I think you overestimate the influence of Mennonites on public policy, both during WW2 or during more recent times. During times that there has been an effective peace movement in the US (such as during the Vietnam War) it was a mass movement and hardly led or guided in any serious way by Mennonites. The Mennonite instinct is to retreat from the world. I'm not aware of any instance where Mennonites represented any meaningful "thorn in the side" of policy makers in the US or anywhere else.PetrChelcicky wrote:Ken said:
"There never was going to be any middle ground."
I think that he is wrong. There is always a middle ground, but one has to look for it.
After the war the United States actually DID look for a middle ground, i.e. they accepted the popular German conviction that Communism was dangerous and promised (West) Germany to protect it from attacks by Eastern enemies. They might have done so before the war. This would have divided the National Socialist Party and its supporters, with consequences we don't know.
When "Mennonite Nazis" - a colourful, but unimportant subgroup - became a matter of historical interest, I have written that this is in a way a digression. The real thorn in the Antifascists' side were and are "Mennonite pacifists", first in WW2 and then in all future wars which are to be modeled on "the good war". I.e. the neocon publicists use history in order to prove that pacifism was (and is) wrong. And I think that Ken's position is a good illustration (even if he perhaps hasn't thought about the implications).
I know less about Mennonites in Germany, but I have a hard time believing they were a meaningful force there one way or the other also.
Nowhere in this thread or anywhere will you find me arguing that pacifism is wrong. I'm simply arguing that in the case of WW2 it was unnecessary to exaggerate the extent of evil perpetrated by both the Germans and Japanese in order to generate support for the war. In fact, many of the worst aspects of those regimes such as the details of the Holocaust and Japanese atrocities in Asia were not widely known until the late stages of the war or afterwards.
If you are arguing that some negotiated peace was going to be possible in 1943 or 1944 then we are getting into all kinds of farfetched alternate histories. In 1943 Germany occupied all of Europe, much of North Africa, and large portions of the western Soviet Union. None of the Allies were going to agree to permanent boundaries looking like that, and Germany was never going to agree to retreating back to its post WW1 boundaries. The land war in Europe did not even reach German territory until 1945. Essentially the same thing happened in Asia. The Japanese were never going to willingly give up their occupations of China and Korea which generated much of the economic output of the empire. The war in the Pacific also did not reach Japanese territory (Okinawa) until late March 1945.
Once they start, wars take on their own internal logic and events have a way of flying out of control. I suppose you could argue for some sort of negotiated peace on the western front between the US, Britain, and Germany that left out the USSR and the eastern front. But I think that would have been exceedingly unlikely. How much of western Europe would the allies have been willing to cede to Germany to attain peace? Any of it? And to the extent that any of that might have ever happened, it wouldn't have been the result of Mennonites or other Anabaptists taking any sort of lead or acting as "thorns in the sides" of policy makers.