Popular memory, popular culture: The war in the post-war world

One common understanding of the Second World War is that it was a contest between liberty and tyranny. The refusal of alleged pacifists to participate in the often lawless violence of the Second World War posed fundamental practical and normative challenges for all combatants, but especially for those who understood themselves to be fighting for individual liberty. By studying the development of the law of conscientious objection from the First World War through the Second World War, one can track both the growing separation between liberal and totalitarian governance and the internal crisis that wracked liberalism in these years. This chapter describes the American, British and Commonwealth approaches to conscientious objection during the Second World War and contrasts them with how other belligerents treated those who refused to fight. The interwar debate over administrative governance had been structured by an overly-simplistic contrast between classical liberal and totalitarian approaches to the rule of law.