On Selective Pacifism & other Oddities

[Bradford DeLong]

>We had a discussion about revolutionary defeatism during the
>Balkans flap; I invoked that phrase and there ensued a convoluted
>debate about the justice of WWII.  Hence my resort to a less
>ambiguous (sic) case of a war about which there would be a
>broader approving consensus, namely the Civil War.

Why should there be a broader approving consensus about the Civil 
War? The American slaveholders were vile, but they viewed the people 
they were oppressing as an *asset*. There is a wide gap between 
American slaveholders' treatment of their slaves and, say, the murder 
of three million Russian POWs during the first year of the War in the 
East because they were Slavs unfit to live. And I haven't even 
started to mention the Nazis greater crimes...

Brad DeLong

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