Unconditional Surrender

“Unconditional surrender” was the military policy of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt in the Second World War. If the declaration of this policy had any impact on Nazi Germany, it’s reasonable to assume that it prolonged the war, which is not to suggest that this eventuality was unforeseen by Roosevelt or that the policy was unwise given the nature of the enemy.

Dresden after Bombing

Unconditional surrender meant that the Allied powers would impose the terms of peace on Germany, period. Thus understood, the policy of unconditional surrender would surely have stiffened Nazi resolve in prosecuting the war. The result would be a more protracted war, hence more bloodshed on both sides, but nonetheless justifiable given the global ambitions Nazi Germany—a threat to the core principles and moral values of Western civilization.

This being the case, the policy of unconditional surrender required not only the Allied invasion of Nazi Germany. It led to the wholesale bombing of German cities. Recall the napalm incineration of Dresden. That inferno killed more German civilians than the number of Japanese civilians who perished from the Atomic Bomb dropped on Hiroshima—a slaughter facilitated by America’s war policy of unconditional surrender.

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Clearly, this policy, as implemented against Germany and Japan in the Second World War, was not based on the abstract concept of “proportionality,” which no country in history has ever pursued against its enemies, a concept, however, which Jew-haters, moral relativists, and inane legalists used to undermine and distract Israel in her wars of self-defense against Hezbollah and Hamas—proxies of Iran whose goal is the utter annihilation of the Jewish state.

This genocidal goal of Israel’s enemies makes malignant nonsense of those who touted the oh-so-humane but hypocritical notion of “proportionality” when Israel belatedly implemented Operation Cast Lead against Hamas, its inhumane enemy in Gaza. Indeed, Israel’s one moral failing in that operation was its failure to utterly destroy Hamas. Only such a war policy would have been ideologically proportionate to the genocidal goal of Israel’s enemy. But this logically required the Israel Defense Forces to jettison their seemingly moral, but actually immoral, policy of self-restraint against an enemy that uses women and children as human shields to psychologically disarm and kill Jewish soldiers.

Viewed in this light, the “Kill for Peace” policy which the present writer has proposed against Israel’s many enemies is not only rational; it is no less humane than Roosevelt’s war policy of unconditional surrender.