Private Panic wrote:
The Nazis were guilty of genocide through gas chambers, mobile death squads, etc as well as starvation. It is good to hear that you accept that.
H.G. Wells dealt with this subject in his book The Island of Dr. Moreau. Three men were on a raft in the middle of the ocean, with no access to food or fresh water. After days of being out in the hot sun, one of the men on the raft said, with a wild look in his eyes, that he knew how they might have drink. Eventually the men on the raft decided to draw straws, on the theory that a 2/3 chance of survival was better than the certainty of dying of hunger and thirst. However, the physically strongest and most aggressive man on the raft drew the short straw, and refused to accept the verdict.
But for the sake of argument, suppose he’d been killed in order to keep the other two men alive. It would be correct to say that they’d killed the man in question. But would it be correct to say they’d murdered him?
That question is a very thorny one. Certainly, there is a moral distinction between killing someone so that you can stay alive, versus killing someone out of spite. In the former case your goal is to protect life. Granted, you’re protecting your own life at someone else’s expense. Nevertheless, I’d feel much less threatened by someone willing to kill if absolutely necessary in a survival situation, as opposed to someone willing to kill for the sheer joy of killing. In a nutshell: I agree with the factual statements you have made above, without necessarily agreeing with you about assignations of guilt.
I would hope that I would not succumb to such acts, but I cannot rule it out as I have not been so tested.
I would not distribute the food equally, but neither would my distribution necessarily be selfish. If (for example) the other guy on the island was someone a few years from developing a cure for cancer, I hope my response would be “The world needs this guy more than me. Therefore I will starve so he can live.” On the other hand, if the other person on the island was a sleazy politician who consistently harmed the public, my response would likely be, “Let the crook starve so I can live.” It would be very important for me to be unbiased–to avoid over-valuing myself or under-valuing the other person, in an effort to justify a selfish act on my part. My decision should be based on a desire to make the world a better place, regardless of whether doing so would help or harm me personally.
CWO Marc wrote:
The blockading of enemy nations is a technique of naval warfare that’s been used for a long time.
That may be, but it’s important to draw a distinction between a normal blockade and a food blockade. Metals, ammunition, weapons, oil, and things like that are all fair game for a naval blockade. Food is in a different category.
Article 42 of the UN Charter implicitly recognizes blockade as a legitimate technique
Article 42 does not specify whether it’s legitimate to blockade a nation’s food supply.
The Allied blockade of Germany in WWI was extremely effective in damaging Germany’s
economy, where by 1917 the effects were felt (among other things) by considerable food shortages.
The Allied food blockade in WWI killed an estimated 424,000 innocent civilians. The fact that the Allies committed a very serious war crime in WWI does not justify their decision to commit that same war crime, on an even larger scale, during WWII.
but the Kaiser’s regime didn’t respond to this situation by targeting the Jews of Germany (or anywhere else) for extermination.
Germany’s inability to feed its own people during WWI may have been the primary reason the Kaiser was overthrown. With Germany’s home front collapsing, a decision was made to lay down Germany’s arms. Why keep fighting when the Allies had promised Germany an honorable peace, based on the 14 Points? (France agreed to all 14 points. Britain agreed to 13 of the 14, with the one point of disagreement involving freedom of the seas.) After Germany laid down its arms, the Allies continued their food blockade into June of 1919, in order to force Germany to sign the vindictive Versailles Treaty. A treaty which had nothing at all to do with any of the promises Allied leaders had made regarding a just and honorable peace.
Allied nations crippled Germany economically in several ways, one of which was the Versailles Treaty. During the '20s the British and French empires closed themselves to German imports–thus augmenting the economic damage done at Versailles. As a result of all this economic harm, Germany could not afford to import the food it needed to feed its own people. Many or most Germans experienced what one historian described as periods of prolonged and insatiable hunger.
These events were why Hitler and other Nazis had what has been described as a “mortal fear” of letting the Germans go hungry. He knew that widespread hunger among the German people could lead to the collapse of his government, and therefore to Soviet occupation of Germany.
But suppose that the Nazis hadn’t had that mortal fear. Suppose that Hitler had distributed food in such a way that any given person was equally likely to fall prey to the Allied food blockade, regardless of whether he was German, or Slavic, or Jewish. Would that have made the blockade any less murderous, or any less of a war crime? I don’t see why it would have. Being at war does not justify the wholesale slaughter of civilian populations living in enemy-occupied territory.
