WW2 -
We are looking at the morality of going to war in general, but also we have focused on WW2 and the US entering. In the discussion we have looked at it, mostly, as whether the US should have considered Germany’s expansion as justifying US entering war. But as I said earlier, the Axis powers were three countries. The US declared war after Pearl Harbor in which one of the Axis powers attacked Hawaii and the naval base there. IOW one of the three members of that team attacked the US. I think it was reasonable to think Japan might eventually go for the continental US, given its expansion through out Aisa and its willingness to attack US allies there. It was reasonable to think the Axis powers might not stop spreading. They could not know, but I don’t think it was a ridiculous conclusion that it would be a good idea to stop the Axis powers in general.
So it is not just siding with the gazelles against the lions. And, in fact, the English had been lions in most of the world, the French in their own way also. There was a team of countries expanding fast and widely. These countries had particular governments with many shared traits, plus a sense of very specific racial superiority, at least in Germany and Japan, if not as much in Italy. IOW part of their sense of entitlement was specifically racial, and while Hitler respected, for example, the English, and considered them a pretty darn good race, he did not consider them as good as the Germans. Nor would the Americans been seen as as Aryan.
The US certainly had its own racial shit, so did the British, but I think it is fair to say that the specific hypermilitarization of Japan and Germany at that time and the levels to which both were willing to dehumanize other groups were not matched by other countries. These were extreme authoritarian utterly anti-democratic conceptions of society that wanted to spread.
One could obviously not know the future, but calling team A lions and other gazelles just seems like a cutesy oversimplification. And an ironically either Nietschian or Blakean oversimplification. You had a form of governing that was antithetical to what the US wanted for itself. It was expanding rapidly and one member of the team HAD in fact attacked the US. The US had closer relations to England and France than it did to the Axis powers. It had reasons to consider that in the long run it would be threatened by the Axis powers in general and would, after losing or being taken over, come under a kind of rigid, extremely controlling form of government that went against not only the ideals of the constitution, but even the less fair in reality system as it played out in real life. Rights to privacy, rights to assemble, a free press, rights to vote, rights to dissent, rights to a fair trial…lots of things considered fundamental to the American way of life were not shared values of the Axis powers. However poorly the US lived up to its ideals, it certainly did so better than the Axis powers since they did not have these ideals.
We are not just talking about one animal eating another animal, an analogy that bothers me more and more each time because it is so facile and limited.
We are talking about the expansion of cultures that were fundamentally different and seemed intent on spreading anywhere they considered themselves superior.
Alan Watts would have found himself considered a decadent, unmanly problematic figure by either Japan or Germany and he and the very people in the West who became interested in his ideas would have been suppressed or killed. Those regimes are not about it is neither ok or not ok. They damn well weighed in on every fucking things as either one or the other.
Now one can get all post-Watts, new agey fluffy and say that it doesn’t matter if one lives in a rigid extremely controlled society like the ones the Axis powers had. Just the universe breathing in and out.
But then, that’s true regardless, regardless of what anyone believes. One could be out experiencing the oneness of nature or having fun with your whole body. Rather than arguing that WW 2 was not the US’s business. I mean, how is that your business? How is it your business what we are thinking? Why intervene in that? It’s also OK.