{"id":4906,"date":"2014-09-02T12:23:57","date_gmt":"2014-09-02T10:23:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.military-history.us\/?p=4906"},"modified":"2014-09-02T12:25:36","modified_gmt":"2014-09-02T10:25:36","slug":"moral-relativism-and-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/2014\/09\/moral-relativism-and-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Moral Relativism and War"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you are of liberal political leanings you will probably not like this piece as I am going to proceed to attempt to demolish several sacred cows of contemporary liberal thought.\u00a0 I unreservedly admit that I am politically conservative and further admit that I am not trying to be unbiased in his piece.\u00a0 I am essentially venting my spleen at the half-truths and outright lies I so often find in books that purport to be histories but that are in reality only thinly disguised attacks on historical actors.\u00a0 I find it typically liberal that such attacks are often made on those that cannot defend themselves, such as historical figures long dead.\u00a0 I personally find the practice repulsive and try very hard to avoid doing the same thing in my own historical writing. \u00a0Then again, if you are liberal and don’t like it, I do not particularly care either.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I am currently reading\u00a0House of War: The Pentagon and the Disastrous Rise of American Power<\/a>\u00a0by James Carroll. \u00a0The level of moral relativism within this book is unreal. \u00a0I figured it would be a leftist take on the Pentagon because there is a blurb of praise on the back cover from Howard Zinn, the ultimate<\/strong> <\/em>leftist historian. \u00a0What I did not count on was the sheer level of Western hatred disguised as objectivity that I would find within the cover. \u00a0That being said, this is not a review of this book in particular but an examination of leftist historiography, particularly when it comes to military history, in General.<\/p>\n

I have read many\u00a0leftist histories over the\u00a0years from Isabel Hull and Iris Chang to Thomas Fleming, Paul Fussell, Dave Grossman, and Howard Zinn.\u00a0 One thing they all have in common from my perspective is a formless hatred of all things Western and a lack of a solid grasp on reality.\u00a0 They don\u2019t write history, so much as polemics designed to convince the reader that they know the big T truth and if you disagree with them then you are part of the problem. In short, \u00a0Leftist history is activist history.\u00a0 It is the type of history that would have you believe that the best thing that could have ever happened to the world is if the population of Europe had been destroyed during the Black Death, if not even earlier, say perhaps before the Dorics moved into Greece during the second millennium B.C.<\/p>\n

If you read leftist history everything not Western is great and everything that has the touch of the West on it is evil incarnate from the Greek settlement of southern Europe to the European colonization of the Americas and just about everything in between and since.\u00a0 They would have you believe that Westerners deliberately introduced disease to the New World to decimate and subjugate the natives to deliberately keeping the peoples of Africa down since de-colonialization to economically exploit them some more.\u00a0 That everything having to do with the Christian church is evil incarnate while Atheism is cool and Muslims are peaceful little sheepherders.\u00a0 Every group out there with a grievance against the West is justified in not only having it but in doing whatever they can to attack the West and they are willing participants as they seek to undermine Western culture itself from the inside.<\/p>\n

It is as if liberals truly believe that contemporary morals have a place in describing the actions of people in the past who ascribed to a wholly different moral code and that they are unable to make the distinction that while they personally find an action immoral, at the time it was made, the action may have been considered fully justified.\u00a0 That is not moral relativism; that is reality.\u00a0 Today we don\u2019t think exposing unwanted children to die on a mountainside is morally justified but the ancient Spartans did and it is stupid in the extreme to condemn ancient practice on the basis of contemporary morality.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s take just a few examples from popular Western history that have gained the currency of Truth in leftist circles.<\/p>\n

1. Western Genocide against Indians \u2013<\/strong>\u00a0This one is so laughable I don\u2019t even understand how the idea got so much currency.\u00a0 Leftists would have us believe that Westerners deliberately introduced diseases such as smallpox into the New World during colonization to kill off the inhabitants and clam the land for themselves. \u00a0Of course that presuppose that 15 Century Spanish, Portuguese, and English explorers understand how diseases were transmitted. \u00a0That the Germ Theory of Disease did not gain wide scientific currency until the mid to late 19th century is conveniently ignored. \u00a0The most common invective hurled is that of the US Cavalry giving out smallpox covered blankets during the Indian Wars.\u00a0 This claim was given credence by the now discredited Ward Churchill and has been pretty well destroyed by\u00a0Thomas Brown in the Journal, Plagiary<\/a>.1\u00a0<\/sup>Despite the subsequent disgrace of Churchill’s corpus of work the myth continues that the US Army deliberately triggered an epidemic of smallpox among native Americans to \u201cget them out of the way.\u201d\u00a0 That claim is made elsewhere about Indians throughout the Americas.
\nWhile epidemics did occur, as Jared Diamond so persuasively argues in\u00a0Guns, Germs, and Steel<\/a>, it did not take deliberation for European diseases to decimate native populations.\u00a0 All it took was one sick European infecting unknowing natives.\u00a0 Widespread epidemics and subsequent population loss did occur in the Americas after the arrival of Europeans, that was the natural result of American populations being exposed to diseases for which they had absolutely no resistance, because heretofore these disease did not occur in the Americas.
\nThe narrative that Europeans deliberately killed off huge populations of Indians suits the left though, so they will keep it alive and it is easy to do because so many people take the claim at face value and never bother to research it for themselves.<\/p>\n

2. The sanctity of civilians in wartime \u2013<\/strong>\u00a0There is a persistent assertion among both leftist historians and the media that throughout history the lives, property, and persons of civilians has been sacrosanct in war and the large scale killing of non-combatants is a new phenomenon.\u00a0 Nothing could be further from the truth, the difference in modern times is that it is easier for a few men to kill lots of civilians, not that civilians have never been a legitimate target. You will not hear a liberal admit that anytime soon though.
\nYou will never hear a liberal acknowledge the Mongol policy of massacring entire cities that refused to surrender.\u00a0 That the rule in medieval Europe was that a city that had to be taken by force was sacked for 72 hours, that for hundreds of years Muslim slave traders preyed on European shipping in the Mediterranean, or that the ancient Goths and others who preyed on the edges of the Roman Empire routinely slaughtered entire villages as a way of solidifying their control of areas by spreading terror.\u00a0 There has never been an absolute prohibition on killing civilians in warfare and what protections civilians have had, especially in modern times, comes out of the Western, specifically, Roman and Christian traditions.<\/p>\n

3. Dropping the Atomic Bomb on Japan \u2013<\/strong>\u00a0The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II is a topic that has come in for considerable debate.\u00a0 I have even read people that claim America should apologize and perhaps pay reparations for the bombing.\u00a0 I am flabbergasted by this.\u00a0 I simply cannot understand how America should in any way apologize for ending the war that Japan started or the manner in which they did so.\u00a0 This argument even goes back and claims that Japan was goaded into war by American policy.\u00a0 That is the \u201cWest is at fault argument\u201d taken to its absurd extreme.\u00a0 What is even more ironic and silly\u00a0is that many of the folks who make this claim condemn America and then turn around and condemn Japanese wartime conduct out the other side of their mouth.\u00a0 These people would have you believe that America is in the wrong for civilian deaths at Saipan and Okinawa during the war and that any place with civilians nearby was not a legitimate target.
\nI hate to disappoint people, but people die in wars, sometimes the dead are even civilians.\u00a0 Civilians are not normally targeted but they are legitimate targets as civilians are the lifeblood of any society and nothing can convince a people that they have lost than seeing that their military cannot defend them.\u00a0 Targeting civilians is a legitimate act of warfare.\u00a0 Unsavory yes, but still legitimate.\u00a0 The arrow, bullet, or bomb that can always miss a civilian has not been invented and probably never will be.\u00a0 It would be imprudent in the extreme for a military force to hamstring itself out of fear of causing a single civilian death.\u00a0 If they do that they might as well surrender because the military is then of no use to the society that sponsors it and it is to the sponsoring society that the military must answer, not that of the enemy.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Rant over.\u00a0 Feel free to comment, I am more than happy to debate on this.\u00a0 (the usual comment rules apply)<\/strong><\/h2>\n

1. Brown Thomas.\u00a0Did the U.S. Army Distribute Smallpox Blankets to Indians? Fabrication and Falsification in Ward Churchill’s Genocide Rhetoric<\/em>.\u00a0Plagiary:\u00a0\u00a0Cross<\/em>\u2010<\/em>Disciplinary\u00a0Studies\u00a0in\u00a0Plagiarism,\u00a0Fabrication,\u00a0and\u00a0Falsification<\/em>. Vol 1, 2006 pp.\u00a0100\u2010129<\/p>\n

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If you are of liberal political leanings you will probably not like this piece as I am going to proceed to attempt to demolish several sacred cows of contemporary liberal thought.\u00a0 I unreservedly admit that I am politically conservative and… Continue Reading →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[341,29,81],"tags":[342,776,361,1007,131,1012],"class_list":["post-4906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-history","category-historiography","category-political-history","tag-general-history-2","tag-historical-principles","tag-historical-theory","tag-historiography","tag-political-correctness","tag-political-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4906"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4906\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.military-history.us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}