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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody criticizes Britain because it killed more Nazi civilians

The bombing of Dresden has absolutely been condemned. British area bombing was contemporaneously criticised by America. It's why we flew our bombers in the day, despite that meaning more of them got shot down--so they could see what they'd hit.

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Bombing civilians wasn’t right when Germans did it and it wasn’t right when it was done to them in retaliation either.

I think in the next millennia, as the objective historians review the last century, they will write that the civilian towns were fire bombed in ww2 to gain military advantage and nobody cared about the innocent, just like how we talk about how Caesar becoming an emperor without getting lost in the daily politics and blindness of the day.

Edit: Added “in ww2” for clarity.

> in the next millennia, as the objective historians review the last century, they will write that the civilian towns were fire bombed in ww2 to gain military advantage and nobody cared about the innocent, just like how we talk about how Caesar becoming an emperor without getting lost in the daily politics and blindness of the day

Doesn't your example suggest the opposite? You're arguing for reductivism. The reductive view on WW2 would almost certainly skip over the bombing of Dresden and even the Holodomor, because those didn't have long-term strategic effects.

Also, Caesar was never an emperor. And plenty of people love to obsess about the daily politics of the late Republic.

I’m saying that those historians, being divorced from the guilt of committing those atrocities, will call things out as they see them. Fire bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and many other cities were done to gain military advantage, knowing full well that they were killing innocent civilians, because a) they were forcing the enemy to come out, and b) killing an entire population en masse. But only the losers of the war had to admit their part in these atrocities, although this was a crime against humanity.

Regarding Ceaser, I meant emperor in the modern sense not that he held the bundle of sticks during war time. The dude practically took over a republic from within using political games and bribery, assassinations and all kinds of stuff, but the gist of it is that, he wasn’t elected democratically by popular vote or anything, he took an army and pass the Rubicon and if you didn’t vote for him you could die in mysterious ways, and some people loved him because he handed out free grains (who cares), in the end, in ww2 innocent civilians, kids, elderly were killed by millions of tons of high explosives on purpose, and my conscience is just not okay with it.

> It's why we flew our bombers in the day

Is a questionable statement, many of the joint US|UK WWII bombings were carried out at night, in the Japanese theatre the Tokyo bombing by the US was carried out at night time as were most (IIRC) of the 71 bombings of other Japanese cities (not including Nagasaki and Hiroshima).

The atomic bombings in Japan were carried out in daylight, accompanied by photography aircraft, with radio calls to proceed based on low cloud cover - the primary objective in the bomb | not bomb on the day decision was visibility to record the effect of the new weapons.

> so they could see what they'd hit.

Such as the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

> Such as the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima?

You're claiming the nuking of Japan is not criticized?

Your comment that I responded to implied that the British engaged in indiscriminate area bombing while the Americans did not. Nothing to do with who was or was not criticised. Don’t straw-man.

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