japanese being used for target practice, or of wounded Japanese having their gold teeth removed by bayonet are not uncommon.
Twaddle and nonsense. The point of surrender is dangerous for any soldier in any war. At the time of greatest brutality, anyone might commit an atrocity. Yes, Americans and British soldiers occasionally murdered and brutalized Germans when they surrendered. It was a forseeable effect of the stress of ground combat, and the army had training and policy in place to minimize it.
The situation was different in the Pacific.
It wasn’t primarily because of racism directed towards the Japanese–only a tiny minority of Americans had ever met anyone Japanese before they entered the Pacific combat zone. Their cultural prejudices towards them weren’t remotely as harsh as those held by White Americans towards Blacks and Hispanics.
The brutalization of the Pacific stemmed, first and foremost, from the Japanese attitude towards the war. Americans entered into combat in the early months expecting to be treated per the Geneva Convention if they surrendered and most expected that the Japanese would surrender under roughly the same conditions as an American or European. Instead, they found themselves up against an enemy that casually murdered prisoners, military and civilian, and brutalized and abused them as a matter of standard practice, the officers leading the torture, maiming, and execution sessions to show off for the enlisted men.
Marine General Archer Vandegrift, who’d served in Asia before the war and thought he’d seen it all, was stunned by what he learned after his first land combat action on Guadacanal, writing to a fellow officer: “I have never heard of this type of fighting. These people refuse to surrender. The wounded wait until men come up to examine them . . . and blow themselves and the other fellow to pieces with a hand grenade.” Attempts to rescue swimming Japanese survivors after a naval battle could get American sailors throttled, drowned, stabbed, or shot.
The experience of battle taught the Allies that they had to deal harshly with this different kind of enemy. To their immense credit, the military commanders strove to minimize the petty atrocities, just as they did in Europe. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that they were not as successful in the Pacific.
As it was, some prisoners were taken in almost every battle, often at great risk to the Allied sailors and soldiers attempting to lessen the horror of what they had to do to survive. Eugene Sledge, who wrote one of the great accounts of Pacific land combat, speaks of its brutalizing effect. He also describes how the Marines he served with tried to keep each other sane and human in spite of it all.
June 29th, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Well into the 60s our own Indians (Native Americans) were still under attack- after a long history of genocide had decimated and displaced their tribes. So y’all can just climb down from your high horses.
And you can cut back on mixing metaphorical atrocities with real ones. The Indian Wars ended by 1890. Racist oppression of the tribes went on for another century. Likewise, slavery ended in 1865. Racist terrorism and apartheid went on for a century after that. All were evil, but not equally evil. And, unless someone reading this list is about a half century older than my grey hairs, none of the people writing here were active participants in those evils.
If you stood up in any court (or debate class) and insisted that murder, theft, fraud, and bad manners were all the same thing and should be equally punished, people would think you were nuts. If you denounced everyone around you and told them they had no right to an opinion because their genetic or cultural ancestors had committed terrible sins, they would think you a religous nut.
I’m guessing you are just repeating the standard memes you learned talking with your friends in college. They don’t carry that much weight outside of that subculture.
June 30th, 2009 at 1:44 am
“The Indian Wars ended by 1890.”
Hmm, when I was in high school, the Mohawks shut down Interstate 90 between Buffalo and Erie. They shot down a National Guard helicopter with a surface to air missile. That would normally be considered an act of war, but Cuomo got the message and gave in on the taxing of Indian gaming. We battle in court now, but the battles go on.
June 30th, 2009 at 2:10 am
Dunno if this has been said already, but the ironic fact of this is that World War II is regularly considered the last noble war.
June 30th, 2009 at 2:28 am
As long as the United States supports an immense, inexorable war machine it is going to do bad things. In the grip of policy madness, American warriors, at all levels, will remain susceptible to a powerful pull -the desire to fully realize the potential of this country’s extensive compliment of state of the art weaponry.
Unfortunately, it seems every generation they are expressly afforded the opportunity. Clearly, if this trend continues, it does not bode well for the survival of the species.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:14 am
“but the ironic fact of this is that World War II is regularly considered the last noble war.”
Is it ironic as the Civil War being the last civil war? Sherman laid out a whole new concept of how war is fought at the end. And then wars weren’t civil anymore. Of course, they never really were civil, anyway. And the slaughter of civilians has happened throughout history. But there really were times when people went out to watch battles as if they were sports. But no surprise, they really were the sport of the day.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:58 am
42: Following along this point, it is important to recognize that statistically, there is a huge difference in the ratio of captured Japanese soldiers/dead compared to any other nation’s military in WWII (which tended to be uniform in comparison). So this is not some unintended bias. Most Japanese soldiers considered it better to die than surrender all the way up until the point of their suicide assault. Poor treatment of captured prisoners is not acceptable, but if I had been a commander in WWII, I think my policy would have simply been shoot on sight. If your enemy systematically disrespects the white flag, it is the only reasonable choice.
June 30th, 2009 at 6:59 am
Is it ironic as the Civil War being the last civil war? Sherman laid out a whole new concept of how war is fought at the end. And then wars weren’t civil anymore.
Lost Cause propaganda. Most Civil Wars are horribly brutal on civilian populations. Our Civil War reached these “normal” levels only in certain areas, notable Missouri, Kansas, and the Virgina border, where guerrilla warfare reduced discipline on both sides and numerous petty atrocities occurred.
What Sherman did was to use systematic property destruction without allowing matching harshness towards civilians. Very different from similar strategies in European wars, and extremely different from how non-European armies fought.
Of course, they never really were civil, anyway. And the slaughter of civilians has happened throughout history.
True, but a slur on Sherman. By world standards, rather than the pretenses of 1860, his campaign was remarkably humane.
But there really were times when people went out to watch battles as if they were sports.
Freakish circumstances, really. In most wars, the chance of suddenly becoming involved in the fighting precludes tourism. And most armies, particularly mercenary armies, are dangerous to be around, even if they’re fighting for your side.
But no surprise, they really were the sport of the day.
Only at a distance of hundreds or thousands of miles.
June 30th, 2009 at 7:55 am
As long as the United States supports an immense, inexorable war machine it is going to do bad things. In the grip of policy madness, American warriors, at all levels, will remain susceptible to a powerful pull -the desire to fully realize the potential of this country’s extensive compliment of state of the art weaponry.
Exactly. This is the second of the two primary causes of the United States being one of the least militarized countries in the world before 1949. The first was that our cultural ancestors saw the military as a threat to political freedom. The second was that having a large military tempted the government to use it. The corollary to that second argument was that the military and its civilian suppliers would become a force for jingoism.
Note that the last great American leader of that pre-1949 generation, Dwight Eisenhower, is the president who gave us that important warning about the “Military-industrial Complex.”
June 30th, 2009 at 8:49 am
Kevin Smith in “Conflict over Convoys: Anglo-American Logistics Diplomacy in the Second World War” spends a good bit of time on the Great Bengal Famine and finds that it largely coincided with the nadir of British shipping resources. Over and above British bloody-mindedness there were serious structural problems in responding to the disaster.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:13 am
Kevin Smith in “Conflict over Convoys: Anglo-American Logistics Diplomacy in the Second World War” spends a good bit of time on the Great Bengal Famine and finds that it largely coincided with the nadir of British shipping resources. Over and above British bloody-mindedness there were serious structural problems in responding to the disaster.
That makes a lot more sense than other comments on this issue. The notion that the British government (not the English extremists quoted in the comments) would deliberately cause a famine is pretty bizarre.
Would they impoverish millions of peasants and villagers in the name of mercantile interests? Damn straight. Would they display stupifying racial callousness in bungling or minimizing relief efforts for people they considered socially inferior? Absolutely.
That’s why Communism was invented in England. That’s why the Americans, the Irish, and the Indians all kicked their asses out, and why the those same peoples were reluctant to ally with them in two world wars.
In spite of this, I do occasionally defend the Brits in the forum. Because, as bad as they were, pretty much everyone else was much worse. Most of us, living in our well fed, prosperous middle-class society, have only a limited knowledge of the petty oppressions and large-scale horrors traditional governments inflicted on their subjects. As Matt originally noted, we keep thinking we’re past all of that, and it keeps coming back, like Freddie and Jason, in endless sequels.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
“As long as the United States supports an immense, inexorable war machine it is going to do bad things.”
And “What’s so disturbing about Bush isn’t so much that his misdeeds have reached an unprecedented level of badness, it’s that much of his conduct seemed to reverse a trend toward better behavior developing over time.”
You are pure ideology, mr Yglesias, just like the military in the 80s who sells the crazy idea of a “war with zero casualties”. I explained in #15 and #34 that when you do the war, you have to do what it is good according to the circumstances and the enemy you are facing. It can be a war of maneuvers, as you seem to wish. But you cannot deny a priori the possibility of attrition warfare.
What is particularly funny and absurd in all the comments here is that if President Bush indeed broke with the crazy idea of a war of pure maneuvers in Afghanistan and Iraq (which, as I said, was politically brave, because in history attrition is more accepted when our existence and values are at stake, which was not directly the case with Saddam Hussein), those wars of him are still to be classified in wars of maneuvers and with ethics involved.
The only “trend” he reversed was the myth of a “clean war” and the myth of “the end of history”. He put back the preeminence of civil power over the so-called “Military-industrial Complex” and revigorated the idea of a fight for our existence and values, hence the acceptation of sometimes heavy casualties in the military to fullfill the mission (contrary to the wishes of the theories of the military since the 80s). This was the rupture.
BUT …
Operation “Iraq Freedom”, even if a new kind of, was STILL a war of maneuvers, and a conflict where “ethics” play a great role. It was not attrition warfare.
The Coalition Forces did not attempt to confront the Iraqi regular army, and they have tried to minimize the losses among the civilian population even though Saddam Hussein had tried to multiply them by using them as human shield for its plan.
During the first 16 days of the conflict, the streets of Baghdad have shown a surprising normality, unlike Desert Storm, the bridges were not destroyed by air strikes, power cuts and water supply and electricity are still unknown origin. The country’s major cities have had no seats and no indiscriminate shelling, and were taken in a few days by a series of raids targeting the regime loyalists.
In “Shock and Awe”, 500 cruise missiles and 1,500 intelligent bombs from 21 to March 22 throughout the country have only made 3 deaths, according to figures of Baghdad, while there were thousands of victims when some 9,000 bombs could fall on a single German city in one night during Second World War.
As opposed to Desert Storm, where Allied Aviation has in 38 days gradually destroyed the Iraqi ability to drive and combat elements, the Central Command has conducted during the first week of Iraqi Freedom strikes concentrated almost exclusively on the infrastructure of command of the Iraqi regime. Only when the mechanized formations had reached the Euphrates and scored in stoppage time due to sand storms and extended their lines of communication, and that when airborne brigade was deployed to Kurdistan to strengthen the activities of the northern front, as Allied Aviation has invested heavily in the close air support to destroy the resistance to ground – just enjoying earthly guidance. In other words, “Shock and Awe” has helped to segment and isolate the forces loyal to the regime of its conduct, while the air pressure was then put in a situation.
Thus, the physical effects exercised by the allied forces were three different types. First, the decapitation of Saddam Hussein’s regime, which inaugurated the start of the operation and continued for almost the entire operation with precision air strikes, and has actually disconnected the government of its defenders. On the other hand, the destruction of forces loyal to the regime such as the Republican Guard, militia Ba’athists, the Fedayeen Saddam and the foreign jihadists, mainly by land offensive in the form of raids and helping hands as well as strikes air guided from the ground, which often turned into carnage by suicidal mythomaniac of these fighters. Finally, the ban on movement on main roads and border crossings, by the insertion of special forces to the west as in the east with the support of aviation, has isolated the reinforcements spontaneous and prevented the escape of some VIPs.
But the psychological offensives have also had effects at least as important. In the months preceding the transaction during its first days, the drops of leaflets, the audio-visual and contacts directly with the commanders of the regular army have largely convinced them not to take part in fighting, while their men are almost all melted into the population. In Basra, news of the surrender of the 51st Infantry Division in Iraq were complete, for example, been criticized when Quarteroni only a prisoner of war has appeared, but we now know that the Allies have just ordered the 8000 soldiers that had this division to return home to avoid the burden of their care. Similarly, decapitation strikes carried out on the top of the regime have certainly increased the suspicion and paranoia among its members, while the targeting of military command post mobile or static reduced them to use only letters Motorsports for transmitting information and orders. Finally, one hopes for Saddam Hussein, the loss of popular support in the United States and Great Britain by the psychological effect of many losses in their ranks, was frustrated.
In the area of ethical, however, the coalition has suffered from the uncertain legitimacy of its operation and has remained largely on the defensive. In denying the evacuation of its population and using it as a human shield for his regime and his forces, Saddam Hussein has indeed sought to increase civilian casualties and the moral instrumentalizing tool. It is now almost certain that the explosions occurred on two markets in Baghdad during rush hour, on 26 and 28 March were the result of bombs laid by a regime that precision strikes Allied alarming. Through the media sometimes hiding their sordid agreements with the regime, global public opinion has been taken over by images carefully stagings of genuine victims, whose pain was part of a deliberate strategy. Faced with this harsh attack, the military allies have been for them a sufficient and good faith efforts to deliver basic necessities to people placed under their control. Only insurmountable ethical liabilities of the Iraqi regime in its own population that has enabled the coalition to be welcomed in most cities, and thereby show the world that its action was actually a liberation.
Superior material, mental and moral were the basis for the success of Allies in having removed the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein without alienating the majority of the Iraqi population, and this domination combining capacity, will and legitimacy shows the obsolescence of traditional wars between states and peoples from the “Iraqi Freedom”.
Crossing in 21 days of often fierce fighting the 550 km separating the attack Kuwait central Baghdad, respond promptly to the resistance and asymmetric perfidious paramilitaries of the regime, ensure continuity of operations despite the sand storms of violence unprecedented undo thousands of fanatical fighters for 157 Allied soldiers died and less than 600 wounded, or capture all the cities in a few days without destroying them and without the starving, the achievements were so brilliant that they have been returned to their studies often apocalyptic outcome – and partial – of this war. Projected seats interminable guerrilla elusive and widespread destruction have been denied by the Allies’ ability to overtake their opponents and adapt to their device, ie to operate within their decision loop. Some 25 divisions of the Iraqi regular army, 7 divisions of the Republican Guard, the division of the Special Republican Guard and thousands of paramilitary fighters have been able to prevent only 5 divisions allied burrowing like a blade in the country and strike at the heart of the dead regime. And this was also accompanied by a joint and multinational integration without precedents in history.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
Shorter Fleur at #53: “The well-trained and well-equipped military organized under Bush I and Clinton executed beautifully an invasion it could hardly have lost, considering the inept, under-equipped, demoralized state of the opposition.”
Really, its like a SWAT team dealing with a riot on death row at San Quentin by breaking into the prison hospital and bragging about how quickly they subdued the cancer ward.
And then, of course, Tommy Franks retired, dumping the difficult part of the operation in someone else’s lap, leading to a slow-motion catastrophic failure.
June 30th, 2009 at 12:52 pm
“That makes a lot more sense than other comments on this issue. The notion that the British government (not the English extremists quoted in the comments) would deliberately cause a famine is pretty bizarre.”
The terror famine thesis has never been that Stalin deliberately caused the famines in the Ukraine, but that misgovernance created the famines, and they were then used by Stalin to destroy resistance to collectivization.
Why did Stalin use famine as a weapon of policy? To change the economic landscape of rural Russia – and the Ukraine – and to subdue its population. Why did the British use famine as a weapon of policy? To monetize rural india and create a more efficient agricultural sector. Anybody who wants to see how this was done should read the material in Mike Davis’s Victorian Holocausts. Richard Stevenson, in his book on the Bengal famine, found no indication in the official British papers that there were any humanitarian concern about the famine at all – but when it became a military problem, as he put it, the famine came to an end. For instance, the ‘destitutes” were cleared from Calcutta and sent to camps – where they disappear from history. Much like the labour camps set up in 1876 in India under viceroy Lytton, which were simply death camps where the ration of food was equivalent to what it was in Treblinka.
June 30th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
Hmmm . . . scanned a few reviews on Davis’s book. Powerful stuff.
Marxist rhetoric aside, the pattern here is one commented on in some of our other historical threads. It goes back to the dawn of the Neolithic Age, and is slamming us full force in our post-industrial world.
Hunter-gatherer cultures have a mixed record as far as health, quality of life, etc., but always have a very low population density. In general, they have little staying power alongside agricultural societies because they cannot occupy and control the land, nor maintain the attrition of continual conflict. They usually are driven to trade with the farming/manufacturing cultures, becoming dependent on them for hard goods and straining the resources they live on. Further, they pretty much always live on the edge of starvation. One famine or plague and a clan or tribe can collapse or disappear entirely.
In The Comanche Empire, Pekka Hämäläinen tells how the Comanche, by the 1840s, controlled a vast stretch of the Great Plains, had a predator-prey relationship with some of them, trading with others–including several Mexican provinces and independent Texas. They had a population of about 20,000 souls living off a herd of 5,000,000 buffalo. Hide trading with New Mexico and a bad drought or two crushed them. They couldn’t sustain themselves when the bison herds dwindled to 3,000,000 head.
A subsistence farming culture has plenty of staying power as long as it does not have constant or forced interaction with a pure cash economy. In the old American frontier, as in much of Eurasia before the 19th Century, you have a large class of farmers with little access to cash and a very limited need for outside goods. If they are taxed they pay in kind themselves to the government or to a feudal landlord, who himself provides a mix of cash, services, and payment in kind to his overlord. Another social class of farmers will own some land, rent some to peasants, and farm the rest intensely. They invest in capital, have a big production surplus, pay taxes or tithes in cash, and have a higher standard of living. Then, of course, you have the pure landlord class, those who draw labor, rents, etc., from the peasants and deal in cash with outsiders, particular the government.
The system rises and falls with the natural hazards of war, drought, and pestilence, developing its own methods of dealing with these calamities, generally after said calamities deal them a harsh dose of population control. It might treat local hunter-gatherers as eccentric neighbors or dangerous animals, depending on whether they resist the peasants taking over all the good land.
With the rise of middle-class rule, particularly with industrialization, the old systems slowly fold up. Middle-class farmers using manufactured tools feed themselves easily and produce a large cash crop surplus. They absorb the best land, inflate living standards and the cost of manufactured goods, and pay cash taxes. Subsistence farmers (and farmer/villagers) are either driven off the land or into abject poverty. The feudal landowners have to either convert their holdings to cash crops or become absentee landlords, maintaining themselves as parasites of the government and/or drawing their wealth from other sources. In either case, they no longer serve as a filter between the peasants and the cash economy.
The negative effects of these changes would be aggravated by the class and ethnic prejudice they generate and intensify. Middle-class farmers consider peasant farmers lazy trash, both of them consider the hunter-gatherers a public menace and wish they’d go away, on their own or with help from government soldiery. Non-landowners, like poor Judd Fry, are looked down on, city-dwellers are suspect but admired-—cities are a way to get away from the land and make good. The aristocrats are either looked up to or tolerated as curiosities depending on whether they are fulfilling their traditional leadership roll in society or just loitering around.
The plantation owners in the antebellum south managed to blame the impoverishment of the subsistence farmers on everything but their own hamstringing of rural development in the states where they held political power. The Marxist historians who ally themselves with the Lost Cause historians gloss over the fact that the ruling “agrarian” classes in the south were also a capitalist class—just not a very efficient one. Like conservative feudal landowners around the world, they fought urbanization and modernization that would have helped the lower class cope with the 19th Century. Even after the Civil War, they retarded the growth of modern farming and cities in the south for generations. When the 20th Century finally drove the southern peasant farmers (“sharecroppers,” they called them) off the land, they moved to Chicago, Detroit, and New York looking for work.
When bourgeois rule and later the Industrial Revolution came to Europe, from the 16th Century on, the subsistence farmers moved by the millions into towns and cities. They are still doing so. My father was one of the last stubborn generation of low-tech small farmers in Minnesota. My mother took it on herself to “work in town” and get all four of her children enough education to make a decent living there. Good economic foresight, on her part.
Big famines happened, as Davis noted, whenever the old methods of dealing with calamity were shattered and large numbers of people were still tied to the rural landscape. Therein, I think, you see the aggravating effect of colonialism. They created cash crop economies, particularly plantation economies, and enforced them through the law, with the raw goods flowing to factories in Europe. They cut the death rate down by reducing local wars, improving sanitation and communications, and providing some modern medical care. Of course, by forcing changes in decades that took centuries to occur in Europe, they trapped a sizable mass of the population in inescapable poverty. Lacking a modern sense of macroeconomics, they blamed the poor for their lot, and when drought struck, sheer, bone-deep bigotry turned traditional famines into major catastrophes.
June 30th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Actually, Davis shows that the British averted a famine in the 1870s under Richard Temple in Bihar. Temple’s success was greeted with severe displeasure in London. Temple had used the state to keep “indolent’ Indians alive and had violated the sacred canons of supply and demand by organizing food supply to be shipped to the affected district. The next time around, he didn’t make that mistake. The british thus knew very well how to deal with famines – they just put the precepts of the free market above the lives of the people. The casualties that result is sort of like treating famine as a form of market clearing.
Temple, by the way, came up with the solution to the expense caused by indolent Indians in 1876 – he established a dietary quota for those who labored in the British labor camps. It was extraordinarily generous – a full pound of rice per day was alloted to labouring men. When a doctor wrote to the papers to complain that, well, a pound of rice per day would not restore the labourer’s “daily waste of tissue”, Temple, with a superiority that only could come from a British aristocrat, dismissed this as an abstract scientific matter, of no relevance in India. Of course, that a pound of rice per day provides only 127 more calories than are consumed by a man in a coma.
But, as our good libertarian friends might point out, this shouldn’t disguise the main point, which is the triumph of a good, steely ethos of self reliance that didn’t allow for no slouching or welfare ripoffs during a time when so many were taking advantage of the lack of food to barely do ten hours of work to earn their keep in labour camps!
July 1st, 2009 at 3:44 am
It’s not surprising that feeding India was not a priority in 1943 because Britain itself was on the verge of famine. Britain’s population was too large to feed itself from its island’s farms. Without food imports, the British would starve. For the first part of 1943, German U-Boats were winning the Battle of the Atlantic, sinking Allied shipping faster than new ships could be built, which implied starvation or surrender.
July 1st, 2009 at 11:05 am
It’s not surprising that feeding India was not a priority in 1943 because Britain itself was on the verge of famine. Britain’s population was too large to feed itself from its island’s farms. Without food imports, the British would starve. For the first part of 1943, German U-Boats were winning the Battle of the Atlantic, sinking Allied shipping faster than new ships could be built, which implied starvation or surrender.
So starving millions of Indians was an okay thing, as long as it kept a few million white folks better fed in the homeland? That sure explains why India kicked the Brits out.
I’ll note that grain didn’t get to Britain by teleportation or star gate. American and Canadian grain was about 5000 miles closer than Indian grain and the ships had to deal with the same U-boats.
Churchill had many good qualities, but he was still a relic from the old 19th Century British Empire. It was a walking corpse after World War I bankrupted it, and virulent British racism corrupted what limited good it was doing the colonial holdings from the 20s on. Converting it into the Commonwealth, not just for economic reasons, but also to protect the old dominions from foriegn predators, was a sensible idea that should have been tried a decade or two sooner than it was. Could have saved a lot of suffering and hard feelings.