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The "complete devaluation of innocent human lives" is at the very core of war, not just of terrorist actions. Harold Pinter nailed it down in a chilling play,

• goldenkey 9y ago
  Tell that to Winston Churchill who was on the front lines..
• throwanem 9y ago
  That's an awfully convenient perspective, don't you think? Was it worth Dresden to end Bergen-Belsen?
  • m_mueller 9y ago
    The question you should ask yourself is whether saving concentration camp victims was the main reason for entering the war.
    • throwanem 9y ago
      Of course not; at that time few or none among the Allies knew the camps existed, so they could not possibly have been the reason. But many lives were saved from those camps, nonetheless, in direct consequence of actions such as Dresden which made it eventually impossible for Germany to continue to prosecute the war. So the question still merits asking - and answering.
      • arethuza 9y ago
        I'm not sure that Dresden is a great example - it was late in the war and strategically probably achieved very little. The attach on Hamburg earlier in the war (July 1943) probably had more impact but even then the Allied air raids on Germany actually achieved disproportionally little given the huge resource allocated to them.
        • throwanem 9y ago
          They didn't decide the war, to be sure. But I think there's a compelling argument to be made that they considerably shortened it.
          • KineticLensman 9y ago
            The German industrial war machine in fact remained surprisingly effective in the face of allied bombing until early 1945 [1] when the scale of the bombing finally became overwhelming. But by this time the Germans were going to lose anyway because they couldn’t continue to handle devastating tactical attrition on two fronts. Prior to 1945, German manufacturing was more constrained by the (non) availability of critical resources (coal and steel) than affected by allied bombing [2]. The bombing also failed to decisively impact German civilian morale until very late in the war [3]. However, bombing did force the Germans to prioritise air defence of their heartlands over tactical air operations against allied ground forces, so that German ground forces and their logistics chains operated under punishingly hostile skies from D-Day onwards. [1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/53742/the-bombing-war/ https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/53742/the-bombing-war/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction [3] https://www.amazon.co.uk/German-War-Nation-Under-1939-45-x/dp/1847920993 https://www.amazon.co.uk/German-War-Nation-Under-1939-45-x/d... [EDIT - reworded for clarity and additional detail]
            • lorenzfx 9y ago
              The bombing operations forced Germany not only to use its planes defensively instead of tactically against the Soviet Union (and build high altitude fighters to begin with), but also forced them to spend an enormous amount of resources on anti-air guns, bunkers for civilians, military assets and manufacturing, radar systems, and what not, all of which could have being spend. As especially the USA's industrial output was much larger than Germany's, bombers might still have been a good investment, even if it didn't actually reduce Germany's industrial capacity, because it did reduce its capacity to wage ground war. EDIT: Also, even if Germany's industrial output did grow during WWII, it still tied up an enormous amount of resources: "The Allied bombing campaign also tied up valuable manpower, with Albert Speer (Germany's Minister of Armaments) estimating that in the summer of 1944 between 200,000 and 300,000 men were permanently employed in repairing oil installations and placing oil production underground. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany#Wartime_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany#Wartim...
      • user982 9y ago
        The answer is no, absolutely fucking not, and the fact is that you are with one post defending the moral rectitude and high ground of American soldiers who refer to their victims as "bug splats" when adults and "fun-size terrorists" when children, and with the other post justifying their wholesale firebombing of civilian population centers because of the unsubstantiated potential for a separate effect that you admit was totally unforeseen and unintentional.
        • throwanem 9y ago
          Meanwhile, you show no evident scruple in trading away the lives of the Nazi regime's victims, in the cause of preserving those of its subjects: > The answer is no, absolutely fucking not To be clear, I don't make this point in order to argue some special lack of moral rectitude on your part, but rather for its value as an example of the fact that, in warfare, there exist no options that offer perfect moral uprightness - that the choices available there are not between virtue and iniquity, but rather between greater iniquity and lesser. There's nothing lovely about this fact, but it is a fact nonetheless, and I fail to see how refusing to acknowledge it improves the ability, of one who does so, to correctly understand the world we so imperfectly share.
  • jlg23 9y ago
    > Was it worth Dresden to end Bergen-Belsen? Is that the moment we discuss how many dead are acceptable to end a war, finally agree on some number and toast to it? Sorry, not joining you here.
    • throwanem 9y ago
      Would that life were so simple as what we see on the stage.