Without Uncle Joe

In another breach of the rules of civilized warfare, Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on unconditional surrender by the Axis powers, thereby prolonging the war and immensely intensifying its bitterness. They made it clear that there would be no mercy for the losers. This was a little more than the democratic leaders figured their people could stomach, so they proposed an alternative Stalinist method: Stalin, sighing at this bourgeois sentimentalism, for once yielded.

When the trials began at Nuremberg, there were a few irregularities. The rules of evidence sharply limited the defense; the defendants were not permitted to argue that the Allies had committed the same acts they were being accused of. Such treatment of prisoners of war was also a novel departure from the old rules, which the Allies justified by arbitrarily declaring the captured German military officers to be civilians. This made them eligible to be tried as criminals under the inchoate new rules.

The purpose of the trials was not to do justice or to determine guilt according to normal standards of law which forbid ex post facto trials , but to give the Allies a propaganda victory on top of their military triumph. In essence, the Germans were convicted of losing the war. The honorable German admiral Erich Raeder, for example, was convicted for invading Norway, though he had merely beaten the British to the punch on the eve of their own planned invasion.

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When similar trials were held in Tokyo two years later, an Indian jurist who participated decried the proceedings: At any rate, the story of the Holocaust is suspiciously convenient for those who were willing to commit such horrors that only something like an enormous program of mass murder could divert attention from their own guilt. Whatever the truth, Hitler is not the only one who deserves lasting infamy.

So do several Persons of the Century.

At the time when Veale wrote, shortly after the war, little had been published about these final Allied favors to Uncle Joe. Since then, James Bacque and other historians have concluded that the Allies also starved millions of Germans after the war, a policy that was interrupted only by the breach between the democracies and the Soviet Union; luckily for the surviving Germans, the Cold War necessitated a new alliance with what was left of Germany. Since the Cold War began, the democracies have repudiated Stalin and Communism.

Most analysts agree that they intensified the war without really affecting the outcome.

Veale argues that the diversion of RAF bombers to Germany may even have changed the outcome of the Battle of France in , when one defeat might have toppled Hitler and cut the war short. In the end the victors succeeded chiefly in hardening their own consciences, while giving Stalin the spoils.

Some sort of pragmatic defense of the war might have been made on the frank grounds of power: But Roosevelt and Churchill chose to wage the war as a Manichaean crusade against evil, while cutting their cynical deal with the devil in the Kremlin not to mention the one in hell. Their partnership with Uncle Joe, their resort to aerial mass murder, and their participation in postwar enormities destroyed any moral claim they made for the war.

Sooner or later the accepted view of this heroic epic is going to have to be drastically revised, as Veale perceived immediately after the war ended. The Allied crimes have never been acknowledged, except as wartime necessities justified by noble ends; and the Allied criminals have never been brought to the dock. Instead, they are still honored as heroes of the twentieth century.

In the absence of any evidence, I still suspect this corrupt, vicious, lonely man understood the power of fear so well only because he felt it himself so intensely.

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What to read next. The Maidan revolution was supposed to bring an end to this type of horse-trading, but Shokin served as a reminder that little had changed. He reinforced that perception by hindering an investigation into two high-ranking state prosecutors arrested on corruption charges and after Economy Minister Aivaras Abromavicius cited him by name before quitting in protest over the delayed reforms. Biden delivered that message directly to Poroshenko over the phone.

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Poroshenko eventually sacked Shokin. Following the incident with Shokin, the pro-Western coalition of Yatsenyuk and Poroshenko was also thrown into peril as the two men began to clash, smearing each other in local media. Since then, Kiev has continued to sputter on reforms, as the vested interests of the past have been confronted by a new wave of politicians and activists trying to take the country in a Western direction.

Ukrainian servicemen play soccer on a road at Svitlodarsk, approaching Debaltseve on Feb. Apart from prodding Kiev on reforms, U. If the Minsk deal collapses and violence spikes, the next president would face renewed debate — not only about new sanctions on Moscow, but about whether to arm Ukrainian forces as they fight Russian-backed separatists. The question of whether to provide arms to Kiev — particularly anti-tank weapons — sparked a heated debate in and outside the administration when the war was at its peak in The White House was so concerned about avoiding any tensions with Russia that it trucked in nonlethal military gear to Ukraine instead of flying it on U.

Low-level fighting continues, with casualties reported every week. Yet there are no large-scale military offensives underway, and front lines have frozen in place.

The Ukrainian armed forces also have become much more capable and organized over the last two years, after receiving training and assistance from the United States and after Kiev began a reform program. Still, Ukrainian officials say they will raise the issue of receiving lethal aid from Washington with the next U.

Officials in Kiev look upon a possible Clinton presidency favorably and have high hopes that their needs will be met. On the sidelines of the U.