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Notes -
Here's a
funhistorical hypothetical: say you wake up tomorrow and it's May 1944, and Dwight Eisenhower comes to you and says "TheMotte User X, you are our top expert on collateral damage. Our forthcoming invasion of Fortress Europe has to succeed, or else condemn millions more innocents to die at the hands of Nazi Germany. Our plan is to maximize our chances of victory by bombing enemy fortifications, re-supply, repair depots, airfields, road junctions, marshalling yards, rail bridges, training grounds, troop barracks, radio transmitters, telephone exchanges, fuel and ammo dumps, and more. Furthermore once on the ground, our soldiers will make use of their supreme material, technological, and doctrinal advantages in naval and land artillery to crush German resistance in all environments, be their urban, rural, or fortified. Inevitably this will result in the deaths of French civilians, who are not only innocent of Nazi crimes but victims of them, and our allies in this fight. So the crucial question I pose to you is: how many French civilian deaths are tolerable to ensure the success of Operation Overlord?"What would your answer be? What would you consider reasonable? Could you come up with a specific number as a threshold for what you would deem acceptable civilian deaths? (Ideally don't look up the actual number before coming to an answer for yourself)
This is also not meant to be a direct analogy to any extant geopolitical crisis; its function is primarily a thought experiment and not a commentary upon or justification for acts of any specific government.
I mean it is a direct analogy to a current geopolitical crisis to bring this up now.
I reject the idea of collateral damage applies to USA in WW2 to the extend that all actions is about limiting collateral damage. Like the nazis, but less so some of the killing done by American forces was deliberate mass murder.
Also, a key reason the USA commited less mass murder than the nazis was that there was pushback in American society eventually to some of the psychos in American goverment who were probably worse than less edgy Nazis like Rommel. Like Henry Morgenthau. The kind of people who promoted this pushback were attacked for it as nazi sympathisers, or indeed had some sympathy towards the German people. Although even them were negative for the most part about Nazi Germany.
If things were left only to the most gung ho bloodthirsty antinazi types, some of which were communists, USA would have been even closer in conduct to the nazis.
The problem of a totalitarian system and a supposed democracy can be captured by totalitarianism and be a fake democracy, is that some key psychos in positions of power can do enormous damage. In a sort of kind of, democracy unless the bloodthirsty more neocon types destroy democracy once and for all while pretending they are bringing freedom tm, is that there will be those who will promote restraint and be disgusted at unnecessary atrocities. Or not see in their interest to be savage oppressors of others. But democracy isn't the only thing important but also the dominant ideology of society.
This is why I would expect actual supporters of freedom to be paying attention to what the entrenched and powerful faction of neocons is advocating in power, what certain states like Israel are doing and what Ukraine and its leader has done with the blessings of the west. And we will find that in addition to attrocities, we have seen extremely authoritarian moves crushing dissent. But even within western world we have seen a rise of authoritarianism agaisnt opposition to the neocon foreign policy agenda, and that cancel culture was also part of the Iraq war.
Anyway, Eisenhower wouldn't take my suggestions seriously, and I reject your hypothetical because it promotes the inacurate implication of the USA and certain other country as more ethical than they really are. And it promotes the inaccurate view that we are dealing with a crowd of people who are out of trying to minimize collateral "damage", when actually there are plenty of people who are bloodthirsty in such debates and in positions of power and there is a strong attempt to frame things in a more flattering manner than the uglier reality. The Japanese imperialists, Nazis, Soviet Communists aren't as unique as people think.
Having said all that, I would play along with your scenario. I would oppose the mass bombing of cities like Dresden. And various other attrocities that happened like Morgenthau's mass murderous genocidal plan that was implemented in part. Moreover the allies send millions of people back to Stalin. These were fugitives from the USSR who went west during the age of WW2 by the allies.
From wiki which has a bias in a pro left direction:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_repressions_against_former_prisoners_of_war
https://youtube.com/watch?v=z6ak1OtC_gM
And avoid general savagery attrocities towards civilians after victory.
And also like Patton argue for western conquest of all of Germany so the Soviets wouldn't take it and oppose further help at that point towards the Soviets.
I don't have particular recommendations about the war in France due to the issue not having something as obvious as the others, and not researching it particularly. After WW2 there are plenty as I mentioned but the while fighting it definitely the mass bombing of German cities as a means of harming the populace instead of seeking military targets is the obvious issue, if the goal is to reduce civilian casualties and avoid killing for the sake of revenge.
I was merely inspired by a discussion with a friend. No point on sitting on the prompt for a few months hoping Israel/Palestine clears up.
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