Every Hero Worthy of the Name Must Eventually Fight Nazis
I am nearly finished with The Real Odessa by Uki Goni. It's taken me so long because a) it's a serious non-fiction book, not the fabulously light essays of Sarah Vowell and b) I took a few weeks off to do some heavy-duty reading of comics. And now I'm reading the afterward, an addition that did not appear in the original hardcover printing, and it's all about the shameful role Holy Mother Church played in shielding Nazi, Ustashi, and sundry war criminals from justice after the Second World War. Amidst all the sadness, an interesting moral question has arisen, or rather a series of such question:

Were the United States and the British Empire morally right or morally wrong to ally with Josef Stalin's murderous Union of Soviet Socialist Republics against Adolf Hitler's fiendish Greater German Reich? Opposition to the Nazis was a moral imperative (one that we in America ignored for far too long), but was cooperation with Stalin right? I'm not asking if an alliance with the USSR was necessary, I'm asking if it was moral.

If the Anglo-American alliance with the blood-stained and blood-thirsty Reds was on the moral up-and-up, was the "rescue" and recruitment of Axis war criminals for use as anti-Communist operatives and officials morally right or morally wrong? If it was okay to name as our friends the butchers who ran the GULAG system in order to defeat the architects of the Holocaust, was it okay to name as our friends the butchers who ran the death camps in order to defeat the architects of the starvation of the Ukraine and the enslavement of all of Eastern Europe?

I know the alliance with Stalin was necessary to defeat Hitler, but I don't know if it was right. I know opposing Stalin's clearly expansionist post-war agenda was both necessary and right, and I can accept that recruiting "former" Nazis to aid our cause was necessary, but was it also wrong? I havee far more questions that answers. Any thoughful comments on the subject would be appreciated.

And on a similar topic...

Flash and Circle
No fascist (nor Fascist) am I, and so well founded are my democratic credentials that I am completely at ease making the following statement and posting the following picture: the British Union of Fascists were traitors to the highest aspirations of Western civilization, but their logo, the "flash and circle" was as pleasing to the eye as the ideology behind it was displeasing to the the mind and soul. Why don't respectable democratic institutions ever have such striking and inspirational emblems?