Wars are never good.

This is very much to your credit and very much appreciated. Now then, down to business. You first point out that the article I included a link to is somewhat dated. Sure, it was written back in the year of the Bicentennial, but the basic facts of American history that it deals with haven't changed, haven't been altered by scholarship since the article was written. If you thought that there were any points in the article that have been invalidated by the recent work of historians you should have told us specifically what they are instead of just questioning the reliability of the article on the basis of it having been written 34 years ago. Next you point out that you didn't exactly say that the reason for WWII was Hitler's appetite for world conquest. Well, it shouldn't be a bone of contention that Hitler had a gluttonous appetite for conquest, he certainly did. And don't get me wrong, by questioning the integrity of the motives of the ruling class of the Allied Powers I was in no way trying to mitigate Hitler's role in helping to cause the war. He was a dangerous and despicable character, it's just my argument that the ruling class of the nations who fought a war with him were primarily selfishly concerned about the danger that he presented to them, to their own special interests, not to the Poles and Jews and Gypsies that he subjugated and slaughtered. Once again, it's safe to say that the war was fought not because the power elite of the US, Britain, the USSR, etc. altruistically set aside their private interests and chose to sacrifice money, resources, and lives to defeat the twin evils of fascism & Nazism. This is safe to say because the conduct of the politicos and plutocrats who rule the world has historically never been devoid of self-interest, like the mafia they never do anything unless they stand to gain something tangible. Okay, so what in the case of WWII did the powers that be gain that should make us suspect the purity of their motives? Well, where to start! They gained quite the embarrassment of riches. The US and its Western allies gained control of Western Europe; Stalin retained Russia and gained control of what became the Eastern Bloc; much of the Third World empire of Britain and France, from oil-rich Iran to Vietnam (talk about a booby prize), became the neocolonial empire of the US; both the US and the Soviet Union were able to pursue their geopolitical and economic ambitions all over the globe; and of course the war finally ended the Great Depression in the United States and left it the one and only industrial superpower for a while. To say that the spoils of victory were substantial would be an understatement. Not only did the ruling class of the nations that opposed the Axis defend their position in the war, they significantly enhanced it. You then say "I would also like my opponent to tell me who these ‘millions of human beings' were that the allies were "guilty of denying self-determination, freedom, and human rights" to. " Well, let's see, there were the masses of India who went through that period called the British Raj when they were an unwilling part of UKs former empire. There were the masses of Indonesia who never exactly asked to be governed and exploited by the Dutch. There were the masses of China who were deprived of national self-sovereignty by European powers. There were the people of Algeria who were disenfranchised, dispossessed, and all-around brutally dissed by France who had decided to turn Algeria into France's version of Hawaii, a colony whose native population would become an underclass for a transplanted French population. There were the banana republics of Latin America who were ruled by the business and political Establishment of the US through local client governments. Etc. etc. You next say that the ignorance of the public in the US and Britain helps explain why there were no efforts made to derail the Nazis from mass murdering Jews & others. Well, firstly, if the Allies didn't know the enormity of the evil of the Nazis this would actually support my contention that the war was not really a great moral crusade to put a stop to a great evil. If the "good guys" didn't really know what the bad guys were doing to their innocent victims behind their lines, well then perhaps the "good guys" were not fighting so much to save these innocents as they were to save their own bacon? But then again, the leaders of the Allied nations had information and intelligence about what was going on behind German lines, they knew that the Nazis were rounding up Jews and carrying out massacres. Ignorance is not an excuse that we can hand them. Nevertheless, you try to make a case that the Allies were quite unaware of the camps and the lethal cruelty of the Nazis. I'll just quote here from the Jewish Virtual Library: "The Red Cross knew about the Nazi atrocities as early as August 1942. In February 1945, the President of the Red Cross wrote to a U. S. official: ‘Concerning the Jewish problem in Germany we are in close and continual contact with the German authorities. ' The fact that the head of the Red Cross would use the Nazi phraseology – "the Jewish problem" – may also be an indication of the organization's attitude that Jews were more of a problem than a people who were being annihilated. " Yes, the reason the Allies did nothing for the Jews had more to do with attitude than lack of intel. The Vatican's official newspaper has also alleged that Britain and the US had "detailed knowledge" of the Holocaust. Apparently Henry Morgenthau Jr. , wartime Secretary of the Treasury wrote the following in his diary about the British attitude: "a Satanic combination of British chill and diplomatic double talk, cold and correct and adding up to a sentence of death". (. http://www.telegraph.co.uk... ) Sorry if it's a bitter pill to swallow but those wonderful humanitarians who waged war against Hitler knew that atrocities and genocide were afoot, and did nothing specific to slow it down quite simply because that wasn't why they had committed their countries to war. Let's move on to the American Revolution. No, it's not a flat-out or even a lumpy lie that the colonies were taxed in part to pay for their own defense. They were, the French and Indian war did protect British interests but it also protected the colonies from French expansionism. Which is something the colonists wanted to be protected from, they certainly didn't want to come under French hegemony. You then say that the Revolution couldn't have taken place without majority support. Well it could because it did. This isn't something that's in dispute by historians so I'll just refer you to Wikipedia, they have the stats. Okay, so Washington didn't want to be dictator for life, this is your argument that the elite of the colonies didn't have their own selfish motivations for seeking independence? And yes, I truly did run out of characters when I got to the Greco-Persian wars, the site only allows us 8000 characters and right now I'm at 7441! I'll just say that the Greek city-states were imperialistic and not so beautifully democratic. Their motives for fighting back against Persian expansionism were self-preservation as a ruling elite and self-interest. And alas, the Civil War was caused mostly be economic factors. Lincoln repeatedly made clear that he had no intention of emancipating the slaves! The industrial North was lording their economic superiority over the backward South and the South wanted out from under. Again, it was economic interests that were at issue and at stake. I stand firm, war, all of your examples to the contrary, is always a mercenary business