| | Of course, Hitler murdered 6 million jews and gypsies, an atrocity that we all abhore. However, the military objective of the allies was never to rescue prisoners of concentration camps. By this I mean that no bombing raids were conducted, for example, to cut supply lines to the camps, or to destroy the compound walls to aid the escape of prisoners; no paratroopers or aircraft were risked on rescue missions; etc. Until American troopers actually arrived at the camp locations, the camps were ignored as inconsequential by allied military brass.
By what moral calculus does one justify the coerced sacrifice (recall the military draft) of 600,000 American soldiers in a military engagement that did not involve the defense of Americans, for the sake of liberating another people from dicatatorship? Could American entry into WWII been sustained without a military draft and heavy taxation? Of course not. Are we to support such rights-violating government oppression for the purpose of bailing out your sentimental attachment to The One Great War? I think not. Was Ayn Rand showing her true colors with her commentary to the effect that both World Wars, Vietnam and Korea, were futile collectivist crusades?
What did your Great Crusade accomplish? Millions of dead in a conflict that may well have been fought on a smaller scale for a shorter time; all of Eastern Europe overrun by FDR's favorite, Joseph Stalin and his mass murderers; huge casualties of innocent civilians at non-military targets that include Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki; and finally, the permanent burden on Americans of heavy taxation, stifling controls, and a huge military establishment that has been around so long most cannot imagine life without it. In this last sense, Americans were freer before FDR's push to war than after. But I thought these non-defensive wars are prosecuted for the sake of individual liberty.
Churchill was a Big Government Crusader who pushed hard for Britain's entry into WWI and WWII. Opinion before the Second War in Britain was opposed to entry, but collectivist altruist career government officials eagerly sought to committ Britain to a de facto military alliance with France, according to Paul Johnson's History of the English People. Johnson explains that for centuries, Britain had consciously avoided military alliances with European powers for the avowed purpose of avoiding Continental wars. This outlook changed with the rise of social reformers and socialism. The British, who controlled the world's largest navy and potentially vast man power from its empire, were actively encouraged in their pursuit of war by FDR, who on two or three occasions (1939)dispatched American emissaries to informally assure the British that sooner or later Americans would be fighting at their side. Of course, FDR did not inform the American people of these assurances.
The Second World War represents a gauzy, unfocused historical ideal to war hawks of every ideological stripe and variety--left, right and center. My experience has been that many prefer to keep it unfocused. Refer to evidence that Hitler's ambitions were to the East, and one hears only outraged sputtering denial. Mention FDR's treachery concerning Pearl Harbor and one hears shrieking protest instead of probing questions or factual refutation. Bring up the never discussed issue of the draft and taxation and the response is a shrug. Ask by what right Americans should have been sacrificed to a global rescue mission unrelated to their own defense, and one receives accusations--as predictable as they are tiresome--of treason, of dictator hugging, of moral degeneracy.
But these are tactics, I suspect, of those who sense they tread on thin intellectual ice and feel unhappy about it.
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