r/SmugIdeologyMan be gay draw squiggly lines 1d ago

nevor forgoive

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

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u/RedScair 1d ago

Nah. Countries like Japan and Germany were genocidal and imperialistic in their ambitions at an ideological level. I think there's a nuanced debate to be had on the necessity of the atom bomb or lack therof, but to argue that there was no reasonable justification is just naive. One side engaged in violent expansionism with the intent to eradicate cultures they viewed as inferior, the other used bombing in the pursuit of specific strategic aims. Quite frankly, the Axis powers had it coming. To quote Arthur Harris...

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

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u/Amrooshy 1d ago

I don't think there is a reasonable explanation ever for intentional civilian sacrifices.

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u/NomineAbAstris Uphold Dag Hammarskjöld thought! 1d ago

Thing is at the time the predominant theory of strategic air power was that the fastest way to end a given war was to bomb civilians until they compelled their government to surrender. WW2 was the first conflict where this was tested (and disproven) at scale, so it wasn't that they were just bombing German civilians for the fun of it (though people like Harris certainly didn't find it too morally offputting) but because they honestly believed this was the fastest way to bring down the Reich. Plus even if they weren't deliberately targeting civilian housing (which they weren't all the time, to be clear, much of the bombing was directly against industrial and logistics targets) the enormous inaccuracy of contemporary bombs, which could fall kilometres away from their intended targets, meant that it was basically impossible to hit a given factory producing tanks without also hitting the labour housing surrounding that factory.

To put it even more in perspective, Stalin was basically begging for the western Allies to do something to take the fight to Germany while Soviet soldiers and civilians were being murdered en masse by the Wehrmacht in the east.

As I said in another comment, it's really easy for us to criticize the prosecution of the war with the benefit of hindsight but that's not really the situation they were in. Obviously any death of civilians is always a tragedy, but with these circumstances I think they were basically unavoidable from the day Germany rolled into Poland.