I mean AFTER the thirty years war and the Napoleonic wars.
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It is never appropriate to punish a people for the actions of their leaders. This is the attitude of the Nazis, of the Communists and it’s not OK because we do it. No one is ever entitled to vengeance, ever. We as human beings are prisoners of our societies, almost entirely powerless to affect change. If you had been a German in the 40s you would have almost certainly done what they did, looked the other way so you didn’t get dragged off as well.
Necessity justifies all things, but only necessity. High handedness, as Princess Leia put it “the more you tighten your grasp, the more stars will slip through your fingers.”
We do not become good by fighting Nazis, nor being better than Nazis, we are only good by being GOOD in objective terms, not simply by comparison. And one thing I’ve learned from reading about American foreign policy and the after math of WWI, being a jerk causes way more problems than it solves. Would you like me to suggest…I dunno…Thieves of State by Sarah Chayes? Or the Dictator’s Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita?
And you need to hear this: punishment NEVER works on these scales, cause the men who most need the precedent are too arrogant in their own righteousness to think it will ever be applied to them. Murderous corrupt thugs who run states never for a second believe they will receive comeuppance, they are too clever, too astute, too…themselves. So you off the bad guy and all you can do to slake your revenge is to brutalize his already battered and terrified wife and children. How stunning and brave you are, to do to them more what he did lesser. It only invites blowback, and it always makes you a lesser person.
YOU (and me) are capable of being the bad guy, even when you believe the ‘right’ things
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You’re saying this in hindsight. But had you physically been there and had your entire family destroyed etc, you would’ve most certainly wanted the Germans to feel the pain you were feeling.
Your logic is literally the backstory to every action movie villain ever.
That’s not thinking, that’s called emoting. And I don’t care what the calls for vengeance are when they are not directed directly at the people who actually did the deed. Violence is a means of control: it’s not a pastime and it’s not a means of emotional catharsis.
All emotional desires need to be subordinated to strategic, long term thinking. This isn’t some sappy Patrick Stewart speech about how dissecting Data for the greater good diminishes the dignity of everyone else, this is cold, calculating realpolitik. Cause the violent struggle for prestige and power NEVER ends, every victory is only cleaning the chessboard for the round and in a series like this you need to be thinking three games ahead as each game in the series affects the conditions of the next round.
There is no place for any indulgence in these kinds of struggles. Indulging in this compromises your credibility, an all-important bargaining chip. If the Western Allies had shown greater flexibility and willingness to accommodate legitimate German concerns, Hitler would have been dead in 1943, and possibly tens of millions of people would have been spared and more importantly, billions of dollars would have been saved by the US treasury and the economic boom of the late 40s through the early 60s would have been far greater.
Also, an end to the war in Europe in 1943 means it’s possible to shake the Japanese into not launching Ichi-Go if only by the USSR putting many many divisions on the Manchurian Border, as well as supplying the Nationalists via the still intact Soviet rail lines in Mongolia, it also frees up incredible airpower to reopen the Burma Road And that might keep the Nationalists from structural collapse which more than one historian trace to Ichi-Go as the genesis of all the post-WW2 hyper corruption problems. If that happens Mao never comes to power and you might bump the lives saved into the hundreds of millions range.
And don’t think this is totally hindsight, these issues happen in every war, and they’d already seen how slaking the vengeance tree only served to isolate their potential allies in central and eastern Europe, one of the reasons why by 1938 Czechoslovakia was the only democracy left east of the Rhine minus Scandinavia. Vengeance compromises your credibility in the internal opposition of your enemies and makes this internal opposition less viable because people not only fear the secret police of the regime but also your ‘tender mercies.’
This isn’t an idealistic argument, it’s an argument against self-indulgent stupidity. Besides, my point is about the Western Allies, who suffered almost no brutalization by at the hands of the Nazis, not compared to what happened in the east. So this argument is wrong when it comes to Poles, Jews, Czechs, Hungarians, etc, but holds even less merit among the French, and no real merit among the Anglo-Americans.
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The Soviet-Afghan War or the Korean War?
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I think the franco prussian war would be interesting.
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