I don't know enough about the role European and North American diplomacy - or lack there of - had w/r/t the roots of the war in the Pacific (beyond our perpetual dream of [drum roll please] the China market.)
-A
On Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Chris Maisano <cgmaisano at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I read Baker's book, and while it was certainly a gripping read, I think
> that his historical method and argument are way off. Undoubtedly figures
> like Churchill and Roosevelt had some rather unseemly personal opinions on a
> number of issues (i.e. on Jews), and certain aspects of the Allies' war
> against the Axis were morally/ethically indefensible (i.e. Dresden,
> Hiroshima, etc.). But what was the alternative to war against the Axis?
> Baker and other pacifists have never satisfactorily answered this question
> because there probably wasn't one. The war against them was evil in a number
> of ways, but probably even greater evil would have been perpetrated if the
> Nazis and their allies had not been defeated. If anything, Gandhi comes off
> just as bad in the book as Churchill and Roosevelt, and Baker's not so
> implicit argument that the Nazis could have been opposed and defeated
> through pacifist moral suasion seems completely bonkers to me.
>
>
>
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