Colonel F suggests the worst kind of compromise between the optimal and the real. Political actors must not overlook reality, as many of the great revolutionaries of history did, but neither should they bend their agendas to it, as Chamberlain, Kerensky, and so many tepid liberals and social democrats did. To do so is to surrender without even fighting. This is especially true for political actors with a true upper hand, like Eisenhower or MacArthur after World War II. They must control the conversation, they must push the Overton window away from competing ideologies and towards their own, because all advantages are tentative. There is no sense compromising with a broken enemy.
That said, it is clearly unwise to be overtly punitive after a victory because punishment suggests weakness on the part of the victor, it suggests an order that can only be maintained by retaliation and fear. This is why the Emperor remained on the throne in Japan and initiatives like the Morgenthau Plan were discarded. The Emperor was not the enemy, Germany was not the enemy: the ideologies of militant nationalism were the enemy.
To me, Colonel Y is obviously correct. I guess this is because I don’t buy the analogy. Religion is emergent, pervasive, and broadly well-intentioned. Nobody ever defeated it in the field of battle, because it never waged open war against civilization. On the contrary, it has cemented itself as part of civilization. Nazism, however, was transient, antagonistic to civilization, and destructive. Even if it were rendered metaphorical, it would make more problems than it would ever solve. There was a German identity before the Nazis and, as we’ve seen, there is one afterward.
Colonel F suggests the worst kind of compromise between the optimal and the real. Political actors must not overlook reality, as many of the great revolutionaries of history did, but neither should they bend their agendas to it, as Chamberlain, Kerensky, and so many tepid liberals and social democrats did. To do so is to surrender without even fighting. This is especially true for political actors with a true upper hand, like Eisenhower or MacArthur after World War II. They must control the conversation, they must push the Overton window away from competing ideologies and towards their own, because all advantages are tentative. There is no sense compromising with a broken enemy.
That said, it is clearly unwise to be overtly punitive after a victory because punishment suggests weakness on the part of the victor, it suggests an order that can only be maintained by retaliation and fear. This is why the Emperor remained on the throne in Japan and initiatives like the Morgenthau Plan were discarded. The Emperor was not the enemy, Germany was not the enemy: the ideologies of militant nationalism were the enemy.
To me, Colonel Y is obviously correct. I guess this is because I don’t buy the analogy. Religion is emergent, pervasive, and broadly well-intentioned. Nobody ever defeated it in the field of battle, because it never waged open war against civilization. On the contrary, it has cemented itself as part of civilization. Nazism, however, was transient, antagonistic to civilization, and destructive. Even if it were rendered metaphorical, it would make more problems than it would ever solve. There was a German identity before the Nazis and, as we’ve seen, there is one afterward.