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Tuesday, November 15, 2005

WW2 - The Just War- (unlike Iraq)

I receive emails from a great many 'chain' sources, and I've recently been getting them from somewhere called imam.net'. They sent me an email, entitled 'Revealed- UK wartime torture camp' containing among anti-Iraq war articles, the story by Ian Cobain from last week's Guardian on the secret wartime torture camp the British operated in World War Two. Sorry guys, but what on earth has this got to do with opposition to Blair's anti-terror legislation and the war in Iraq? I had a look at the imam.net website- but it was all in Arabic- all there was was a picture of a mosque in the top left hand corner. Are imam.net suggesting that Britain should be in the dock for alleged use of torture in WW2? No one is denying that some pretty unsavory things were done on occasion by the Allies to win WW2- but to somehow suggest that our opposition to the Iraq war means we must also be opposed the Allies stance in WW2 is absurd. It is precisely because the US and Britain are now apeing Nazi Germany on the world stage- by threatening other countries and in the case of Iraq- invading them- that all anti-Nazis should be united in opposition to the war lobby. Unlike the aggression against Iraq- the war against the Axis Powers was a just one, one which I have no problem in defending. As Stephen Ambrose, the American historian said, 'never has justice been better served' than with the defeat of the militarists in Germany, Italy and Japan. So please, please, please, no more emails on nasty things Britain, America, USSR and their allies might have done in World War Two. It really was our finest hour.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Your finest hour? Not for the Jews of Europe (I shudder to think what would have happened to the Jews of Britain had the Germans invaded in 1940)...

From the address by Ariel Sharon to the Knesset in commemoration of the 60th Anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz:

The allies knew of the annihilation of the Jews. They knew and did nothing. On April 19, 1943, the Bermuda Conference gathered, with the participation of representatives from Britain and the United States, in order to discuss saving the Jews of Europe. In fact, the participants did everything in their power to avoid dealing with the problem. All the suggestions for rescue operations which the Jewish organizations presented were rejected.

The Bermuda Conference was nothing more than a continuation of the shocking story of the "Ship of the Damned," the Saint Louis, which set sail from Germany in 1939 with 1,000 Jews who had succeeded in escaping from the Third Reich on board. The passengers knocked on the doors of Cuba and ports in the eastern United States, but were refused sanctuary and were forced to return to the shores of Europe. Most of them were murdered in the death camps.

The leadership of the British Mandate displayed the same obtuseness and insensitivity by locking the gates to Israel to Jewish refugees who sought a haven in the Land of Israel. Thus were rejected the requests of the 769 passengers of the ship Struma who escaped from Europe -- and all but one found their deaths at sea.

Throughout the war, nothing was done to stop the annihilation. When, in the summer of 1944, the mass deportations in Hungary were carried out, the allies did not bomb the train tracks which led to Auschwitz from Hungary, nor the murder facilities in Birkenau, and this was despite the fact that they had the ability to do so. Allied planes attacked targets near Auschwitz, but they refused to bomb the camp itself, in which 10,000 Jews were murdered daily. Thus were 618,000 Jews annihilated in a number of weeks -- the Jews of Hungary.

Mr. Speaker, the sad and horrible conclusion is that no one cared that Jews were being murdered.

http://judaism.about.com/od/holocaust/a/ausch_sharon.htm

Anonymous said...

WWII had nothing to do with saving the Jews, or the 5 million non-Jewish civilians who perished in the Holocaust.

I don't think WWII was worth it, personally. We should have appeased Hitler and let him and Stalin divide Poland. Five years later we in Britain would have had nuclear weapons to keep Germany at bay.

WWII failed to free Poland, our original objective; it also ruined Europe and established a divided, unstable Middle East. Bad idea.

Anonymous said...

Ok, fist of all, whether the intention was to save the Jews or not, that was what they accomplished.
Secondly, Chamberlain tried to appease Hitler, he gave the Nazis Czechoslavokia, and Hitler then completely ignored the pact and invaded Poland anyway.
Next, Britain probably wouldn't have made it five years for those nuclear weapons. Hitler took France in a little over a week. He wanted control over all of Europe, and he was not taking his time in getting it. Not to mention that the chances of Hitler making a deal with Stalin would never have happened. He hated Stalin and everything that the communist stood for, just as Stalin hated everything facist about him.
If we hadn't gone to war in 1939, right now you would either be a Nazi, or dead.