No on scale - as to severity there is some question about whether all dead childern are equal. But I don’t think there is anyone in the thread who feels taht and Axis victory would be preferable.
No, indeed I am not.
But not because of the often held notion that American soldiers are say ‘better’.
Most people don’t even know that the Allies commited any atrocities. Which just feeds the silly notion of superiority.
The pointing out of such deeds is done to negate that effect.
The Japanese are different, in that they have a different cultural background. There is also a difference between the Eastern front and the Western. Also a difference between what went on behind the front lines in the East. I feel that, generally speaking and certainly with regards to the Western Front, the ‘avarage’ German front-line soldier (that includes waffen-ss) was as (un)civil in warfare as his allied counterpart. The notion that only ‘them nasty Germans’ did bad stuff is a myth.
Point is, war is bad. There are plenty of occasions where an absence of authority makes it all to easy for armed men to let themselves go. It happens everywhere and we all carry the seed.
The longer you are in such a situation, the more likely this becomes the real world. The life as a peaceful, unarmed working man is far away. Some Germans lived through 6 years of it.
Given time the Western front too could easily have deteriorated to worse levels.
Speaking purely for myself, most emphatically no. I don’t think anyone else here is making such a claim either. Indeed I think that those who have cited barbaric behavior by Allied forces would likely be all over someone who put forth such an idea unless it were based purely on the ‘all dead children are equal’ train of thought.
The claim that American (and by extension all Allied) boys never did any wrong in a combat zone, World War II or otherwise, is just playing at no true Scotsman and is clearly untrue though.
You summed it up better than I did, dissonance.
Although Grim_Beaker I think the thread continued well past the actual question more or less being answered partly because a lot of us are uncomfortable with merely being better than Nazis (or WWII Imperial Japanese Soldiers). I like to think we set the bar a lot higher than that, and at least somewhat achieved it.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Grelby *
**This is a disgusting attitude. Are you not at all sorry about civilian deaths in Afghanistan because their government harbored Al-Qaeda? Would you be completely cool with the fire-bombing of Basrah or Baghdad for the crimes committed by the Saddam Hussein regime? Was any suffering that those civilians DID undergo “well and truly deserved” because of what that regime did to the Kurds?</b></quote>
Jeebus, Grilby, get a grip. The Nazis exported their fucking wars. They decided they would go out and conquer by force other peopel, killing, and torturing them. They did it methodically and with great vigor. Considering what Japan and Germany did to the innocent people of Europe and Asia during and prior to WWII, they used up all their fucking innocence. Yeah, it’s terrible that innocent women and children were bombed to bits, but you know what? Those women and children just might have been OK if their husbands and fathers hadn’t been such a bunch of militant asswipes.
Payback, as they say, is a bitch, and anything less than rendering Japan and Germany into huge slabs of molten glass after what they did to so many innocent people constitutes a form of mercy.
I suppose that you think all the innocent victims of the Japanese and German armies were just so much expendable trash whose lives meant nothing? That once dead their existence no longer counted for anything? Do you feel that way about individuals who are murdered by other individuals?
I would prefer to consider the events in Iran and Iraq separately, thank you very much and within their historical contexts, but I will say this: I do not feel the U.S. had sufficient justification for its current war against Iraq. The first one, yes, the second one, no.
<b>Finally, if you can justify the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the firebombing of Tokyo and the razing of Dresden and the deaths of all those civilians, you can justify any act of terror committed against the United States.</b>
No, I can’t. Speak for yourself.
<b>ALL of the belligerents involved are responsible for the horror of war, and to attempt to drop it all on the “bad guy” is irresponsible and cowardly. Some actions can NEVER be justified, and to see some attempting to do so sickens me. **
Your notion that the victims are as responsible for the horrors of war as their torturers and murders is what’s sickening.
Others have done a very good job of disabusing you of the notion that U.S. soldiers have always been perfect in their conduct on the field of battle.
My personal feeling is that U.S. soldiers have consistently held to a very high degree of professionalism and morality during their wars. There have been times and places when the level of morality slipped, but given the nature of war it’s completely understandable that it would. Frex, if I had to crawl across a beachhead watching my buddies get their faces blown off by 50 mm machine gun rounds and knowing I could be next at any second, the first person in an enemy uniform I saw would very likely get shot no matter what they were doing. It is hard for me to understand the kind of self-control that it would take to accept a surrender under such circumstances.
In my view its important to distinguish between two levels of atrocities.
The first I will call for want of a better term ‘background’ atrocities. These are the events that get out of control sometimes in all armies in all wars. Prisoners get shot, medical ships get bombed, women get raped, villagers get massacred, not from state policy but from the behaviour of individual men and individual units. This can occur to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the discipline of troops, the type of conflict and whether the state will punish offenders. And factors such as racial hate for instance as was common on both sides in the Pacific will make it worse. You can minimise this with codes of war that are enforced but fundamentally you cant stop it, its always there, always has been and always will.
Here is another Allied example of this first category:
Now this was illegal and it was wrong although we can all understand why it happened which is why I have used this particular example. It wasn’t a state policy and nor was it cold-blooded (see my bolding). And things like this are just going to happen.
http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/massacres.html
The second category is organised, deliberate and systematic war crimes sanctioned by a state. There is nothing random about the actions of the einsatzgruppen or say the NKVD breaking Latvian resistance, they are enforcing state policy. Unlike the first category it could simply be stopped. The state in question chooses to act that way.
So I dont equate Allied atrocities with Nazi ones as in the main, the Allied crimes lie in the excesses of human beings in the heat of battle whereas many of the Nazi crimes are systematic and to me thats an important distinction. I think it is important though to remember the Allied examples as they did happen and we are not as lilywhite as some would make us and indeed no-one ever is.
The big difference is that in the German and Japanese (and to a lesser extent the Italian and Soviet) armies, the atrocities were conducted as part of a deliberate policy. The American and British armies never encouraged the commission of atrocities.
I think that is the key Little Nemo. I would accept the fact that general German GI’s were generally decent people. I’ve read numerous accounts of attempted assassinations of Hitler by his subordinates, military officers in the German army who strenuously objected to certain codes of conduct (and who were replaced because of that) and so forth. One important difference between the German army and the allied forces however was the existence of the SS. This branch of the military committed some of the worst atrocities in the European theatre with the full understanding and encouragement of the top levels of the German command. No such acceptance of barbarous behavior at high levels existed on the side of the Allies.
In Japan, however, it was much worse. You did NOT want to be a POW of the Japanese. US soldiers captured by the Japanese had a much higher death rate (close to 30%) than US soldiers captured by the Germans (around 5%).
I, personally, feel that Susanann is frustrating to debate with. She ignores factual data, is uninformed, and has difficulty viewing things in a non black and white fashion. However, I also feel that implying that Susanann’s war veteran relatives are possible war criminals is very insulting and unwarranted. Yes, prove to her that U.S. service men aren’t all liberating angels. We need to recognize and remember the mistakes of our military in order to help prevent them in the future. At the same time, let’s not needlessly slur or suggest impropriety on the part of U.S. war veterans that we don’t even know.
No. Lt. Calley was not dishonerably discharged, nor was he found guilty. He was tried, but the case was thrown out on appeal, due to a technicality.
Last I checked, Calley was a Major in a low-profile desk job.
DUUUUH!
My bad.
Calley was convicted, tried, but released at Nixon’s orders.
Here’s his bio—
Tars Tarkas
I find your refusal to pay attention to what I am saying, and decision to instead make up ridiculous accusations, to be insulting. Do you have some sort of cognitive disorder which causes your brain to insert bigoted statements into posts of those with which you disagree? Is this some sort of advanced coping mechanisms which allows you to dismiss all opposing viewpoints?
Zsofia
That is neither accurate nor relevant. You implied that Susanann had said that an American who is friends with a Japanese person is a traitor. Susanann never said that (and if fact specifically denied it), and none of your imitations of logic change that. I don’t see why you people are so willing to reword other posts. If you have a problem with something in a post, then respond to it. Responding to something that didn’t appear in a post serves no useful purpose. Why even bother logging onto the message board? If you people are going to just keep ignoring what people say, it would help ease the strain on the server if you would just stay off the site, and make up other people’s posts all by yourselves. Plus other people’s actual posts wouldn’t get in the way of your fantasies.
No, the treaty states “In case, in time of war, one of the belligerents is not a party to the Convention, its provisions shall nevertheless remain in force as between the belligerents who are parties thereto.” What this means is that even though Britain and the US were allied with a country that had not signed the treaty, Germany was still bound to treat Brtish and US prisoners according to the treaty. It does not mean that Soviet soldiers were protected.
Eolbo:
I agree that there are shades of grey, and sometimes there is no good reason to not accept a surrender, but sometimes there are. I don’t think that soldiers are, in every situation, required to accept a surrender, and they are justified, when unsure as to whether someone is surrendering, in erring on the side of safety (their own, that is).
Grelby
“Economic exploitation”? “Oppression of the Palestinians”? You think that’s comparable to the evil that the Germans perpetrated? Germany built planes, filled them with bombs, and dropped them over civilians. This was an official act of the German government. Everyone in Germany knew that that the bombers were being built. Everyone in Germany knew what their purpose was (even if they didn’t know the details). And as an analog you present such fuzzy notions as “economic exploitation”. Yes, it’s possible to rationalize terrororism on the basis of “economic explotiation”. It’s also possible to rationalize terrorism on the basis that Jews are subhuman creatures of Satan out to destroy the world. Terrorists will always find a way to convince themselves that they’re right regardless of whether we accept the firebombings of WWII. But your implication that “these people are building bombs that are being dropped over us” is no more valid a justification than “I don’t think we got a fair deal in our trade relations” is absurd.
So the Chinese were responsible for the Rape of Nanking? Sometimes good people have to kill other good people to stop bad people from winning, and that’s just the way it is. Had the Air Force shot down one of those hijacked planes, would you have condemned the act, and called it “irresponsible and cowardly” to blame the terrorists? I’m not saying that the victim of aggression has carte blanche to commit atrocities, but I am saying that it is absurd to judge actions committed to ensure one’s own survival and actions to ensure another’s destruction by the same standards.
Evil Captor
I can see why children get a pass, but why the women? Are women more virtuous than men? Women raised the men that became murderers. They married the men that were murderers. They tended to prefer those with spiffier uniforms (and those spiffier uniforms were usually a result of being better at murderering than their fellow murderers).
Y’know, selectively bolding the parts you like while deliberately ignoring the parts of speech that harm your position does not make your argument more effective. Note the word as that initiates the clause you bolded. I do not think this means what you think that it means.
Leaving the lack of bolding of the word as in that sentence aside, the opening sentence of Article 82 is omitted in this reading. It states:
The provisions of the present Convention must be respected by the High Contracting Parties under all circumstances.
Not in circumstances between signatories, but at all times. It was the position of Germany that the Geneva Convention did not apply between the USSR and Germany, and this was the position of the defense council at the Nuremberg. While the Nuremburg trials did not give a direct ruling on this interpretation (that I can find, at least) as the defendants were being tried for crimes against humanity, etc and not directly for violations of the Geneva Convention of 1929, the defendants were convicted for actions done on the Eastern Front. Even accepting for the moment the interpretation that the Geneva Convention itself did not apply, it runs straight into other problems as Admiral Canaris’ notes as read into the Nuremberg testimony shows.
Grim_Beaker While it is no doubt true that many German soldiers in the 1939-45 timeframe werein fact decent human beings, it should be noted that many of the early “special actions” in the east were carried out by reserve police battallions, consisting of ordinary decent Germans who were too old to be of use at the front.
Neither does making baseless accusations of intellectual dishonesty. I bolded that part because I believed that it needed to be emphasized, not because I was ignoring the rest (if I were, why quote it?). I could have accused Dissonance of deliberately ignoring the part that I bolded, but I don’t consider the mere fact that someone does not attach the same meaning or importance to a phrase to be evidence of dishonesty. Apparently some of us are more suspicious than others.
And note that the Raiders ended their preseason with a devastating loss.
Do you have an argument as to the significance of the word “as”?
IIf I had included the word “as”, would you have directed my attention to the phrase “in force” which precedes that word? I didn’t include the word “as” because it’s not part of the phrase; it is a preposition and as such serves to connect different phrase; it seemed inappropriate to me to bold a connecting word when I was bolding only one of the phrases which it connects.
Dissonance:
Yes, and one of the provisions is that it applies between parties of the treaty. Arguing that the treaty applies to prisoners of a nonsignatory on the basis of this article is circular reasoning. Even if Article 82 contradicts the later Article, why does Article 82 take precedence?
I am not defending the conduct, only the position that it is not prohibited by the Geneva Convention. Although I do think that the threat of mistreatment of opposing prisoners is a valuable incentive for the other side to treat one’s prisoners well.
Please. You said:
And just avoided saying when we can feel irrational towards particular groups. I’m very interested how we can feel interested towards a group without being bigots. Keep in mind we are not talking about someone who was in the POW camp, so that excuse is gone before you start.
You also said
Hey, playing the race card, i see. Yet just now you accuse me of playing race games. Pot, Kettle, yada yada.
Yes, this is true, but using it to defend someone who hates people because what their grandparents did to one of her friends 58 years ago is ridiculous. If Susanann was in a POW camp no one would care if she hates the Japanese or not, because of past experiences. Since she was not their, and is only going on second hand information, and has made the jump to condemn all Japanese, not just the ones in the camp, she is violating your statement, why are you defending her?
The word “as” indicates that in a war between a non-signatory and a signatory nation, the terms of the conventions still apply. Article 82 need not be taken to imply 3 parties in a conflict. It can involve 2: a belligerent who is a signatory and a belligerent who is not. The conditions nonetheless apply as they would between two signatory nations.
No, they are not separate articles. The two sentences compose the entirety of Article 82 and Article 82 alone. It reads, fully, from here:
The link is directly to Article 82, but the page is the complete text of the Convention Between the United States of America and Other Powers, Relating to Prisoners of War; July 27, 1929. If you can find a provision in the Convention that states that it only applies to signatory power, I’d be happy to change my view on the matter. The fact is, it isn’t there.
This somewhat misses the point of what Admiral Canaris was saying. Even if the German claim that the Geneva Convention didn’t apply was on solid legal grounds, Germany was still bound by preexisting international law, such as for example the Hague Convention of The Laws and Customs of War on Land, of which Germany was a signatory. Chapter II of the Annex to the Convention, starting with Article 4 lays out what is expected conduct. Amongst them is that “They [prisoners] must be humanely treated,” something that Germany completely failed to do. Hitler also considered denouncing Geneva altogether later in the war, as can be seen here. Such a denunciation would have been as illegal as deciding that the Convention didn’t apply to the USSR, as the requirements of denunciation are clearly laid out in Article 96, bolding mine: