I was just explaining why the Japanese have never been taken to task for their atrocities in the decades leading up to World War II.
“...If the estimated casualty count of an invasion is too high, then don’t invade at all...” [Alberta’s Child, post 21]
“The better approach (in this case) is to ask the same question 15-20 years later. The public support drops dramatically. And it’s not because of some “revisionist history” nonsense, either. ...” [Alberta’s Child, post 126]
“I was just explaining why the Japanese have never been taken to task for their atrocities in the decades leading up to World War II.” [Alberta’s Child, post 190]
The Nuremberg trials were not a serious activity, just a sop to the Soviet Union. The Soviets hadn’t suffered so much in the Far East, so there wasn’t as big a push from the “community of nations” to step on the remnants of the Imperial Japanese power structure. Political realities intruded too.
“Revisionism” isn’t some recent development. In December 1945, Harper’s magazine published the results of a postwar poll of Americans. A significant majority approved of the employment of atomic bombs in combat against the Japanese. Some 25 to 30 percent expressed disappointment that the Japanese had surrendered so quickly, depriving the nation of the opportunity to use more such weapons.
America’s moralizers and other members of the chattering class reacted in dismay, and immediately set about jawboning the unwashed masses, arguing with undisguised eloquence about how we all needed to recall moral & religious instruction from childhood and learn to become kinder.
In this, they were substantially aided by a number of the scientists who had worked on the Manhattan Project - learned experts who suddenly got cold feet when they saw the results of what they’d theorized about. Out of this movement came The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a widely read, widely respected publication that is now reliably anti-military and anti-American.
Ironically, one of the movers and shakers behind this sudden reversal of sentiment was Leo Szilard - the same Hungarian expatriate physicist who argued Albert Einstein into signing that famous letter to FDR.
The sort of ex-post-facto moral nitpicking appearing in the posts I quoted is annoying. Especially when it’s indulged in by someone who has presumably lived a lotus-eating life of ease, in one of the nations which got liberated by the Allies, or defended by them - an existence made possible by the sweat & sacrifice of people a few generations ago, who weren’t so exalted as you are.
Anyone who purports to deplore loss of life in Axis countries in the same way they deplore loss of life by Allied nations is not practicing superior morality; it’s more like moral exhibitionism.