Comment by scotty79

I guess you could say that my views align with views of absolute pacifists at least when it comes to moral evaluation of war related activities.

However I arrived at it independently from two beliefs I hold. First, that killing is innately evil. The other one is that I believe that the idea that good and evil are somehow additive and can cancel each other out is worth of people from two thousand years ago. This simplistic view of things that are core of any morality was (and is) propagated by major religions for the purpose of getting away with evil. Religiously fossilized perception of good/evil as a single axis is far behind current cultural development of humanity.

More accurate perception, I believe, is to see good and evil as orthogonal. To be considered independently. To be rewarded and punished separately and accordingly.

> I read this as you think it is never OK to take a life in self defence, even if that means that tens of millions will be exterminated?

It's good to save millions. It's evil to take life. If you managed to save millions without taking a life you are purely good. Way better than a person who saved millions but killed someone.

A billion people owe their entire existence to Norman Borlaug. Would you be willing to absolve him of guilt if he intentionality killed 100 people during his research?

I assume not. Why should fighting be considered different?

> There are also many examples of much smaller ethnic groups who avoided complete extermination because they had a very competent army.

Does some specific case come to your mind?

> Do you strive to make logically sound arguments, or is that not important?

I agree that logic is important and I would like to have reasoned beliefs (apart from things I take as axioms, like killing is evil, less suffering is good).

> Maybe you think that Germany didn't plan to exterminate all poles. Ok, let's just pretend that's the case.

We don't need to pretend. We know that they didn't. Slavs were destined to be subservient workers in their plans. Many ethnic Poles died in death camps, second only to Jews. The main purposes was to terrorize populace (to achieve control), reduce number of Poles (to make lebensraum for Germans) and eliminate Polish elite (that was deemed counterproductive to the idea of turning Poles into workers). All in all terrible, far end of the evil axis. But completely unpreventable by attempting to kill Germans. I could argue that some lives might have been saved if Germans believed they already have full control so that terrorizing is unnecessary.

Poland has a history of armed resistance and uprisings that almost all failed. Again, compare to how much suffering was inflicted on countries that didn't resist this much. Poland was leveled.

> you're at the same time advocating handing over the 3 million Polish jews to Germany without a fight

And you are advocating handing them out with a fight. Result is the same. Just more people dead.

The correct action is to evade, hide, run, bargain. Fighting is in almost all cases the worst possible idea even from purely utilitarian standpoint. And for the cases it somehow succeeds it still doesn't mean it's only good in a moral sense. When it's effects ar deaths and destruction it is also evil.

> During the 1930's, Stalin sent out his underlings with orders to kill a certain quota in given area. The quotas were in the hundreds of thousands.

I think Russian would be way worse than Germans. Then again Eastern Europe was effectively given away to Stalin unconditionally and most survived, no thanks to attempts at armed resistance. Just by waiting out till those idiots run out of steam.