Guaporense wrote:I wasn't consciously trying to sound dismissive. I only said what he was saying in a short and precise way. Also, in Brazil we generally do not have the strict black and white view that the English speaking world has: Allies = good guys, Axis = bad guys, we don't hold everything that the allies did in high regard and examples such as the atomic bombings are used to illustrate how WW2 did not have any "good guy", a professor in the university where I had my undergrad in a lecture cited the strategic bombing of residential areas in Axis countries in the same sentence as the holocaust.
Oddly enough, I don't have a black or white view either, but it sounds like I had better professors than you. Strategic bombing and the holocaust are two very different events. Mentioning them in the same sentence, unless it was to say how different they were, is at best facile, and facile professors are perhaps the worst.
Yes, I do not personally approve mass killing of civilians of enemy countries: dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs on residential areas made of wood, burning the civilian population in a firestorm, as happened in Japan several times, is not something I personally regard as morally justifiable. And Japan was bombed in 1945, when the outcome of the war was not hard to see (well, most people here say the outcome of the war was crystal clear already in July 1941 when Barbarossa was proceeding slightly more slower than initially planned).
I am glad you don't approve of mass murder or genocide, which is what I think you meant, but strategic bombing in war is not mass murder or genocide. And hindsight makes everything crystal clear, unless you happen to have your insights generated by bad professors.
For another example, the 1943 bengal famine, killed a couple millions of Indians of hunger while the resources of the Western allies were being used to keep the UK well feed. Same way, a couple million jews died of hunger in concentration camps, while the resources of Germany were being used to keep Germany well feed. The ethnic group running the colonial empire takes priority, right?
The Bengal famine was also not an act of war, and little different from the famine's that plagued the world for years after the war. They were a consequence of the war. And I doubt any Britain that lived through the war's rationing would ever describe it as a period when they were "well fed"...do you know when rationing ended in Britain? Hint: it wasn't on 8 May 1945...anyway, you are simply voicing a variation on the moral equivalency argument.
The Nazis were essentially a extreme application of ideological elements existing in the western world during that time. These elements also existed in the Allied countries, however, to a much smaller degree in the western allies. While the Soviet Union, the frontline player in the allied side, showed equal or less respect to general human life/individual rights than Nazi Germany, Japan and Italy did.
Did the Soviets, British, Americans, French, Dutch, Belgians, Italians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Greeks, etc engage in systematic mass murder? Even for the Japanese it was chaotic mass murder, although that is hardly an excuse either.
WW2 happened essentially because Nazi Germany wanted to get a colonial empire, like the ones France, UK, US and the USSR (exp. Ukraine) had. However, to implement that desire it would be required to exterminate much more people in a much smaller amount of time than their role models. It's no coincidence that soon after WW2 the concepts of racism and colonial empires were abolished.
Er, nonsense. Hitler and the Nazi's didn't give two hoots about a "colonial empire" except as Lebensraum in the East and a subjugated West. Perhaps similar to the Belgian treatment of the Congo...so the Belgians were brutes, does that mean the Germans were justified in even worse brutality? And the purification of the "German race" and expulsion/destruction of "undesirables".
Finally, if one argues that the allies were not so morally superior it does not mean necessarily that one is an advocate of fascism. Since, well, that doesn't mean that one thinks the allied government were not evil in the first place.

The US government, after WW2, turned into a powerful organization that managed to interfere much more on civil society and on the world as whole, establishing military bases all over the world, it maintain's a "colonial" presence in many countries, in essence, it became closer to a fascist government in many aspects compared to the minimal US state of the 1920's.
Oddly enough, you seem to be the only one arguing morality and who was superior to whom.
I understand that they are worse than wounded from a strategic point of view as they represent permanent losses. In terms of permanent losses of personnel Germany fared far worse than the western allies did in the western front in 1944 (like you said, 800,000 POWs plus several tens of thousands of KIA). I perfectly understand that.
No, they aren't "worse than wounded", since wounded involve a whole another set of problems. They simply are permanently gone. So if you understand that you won't make the error again?