Is There Such a Thing as a Good War?
British troops in a liberated town during WW2
Despite the popular belief that wars are an inherent evil that plagues mankind bringing nothing but misery, suffering, death, and destruction, there are certain types of wars which can be classified as being “good”. Wars appear to be the one constant in human history. Over the past 2,500 years innumerable wars, some recorded most not, have been waged all over the planet. Generally speaking my researches in history have concluded that the early wars from the Persians up to the time of the Romans were wars of imperial expansion. The wars fought from the end of the Roman Empire to about the 1700s, were wars of religion. These wars were both inter-religious such as Christianity vs. Islam, or intra-religious such as Catholics vs. Protestants. After the 1700s, wars became more national in character with the emergence of countries such as the United Kingdom, France, and Spain who wanted to extend their influence through acquisition of colonies abroad. This ultimately led to the destructive wars of the 20th century which were fuelled by crude ideologies.
But were any of them “good” wars? In order to answer this question, one has to approach it in a manner of Socrates. One has to find the right definition of “good”. What war is good for, as examined in the Wilson Quarterly, does not necessarily mean that war is good. The idea in the article that war is good because it brings people of a country together to fight for a common cause is hardly “good” if the cause is questionable (The Wilson Quarterly, What War is Good For). Similarly, the idea that minorities may have a chance to bond with other groups of people was hardly the case in the Vietnam War where racial tensions still existed. The idea that a good war is one which spreads a better form of government is also debatable (Foreign Affairs pg. 4). One country trying to enforce its style of government on another is hardly the model for a good war.
Obviously when any war is fought, the war is going to be good for one of the belligerents, normally the winner! Wars can be justified in that they help to get rid of odious regimes like that of Saddam Hussein (Opposing War is Good, But Not Good Enough). Wars can be justified that an expanding population needs more territory to grow more food for its citizens. But that inevitably means taking land from somebody else. So again, this is hardly an adequate definition of “good”. Wars to convert a group of people from one faith to another might please the fanatics, clergy, or the religious establishment of a certain country. But massacring large groups of people who do not wish to be converted again is hardly “good”. A third country might consider a war “good”. Although the USA was ultimately dragged into both the world wars, it was the demand for weapons which ended the Great Depression of the 1930s in America and boosted the economy of the USA in the First World War. War is good according to Homer as it is here where men win glory, as Glaucus and Sarpedon agree in Book 12 of the Iliad (Homer, Iliad, 12.310-330). However, it is here where the thousand demons of death which nobody can escape or avoid hover over them. These demons of death are the attendants of the war god Ares. In the train of his chariot is often found the companions of murderous Ares. Following at his heels can be found Strife (Eris), Pain, Panic, Famine, and Oblivion (D’Aulaire, pg. 32). Indeed, Zeus later castigates the war god stating that he hates him more than any other god on Olympus because the breath of life to him is rivalry, war, and fighting (Homer, Iliad, 5.890). In the Iliad, war is both good and bad.
US troops during the Gulf War
However, rather than leaving this in the normal Platonic matter where nobody can agree with the term in question, the claim of a “good” war has been applied to the most destructive war in the history of mankind, the Second World War (Hastings, pg. XIX). How can a war that claimed 27,000 lives a day, 60 million in total, and which reduced cities to rubble, subjected a large proportion of mankind to famine, dislocated millions of people from their homes, and ravaged large swathes of the planet be considered a “good” war? The answer is that this war put an end to one of the most evil ideologies in the history of mankind. In this war, certain groups of people were targeted for exploitation and then extermination all in the name of a racial ideology. The perpetrators were the Nazis. Their heinous actions were crimes against humanity. They were the architects of genocide on an unimaginable scale. Any war which puts an end to this has to be considered a “good” war, or as quoted in an article by Christopher Hitchens of Newsweek, “A war worth fighting.” (Hitchens, A War Worth Fighting).
Might is right is an ideology that has been around for a long time. Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue is an exposition of this idea. Basically, the Athenians tell the inhabitants of the island of Melos during the Peloponnesian War that, “The strong do what they have the power to do, and the weak accept what they have to accept.” (Thucydides, 5.89). They go on to say that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can….and that this is a natural law. (Thucydides, 5.105) This became the basis of the late 19th century Germanic idea of Social Darwinism. This is the foundation of Nazi racial ideology. Hitler believed that certain races, in this case the Germanic race, possessed a series of unique racial characteristics and a nature which equipped it to rule (USHMM, pg. 1). It was the survival of the fittest, and the Germanic race through constant warfare and destruction of inferior beings both physically and racially was destined to dominate mankind.
Even before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hitler had been secretly carrying out the T4 euthanasia programme of disposing of inmates of psychiatric and physically handicapped hospitals who were deemed unfit for further existence (Hastings, 491). No inferior blood was allowed to taint the racially pure Aryan master race. After wiping out the weak, he then turned to those races who he thought racially impure. The Jews suffered the most and were singled out for genocide first by execution of Einsatzgruppen squads and then by gassing in the notorious death camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec. We all know that six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis, but they were not the only victims. The fate of the Slavs was spared by the changing situation of the Eastern Front during World War 2. According to Browning (pg. 240), Himmler had already predicted the fate of up to 30 million Slavs and Jews as a consequence of the food shortage the Second World War had brought upon Germany. Basically, the Nazis wanted the land but not the tenants. Himmler is quoted as saying, “It is a question of existence; thus it will be a racial struggle of pitiless severity, in the course of which 20 to 30 million Slavs and Jews will perish through military actions and crisis of food supply.” The fate of the Slavs was pretty clear. Enough would be kept to serve their German masters as slaves, the rest would be allowed to starve to death or pushed through the Ural Mountains into Siberia. According to Hastings (pg. 487), the Nazis were different to other successful empires in that instead of offering its conquered peoples stability, prosperity, and the rule of law in compensation for their subjection, instead, they would be offered only brutality, corruption, and administrative incompetence.
The Nazis found that they were free to do what they liked. To commit whatever atrocities came to their fancy. The Nazi official was not constrained by law or social convention, and his victims were reduced to absolute impotence. As Hans Frank, the Nazi ruler of Poland wrote in 1942, “Humanity is a word that one dares not to use.” (Hastings, pg. 484). Over 3,500,000 Soviet POWs died as slaves of the Nazis. Jews not selected for the gas chamber were also used as slave labour. The introduction of forced labour throughout the territories of the Reich, led to the largest exploitation of slave labour in history. Eight million foreign labourers and POWs treated with institutionalised cruelty and surviving on minimal rations fuelled the Nazi war economy (Hastings pg. 488).
If ever there was a war that put an end to this egregious abuse of fellow human beings, then this would be a war that would deserve the label of being called a “good” war. Granted that one of the Allies themselves, the Soviet Union, was responsible for some appalling treatment of its people under Stalin at this time, the Nazis were the only country that made genocide of fellow humans a state sponsored mission. The Nazis were utterly destroyed. With all this considered, World War 2 was indeed a good war.
Soviet solider hoisting Soviet flag over the Reichstag (Battle of Berlin)
Bibliography
Browning, Christopher R., and Jürgen Matthäus. Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939-March 1942 (Comprehensive History of the Holocaust). University of Nebraska Press, 2004.
D’Aulaire, Ingri, and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire. Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths. Bantam Doubleday Dell, 2003.
Mandelbaum, Michael. “Why they fought: how war made the state and the state made peace.” Foreign Affairs, Nov.-Dec. 2014. Opposing Viewpoints In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A388827088/OVIC?u=j031916004&sid=OVIC&xid=4d59bdcf.
Hastings, Max. Inferno the World at War, 1939-1945. Vintage Books, 2012.
Hitchens, Christopher. “A War Worth Fighting.” Newsweek, 23 June 2008, p. 26. Opposing Viewpoints In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A180330087/OVIC?u=j031916004&sid=OVIC&xid=4bab05b5
Homer, et al. The Iliad. Achilles Press, 2004.
Jabar, Faleh A. “Opposing War is good, but not good enough.” The Progressive, Jan. 2003, p.20+. Opposing Viewpoints In Context, http://link.galegroups.com/apps/doc/A96954094/OVIC? U=j031916004&sid=OVIC&xid=74e3c7eb.
Thucydides, et al. History of the Peloponnesian War. Penguin Books, 1972.
“Victims of the Nazi Era: Nazi Racial Ideology.” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007457.
10. “What war is good for.” The Wilson Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 2, 2011, p. 76+. Opposing Viewpoints In Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A255086164/OVIC?u=j031916004&sid=OVIC&xid=9705fbcd. Accessed 19 May 2018.
