WWII is often portrayed in popular culture (and political culture) as the most clear confrontation of good and evil, with good often being the United States and the United Kingdom, evil being the Nazis, Italians, and Japanese, and somewhere in between being the Soviet Union.
Other portrayals attempt to humanize the individual soldiers and citizens who were caught up in the various totalitarian regimes, supporting the viewpoint that Evil with a capital E is something of a fiction. However, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, a famous intellectual book by Hannah Arendt, talks about how the Nazi atrocities were carried out by bureaucracies with lots of paperwork and chains of workers who were "only doing their jobs."
The Lend-Lease Act doesn't explicitly discuss the question of good and evil, but as its official title is "An Act to Promote the Defense of the United States," it certainly assumed there was something out there the United States needed to defend itself from.
Questions About Good vs. Evil
- If something that is good for one person or group of people is potentially bad for another, can we ever really clearly define something as being purely one or the other?
- Is a dictatorial regime always evil?
- Is democracy always good?
- If someone intends to do something good, but in the end, the result cause harm to others, does that actually make the person and the deed evil?
Chew on This
Regardless of the ethical complication of war, evil is easy to identify in situations where human beings are oppressed by dictatorial regimes.
The victor of any conflict determines, to some degree, who is right and who is wrong, making clear cut decisions about what is good and what is evil difficult to discern.