Private Panic wrote:
I find the guilt of the blockaders a complex moral question.
If I use bombs to kill the civilian population of an enemy city, the responsibility for those deaths is mine, solely. If I use poison gas to wipe out the civilian population of that city, the responsibility for the deaths is once again mine. If I use food as a weapon with which to kill that civilian population, the responsibility for those deaths is also mine.
During WWII, the gross supply of food in German-occupied Europe fell by 30%. The biggest single cause of that decline was the Allied food blockade, which directly accounted for half the total decrease. The remaining half of the decline was caused by varying factors. Under Stalin’s scorched earth policy, food stores and agricultural machinery were destroyed. The Allied food blockade cut Europe off from fertilizer, a factor which also contributed to the decrease in agricultural production. There were cases in which the German military took farm animals for military use, which also contributed to reduction in agricultural output.
Before food can be consumed, it needs to be moved from the farmlands to the cities. That typically means putting it on trains. Also, harvest only occurs once a year, whereas consumption occurs all year round. That necessitates large storage facilities for food. Both the train cars carrying food and the warehouses storing it could be (and were) subjected to Allied bombing raids. Europe’s actual food situation may have been significantly worse than the above-mentioned 30% figure would imply.
We like to decry the blockage of humanitarian aid when it suits us and yet leave
open the possibility of it being acceptable when we wish it to be.
That’s true, and it’s hypocrisy. It reminds me of the fact that the American government decried the September 11th attacks (3,000 civilian deaths), while happily participating in the Dresden raids (at least 30,000 civilian deaths, against a target with no military value). They can’t have it both ways: either killing enemy civilians is a war crime or it isn’t.
But returning to the genocide guilt of the Germans - killing in self defence is one thing, but
killing in self-interest is entirely different, no matter how desperate the circumstances.
During the early 1930s, the Soviet government created an artificial famine in the Ukraine. The famine killed an estimated 7 million people, including 3 million children. When the famine was at its worst, there were cases in which mothers would take their babies, boil them, and eat them.
I’ve never experienced severe famine. I expect that most of those reading this could say the same. I am certainly in no position to pass judgement on those who did everything they possibly could to protect themselves and their families from the type of suffering endured by the Ukrainians and the other victims of Soviet mass murder.
KG - your own example includes giving you the power to decide who lives and dies.
There will often be people in a position of power who can decide who lives and dies. Unfortunately, there will also be times when they will be forced to make a decision–when circumstances are such that it is literally impossible for them to save everyone. It’s very easy and convenient for us to find fault with decisions of that nature. We don’t have their responsibilities. We can focus on the bad consequences their actions did create, while ignoring the bad consequences which would have resulted from any of the alternative actions available to them.
You can make a valid case for that re-evaluation without excusing the Germans their evils.
Being persuasive is my secondary goal. My primary goal is to tell the truth, whatever that truth may be. I realize I’m fighting an uphill battle here. Everyone reading this has spent a lifetime steeped in Allied propaganda. That kind of propaganda effort affects everyone. It affected me. It took me years–and thousands and thousands of pages of historical reading–to overcome the effect of that propaganda effort. Even now, it’s possible there are still elements of Allied propaganda I’ve unknowingly failed to reject.
But once I’ve disproved an Allied assertion in my own research, I can’t then act as though that assertion is true on some discussion board in an effort to seem more conformist to the Allied propaganda effort than I actually am. The fact that the Allies heaped a bunch of mud on Nazi Germany is not proof (or evidence) that the Nazis did anything wrong. Of course, the Nazis did do things wrong–there is no question about that. But those crimes were not what motivated the anti-Nazi propaganda effort. Had the Allies cared about preventing atrocities, they would have adopted anti-Soviet foreign policies. No major Western democracy adopted an anti-Soviet foreign policy prior to 1948.
