Psyche, Science, and Society

The Good War?

November 14th, 2005

The myth of World War II as the Good War took another hint, as the British Guardian newspaper revealed that the UK maintained a secret torture center in London, in which several thousand German prisoners were systematically tortured.

Some are also alleged to have been starved and subjected to extremes of temperature in specially built showers, while others later complained that they had been threatened with electric shock torture or menaced by interrogators brandishing red-hot pokers.

On at least one occasion, an MI5 officer noted in a newly declassified report, a German prisoner was convicted of war crimes and hanged on the basis of a confession which he had signed after he was, at the very least, “worked on psychologically”. A number of people who appeared as prosecution witnesses at war crimes trials are also alleged to have been tortured.

Lest one claim the existence of this camp as a military necessity, the camp was maintained for at least three years after the war ended, “during which time a number of German civilians were also tortured.”

After the firebombing of Dresden, the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the brutal colonial fighting for territory, and concentration camps for Japanese Americans, it is hard to see any side as “good”. One may differ as to whether the war was still worth fighting, but no reasonable person can seriously maintain it as a fight of good against evil. Rather, we see yet again that war inevitable unleashes evil on all sides. All talk of good wars is just a fantasy protecting people from awareness of the evil done by them or in their name.

Entry Filed under: Social Issues, War and Peace