Confronting Evil, Winning Over the Middle

I just recently got the book The History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, by English historian Andrew Roberts, which self-consciously updates Churchill's monumental work.  It looks like an interesting read, advancing, according to one jacket blurb, "the faith of Winston Churchill that the English-speaking peoples [UK, US, Australia, New Zealand] are 'the last best hope of mankind.'"  For this thesis to be convincing -- insofar as a nation state could ever be that kind of hope -- it would have to be asserted in quite a qualified, measured manner.  So we'll see.

I flipped first to Roberts's discussion of the Versailles Treaty, where he attacks the "received wisdom" that the Treaty's undue harshness on Germany ended up bringing on the next world war.  I'm no historian, so his attack could be right, but the following argument of his struck me as seriously fallacious: "Adolf Hitler had plans of conquest and dreams of scourging the Bolsheviks and Jews that would have led him far beyond the frontiers that any peacemakers could have possibly agreed for Germany at Versailles."  Of course he did, but the question is whether Hitler would have been able to take power in a Germany that had not been subjected to Versailles: the received wisdom, obviously, claims that the treaty's harshness contributed to the chaos in Germany that led many people to turn to Hitler for salvation.  You could question that claim factually (e.g. maybe the treaty itself didn't have such a harsh effect), but the quoted passage from Roberts seems simply to dodge the argument.

It's hard not to see a parallel in today's debates about how to deal with Bin Laden and "Islamo-fascists."  Since their demands are entirely unacceptable, and since no compromise can be brooked with evil, does that mean -- as is sometimes argued -- that there are no prudential limits on what should be done to fight them?  Only if you look at the violent radicals in isolation, and disregard the fight for the hearts and minds of millions of Muslims who might or might not be attracted to the radical wing -- who might either strengthen it or instead be helpful in our fight against it -- depending in part on how America acts.  To say this, of course, is decidedy not to advocate "blaming America first" or hamstringing ourselves from action against terrorists.  It is simply to say that we must consider the effects of our actions on both groups, "Islamo-fascists" and "Muslims in the middle."  People can differ on how precisely to balance those two considerations.  But when Roberts in the above-quoted passage about Versailles talks about only one -- the unmanageable Hitler, and not the larger group of Germans -- I wonder if he's driven by some of the perceived exigencies of today's fights?

(In defending the relevance of this post to Catholic legal theory, I'll plead that we've spent a fair amount of time on the blog talking about the theological/moral/prudential issues involved in "the war against terror" ...)

Tom

UPDATE: There's a debate at the The New Republic between Roberts and a critic over whether his book minimizes or apologizes for atrocities committed in the past by the British (e.g. the Amritsar massacre of Indians in 1919, the killing of Kenyans in the Mau-Mau uprisings in the 1950s, and the Boer-War concentration camps).  Again, the strong subtext is whether "the English-speaking peoples" (today, mostly the Americans) can generally be trusted to keep their use of force within acceptable bounds.  Sounds to me like the critic wins the debate over Roberts' passages, but I'll read the book.