Amerika

It seems like heresy to say that America should have avoided participation in WWII, but a sensible conservative position would have kept America out of the conflict:

The Weekly Standard, a conservative journal, quoted Mr. Dondero further: Mr. Paul “does not believe that the United States had any business getting involved in fighting Hitler. He expressed to me countless times, that ‘saving the Jews’ was absolutely none of our business.”

…This apparent reluctance to wage war on Nazi Germany goes beyond Mr. Paul. In his 2008 book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, controversial author Pat Buchanan (who himself once ran for the Republican presidential nomination) documents this dark, enduring niche in American conservatism. Mr. Buchanan blames Churchill, not Hitler, for the Second World War.

It is unclear how much “saving the Jews” factored into public calculus of entering the war, since the details of the Nazi anti-Jewish campaign were not widely revealed until the year after the war ended.

However, the broader question is whether we should fight wars against other European powers if not strictly necessary, given that we as European-descended peoples are a tiny majority worldwide.

Even more, we should ask whether we should ever fight an ideological war, that is one where we defend democracy and liberalism against those who are more Right-wing than us.

It is clear that wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Korea have a certain sensibility to them in that they check the spread of ideologies which like a disease consume nearby nations and then grow more powerful as a result. Islam and Communism have a lot in common because both are mass manipulation based on ignoring the differences between people, so long as they affirm the ideology.

But what, really, do we care if parts of Europe remain monarchies or Right-wing governments? We can still interact with them, and approve of the good they do while rejecting the bad.

As in the French Revolution, where the rise of Leftism began a campaign to take over the world so that it could be reformed in the Leftist manner, American wars like WWII resemble ideological crusades more than practical actions.

And when we look over the vast fields of the dead, realizing how we condemned the best of two generations to die for beliefs that have self-destructed in our time, we can reconsider and realize that the World Wars were mistakes and nothing more.

Tags: ideological wars, world wars, wwii