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~226,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone, most of which were civilian. Shall we include people drafted into a war they didn't want to fight?

~226,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki alone, most of which were civilian. Shall we include people drafted into a war they didn't want to fight? People shot by their own countrymen because they didn't want to go over the top as they were a scared civilian with minimal training being used as cannon fodder? Those same scared civvies with minimal training who did go over the top and got mowed down by machine guns and shells? Shall we do civilian resistance groups next? Whole villages of France that were shot dead? You can still visit at least one of them and see it as it was left. It's shocking, and it's left like that as a reminder of how shit things were. Yes, proxy wars are terrible, as are all wars. All loss of life is horrible. Nobody is saying anything to the contrary. But saying it isn't less terrible is blatant denialism. These are all people who are all someone's son or daughter, both now, and then.

fatherzine 4y ago
"Whole villages of France that were shot dead" That was with gloves on. The Eastern Front was on a whole different level. I stumbled at some point upon the fate of Belarus under 3 years of Nazi occupation, and just could not wrap my head around it. "Altogether, more than 2 million people were killed in Belarus during the three years of Nazi occupation, almost a quarter of the region's population,[1] including 500,000 to 550,000 Jews in the Holocaust in Belarus.[2]" "At least 5,295 Byelorussian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and some or all their inhabitants killed (out of 9,200 settlements that were burned or otherwise destroyed in Belarus during World War II),[3] and more than 600 villages like Khatyn had their entire population annihilated.[3]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Byelorussia_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Byeloruss...
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  Well, the French villages were over civilian resistance in wartime. I'm Ashkenazi Jewish myself, and I don't like to be the guy invoking The Holocaust at every opportunity because there's plenty of other demographics usually overlooked, and The Holocaust itself wasn't as civilian war casualties, it was state-sponsored murder, and the topic at-hand is civilians getting killed through the war itself, thus invoking The Holocaust would skew the stats on wartime civilian casualties if it was to be included relative to more recent conflicts. Commonly, the victims are counted separately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties But yes, it's horrifying, and I find it difficult to understand the true scale of. I've been in stadiums with tens of thousands of people, that certainly seems like a lot of lives, a lot of families, a lot of humanity. Hundreds of thousands or millions? Yeah, it boggles my mind, and it really wasn't very long ago whatsoever.
somenameforme 4y ago
You need to look at ratios. WW2 was such an unimaginably large scale war, that anecdotes don't really tell you anything. In WW2 the Allies lost 16,000,000 military and 45,000,000 civilians. The Axis powers lost 8,000,000 military and 4,000,000 civilians. Comparing this to e.g. Iraq is difficult due to a lack of reliable source of casualties, so we'll have to ballpark it. Leaked US figures (Iraq War documents) claim we killed 45,000 enemies, which is going to be a heavy overestimate. Civilian deaths in Iraq range from 110,000 to 1,0333,000. I'll pick a meet in the middle of 500,000. Using those figures we can measure this objectively: Civilians deaths per combatant death: --- WW2 Allied Forces = 2.8 WW2 Axis Powers = 0.5 Iraq War Iraqis = 12.7 --- Modern wars are smaller in scale (for now), but much worse on civilians as a ratio where they do happen. The reason is because of the nature of wars we get into. We invade countries which cannot competently defend themselves, and so it immediately transforms into an asymmetric Guerilla style defense against an occupying force. And in these scenarios its impossible for the invader to know who is an enemy and who is a civilian, so civilians suffer just terribly and over very long periods of time. The final drone strike of Afghanistan [1] is quite a symbolic one that will certainly go down in history. The US military initially claimed they killed a group of Islamic State forces planning an attack on US forces, after observing an ISIS militant placing explosives in his trunk. In reality they killed 1 man, 2 adult members of his family, and 7 children from the local neighborhood (who ran out after he honked his horn when getting home). Those "explosives" were bottles of water, and the "ISIS militant" was a longterm humanitarian aid worker, who was working for a US NGO and applying for a US visa. If not for the excessive media attention on the final strike of the war, that would likely have just been marked up as another successful strike, with some unfortunate collateral damage. And that was one day in a 20 year occupation. [1] - https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-strikes-islamic-state-group-b8bd9b0c805c610758bd1d3e20090c2c https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-strikes...
- neatze 4y ago
  This is almost like arguing that ISIS inflicted civilian casualties are only due to US air strikes, because it reads to me like you are arguing that Iraqi civilian casualties are not due to unimaginable number of IED's in civilian population, and not due to using combat storage/staging ares in civilian population, in addition, to country as whole being in a civil war a like state of many years.

fatherzine 4y ago

"Whole villages of France that were shot dead" That was with gloves on. The Eastern Front was on a whole different level. I stumbled at some point upon the fate of Belarus under 3 years of Nazi occupation, and just could not wrap my head around it. "Altogether, more than 2 million people were killed in Belarus during the three years of Nazi occupation, almost a quarter of the region's population,[1] including 500,000 to 550,000 Jews in the Holocaust in Belarus.[2]" "At least 5,295 Byelorussian settlements were destroyed by the Nazis and some or all their inhabitants killed (out of 9,200 settlements that were burned or otherwise destroyed in Belarus during World War II),[3] and more than 600 villages like Khatyn had their entire population annihilated.[3]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Byelorussia_during_World_War_II https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_occupation_of_Byeloruss...

hammyhavoc 4y ago
Well, the French villages were over civilian resistance in wartime. I'm Ashkenazi Jewish myself, and I don't like to be the guy invoking The Holocaust at every opportunity because there's plenty of other demographics usually overlooked, and The Holocaust itself wasn't as civilian war casualties, it was state-sponsored murder, and the topic at-hand is civilians getting killed through the war itself, thus invoking The Holocaust would skew the stats on wartime civilian casualties if it was to be included relative to more recent conflicts. Commonly, the victims are counted separately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties But yes, it's horrifying, and I find it difficult to understand the true scale of. I've been in stadiums with tens of thousands of people, that certainly seems like a lot of lives, a lot of families, a lot of humanity. Hundreds of thousands or millions? Yeah, it boggles my mind, and it really wasn't very long ago whatsoever.

somenameforme 4y ago

You need to look at ratios. WW2 was such an unimaginably large scale war, that anecdotes don't really tell you anything. In WW2 the Allies lost 16,000,000 military and 45,000,000 civilians. The Axis powers lost 8,000,000 military and 4,000,000 civilians. Comparing this to e.g. Iraq is difficult due to a lack of reliable source of casualties, so we'll have to ballpark it. Leaked US figures (Iraq War documents) claim we killed 45,000 enemies, which is going to be a heavy overestimate. Civilian deaths in Iraq range from 110,000 to 1,0333,000. I'll pick a meet in the middle of 500,000. Using those figures we can measure this objectively: Civilians deaths per combatant death: --- WW2 Allied Forces = 2.8 WW2 Axis Powers = 0.5 Iraq War Iraqis = 12.7 --- Modern wars are smaller in scale (for now), but much worse on civilians as a ratio where they do happen. The reason is because of the nature of wars we get into. We invade countries which cannot competently defend themselves, and so it immediately transforms into an asymmetric Guerilla style defense against an occupying force. And in these scenarios its impossible for the invader to know who is an enemy and who is a civilian, so civilians suffer just terribly and over very long periods of time. The final drone strike of Afghanistan [1] is quite a symbolic one that will certainly go down in history. The US military initially claimed they killed a group of Islamic State forces planning an attack on US forces, after observing an ISIS militant placing explosives in his trunk. In reality they killed 1 man, 2 adult members of his family, and 7 children from the local neighborhood (who ran out after he honked his horn when getting home). Those "explosives" were bottles of water, and the "ISIS militant" was a longterm humanitarian aid worker, who was working for a US NGO and applying for a US visa. If not for the excessive media attention on the final strike of the war, that would likely have just been marked up as another successful strike, with some unfortunate collateral damage. And that was one day in a 20 year occupation. [1] - https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-strikes-islamic-state-group-b8bd9b0c805c610758bd1d3e20090c2c https://apnews.com/article/afghanistan-kabul-taliban-strikes...

neatze 4y ago
This is almost like arguing that ISIS inflicted civilian casualties are only due to US air strikes, because it reads to me like you are arguing that Iraqi civilian casualties are not due to unimaginable number of IED's in civilian population, and not due to using combat storage/staging ares in civilian population, in addition, to country as whole being in a civil war a like state of many years.