Innocent Lives and Murderous Regimes

H/t Judy

Extract from article in The Australian [a subscription only news outlet]

Written by Henry Ergas

"It is, in effect, not merely the loss of innocent life that counts; it is also the circumstances in which it occurs. Thus, the fact that more than a million civilians were killed by Allied bombing during the Second World War, while millions of innocent Jews were being slaughtered by the Nazis, scarcely means that the Allies were no better than their adversaries. There are, no doubt, debates to be had about which Allied tactics were effective and which were not. But it is clear that the Nazis deliberately set out to butcher their innocent victims while the Allies, even when they incinerated entire cities, were not motivated by a desire to exterminate those cities’ populations. Their goal was to defeat the German and Japanese regimes whose very existence made peace impossible. 

The Allies certainly knew that their actions were causing countless civilian deaths. But they believed, for good reason, that the moral responsibility for those deaths lay with the murderous regimes they were fighting. 

And they also believed that it was not solely the people of the Allied countries who would benefit from their enemies’ defeat. Innocent German and Japanese lives would be saved too – saved from an ideology and a political domination so monstrous, so degrading even to those who might survive, that the consequences of its final victory were beyond imagining."