World War II

So...Whose fault was it? Pointing fingers was never an easy job and you always have to think long and hard, evaluate all causes before you can reach a conclusion, which, usually is never straight forward.

Let's take a simple but morbid example. A man points a gun at another man points the trigger and fires. He kills the man. A week later he is arrested. He says that it was an argument and the gun misfired. The gun itself has gone absolutely missing. Untraceable. There is only one other witness who did not see the shooting but says that the murdered dude told him that he was going to start an argument to get himself killed. Question is: who is responsible for this man's death? Is it the arrested man, the witness, the gun or the man himself?

The truth is often murky and very often we must evaluate a situation based on what we know. One of the most cherished skills of a historian is being able to evaluate according to the evidences presented like a detective, forming a picture from the pieces of jigsaw.(hint: this is what you do in source-based). Some pieces smell iffy, some are useless, some slant the image according to what it wants to see. So you must sort through each piece, pick at it, dissect the meaning and see the nuances of what its trying to do. After all, humans are imperfect and every evidence presented by anyone comes with perspectives.

But I digress, think about this, when we truly evaluate any event of situation, we can follow the lines of logic but most of the time, we make value judgements on what is important and what is not. Even being practical involves a value judgement. So begs the question, what do we value the most? Is it money? Is it honor amongst friends? Is it the ability to do what's right regardless of the consequences? Or is it self preservation?

It is with these do we finally come to any type of conclusion.