Greetings Rouspeteur,

The following is a good thought -
A moral question: What if the Allies had an atomic bomb in 1939. Would incinerating Berlin in order to stop Hitler have been justified. Would saving 30 or 40 million lives have been worth a few hundred thousand Berliners? As a guess I would say the answer of Yugoslavian who had most of his relatives slaughtered, or a Polish Jew, would be, for the most part, quite different from that of a Canadian or American.

Now, I'm not Canadian or American - I'm English by birth and Polish by blood. I'd say that in 1939 the UK would have had to have done what it did anyway. The USA wasn't yet involved, and there wasn't much awareness of the Holocaust - we didn't know how far Hitler would go. Unless you're talking about a time-machine scenario, the nuclear option would be far better used (and probably would be successful) as a threat at that stage.

But I'd quite like to present you with a moral question:

Should Stalin have been an essential ally during World War II? Should he have been allowed to get away with his own reign of terror, mass murder, deportation and annexation of land?

This is newly meaningful to me, as - amazingly - I only recently realised that after the war Stalin was given no less than 48% of Poland, which included the towns in which my parents and grandparents lived until 1939. They could never go home. At the start of the war, Stalin invaded Poland from the East (under the pretext of helping the Poles), at the same time as Germany invaded from the West. And after the war Stalin retained that land won by invasion, in complicity with Churchill and Roosevelt; and that land remains Russian.

So - was this justified? Half of a land you are supposedly "saving", land that belongs to a people who were staunch allies in the War, is taken away from those people. Was this the "greater good", as the Nazis may not have been defeated if not for the USSR?

I think that overall it may - just barely - have been the greater good, and that's a very painful realisation. But it's a very close-run thing. In his time Stalin killed tens of millions of innocent people. An Alliance with Stalin was dealing with the Devil, and was turning a blind eye to a great deal of suffering.

But I'm afraid that there really are no simple answers and there never have been. It is very important to realise that fact.

So relativism appears to remove black-and-white certainties?
Good.

Think about it some more before you act.

Consider your enemy's reasons.

Consider the long-term consequences of your intended actions.

Because you can't turn the clock back once you have acted, and the world is a very small place these days.

There are still near-certainties to be found, but you have to work them out for yourself, and they may not be what you expect.
The truth is often uncomfortable.