[PEN-L:7414] Re: Re: Re: alternatives to Nato; Rubenstein

[Peter Dorman <dormanp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks for the interesting summary of Rubenstein.  I shouldn't pass
judgments until looking at the source, but the point about tradeoffs in
bombing targets strikes me as disingenuous.  The US was bombing heavily
guarded Rumanian oilfields (I am told) under dubious circumstances (the
expectation that the Russians would acquire them) and not bombing, or at
least trying not to bomb, GM-owned war production plants (according to
Snell).  In other words, I don't think the allies were on their
destruction possibility frontier.  (The Rumanian oil story circulated
widely in my home town, Racine WI, since two pilots killed in that
mission were from there and later had schools named after them.  It
could all be baseless innuendo.)

Peter

Robert Naiman wrote:
>
> I think it would be better if such a force were unarmed rather than armed, better if it were lightly and defensively armed than heavily and offensively armed.
>
> The point of such a force should be to protect civilians and prevent violence, period. Not to impose political changes from the outside, except to the extent that protecting civilians has good indirect effects on the politics of a society (which it does, strongly so.)
>
> To the extent that every combatant and non-combatant knows that it is sole and sincere purpose of this force to prevent violence against civilians, it will be more politically effective. And to me that is the point of such a force, to strengthen the internal dynamics of the society against violence. The more violent and coercive the external force, the lesser its moral claim on the conscience of the combatants, their supporters, and their potential critics, the more likely it is to become a "side" in the conflict.
>
> In re WWII and the Holocaust, I agree with you on the conclusion -- that war is not how you protect civilians, but I am less sure about the argument that the "West did nothing" than I used to be, after reading Rubenstein's book. Rubenstein argues that the refugee policies were not that restrictive, relative to their context and what was known at the time. 90% of German Jews got out of Germany before the war closed the borders, including most of the young people. Unfortunately, many of them went to countries that were later occupied by the Nazis. The fact that they would not be safe in these countries -- nor the Jews who were already in these countries -- was information not known at the time. Rubenstein argues that while the Western countries did have strong immigration restrictions on paper, they generally relaxed these to deal with the refugee flows as they occurred. As the situation in Europe became known, the problem was not that "refugees" had nowhere to go, it was th!
at t!
> hey could not get out.
>
> As for bombing the camps, he has a long and interesting discussion about this. For example, he talks about the picture in the Holocaust museum which is designed to convince you that the Allies could easily have bombed the camps. He points out that this picture did not exist at the time -- it was developed after the war using techniques which didn't exist during the war. The level of detail in the picture didn't exist.
>
> He claims -- I read this a while ago and am not competent to judge the military arguments anyway -- that the window of time when the camps were actually feasible bombing targets was quite small, a couple of weeks, when the front line was close enough to the camps.
>
> And not surprisingly, there was a spirited discussion of the issue at the time, with military planners arguing that the thing that would stop the Holocaust was winning the war as quickly as possible, which bombing the camps would not contribute to, so it was a diversion of needed resources and would be counterproductive; that they didn't have the intelligence or ability to bomb the camps selectively, so the chance of heavy Jewish civilian casualties was high, which would be a propaganda boon to the Nazis, etc. Not implausible arguments, certainly when you compare the situation of the Allies then with NATO now, given the tremendous difference in intelligence, technology, etc.
>
> But regardless to how much was capacity and how much motivation, then or now, it all comes down to the same conclusion. As a friend of mine once said, "You can't get the cops to do social service," and the same is true of the military. It's a damn bad tool for protecting civilians.
>
> I strongly recommend that anyone who still believes the "abandonment of the Jews" narrative should read Rubenstein's book as a corrective. I'm not saying it's gospel, just a perspective that one should know about. And the "abandonment of the Jews" narrative seems to have had quite a number of destructive effects, continuing into the present, so perhaps that is some reason to reflect on it.
>
> -bob
>