Moral Equivalence - World War II Atrocities

World War II Atrocities

As in the other cases, the moral equivalence device is used by those who claim that the Allied side by definition was good and the Axis was by definition evil. The war was cast as a big picture struggle - that allowing the Axis powers to have their own way would be so horrible that anything done by the Allies became justified. World War II has become a favored example for those who use the device because of the magnitude of the Holocaust and the implications of the successful implementation of Lebensraum. It becomes a matter of suggesting that the present-day case (Israel-Palestine, Cold War) is one where the victory of Evil (Palestinians, Soviets) would be akin to allowing Hitler to win World War II. That such horrors happened thus make the possible worst-case scenarios seem more likely.

Suggesting a moral equivalence between a number of acts carried out by the Allies during the Second World War and the deeds of the Nazis, especially the Final Solution is a common strategy employed by apologists for the Nazis in Germany, such as politicians of the National Democratic Party of Germany. Forms of the argument are also found in the works of authors not sympathetic to Nazism, such as F.J.P. Veale, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Sobran, and Nicholson Baker. Commonly cited as examples are the Allies' aerial destruction of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Hamburg and Dresden, the systematic murder and rape of East Germans by the Red Army, etc.

Their point is to say that though the implications of an Axis victory, in particular a German victory, would be horrible, that this did not justify Allied atrocities. Those who defend the atrocities say that even if firebombing Dresden, for instance, served very little military purpose, even the slightest purpose justified it and also, German people bore responsibility for the horrors of the war and that they had to be punished for that.

Notable in this context are Justice Jackson's comments at the Nuremberg Trials:

"If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us...We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow. To pass these defendants a poisoned chalice is to put it to our own lips as well."