Making Deserts.

Berlin 1945/Gaza 2025
“They make a desert, and they call it peace.”
 - Tacitus 56-117CE

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER doesn’t leave those demanding it very much in the way of wiggle-room. When President Franklin Roosevelt announced to the world that the Allied Powers would accept nothing less than the Axis Powers’ (Germany, Italy, Japan) unconditional surrender, he took the man sitting next to him, 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 imperial 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 USA 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. There can be little doubt that the thought, at least, had crossed Churchill’s mind.

No Wiggle Room: Franklin Roosevelt tells Winston Churchill, and the world, that the Allies’ war aim is Unconditional Surrender. 

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 civilised distinction between combatants and non-combatants: soldiers and civilians; 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 the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote of his own great city-state: “They make a desert, and they call 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 7 October 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 the Second World War 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. [The 80th anniversary of VE Day. - C.T.] 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.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 9 May 2025.