V-E Day – the day on which the Allies remember their victory over Nazi Germany during World War II – fell on Mother’s Day this year, so the 60th anniversary celebrations seemed somewhat muted. In that regard, British historian Niall Ferguson reminds us in this LA Times op-ed that, despite the courage of the Allied forces in ridding the world of the monstrous Axis powers, we should not forget the moral compromises that were part of the price of winning the war:

Most historians today would give the lion’s share of the credit for the Allied victory to the Soviet Union. It was, after all, the Soviets who suffered the largest number of wartime casualties (about 25 million). That reflected in large measure the appalling barbarity with which the Germans waged the war on the Eastern Front. Yet it also reflected the indifference of Stalin’s totalitarian regime to the lives and rights of its own citizens. It might have been expected that in the crisis of war, Stalin would suspend the terror that had characterized his regime in the 1930s. On the contrary. The lowest estimates for the period (1942-1945) indicate that 7 million Soviet citizens lost their lives via political executions, deportations or death in the gulag system. All of this reminds us that to defeat an enemy they routinely denounced as barbaric, the Western powers made common cause with an ally that was morally little better.

At Potsdam and in the subsequent Nuremberg trials the victors also struck splendidly sanctimonious poses. The leaders of Germany and Japan had “set in motion evils which [left] no home in the world untouched.” Yet the Soviet Union had been on Hitler’s side in 1939, something the Baltic states invaded by Stalin have not forgotten.
As for the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, it suffered a similar fate in 1945. Britain had gone to war with Germany ostensibly to prevent Poland from being overrun by Germany, as Czechoslovakia had been. Yet within a few years of the war’s end, the whole of Eastern and Central Europe up to the River Elbe was firmly under Stalin’s iron fist.

While noting that the Allied bombing campaigns restricted German’s ability to mobilize its war economy, diverted key German resources from the Eastern Front and ended the war with Japan, Mr. Ferguson notes that the campaigns also raise serious moral questions:

[T]he destruction caused by the British and American air forces in their bombing campaigns against civilian populations in Germany and Japan is hardly something we can look back on with pride. Hamburg was destroyed in a firestorm code-named Operation Gomorrah; about 45,000 people died. Similar numbers perished when Dresden was bombed. Tokyo was literally incinerated in a raid that killed between 83,000 and 100,000 people, maybe more.
Such bombing was precisely what the U.S. State Department had denounced as “unwarranted and contrary to principles of law and humanity” in 1937, when the Japanese bombed Chinese cities. And it was precisely what Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill’s predecessor as prime minister, had dismissed as “mere terrorism,” to which “His Majesty’s government [would] never resort.”

After the war, the charges against the Japanese leaders who stood trial included “the wholesale destruction of human lives, not alone on the field of battle, but in the homes, hospitals, and orphanages, in factories and fields.” Yet this had been the very essence of the Allied policy of strategic bombing.

Mr. Ferguson is no half-baked historian who fails to recognize the moral superiority of the Allied cause during WWII, so he concludes in the following measured manner:

None of this is intended to detract from the valor of the millions of Allied service personnel who lost or risked their lives in World War II. Nor is it to deny that the war had to be fought to rid the world of two of the most evil empires in all history. There is a moral difference between Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The Axis cities would never have been bombed if the Axis powers had not launched their war of aggression. And the Axis powers would have killed even more innocent people had it not been for the determination of the Allied powers to prevail.
Nevertheless, we would do well, this V-E Day, to face some harsh realities about the nature of the Allied victory, if only to remind ourselves about the nature of all wars. To win World War II, we joined forces with a despot who was every bit as brutal a tyrant as Hitler; we adopted tactics that we ourselves had said were depraved; and we left too many of those we set out to liberate firmly in the grip of totalitarianism.

Hat tip to Professor Bainbridge for the link to Mr. Ferguson’s piece.
Also, Deutsche Welle has this outstanding collection of photo essays that show then-and-now pictures of World War II.

Diplomat and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian George F. Kennan died Thursday night at his Princeton, N.J. home at the age of 101.
Mr. Kennan was one of America’s foremost foreign policy experts of the post-World War II and Cold War eras. He was one of the primary architects of the highly successful Marshall Plan that underwrote the reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II, and he had an equal amount of influence on the development of the containment postwar foreign policy that the United States government adopted to combat the Soviet Union’s promotion of totalitarism during the Cold War.
When he was chief of the State Department’s policy planning staff, Mr. Kennan was the author identified only as “X” in a famous 1947 article in the Foreign Affairs journal that outlined the containment policy and predicted the demise of Soviet communism that eventually occurred over 40 years later. When the Communist Party was finally driven from power in the Soviet Union after the 1991 coup attempt, Mr. Kennan publicly called the development “a turning point of the most momentous historical significance.”
Despite the “X” article and his work in formulating the Marshall Plan, Mr. Kennan left government service in 1950 after he and Truman administration Secretary of State Dean Acheson disagreed over the reunification of Germany (Kennan supported it). He briefly served as ambassador to Moscow in May 1952, but he soon left foreign service again until the Kennedy Administration after butting heads with the Eisenhower Administration’s first Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.
During the Kennedy Administration, Mr. Kennan returned to foreign service in as ambassador to Yugoslavia from 1961-63, but his highest profile engagement during the 60’s came in 1967 when he persuaded Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, to come to the United States. During the late 1960s, Mr. Kennan opposed American involvement in Vietnam because he argued that the United States had only five areas of vital interest — the Soviet Union, Britain, Germany, Japan and the United States.
Mr. Kennan won the Pulitzer Prize for history and a National Book Award for Russia Leaves the War (1956) and a second Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for Memoirs 1925-1950. As a young college student, I read my late father’s copy of the latter book and it stimulated an interest in foreign affairs that continues to this day. Mr. Kennan’s honors also included the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1989, Albert Einstein Peace Prize in 1981, the German Book Trade Peace Prize in 1982, and the Gold Medal in History from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1984.
Professor Drezner, who is one of the blogosphere’s most insightful foreign policy analysts, has more on Mr. Kennan here.

This Daily Telegraph op-ed addresses the long overdue disdain that is being heaped upon Gerry Adams, who is the leader of Sinn Fein, which is the Irish Republican Army‘s “political” wing, as the MSM tepidly refers to the group.
One of the more incongruous developments in the post-September 11 world has been the way in which Mr. Adams has been able to avoid scrutiny for his and his followers’ support of terroristic activities over the past 30 years. Despite this dubious background, this week is the first time since the mid-’90s that American political leaders will not welcome Mr. Adams with open arms in connection with traditional St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. Rather, President Bush will host the family members of the late Robert McCartney, the 33-year-old Northern Irish Catholic who was brutally killed outside a Belfast bar in January. Given the IRA’s mob-like control of certain local communities in Northern Ireland, none of the numerous witnesses to the McCartney murder — which include two Sinn Fein political candidates — have been willing to step up and identify the murderers.
Meanwhile, the IRA remains the prime suspect in the $50 million bank robbery that occurred in Belfast this past December just as British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a last ditch offer to restart the deadlocked Northern Ireland Assembly. That deadlock grows out of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement under which Mr. Blair agreed that the Assembly rules would require that operations be approved by parties such as Sinn Fein that represent only a small minority of the vote. After September 11, the Assembly increasingly appears to be a symbol of the failed policy of appeasement toward terroristic tactics.
As a result, the U.S., British and Irish governments are all finally on the verge of blowing off this failed policy toward dealing with the IRA and Sinn Fein. Inasmuch as Northern Ireland citizens — unlike the oppressed citizens of most Islamic countries — have always been fully represented in a democratic British government, one can only wonder why it has taken the governments this long to recognize the folly of appeasing the IRA and Sinn Fein.
The bottom line is that IRA is not a freedom movement of oppressed Catholics. Rather, it has evolved into a criminal enterprise that embraces a radical political agenda and cooperates with virtually every radical terrorist group, including radical Palestinian and Libyan factions. Over the past 35 years, the IRA has killed about 3,000 people, and has undertaken several assassination attempts on various British prime ministers.
Meanwhile, the IRA and Sinn Fein have for years secretly raised millions of dollars in contributions in the United States, and the groups have been allowed to raise contributions openly in the U.S. since President Clinton lifted the ban on the group in the mid-90’s. Politicians such as Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy (Democrat) and New York Congressman Peter King (Republican) have been among the IRA and Sinn Fein’s biggest American fundraisers.
In one of the more refreshing moves of the year, the Bush Administration has finally revoked the IRA and Sinn Fein’s license to raise funds openly in the U.S. this year, and even Messrs. Kennedy and King are shunning Mr. Adams during his visit to the States this year. However, keep watching this process carefully. Appeasement is almost always a more comfortable policy than confrontation for politicians to embrace, and organizations such as the IRA and Sinn Fein are masters at pushing the edge of the violence envelope under an appeasement policy. It does not make much sense for America to be fighting terroism that seeks to sustain radical Islamic fascism in the Middle East if it is unwilling to confront terrorism that seeks to undermine democratic government in our closest ally.

On the heels of this earlier interview, don’t miss this Dartmouth Review article reporting on the recent “just war” debate between Professor Hanson and popular Dartmouth adjunct history professor Ronald Edsforth. Included in the article is this interesting report:

Edsforth proposed that the human race has learned the dangers of war, especially after the blood-soaked twentieth century. ?Evolution [of human behavior] is a fact,? he said. ?It didn?t stop back in ancient times? We are capable of learning as humans and changing our environment in such a way that that which we abhor is less and less likely.? . . . He proposed that the United States adopt a foreign policy for ?the twenty-first century, not the fifth century B.C., not the nineteenth century, not 1941.? The world sees ?war as a legacy of the imperialist era,? he added.
Hanson, though, maintained that the human race has not changed significantly in the past several thousand years. ?Human nature is set,? he said?it was ?primordial, reptilian,? adding that man is always ?governed by pride and fear and envy.? He cited Thucydides, who wrote that his works would remain valid through the ages precisely because human nature is unchanging. ?We have not reached the end of history.?
Whether human opinion changes is irrelevant to the question of human nature, Hanson said; . . .
At a question-and-answer session at the end of the debate, this view of human nature was the subject of much disdain by many members of the audience. One fellow questioned whether ?you and Homer and Thucydides two-thousand years ago? were cut out for modernity. Another asked Hanson when the war in Iraq would come to end??when will we reap the benefits of preemptive war???and wondered whether ?Pericles would have any advice for defeating suicide bombers in an urban environment.? Actually, Hanson retorted, the juxtaposition was poorly-chosen, as Peloponnesian War lasted for ?twenty-seven and a half years.?
During one of the lighter moments, Hanson jokingly observed that the Iraq war had made some unlikely allies. ?I never thought in my lifetime that Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan would have an alliance of convenience,? he said, smiling.

This Times Online article opines that there are clear signs of increasing instability within the government of North Korea. Earlier posts on the sad saga of North Korea may be reviewed here, here, and here.

Samuel Pisar is an international lawyer and author Of Blood and Hope (MacMillan 1979), who is probably best known for his advocacy of free trade between the U.S. and Russia. However, Mr. Pisar is also one of the youngest survivors of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Dachau. Don’t miss Mr. Pisar’s Washington Post op-ed on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camps. Wise words from a gentleman who truly understands the inherent depravity of man.