In a way, yes. When I know that X is in the range of 1-5 and Y is in the range of 500-1000, I have no troubles claiming Y is bigger than X. Whether it is 500 or 750 or 1000, it is bigger and by a big margin and my point stands.



That's not the half it. Nazism was an evil ideology based on racism and total contempt for human life that treated various people as vermin, rats and sub-humans, fit only to be exterminated or to be slaves. That ideology got a hold of a powerful country and managed to act on it. Had it been succesful, the world would have been a terrible place to live. Allies on the other hand, with all their quirks and flaws, were fighting a defensive war for the defeat of that ideology, and after that ideology had been defeated, Allies didn't take vengeance but had rebuilt Germany and Japan and allowed them to take their place in the world as influental and successful nations. That is not what would have happened had the Axis won the war. In the process of defeating that evil ideology, Allies also committed far less war crimes and killed far less innocent civilians.

I can not equate Allies with the Axis, unless it is proved to me that Allies started an aggressive war, whose goal was territorial expansion and extermination and enslavement of millions.

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Your attempts to retroactively justify the use of that graphic are undercut by the unfortunate fact that it inflates your point by millions of people, which is neither a small number on its face nor a statistically insignificant figure in relation to the chart. Sloppy and inaccurate.

And I'm not even challenging counting the Soviets with the Allies, which is questionable at best as they were just as responsible as Germany for starting the war and then went on to launch their own expansionist war against Finland. Only circumstance eventually forced them on to the Allied side, not any sort of idealogical similarities.



First of all, historical supposition has no place in this thread. We don't know what the world would have looked like had the Axis won. I could say, with some degree of historical evidence, that Stalin would have overrun Europe both in late 1941 or early 1942 had the Germans not invaded and again in 1945 had the US not used nuclear weapons. And...? Second, Germany and Japan were rebuilt for a very specific purpose, not out of some altruistic Allied intentions.

Other than that, you've got no arguments from me. Nobody is arguing that Nazism was about peace, love, and dandelions.

I feel like we've come full circle. Again I must ask, don't you think you should separate the Western Allies from the Soviets?


I have not avoided your points. They have been noted and I think addressed in earlier posts. I can only continue to repeat my points to a certain extent before monotony ensues.

The research seems to indicate otherwise, that racial superiority and dehumanization of the Japanese lead to widespread refusal to take prisoners from the start, which did not happen in Europe. As you said, though, there really is no excuse.

You mean those 600 hundred who survived to get there by '44? I'm not sure you're making the point that you intended.

Well, I have already touched on one mass rape by American forces and there are others, but yes, the war ended before Japan proper was invaded.

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And the fact that IJA troops wouldn't surrender as a general rule, or would fake a surrender for an ambush, etc. You are glossing over the fact that the command structure wanted POWs, for intelligence and propaganda. Prisoner execution was not condoned, if anything the propaganda machine was too effective in this case. The same cannot be said within the IJA. Given the nature of the fighting, I'm certain Marines shot surrendering Japanese troops. In some circumstances, these actions would be understandable, if not excusable. In other circumstances, an outright war crime. The scale of the latter is still in question.

Those, and the ~40-50k taken before the end of hostilities. When you say "by '44" are you talking '41-43, or including '44? Wiki has 921 POWs at Saipan (1944) alone. The Marines didn't have a chance to start taking prisoners until, what, Guadalcanal, and didn't really get moving until 1944, after sorting out their island assault issues from Tarawa. Again, how were the processed Japanese POWs treated, compared to the Allied POWs?

So Hiroshima/Nagasaki saved the Japanese from the predations of American forces?

You still have yet to justify this claim. It fails on both acts and scale.

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On the contrary, the research indicates that racism, dehumanization, refusal to take prisoners, executions, mass rapes and mutilazation were common and widespread among US forces in the Pacific. Maybe it would be helpful if you told me what you feel the Japanese did that sinks to an even lower moral level.

You are making my point for me.

German soldiers, for example, were compelled to commit atrocities through a carrot and stick approach by the top Nazi leadership. First, they were force-fed a daily diet of propaganda that dehumanized the Eastern peoples and justified German manifest destiny. Hitler himself used all his charismatic might to fill them with feelings of racial superiority and talk of "subhumans" and "vermin". They were given every excuse in the book from their leaders to justify their actions from the fight against bolshevism to the need for German living space. When encouragement wasn't enough, they used punishment. Those German soldiers who refused orders could expect a wide range of reprisals. They could only hope to be sent to a harsh front, and not wind up in a concentration camp themselves. Still, the Nazi leadership felt the need to continually sanatize their genocide. IIRC, by the time Treblinka was set up, no more than 50 or 100 Germans ever worked there at one time.

American soldiers, on the other hand, had no such encouragement. IIRC, FDR never denigrated the Japanese on a racial basis, and soldiers committing atrocities could technically be charged - although the vast majority of officers looked the other way, if they didn't support it outright. As I pointed out, the military even made an effort to increase live prisoner taking, for intelligence purposes. Despite all that, American soldiers engaged in racism, dehumanization, and atrocities on a wide scale. American culture - from Time Magazine to Hollywood - relished in the same type of racism that Goebbels worked so hard to foster. Unlike the top-down nature of the war crimes committed by the Axis dictatorships, these American war crimes were cultivated from the bottom. American soldiers needed no carrots or sticks to boil the flesh off of Japanese skulls and send them home to their girlfriends, such behavior just came naturally to them.

This is why body counts are not the best context in which to judge morality.

I long ago stopped bothering. My perspective on the war is not aligned with the black/white, good/evil narrative that has emerged, and any deviation from said narrative usually yields hostility.

As for this discussion, it is all just an intellectual exercise for me. I am not of the belief that we should apply 2010 moral norms to people who lived in 1940. It has been interesting to challenge some established perceptions, and I do think I have opened some people's eyes to elements of history that they may not have known about before, so it has not all been for naught.

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That's quite the contrary position to develop - that the Germans wouldn't have committed atrocities without being poked by their commanding officers. The Germans basically agreed with the Nazis and weren't troubled at all by the "purge the Jews" business - which was no Nazi secret. And how many German soldiers were actually punished for refusing to participate in the race war on the Eastern Front? It's a pretty small figure, and the book discussed here a few months ago found just one corporal, who was executed for hiding Jews (and having more courage than the entire Wehrmacht put together).

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My position - as I clearly stated - was that the Germans received both encouragement from their political leaders to commit war crimes and feared reprisals for not doing so, and that the Americans were not under such constraints, but still engaged in atrocities. I was discussing context, not guessing about hypotheticals. It is obviously impossible to know the extent to which the Germans would have engaged in such behaviors without inducements from their leaders.

Certainly not. While FDR's governing intentions were far from altruistic, they were many levels above those of Hitler and the Nazis in a moral context. America in general was far better than Nazi Germany in that regard, which should be obvious. I'm discussing specifics and you're trying to turn this into a question of who was better - Germany or the US. The answer to that is not in dispute.

Some researchers have hypothesized that cultures in which hunting is extremely prevalent are more likely to dehumanize their enemies - making them little more than animals to be hunted. As a hunter myself, I have my doubts about that, but I really have no idea. War brings out both the best and the worst in people.

I don't think killing people to take their teeth is exactly equivalent to a trip to the souvenir shop. If you're going to accuse me of bias, minimizing what the Americans did only weakens your position.

What is growing old is people reading what they want to into my statements instead of what I actually write.

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But that's basically what you're implying by bringing it up - that the US troops committed these crimes voluntarily (which is true) in contrast to the Germans who were forced to (which is false).

Additionally, you haven't really shown the scale of the atrocities the US troops committed. You've shown that the Americans killed a lot of surrendering Japanese POWs (I don't think you've given an estimate though) and you've alluded to some rapes. But we can't say for instance whether a majority of US units stationed in the Pacific committed war crimes or not because you haven't really said anything except "the research is there." Give us some links with the parts you think are important quoted for us.

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You post implies the Germans showed restriant while being encouraged while the Americans were licking there chops while being restrained

Unless you can point to some factor in American society that is vastly different from German society I have a hard time beliving you.

I'm sure Bavarians hunt as much as Texans no?

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Clearly the Germans are better than us....perhaps some type of supermen?

So why in your opinion are Americans so ready to commit ethnocide?

The war is a soft spot for you as the best you can do is cherry pick examples of trinkites taken by American soliders with the rape of nanking and auschwitz

You're fair and balanced veiw is bordering on relativism and trying to reconcile the NAZIs...the schtick is growing old

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On the contrary. What you wrote has barely anything to do with what I did. Except to underwrite it, that is.

And that's why they occurred far less often and far, far less systematically than in the German or Japanese militaries. As you yourself point out.

Indeed, I agree. Rather, intent is. And the American intent was clearly to limit war crimes as much as possible. German and Japanese intent was to maximize them to the fullest. Need I say more?

Dude... you're the one claiming the Americans/Allies were just as bad as the Axis. You're the one claiming what Marines did to surrendering Japanese soldiers was just as bad as the Rape of Nanjing. In other words, you're the one trying to generalize. Now you're complaining when we argue on that premise? Come again?

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There is always one weak spot in the mainstream historical narrative. Namely, that is it focused on Europeans, or by extention, to 'civilised' non-Europeans.

A certain discrepancy was not felt back then, which we do nowadays. Namely, there is outrage over German genocidal acts against Jews and others, outrage at their treatment of Poland, which had to dissapear in genocide, enslavement, suffocation, outrage at Japan's cruelty, its perverse sadism, in East Asia . But this outrage was not extended to the treatment of non-Europeans / non-Europeans considered uncivilised.

Yet, what is the history of the Western liberal-democratic powers? Was the fate of the Aboriginals in Australia not what the Germans had in mind for the Poles? What did the French, Portuguese, Belgians, Dutch, Americans do in their colonies, and at home? The period of Germany's imperial warmongering, 1870-1945, roughly corresponds with that of the French second colonial Empire, 1870-1960's.

Racial superiority thinking was the norm for all. The Germans, whose colonial empire 'consisted of a single sausage factory in Tanganyika', were exceptional for bringing racial superiority thought to Europe. What Germany learned fighting the Herrero, it brought back home and applied in Europe. Including the wholesale murder of Germans - those first victims of the Nazis.


More briefly, killing all Poles is wrong, killing all native Americans is okay.


There is a moral lesson there. I disagree that it was not learned, or has been brushed aside. The very realisation of it was instrumental in de-colonisation, in the creation of multicultural societies, and in the extention of civil rights in the US and eventually South Africa. (One funny irony is that a lot of people admire the Nazis because they abhor multiculturalism, because they dislike Blacks. Little do they realise that it was the very example of moral bankruptcy of Nazism that created the multicultural society in the West.)

I would agree that this perspective remains underappreciated in any moral narrative of the history of the period. But as so often, once a historical narrative has taken hold, it is nigh impossible to replace. Even serious scholarship often limits itself to dutifully filling in the footnotes.


(One caveat: Nazism, then and now, is founded on the principle of inequality. The nazi can rightfully call out western liberalism for their not living up to their own liberal standards of equality. But nazism glorifies it, whereas liberalism is disgraced by it. Some hypocricy there is, moral equivalence not)

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In many ways, I suppose you're right. Still a long way to go; it's not an easy thing getting an entire race back up on their feet after centuries of genocide, you know? But at least it is happening, little by little, in spite of the mixed messages the provincial and federal governments have been sending.

Anyways, it would seem that Canada is finally getting aboard with that Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Can you imagine it? With this coming by, all sorts of things are possible: for one thing, imagine Canada actually agreeing to a satisfactory reformation of the Indian Act! Within my lifetime, and hopefully with my eager participation, my First Nation(-state) may one day have our right to regulate our citizenship recognized by the Canadian government.

As it stands right now, our citizenship is controlled by that same Indian Act, which is simply some stupid **** Canada pulled out of their ass to control our lives. Imagine how much they'd be laughed at if they came up with something called the "French Act" and told France which Frenchmen were eligible for French citizenship and which weren't (among other things)? I don't see anyone laughing at the Indian Act, though.

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Still doesn't change the point. Take away those millions and still a huge difference remain.

Debatable, but that's for another thread.

Unfortunately, it seems you do. Ok, you say that it wasn't your intention to equate Axis and Allies, I'll accept that and let it rest, we're really not getting anywhere. It's just that it wasn't only my impression but pretty much everyone involved in the discussion got the same impression. So, if that wasn't your intention, maybe you should worry about how you're coming off.

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