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Comment by mythrwy | Hacker News Reader

I suspect he may have had a preemptive opinion on that even though he wasn't around any more when it started.

“WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” - SB

We are told a version of things, and maybe that version is even mostly true, but I'm less sure about this now then I was when I was a kid in grade school.

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We are often told that the conflict in WW2 was a conflict between a clearly good side and a clearly evil side. While it's true one of the sides was certainly the a much greater evil, it would be disingenuous to hide the short comings of the "good" side. The USA was a country that at the time still practiced segregation, and was the only country to use nuclear weapons. The British, French and Belgian empires and their conduct in India and their African colonies was not far off from what the Germans were accused of. It's not good to whitewash these facts.

So, resisting attack isn't allowed unless you're pure as the driven snow? This is nonsense.

The points I am trying to make is that it isn't black and white as "resisting attack", and that the history that is taught shouldn't be whitewashed. The Indians fought in the 2 world wars for the freedoms of others while their own freedoms were not guaranteed under British colonialism. 1/6th of all the "British" forces in ww2 were Indian, while India was suffering British induced famines due to redirection of supplies and scorched earth policy of the British in the south east Asian theatre. Do you think it's fair to them to not acknowledge this fact and teach it in history?

We were talking about WW2. It absolutely was black and white. Trying to deny that is itself a despicable act, in the same spirit as Holocaust denial. Pointing to other acts of evil alters that not one whit.

I explicitly said the Nazis were evil. But please do not underplay the suffering of the colonial subjects of the allied powers. That is a despicable act.

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