@ George Jochnowitz:
If at some point during the war, some plane or planes managed to hit the factories at Auschwitz, that doesn't speak to the practicality of targeting and destroying gas chambers. I'm not familiar with the events Levi refers to - who did the bombing, what precisely was bombed, what the effects were, if any, other than providing cause to the prisoners to rejoice.

A high altitude bomber operating at the extreme limits of its range would be lucky to hit the city that was targeted and return home safely, much less destroy a specific facility in a specific area of a specific camp.

@ fuster:
If I had the time right now, I could launch a pointless detailed defense of that position, which, properly understood, can coherently explain the course of the war from before the beginning to after the end.

If you promise to argue the other side responsibly and stubbornly, we can at some other time extend that Wall discussion that Sully found so mind-bogglingly atrocious.

So, here's a question I've never heard asked quite in this form, though there has long been a strain of criticism directed at FDR's declaration of an unconditional surrender policy: Especially considering that the last months of the war were by far the mostly costly in human lives - direct military casualties, civilian casualties, and victims of the death camps - as well as in material destruction, would it have been a morally more sound position for the U.S. and allies to offer peace terms to the Germans and Japanese that allowed their governments to remain in place, possibly even to retain some of their conquests, in exchange for disarmament, cessation of hostilities, reparations, and freedom and safety for internees of all types? Or were the U.S. and the Soviets driven by historical necessity to seek the destruction of the main centers of potential resistance to their hegemony, regardless of costs?

George Jochnowitz wrote:

If it had been only a tiny bit effective, it still would have saved a life or two. And it would have slowed the transportation of equipment to soldiers, etc. Bombing rail lines in those railroad-dependent days was as useful and less deadly than bombing cities in order to weaken one’s enemies.

Not really. Bombing rail-lines to any effect was extremely difficult given the inaccuracy of bombing. Even if major damage on a line was inflicted, the rail lines themselves were relatively easy to repair. For that reason, attacks on rail transportation focused on main nodes in the system, and even they were of limited effectiveness. In addition, the death camps were at or beyond the extreme limit of the range of bombers, meaning that mounting an effective campaign, if possible at all, could have been done only at very great cost in men, planes, and munitions.

Even if the genocide had been widely understood, it would remain debatable whether the most effective way to stop it would have been through diversion of air resources to purposes of minimal military importance, in theory extending the war. Post-war assessments of the entire strategic bombing campaign, both in the Europe and in the Far East, suggested that it had been greatly oversold. (Max Hastings suggests that a relatively tiny investment in submarines had greater concrete benefit for the US strategic campaign against Japan than virtually the entirety of the rest of the US effort.) Its main military significance in Europe may have been in diverting Germany's most effective artillery - which had dual uses - from the Eastern Front to protection of the German homeland. Concentrating the air campaign in Central Europe would have undermined even this one area of effectiveness.

@ fuster:
Right, but it was very common in those days for educated, assimilated German (and other) Jews to express disdain for Shtetl Jews and Ghetto Jews: "Don't associate me with these people - I'm as much one of you as one of them." It's a familiar pattern among ethnic minorities and social climbers of all types.

"fundamentally transform" is a good thing, unless you think that the world as it is is perfect. Why do you assume that anyone should have a negative reaction to the mere phrase? You use it a lot. It's just an emotional way of saying "I'm a conservative!" I think we know that by now. For those who are not interested in arguing from the presumption that, whatever else Beck says or does, he's on the right side, and that conservatives are on the right side, and everyone else is on the wrong side, it's meaningless.

Lippman was a complicated figure active in American public life for nearly 50 years after that statement. He wrote around 20 books and had a regular news column. Are you sure he never praised the kibbutzniks? Or that he held to the views underlying that statement?

What I think is interesting about Beck's anti-semitism is that it probably is largely devoid of the personal animus toward Jews that Lippman showed in that comment, and that seems to have been fairly common among a certain stream of cosmopolitan assimilated Jews. Beckism has an ideological content alongside all of the sensationalism and outright stupidity that really does tend to come into conflict with a Jewish universalist tradition that influenced all or almost all of his enemy Jews. In other words, there is more than mere emotion or prejudice in the collision between the far right's rejection of the state and a Jewish tradition of moral action that includes the state, but the anti-statist tendency may inherently, if often unconsciously, rely on xenophobia, bigotry, and other "in-group" preferences.