Roosevelt and Stalin agreed on 50,000 to 100,000 Executions of Germans - Churchill: We are not butchers.

I count myself a reasonable man, being thus endowed by my Maker. When, at the age of 7, I was converted by my grandfather to atheism, I realized very quickly that, if there were no God, love and pleasure were all that there was.

The same grandfather, a good man though lost, told me stories of his Great War experiences. Gassed, minus one lung, and wounded, he was invalided back to England where, while enjoying a quiet drink in a pub, he was handed a white feather (an accusation of cowardice and dereliction of patriotic duty), by some upper-class female.

I quickly decided that, in the absence of an afterlife, patriotism and heroism were not for me, and that my first duty, to myself, the only being with any certainty of reality, was to stay alive and be as comfortable and as happy as possible.

With so much to live for (ice cream, toffee, Dinky toys, and Winnie-the-Pooh) what was there to die for?

Later, in the early nineteen-fifties, by which time I had reverted to Christianity, there were conversations, with teachers and neighbours like this:

Adult: Mark my words! Germany is on the way up again, and soon it’ll be your turn to fight them.

Me: After two wars in one century, why didn’t we just wipe the Germans out?

Adult: Civilized people just don’t behave like that.

Me: Were the Germans civilized?

Adult: Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Me: I’m a pacifist. (A lie: I had no objection to killing, only to being killed at the whim of some fool. I still have the same objection. I have work to do.)

Adult: “You’ll join up and fight when you get your call-up papers. That’s all there is to it.”

I was due for National Service when I was 18, or finished University. Fortunately its abolition freed me from the necessity of a tribunal, possibly followed by prison.

At the Yalta conference, Stalin memorably called for 50,000 to 100,000 executions of Germans of senior rank. When Churchill demurred, saying, “We are not butchers,” Roosevelt suggested 49,000, and proposed a toast to that number.

For once I found myself largely in agreement with both the President and the Great Teacher, but consider the numbers proposed to be quite insufficient. 

I have no objection in principle to butchery of the guilty, and for me, due punishment of cruelty inflicted on human beings should, to adapt the American phrase, be cruel and usual, the cruelty of the penalty to be proportionate to the cruelty of the wicked act.

I am undoubtedly cruel and unusual.