soc.history.war.world-war-ii

Dick C wrote:
> Duwop wrote in soc.history.war.world-war-ii
>
>> On Mar 20, 11:14 am, Dick C wrote:
>>> I disagree entirely on this point. Hypocrisy has rarely, if ever,
>>> been a factor in any political decision. And there is a saying, to the
>>> victor goes the spoils. One of the spoils is the ability to prosecute
>>> the losers for wars, while ignoring the war crimes that the winners
>>> committed. There were plenty of crimes committed by all parties of
>>> WWII, but the only people prosecuted were leaders of the losing side.
>>>
>>
>> Fortunately one sees this argument fairly rarely, and always, always
>> by those without many facts to get in the way of this glib argument.
>>
>> But Dick, I've really love to see the Allied crimes comparable to
>> German Sondercommandos and KZ's or Japanese behavior in China and
>> Korea.
>>
>> On the allied side:
>> Forget about city bombing, both sides did it, the Allies were just
>> *better* at it.
>> A-Bombs, the concensus is that dropping these bombs saved lives by
>> shortening the war.
>> So what's left that makes the Allies hypocrites and moral equals to
>> the nations that started the war?
>
> Forget about something because both sides did it? Is that what you mean
> by the hypocrisy? And I did not say anything about comparable crimes,
> the point I was making is that crimes committed by the winning side were
> not prosecuted, the crimes committed by the losing side were prosecuted.
> And it is the winning side that gets to determine what the crimes were.

Undoubtedly true. However crimes are constituted and defined, they apply to
both sides in any conflict. As you pointed out, by the time the losers are
determined, their apparatus for prosecuting such crimes usually has
disappeared in the detrius of prosecuting the losing war. The winners,
OTOH, have their tools of governance intact and may use them to address
their need for revenge or retribution as they see fit.

> .....The A-bomb? It may helped shorten the war, but the main lives it
> saved
> were American, not Japanese.

I believe that your comment about the effect of the A-bomb is arguable and
therefore invalid. It may well be that large numbers of American lives were
saved by the use of the A-bomb. However, it's probably more than likely
that even more Japanese lives were spared because the Japanese culture
which, while it would have required the spilling of a huge amount of
American blood, would've simultaneously required the unlimited spilling of
Japanese blood in pursuit of whatever it took to defend the homeland. It
would be a mistake to think that the Japanese surrendered because of such
impending loss of life or of the potential destruction of their cities or
centers of population under A-bomb attack.....they surrendered in obedience
to their emporer's wishes and orders. Without that, they would have
continued fighting and dying because surrender is not an acceptable part of
their culture. Even the culture had to be ignored by them in the face of
contradictory indications of imperial desire because the emporer represented
an almost human deity in their eyes and therefore one that could not be
disobeyed.