Wars are never good.

Firstly, my opponent is being a bit literal by citing my use of the word "mercenary" and my characterization of war as a "mercenary business" as a departure from my fundamental thesis that wars are normally imperialistic. Apparently he's hung up on one usage of the word "mercenary". No, the word doesn't exclusively refer to the war-making of soldiers of fortune. The Oxford Dictionary of English: "primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics". Which is exactly what I've been accusing the business and political elite that starts our wars of all along. As for my use of the phrase "mercenary business", well, the word "business" doesn't just refer to a business enterprise, the Oxford Dictionary of English again: "an activity that someone is engaged in". War is an activity, and it's an activity that the imperialistic ruling class engages in because it's "concerned with making money" and willing to do so at the expense of ethics, hence war can aptly be described as a mercenary business. Varying my adjectives from "imperialistic" to "mercenary" in no way constitutes "changing my thesis" as my opponent alleges. Sorry to belabor semantics like this but my honorable opponent tries to make me out to be inconsistent by hewing to a limited definition of my terms and so I had no choice. As for your point that the oppressed people I cited in my previous argument were "mistreated before the war", well, firstly I had asserted that the ruling class of the West had demonstrated that it didn't care that much about human freedom by oppressing other peoples and you asked for examples so I provided some. That these peoples were oppressed before WWII is irrelevant, they were oppressed by the supposedly freedom-loving nations who fought the fascists and this fact convicts those nations of hypocrisy when they claim that they fought the war for liberty and human rights. If Britain, for example, had so much genuine concern for the rights of man it wouldn't have amassed an empire so large that the sun never set on it, as it used to boast! Secondly, how did Britain and other Western nations acquire their empires? By using military technology and force of course, once again we find that the use of military force is normally motivated by greed. Then you have the chutzpah to say that after WWII the various peoples who had been the victims of European colonialism were "granted their independence"! "Granted"? They won their independence by striving and struggling for it. And they only received independence when the imperialistic powers that had dominated them were weakened by WWII, and when those powers realized that they could no longer maintain control of their overseas empires. Times change, and the age of naked imperialism finally saw its end. But of course it only gave way to neocolonialism, a more sophisticated and veiled imperialism, i.e., the use of economic power to dominate the Third World. Then you defend the fact that the Allies took no actions during the war to interrupt the Holocaust by asserting that the reason was concern about potential civilian causalities. That didn't stop the bombing of Dresden or Hiroshima. And bombing the train tracks along which the victims of Hitler's hate were transported wouldn't have produced civilian causalities, it would have saved lives. The reason the Allies did nothing to save the lives of the men, women, and children who were being exterminated in the camps was simple, the Allies had other motives for fighting and saving Jewish lives wasn't a priority. The ruling elite of the Allied nations was waging war to keep the world a safe place for themselves and their interests, not for the people being massacred by the Nazis and not for democracy. Then you seem to become confused about the phrase "the Jewish problem" in a quote I provided in my previous argument. The phrase was a bit of Nazi terminology and the quote that it occurs in is from an official of the Red Cross, that he would use such a loaded Nazi phrase perhaps indicates that the Nazis weren't the only ones with anti-Semitic attitudes, that perhaps the such attitudes were shared by bigwigs in the West. And I really can't imagine how you get to the conclusion that I was suggesting that a quote from a Red Cross official indicated the attitude harbored by the Russians about the Jews, the Red Cross wasn't exactly a Soviet organization! The Russians had the Red Army but no Red Cross. As for anti-Semitism in the former Soviet Union, sure, Stalin persecuted the Jews, but then was there anyone he didn't he persecute? Stalin was a flaming power monger who placed no value on any human life, therefore I don't really have to make a case that he we anti-Semitic to prove that he didn't care about saving Hitler's victims. Clearly the only thing that motivated him to put up a fight was the desire to preserve his repressive regime. Then you zero in on the word "ALLEGED" to dismiss the article in the Vatican's Newspaper about the depraved indifference of the Allies to Nazi genocide. Sure the article has to use the word alleged, it's not as though the US or UK is ever going to declassify a smoking gun that conclusively convicts Churchill and others of knowing what evil the Nazis were up to and doing nothing. Alleged, yeah, like OJ will always just be an "alleged" murderer. Then you question the accuracy of the stats on the Wikipedia page for how many colonists supported and opposed the Revolutionary War. Well, I only suggested Wikipedia because it's easy to find online. The percentages I gave aren't really in dispute by historians, and anyone can find this out by doing a Google search. Then you fasten and harp on the technical definition of the word "imperialism", well, I never put all my argumental eggs in the basket of that one term. My thesis is that war is normally motivated by the self-interestedness of a society's political and economic ruling class. Classic imperialism is only one form and manifestation of the greed that causes war. Hmm, then you once again assert that my arguments shift gears too much, well, as I clarified above, my arguments only seem so shifty to you because you're cherry-picking straw man key words and fixating on the wrong definitions. It's not inconsistent to call the plutocrats who rule the globe greedy, selfish, mercenary, imperialistic, etc., and certainly not a "fatal flaw". Sometimes it's good to be a stickler about semantics, and sometimes it's just lame. Then you say that the Mexican War is the only war in history that's clearly imperialistic. Assuming that you mean American history, what about the Spanish-American War that netted the US some foreign colonies? What about the invasion of Iraq, or was that to protect us from those invisible weapons of mass destruction? And if you mean world history then you've glossed over quite a few examples. Then you try to secure an easy win for yourself by making the question an all or nothing proposition with the world "solely". Something doesn't have to be all black to be bad, or all white to be good. Something can be dark gray or light gray, so to speak. Some wars have perhaps been gray but have been a dark shade of it, being predominantly a product of the economic self-interest of the rich & powerful. Well, then you declare that you've thoroughly proven your case and utterly demolished mine, I'll let the voters be the judge of that. As for your capitalized parting words, a little over the top. War is "politics by other means", and politics is an ambitious, selfish, dirty business. War is no more noble than politics or the politicians who decide when it's "necessary". And under our capitalist system war is no more noble than the corporate kingpins who to a disturbing extent decide for the politicians, and for the rest of us.