The morality of the war against Hamas.

Declan Mansfield I 15 June 2024 I The Spectator Australia

Safety, justice and retribution

On the thirteenth of April, 1943, the Nazi government reported that a mass grave of Polish officers had been found in the Katyn forest near Smolensk in present-day Russia. Five days before the massacre site was discovered, the SS, the Nazi organisation tasked with the Final Solution of the Jewish Question (the murder of the European Jews), closed the Chelmno extermination camp and eliminated all traces of the murders committed there. At least 172,000 Jews were murdered at Chelmno. Six days after the discovery at Katyn, the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto rebelled against their Nazi tormentors. 56,000 Jews were killed during the uprising, or deported and gassed at the extermination camps of Treblinka and Majdanek.

To publicise the atrocity at Katyn, the Nazis invited the Red Cross to exhume the site and report what they found. A film of the exhumation was produced and the Nazi press provided grim details about what was discovered and about how the victims, hands tied behind their backs and with a bullet in the back of the head, died. It wasn’t until 1991, however, that Russia admitted murdering 22,000 military officers and members of the Polish intelligentsia.

The chutzpah of the Nazis accusing the communists of mass murder is admirable in a grotesque, fiendishly disgusting way. Both communist Russia and Nazi Germany were criminal regimes, who imprisoned, murdered, tortured and enslaved millions of people. But the Nazis were worse because of their indifference to human life, their philosophy of a racial hierarchy among human beings, and their attempt to murder the Jews of Europe.

A question presents itself, though, for anyone seeking to understand the morality of the belligerents in World War II. Which side would you have supported, because the answer to this question has contemporary relevance?

If you answered the Allies, as any normal, sane person would, then you are making a moral judgment, which is based on a number of premises. You are admitting that, while the Allies behaved badly at times during the war, their intentions and their sometimes questionable actions paled into insignificance when measured against the awfulness of the Nazis. And you are admitting that there are good and bad reasons for committing violence. In other words, the ideology of the participants and their intentions matter. Churchill, when questioned about Britain’s alliance with Stalin, said he would make a favourable reference to the devil if it would help in the war against Hitler. Morality, then, is not absolute, but is mediated to a profound degree, all things being equal, by circumstances. It is not measured by the number of child victims or by the reprehensible actions of renegade soldiers.

If an internationally proscribed terrorist organisation (similar to Isis), with a history of waging Jihad (Holy War) against the Infidel, especially the Jews, and which is a death cult that welcomes martyrdom, even for children, paraglided into your town and gang raped, burned alive, mutilated and murdered innocent people, then took hostages, whom it brutalised in the most fiendishly evil ways before killing them, and then promised it would commit the same acts again, if given the chance, a thousand times, how would you expect your government to respond?

Would you be willing to sacrifice your fellow citizens, your acquaintances, your friends, your nephews, nieces, cousins, sisters, brothers, parents, and especially your children to the depravity of such people?

The answer speaks for itself. You would demand safety, justice and retribution.

You wouldn’t, for example, excuse the Nazis murdering fifty million people in eastern Europe because children were killed in an Australian bombing raid over Germany, would you? You wouldn’t accuse an Australian soldier of war crimes, who, in desperate hand-to-hand combat in a rabbit warren of a tunnelled cityscape, accidentally shoots a child, especially one put in harm’s way by the Nazis, so they could produce propaganda videos which attempted to blur the distinction, by invoking feelings rather than logic, between the perpetrators and their victims?

You would also question the veracity of atrocity videos on social media, and ask yourself why am I seeing this video and what is the motivation of the person who posted this to the internet? You would also know, because it’s implicit in their abominable behaviour, that people who perpetrate barbaric violence are not above faking atrocity videos, which, by the way, the Palestinians have been doing for years to gain sympathy for their cause? In other words, you would not be a fool.

Imagine, moreover, you are the head of government in such circumstances. How would you react? Remember, if you do nothing your family and friends die; and if you respond, the terrorists, and some innocent civilians, die.

To put this in context, if the Israelis had perpetrated the October the Seventh massacre, and Hamas was the democratically elected government of Gaza, with a genuine commitment to human rights, all democratically minded people would support the Palestinians. But that is not the situation we find ourselves in. Are you, in your muddled decency, mistaking, as Churchill said, the fireman for the fire, or the policeman for the criminal?

To put your new-found achingly right-on morality in perspective, if you did not condemn Hamas’ atrocities on October the Seventh – if, for example, you said nothing on social media, keep schtum, your current self-regarding morality about the war in Gaza is flagrant hypocrisy.

You’ve now answered the perennial question of how you would have behaved in Nazi Germany. If you support the Palestinians, where a majority of the population of the West Bank and Gaza agree with Hamas’s actions on October the Seventh, then congratulations, you’re confused, but don’t lecture anyone about morality.

And finally, people need to learn how to think rather than react to the dreadfulness of war.

As Heraclitus said, ‘War is the father of all’. Until human nature changes, there will always be people who use violence to attain their goals, and decent people will always need justified violence to frustrate the narcissistic and psychopathic plans of people with no moral compass. By all means empathise with the Palestinian victims of a war their leaders started, but remember, there are worse things than war, and compassion is only one of the virtues. Justice is always more important than feelings.

Author: Declan Mansfield