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This is the reason why China finds it acceptable to act as they do in quite a few things, such as attempts to enlarge their EEZ. In their mind, they are just do
by YUMad 8y ago
This is the reason why China finds it acceptable to act as they do in quite a few things, such as attempts to enlarge their EEZ. In their mind, they are just doing what USA did too, so it's a fair game.
But they do not understand, refuse to understand, or simply hold irrelevant the narrative manipulation that is necessary to pull it off, and this is something US excels at. The 'spreading freedom' meme is just one example; another example is 'we do it, and after that we declare it illegal for others to do it' - US committed significant war crimes, such as fire bombing of Dresden and Kyoto, and was never held accountable for it.
- i_am_proteus 8y agoPlease attend to your facts: -The fire bombing of Dresden was executed jointly by the United States and United Kingdom, with the UK flying more sorties. This occurred during a war when Germany was executing strategic bombing campaigns against the UK. -The United States of America did not fire bomb Kyoto. Nobody did.
- DanBC 8y ago> This occurred during a war when Germany was executing strategic bombing campaigns against the UK. The wider point is interesting though. We started the war with the attitude that killing civilians would be a war crime, and then as the war went on that principle was eroded more and more until fire-bombing several civilian populations across Germany was allowed. There's a reason "Bombber Harris" was also known as Butcher Harris. Even Churchill disliked the area bombing tactics.
- i_am_proteus 8y agoIndeed. Attitudes toward civilian casualties in warfare, at least in the West, are less tolerant today--- but the West hasn't been in an existentially-challenging shooting war since 1945.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago100K+ civillians were killed in Iraq2 and the press stayed mostly silent about it while the government tried to fudge the numbers and avoid accounting them altogether. Nobody cares if it's not the anointed ones dying.
- skinnymuch 8y agoAren’t there great number of civilian deaths in the Middle East like Iraq, Yemen? I wouldn’t be surprised that my ignorance is leaving out some wars in Africa this century that the west has some complicity to as well.
- NeedMoreTea 8y agoIt's probable that Harris would not have been given as much rope had the Luftwaffe not changed tactic. Switching away from mainly strategic and airfield targets to the blitz, and attacks such as Coventry. Had they kept plugging away at airfields, they even might have won the Battle of Britain.
- vivekd 8y agoUS did not firebomb Kyoto specifically but they did firebomb many of Japan's wood and paper urban areas including Tokyo, Nagoya, and Osaka. Here is the video of McNamara, the man who helped plan the attacks, reflecting on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RceLAhPOS9Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RceLAhPOS9Q
- pluma 8y agoOof. As a German I cringe when I hear people cite the firebombing of Dresden. Yes, it was one of the worst bombing raids and yes, we would consider it a war crime (or at least extremely unethical) nowadays (much like many things both sides had done throughout either World War) but it's usually invoked to play down nazi crimes and it's usually misrepresented because of very successful propaganda. The estimated death toll was around 25-30 thousand. During and after the war various revisionists and propagandists have blown up that figure to over 100 thousand. Additionally German nazis have built an entire tradition around it, "mourning the fallen" to exploit the incident as a display of nationalism and nazi sympathies. There's no legal basis to single out the bombing of Dresden as a war crime within the context of the Second World War. I would say that it can be argued that some of the crimes nazis were charged with after WW2 also lacked a pre-existing legal basis but there was no expectation that the winning side would apply punishments consistently, sufficiently or even fairly. So even if there were good reasons to categorise the Dresden bombings as a war crime in the context of WW2, it'd just be one of many alleged and proven war crimes that went unchallenged -- including other crimes (and "crimes") committed by the US, the Allies in general or any other involved military.
- 0x262d 8y agothis seems like a valuable point: the collective misremembering of WW2 as some sort of "noble war", at least by the Allies, should probably be completely reassessed. but it is tied in very closely to the non-empire myth, and so it isn't.
- slededit 8y agoWhat really was different was conquering territory and then giving it back to the governments in exile. Contrast this with the other players in the war who kept territory they acquired. Even the soviets who were on our side.
- 0x262d 8y agoland was given back to other imperialist states but not in actuality to territories under US control. the pattern has been establishment of neocolonial, subordinate client states since WW2, continuing to today in Venezuela. it’s true that we pretend not to have an empire formally but our winning WW2 in large part was about establishing the dominance of American empire.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- kalleboo 8y ago> fire bombing of [...] Kyoto I'd love to hear what you're referring to since common knowledge is that Kyoto was notoriously the only part of Japan spared from major bomb raids (originally due to no military significance, then because they wanted to A-bomb it and didn't want earlier strikes to mess up the damage data, but later it was spared from the A-bomb as well)
- SkyMarshal 8y agoWell the US collapsed our own narrative with Iraq and subsequent regime change attempts, which is why Russia and China don’t bother to try now. In the aftermath of the first Gulf War, George H. W. Bush originally attempted to create an international precedent where sovereign nations don’t invade each other, by refusing to push into Iraq and depose Saddam after expelling him from Kuwait. That was an important aspect of his “New World Order” and quite forward looking. Clinton mostly upheld it, but subsequently Bush Jr and the neocons tossed that out the window with their invasion of Iraq. That the Iraq invasion was both poorly justified and poorly executed (the occupation at least) hastened the destruction of H. W.’s precedent. America’s additional regime change attempts since of varying results have further undermined it. At this point the precedent and SOP for the great powers is barely concealed will to power. The 21st century is going to be ugly as Russia, China and others follow America’s ill-conceived lead in this regard. But make no mistake, it was the US itself that made this dangerous state of affairs more likely.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- subjoriented 8y agoThis comment is whataboutism. The topic is very clearly about American activity. I wish I had an account long enough to flag this.