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ShlomoS

>What historians try to do that?

Most of them.

>Are they respected in their field?

Yes.

>Are they trying to minimize casualties

Yes. The reality is, people don't want nuance. They don't want grey. They don't want to feel the discomfort of realizing that the "good guys" were not so good, that they started deliberately burning tens of thousands of innocent women and children alive before a single bomb had been dropped on an allied city. People do not want to understand that WW2 was a war between bad guys and bad guys, not some noble heroic battle of good vs evil.

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Curtis Lemay, who was the man in charge of the firebombing of Japan had no questions in his mind on the morality of the operation.

> Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier. - On the morality of the firebombing campaign

And also:

> There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn't bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders. [0]

I would imagine that this is the same logic that modern terrorists(not only Islamic) use to justify their killing of civilians. Aka, collective responsibility.[1]

[0] https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_responsibility

.. its also the mechanism by which it is acceptable to completely ignore the victims of America's illegal drone killings.

Putting aside our disagreements on the moral equivalency of the Axis and the Allies; it is simply factual incorrect to claim that Dresden was done before any bombings on allied cities. The Blitz happened in 1940.

Quite and one of my grandfathers was a bus driver for the corporation and drove Red Cross workers to Coventry.

My mother told me that he had told her you could see the city burning from 15 plus miles away.

>it is simply factual incorrect to claim that Dresden was done before any bombings on allied cities. The Blitz happened in 1940.

I did not claim that. I stated the objective and indisputable fact that England began deliberately burning women and children alive before Germany started bombing British civilians. The British terror campaign against German civilians began on 11 May 1940. The first German retaliation in kind was 4 September 1940.

This is a bad comment on multiple levels. It's factually incorrect: a LOT of bombs were dropped on the UK, and knowing that seems like a pretty low bar to having any opinion on the topic.

But beyond that, it's obviously ludicrous to reductively say "between bad guys and bad guys" and simultaneously complain that people don't want nuance.

>It's factually incorrect: a LOT of bombs were dropped on the UK

Yes. After we started firebombing German civilians. I didn't say Germany did not bomb civilians, I said England (the supposed "good guys") did it first.

Dresden was 44/45. The blitz was 1940. Please explain.

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