Did you know that during WWII that several orders of magnitude more German (and Japanese) civilians were killed than American? Or does that also not fly with you? You can’t quantify whether a position is moral or not based on the raw numbers of deaths, one way or another. A slightly less ignorant way to look at it would be to ask the seemingly simple question of WHY conflict happened in the first place. Who initiated the conflicts and why did they do so?
Or, I guess you could just rant about cutting out the Middle East (you generally capitalize it btw…well, unless you plan to cut it from the pages of history) and doing some simplistic body count thingy to judge moral relativity in a complex conflict (why think? why research? just do the emotional thing and look at the body count to determine who is right or wrong! then bunch them all together and advocate cutting them all from the pages of history! it’s the right thinking way that any bigot would admire…)
I’ve always found the metric of “who targets what?” to be much more useful than Bodycount Bingo.
-If 100% of Hamas members quit civilian population centers and launched their rockets from open fields in agricultural areas, would Israel target them, or Palestinian civilians? Who, then, is being targeted?
-If 100% of the IDF got into rowboats and rowed out to sea, would Hamas indiscriminately rain down rockets on them, or on Israeli towns/villages/cities? Who, then, is being targeted?
Seems fairly non-ambiguous if you’re actually interested in an honest analysis of facts, rather than supporting some recreational outrage.
Who is the rest of the world? All the great powers during the war committed similar ‘crimes’. Not that this has much to do with the point I was trying to make, but can you tell me who constitutes ‘the rest of the world’ who say that the US committed war crimes by it’s actions in WWII? Does ‘the rest of the world’ similarly condemn, well, every other participant of the that war as well? And if so (let’s say they aren’t being ridiculous hypocrites, for the sake of argument), what does it even mean to say that ‘war crimes’ were committed by every…single…participant? Does that put the US on par with Germany? Japan? Does that put the UK on par with both? Does it put the US/UK on par with the Soviet Union? The Soviets on par with Japan/Germany? What about the myriad crimes committed in the Balkins, Eastern Europe…how about those committed against the Jews by non-German nations?
It’d be far from a unanimous conclusion in any of the countries brutalized by the Axis Powers. And it’d be an uncomfortable sentiment in Great Britain or Japan.
The issue isn’t whether the US committed war crimes, it is which side in that particular conflict were, essentially, in the right to be engaging in that war in the first place.
In highfalutin Latin tags, the terms of art are jus ad bellum (the right to go to war), and jus in bello (right conduct within war).
A “just war” can be fought using “unjust conduct”, of course. The two are not necessarily related.
The fact is that, no matter how the US fought WW2 - whether justly or unjustly in conduct - more Axis civilians were going to die for the simple reason that the Axis powers lost the war - meaning it was going to be fought, in part, in their countries; aside from the Aleutiens, not a single part of the continental US was actually invaded by the Axis. This does not of course mean that the Axis held the moral high ground.
In the specific case of Israel, it would appear that some posters are in effect stating that Israel could only hold the “high ground” morally if it allowed an equality of civilian deaths with their enemies. I suspect that is not a theory of justice in war that would appeal to many Israelis, or indeed anyone actually likely to be involved in a war themselves.
That was exactly the point you were trying to make; that killing civilians wasn’t a yardstick of any kind. because, well.. *we *killed a lot of civilians and we are still the good guys.
Um, no…it wasn’t the point I was making actually. It’s that you can’t judge the relative merits of a conflict or who has or doesn’t have the moral high ground based solely on the body count. In point of fact, WE (meaning the US) didn’t kill most of the civilians who died in Germany or the European theater. We certainly did kill the majority of the civilians who died in Japan though. Neither fact is much of a metric to judge the relative merits of the conflict or set who was or wasn’t on the moral high ground.
My, what the rest of the world™ must think of the British. They were, after all, pioneering the bombing of civilians while the US had yet to enter the war. And while the USAAF continued to try to fool itself that it could target anything smaller than a city with any real degree of precision, the RAF abandoned that fiction and adopted a deliberate plan of area bombing of cities designed to ‘dehouse’ the German population. I noticed you list your residence in the Netherlands. You might want to write to your government representative about the memorial they erected to commemorate the sacrifices of the 55,573 [del]members of Allied Bomber Command[/del] Allied war criminals. You might also want to look into hunting down the war criminals of your own from No. 320 (Dutch) Squadron, RAF, which was part of RAF Bomber Command.
Another one of those “this has been done from time immemorial” …
Israel has yet to climb that plateau where they can be treated as US or British when it comes to killing civilians. They’d like to be treated as untouchables of the World – God knows everyone arguing on their behalf on this board placed them there already - but it’s a hard climb and not many are impressed to that degree. Now, if only they could bomb those who are still not impressed they’d be going places.
Actually, the “Israel can do no wrong!” canard is propagated 100% by you and yours, most often as a simple diversionary strawman when you’re getting your head handed to you on factual/logical grounds. Not one single person you’re arguing with in this thread, not one, has refrained from criticizing Israel. Which, of course, leads one to wonder why y’all are so keen to use a label that even a cursory bit of paying-attention would have cleared up for ya. Personally, I suspect that it’s for a similar reason that we now have two posters posting in this thread to do nothing, at all, other than bewail how awfully they’re beaten and how they can’t even bother to post intelligently on the topic because, gasp!, people here disagree with them.
See, despite that lil’ ol’ annoying bit about how the facts all contradict your claims, you just know that it’s a Good Guys vs Bad Guys sorta thing, and you know who the Bad Guys are. Facts just get in the way. IIRC, it was your claim that those who don’t reflexively share your anti-Israel animus are introducing, what was your phrase… “false complexity” into the system? Obviously, your failure to sell your narrative is other people’s fault.
Sorry for the double post, but, yep, found the quote:
So, in other words, to you, people pointing out your lack of knowledge, or lack of comprehension, or lack of awareness of context? They’re all just trying to throw you off the scent. Because, after all, you know you’re right. And what do they have, against your gnosis? Facts you weren’t aware of? Pshaw. Context that makes an issue more complex than a simplistic Good Guys/Bad Guys gloss? Who needs it! Evidence that you’re ignoring in order to come to your conclusion? Why are they playing such dishonest games?!?
Truly, with such adroit debating tactics, I have no idea why you can post about nothing in this thread other than how powerless you are to support your own position. I’m baffled. Really.
Scout’s honor.
OurLordPeace, read the response above, and my warning below:
Deja Vu, no? This is what they do here: devalue the poster to diminish their position. See it above, the proof is in the pudding. Do not participate in Israeli threads. Ever. This will my last post in this thread but felt obligated to highlighted this to OurLordPeace in case s/he comes back to look at the posts in the future.
See, there you go again Finn, oppressing him and keeping him down. To paraphrase a little known and highly obscure quote: Everyone…come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! newcomer (et al) is/are being repressed! Or suppressed! Or perhaps oppressed! Or, perhaps are just being pressed!
Well, it’s cheaper than a movie and there’s free coff… hey, wait a minute, where’s the free coffee???
Curse you Zionist Overlords, curse youuuuuuuuuuuu!
You’ve never heard of the PM system?
Or are your posts merely preening displays of being fashionably-oppressed-via-debate, designed not to warn anybody at all, but to make a spectacle of yourself as you complain bitterly about how you keep losing debates in GD and obviously that just shows how much of a Martyr For The Truth you are?
Do I even need to ask?
Actually, it is fairly ironic that someone named “Honesty” is so relentlessly wrong on the facts. Absent of any malice on your part, it’s still ironic. Of course, it’s also true that you’re now objecting to people quoting your (and other people’s) own words, showing how they’re in error, and then responding to them. I mean, I gueeeeeees that you have a point, in as much as the fact that a poster who is prone to numerous mistakes of fact and logic, is indeed pretty much devalued as a useful source of information. But the solution to that is, wait for it… to post with actual facts and valid, sound logic.
You see how you keep making this personal? I said no such things. Your username is a spin off one of the most racist books ever made. Period. What if I were to make comments based on that rather than focus on your post? Frankly, if I made it an issue, I’m sure I’d be (rightfully) told to focus on your posts rather than your username. Besides, unless I’m trying to hit below the belt, why would I? The problem you have FinnAgain, is that your debating style is pedantic and childish, you snip and cut posts into digestible quotes , and from them, you assemble what basically equates to a strawman that’s out-of-context from the original post.
The problem is that you aren’t here to debate, in any style. You, and others, have shown up here specifically to state that debating is pointless here.
Finn’s just saying that he thinks you are wrong. There is only one way to deal with that which works here - and that is, to prove you are right, using facts and arguments (that is, to debate).