| As the writers of this article seem to be suggesting, saving Jews was never the reason for fighting the Germans. The rest of the world had spent the previous two thousand years persecuting them, including in the British Isles on at least some occasions, and they weren't about to change in 1939. Finding out after the war just how bad the Holocaust was has given us a sense of moral self-righteousness ever since.
The reasons we went to war ranged from pure self-interest - or self-preservation to be slightly fairer - to, at best, a desire to protect the Gentile populations of Poland etc from oppression; not all that different from WW1. I'm not saying we shouldn't have gone to war, and I believe that WW2 came closer to being a Just War than almost any other, but the Holocaust is something we only know by hindsight.
Even since the Holocaust I don't see us going to war to prevent genocide in Darfur, or oppression in Burma or Zimbabwe. Now David Milliband has made his bid for statemanship by suggesting we should be aiming to "export democracy", in other words prostitute our Armed Forces on the Bandwagon of Cultural Imperialism which was derailed in Vietnam, let alone Iraq.
The Nazis were, of course, democratically elected. |