A propos of Memorial Day, Pen at The Gutless Pacifist links to this interview from last year with pacifist theologian Stanley Hauerwas. The ever contrarian Hauerwas, as we might expect, rejects the received view of World War II:
This Memorial Day, the new monument to World War II veterans formally opens on the Mall in Washington, D.C., commemorating the war we regard as blameless, since it fought Nazism. Is World War II a blameless war, from the nonviolent Christian’s point of view?
Not at all, because World War II was not a just war, because the Allies insisted on unconditional surrender. In the Crusades, getting the Holy Land back was the goal, and any means could be used to achieve it. World War II was a crusade. The firebombing of Tokyo by Doolittle and the carpet bombing in Germany, especially by the British, showed that. Those actions were also not in keeping with just-war theory, since they involved the intentional killing of civilians.
I think there are (at least) two senses in which we might say World War II was “not a just war,” and it might be helpful to distinguish them.
In the first place, Hauerwas is right that certain actions of the Allies violated the norms of the just war tradition as generally understood. The bombings of civilian population centers, whether with conventional or atomic weapons, pretty clearly violates the requirement of discrimination, i.e. that civilians never be deliberately targeted.
The demand of “unconditional surrender” is often thought to violate just war criteria because it seems to require the enemy to be totally subjugated to the victor. It is, effectively, to demand that the enemy submit to a condition of slavery.
On the other hand, to show that the war as actually fought by the Allies failed to comport perfectly with just war criteria in certain ways is not to show that no possible war against the Axis would have been just or that it would have been better not to fight at all. It’s certainly conceivable (though historians would have to judge whether it would have been feasible) that the Allies could have resisted German aggression but conducted that resistance within the constraints of just war criteria.
For instance, instead of insisting on unconditional surrender they could have demanded that Germany surrender its ill-gotten territorial gains and return to its pre-war borders (similar to the demands that were made upon Iraq in the first Gulf War). And they would have had to refrain from deliberately targeting civilians in enemy countries (it has been argued by several historians that this wasn’t militarily necessary anyway).
This still leaves untouched the question of Germany’s treatment of the Jews, which, quite apart from German territorial aggression, would seem to have called for some kind of intervention (though it’s doubtful that any of the powers of the day would have been willing to undertake such an intervention on purely humanitarian grounds). Conceivably some kind of intervention could’ve been undertaken without requiring unconditional surrender, though, since it entails disregarding the offending nation’s sovereignty it might come to amount to the same thing. But in the case of massive extermination of innocent people, unconditional surrender may well look like the lesser evil.
The upshot, I would say, is that though Hauerwas may be right that some of the actions of the Allies violated the canons of just war theory, there was still a just war to be fought against the Axis. And, moreover, the war as it was actually fought may well have been vastly preferable to not fighting at all (unless, that is, we follow Hauerwas in taking the pacifist position).
A Thinking Reed 
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