Quote:
Originally Posted by Mumitroll
thats an answer for the kindergarten. for the 10-year-olds.
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They don't tell that to ten years olds.
Moreover, what's your answer? My country is less bad because they killed less people?
That's ten years olds' answers. And don't give me that morally understandable nonsense. Morally understandable is me shooting you back because you shot me first, so you shoot me back because I shot you, or may be you just want to live and the only reason you shot me back was to stop me from shooting you again, and by the time we're done there's ten million dead people and there's more than enough blame to go around.
Oh wait, no: you killed one more person than me,
you suck.
Or may be: my daddy used to live in this crummy hellhole one day longer than your daddy did. This fight is
your fault.
Better yet: you're currently the most powerful person, so
everything's your fault.
These things happen, they're tragedies; there are blames, there are faults, and there are those who suffer -- even die, a lot. There are motivations to do things which has little to do with what kind of hell these things will create once they get to be done. Every single
good anti-war novel in the last century is universal in expressing what it means to commit an atrocity: to the leaders, it's a political and sometimes ideological decision, be it dropping nuclear bombs on cities, shooting prisoners of war on the spot, ordering genocides, or launching bloodthirsty offensives. You do it for reasons, you do it for results, you do it for ideals you hold and others despise and then the historians will figure out how horrible you are when all things are said and done. To the common grunts, it's that numb feeling where you don't know shit and you can't change shit so you just do what you gotta do to make it through to another day, and by the time you're done you realized you just murdered an innocent or three and
then you get to see the pretty numbers showing how your side in the war didn't kill nearly as much people as the other side so you probably did a good thing when you shot the poor French printer in Flanders or the Vietnamese mathematics student in some god-forsaken village somewhere.
This high-handed debate attempting to implicate moral values to the historical facts and using them in current context mean less than the dead Vietnamese mathematics student who's probably not real and therefore not dead, or maybe he's real and alive, or real and very much dead, killed by war.
What historians
should do is debate what the hell happened and why, who did what and when, and may be on how to stop it from happening again;
not trying to judge who's good and who's bad in the hellish things we see happen when force gets used to resolve conflicts, and then go up on a soapbox to blame everything on every living Germans because dead Germans used to oppress Jews for sport.
So, for example, your contention that at least part of Truman's decision to drop the bombs on Japan is driven by geopolitical concerns is something interesting to argue about -- and I happen to agree, though not with your version that apparently place it as the one major reason why the bombs were dropped. But when you turn that from "the US did this" to "therefore the US sucks, go to hell hypocrite Americans," I call your bluff and I'm not taking the "ten-years old" comment down quietly. One it places blame on institutions rather than people, two it also places blame on people who didn't even get to live through it much less did it, and three it shows quite well where your prejudices are by placing these blames where they don't belong. The US is not guiltless, the US should probably be more willing to recognize World War 2 for a multi-faceted war it is and the extent of Allied atrocities that are forgotten in common awareness, the US can probably even benefit from a sincere apology or two for
past conduct of the predecessors (or the mistakes of the living ones for, say, Iraq War) for the surviving recipients of the bad side of American foreign policy, but I don't buy into the "you* used nuclear weapon in 1945 therefore anti-nuclear sentiment in 2008 is hypocrisy and the USA remains the Evil Empire" argument.
*which isn't even really "you," as few of us are alive back then.