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>>>What the Germans and Japanese did was of a scale and brutality that had not been inflicted in 'civilized' warfare for centuries. Doesn't that boil down to s

>>>What the Germans and Japanese did was of a scale and brutality that had not been inflicted in 'civilized' warfare for centuries. Doesn't that boil down to skewed perceptions re: the nature of war as much as anything? That's a question for HN writ large, not you specifically, as I think you capture understanding of that with your quotation marks. WW2's death toll was in the same order of magnitude as WW1's, which should have already shattered misconceptions of clean wars. However, I think WW1 had a higher ratio of combatant casualties vis-a-vis noncombatants. WW2 being a "regression to the mean" so to speak with regards to brutalizing civilians, combined with the growth of media dissemination, may be why it's made such a socio-psychological mark. >>>And neo-nazis are a thing now, and they're not nice. Communists are a thing, and they're not nice. There's a lot of reasons we never had mass-market video games singing the praises of Konstantin Rokossovsky (the only Soviet war hero I can think of as photogenic as Rommel), and the virtuousness of the ideology and/or its adherents isn't the deciding factor IMO. We also don't spend anywhere near as much time and energy, as a society, highlighting the sole modern ideology with the dubious distinction of a larger 8-figure excess death count than national socialism/fascism. But I digress... Agreed that the time scale of Romans vs Germans is an issue. I don't know how we can consistently get people to "zoom out" and look at things with a larger, multi-generational timescale in mind and see that the things they are taking exception to are closer to "business as usual" than they realize.

rsynnott 6y ago
> WW2 being a "regression to the mean" so to speak with regards to brutalizing civilians It wasn't, though. The level, and degree of planning, of genocide in conquered territories was historically _very_ unusual. Medieval armies, say, were not generally followed by specialist murder units. Even in, say, the Reconquista, there was no real equivalent of the Einsatzgruppen, nevermind what came after occupation. This isn't to say previous wars were clean; lots and lots of civilians died, but there was rarely an organ of the military whose explicit purpose was in massacring civilians until WW2. I think there's a reasonable case that the Nazi military really did have a special, virtually unique brand of evil.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "Medieval armies, say, were not generally followed by specialist murder units." Wasn't sacking of cities in antiquity and medieval times basically looting of all valuables and either the killing or enslavement of the population, mixed in with considerable brutalization during the process? The entire besieging army took part in that. > "I think there's a reasonable case that the Nazi military really did have a special, virtually unique brand of evil." Nope, I'd say the Imperial Japanese Army had them beat on that score easily: they spared themselves the need for specialized units by simply having the entire military commit atrocities. Much larger scale than the Nazis too.

rsynnott 6y ago

> WW2 being a "regression to the mean" so to speak with regards to brutalizing civilians It wasn't, though. The level, and degree of planning, of genocide in conquered territories was historically _very_ unusual. Medieval armies, say, were not generally followed by specialist murder units. Even in, say, the Reconquista, there was no real equivalent of the Einsatzgruppen, nevermind what came after occupation. This isn't to say previous wars were clean; lots and lots of civilians died, but there was rarely an organ of the military whose explicit purpose was in massacring civilians until WW2. I think there's a reasonable case that the Nazi military really did have a special, virtually unique brand of evil.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "Medieval armies, say, were not generally followed by specialist murder units." Wasn't sacking of cities in antiquity and medieval times basically looting of all valuables and either the killing or enslavement of the population, mixed in with considerable brutalization during the process? The entire besieging army took part in that. > "I think there's a reasonable case that the Nazi military really did have a special, virtually unique brand of evil." Nope, I'd say the Imperial Japanese Army had them beat on that score easily: they spared themselves the need for specialized units by simply having the entire military commit atrocities. Much larger scale than the Nazis too.