When US President Franklin Roosevelt announced to the world that the Allies would accept nothing less than the Axis powers’ (Germany, Italy, Japan) unconditional surrender, he took Winston Churchill by surprise.
Though the official history of the Casablanca Conference of January 1943 insists otherwise, the journalists present were pretty sure that Roosevelt had caught Churchill on the hop. Ever the wily politician, Great Britain’s wartime prime-minister was a great believer in wiggle-room. Now there was none.
Roosevelt had very good reasons for his decision to eliminate the possibility of compromise. The most important of these was the absolute necessity of convincing the Soviets, then fighting for their lives, that there was no possibility of the United States and/or Great Britain negotiating a separate peace with the Nazis.
The Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, whose paranoia was legendary, was fearful that Churchill, a convinced imperialist and passionate anti-communist, might prevail upon Roosevelt to transform the war into an anti-Soviet crusade.
Unconditional surrender was Roosevelt’s way of reassuring Stalin that his fears were groundless. It was also intended to prevent his Soviet allies, whose backs had been against the wall since June 1941, from themselves negotiating a separate peace with Nazi Germany.
Beneath all this calculation, however, Roosevelt’s demand for unconditional surrender reflected his bedrock conviction that the evils of Nazism were too dreadful to be seated at any negotiating table. They could not be set aside in the interests of peace, because Nazism was the antithesis of peace. To end the war, Adolf Hitler and his creed had to be extirpated entirely. Nazi Germany’s surrender to the forces of civilisation had to be unconditional.
But evil has a way of corrupting even the most noble of intentions — and the demand that it surrender unconditionally to the forces of righteousness is no exception.
When your enemy realises that there is no wiggle-room, the temptation to go on fighting to the bitter end is very hard to resist.
Equally hard to resist, on your own side, is the temptation to increase dramatically the level of punishment inflicted upon the enemy. If their stubborn refusal to acknowledge defeat persists, and the conflict is needlessly prolonged, then a steady escalation in the violence and destruction unleashed upon them is not only deemed morally justifiable, but also morally necessary.
Suddenly, the distinction between combatants and non-combatants begins to blur. The commitment to waging total war pronounced by one side inevitably calls forth an answering commitment from the other.
Everybody and everything is to be considered a target. The sooner the enemy’s critical infrastructure, now deemed to include the houses — and the bodies — of their citizens, is reduced to rubble and torn flesh, the sooner peace will come.
This terrifying, though hardly novel, mode of thought was well understood by historian Tacitus, who wrote of his own great city-state: "Rome makes a desert, and calls it peace."
In Hamburg and Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Allies’ quest for unconditional surrender would create deserts of its own.
And the making of deserts, if not peace, continues. In response to the evil of October 7, 2023, Israel demanded the unconditional surrender of Hamas, and the release of all the hostages taken on that dreadful day by its pitiless foe. Hamas was defiant. God loves martyrs, and Hamas has plenty to give him.
Eighty years after the end of World War 2 in Europe, the world watches in despair as those who set forth in righteous wrath to secure the unconditional surrender of evil have ensnared themselves in the same remorseless escalation of violence and destruction that captured our fathers and grandfathers.
The focus over recent days has been on the grainy images of universal celebration. More difficult to watch are the images of ruined German cities, and how closely they resemble the images of ruined Gaza.
Like the Romans and the Allied Powers, the Israelis are determined to bring forth the flower of peace from the desert they are making. But, surely, the evil whose unconditional surrender Israel should be seeking is the evil of not knowing when to stop.
■Chris Trotter is an Auckland writer and commentator
