![]() ![]() Over the past seven decades, some of the factual issues about the war have come under close scrutiny and the more-or-less official versions have been found wanting. Even many otherwise principled pacifists have difficulty denying that it was a “just war.” A primordial reaction of limitless disgust at Nazi atrocities remains, no matter how much I learn that the Allies were far from blameless. Only later did I allow myself doubts, and even now I am vaguely discomfited by those who declare that it was an immeasurable human tragedy and one that might have left the world no worse if it had not been fought. ![]() From John Wayne’s film “The Sands of Iwo Jima” to a cursory reading of the initial six-volume edition of Winston Churchill’s Nobel Prize-winning history, both the moral rationale for the conflict and the outline of its main events, causes and consequences seemed perfectly clear. As a boy growing up in rural Ontario, Canada in the wake of World War II, I was open to all the popular mythologies about what some people now call the “last good war” (Weber, 2008). ![]()
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