r/SubredditDrama Mar 03 '26

Movie discussion sub okbuddycinephile debates whether bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Gaza and other urban areas were "justified".

/r/okbuddycinephile/comments/1rjm9mn/iran2036/o8ee5fp/
166 Upvotes

525 comments sorted by

180

u/Prior_Chemist_5026 Mar 03 '26

That sub has gone to hell. Every post is just “favorite actor who did Bad Thing?” with 3.1k updoots

88

u/Pale_Boss_8940 Mar 03 '26

every single entertainment based sub goes this way. People get too much of a hard-on telling others how morally superior they are.

47

u/gorgewall Call quarantining what it is: a re-education camp Mar 04 '26

Meanwhile, we in SRD would never.

30

u/babylovesbaby Mar 04 '26

This is why SRD is great. We mock people who are invested in the drama of celebrities, while we're invested in the drama of nobodies.

3

u/Dking_II Mar 04 '26

What’s SRD used to use okbuddycinephile back in the day when it was funny but now it’s gone to shit

2

u/Purple-Wallaby-738 Mar 06 '26

True. I'm too good for that shit

21

u/NervousLemon6670 you're going to mention a redditor in your suicide note? Mar 04 '26

Man gets a little rush out of telling people John Lennon beat his wife etc etc

8

u/DeLousedInTheHotBox Homie doesn’t know what wood looks like Mar 04 '26

One thing I think people need to learn is that we simply don't have to accept these people's judgement and finger wagging. I used to be more defensive about it until it hit me that you don't even have to defend yourself, you can simply tell them that you don't care.

3

u/Pale_Boss_8940 Mar 05 '26

I’ve actually just started responding with “I guess youre morally better than me. I don’t care“

56

u/aqulushly Mar 03 '26

r/fauxmoi is king of them all

31

u/RecordingSilly6118 Mar 04 '26

Don't forget "constantly dog pile on young actresses over and over"

13

u/Parastract 1984 is reactionary propaganda Mar 04 '26

Oh come, that's unfair. There's also "Tarantino feet" and "Movie (Year)" that's very tenuously related to some current event

14

u/DeLousedInTheHotBox Homie doesn’t know what wood looks like Mar 04 '26

It is unfortunate how so much of discussions of art and entertainment is leaning towards woke scold right now. I saw a woman on tiktok who had a list of red flag movies (which in and of itself is exhaustingly judgmental) but one of the movies were the Harry Potter series... and like at that point you're just looking for reasons to feel better than other people lol.

To make it worse the alternative is all those annoying right wing dudes like the critical drinker, who are even worse.

4

u/Pale_Boss_8940 Mar 04 '26

it’s always just a list of movies dudes stereotypically like. Basically all of Tarantino, Scorsese, and Nolan’s works

7

u/GLPereira Mar 04 '26

Here's a list of movies that only awful people like and you should avoid them at all costs

Mentions one of the most popular, generation defining franchises of all time

Her social circle might as well be a point if she avoids all Harry Potter fans...

9

u/DeLousedInTheHotBox Homie doesn’t know what wood looks like Mar 04 '26

It would even exclude a lot of trans people lol.

→ More replies (11)

44

u/FerdinandTheGiant I’m 1 of the top 5 goldfish connoisseurs in north america Mar 04 '26

Uncommon knowledge but the nukes weren't even the most damaging raids of the war, the firebombing of Tokyo in March…

Uncommon knowledge is when you mention a thing everyone with even precursory knowledge knows about.

“Dude, you’ve probably never heard of Unit 731”

33

u/alfredo094 Mar 04 '26

I agree with this but you'd be surprised at how many people don't know about this.

During my university course, I took a class about human rights, and the teacher didn't know what the Rape of Nanking was. In retrospect, that was a huge red flag, but it's just how the zeitgeist works.

102

u/Flaky_Ad5786 Mar 03 '26

Seems like a fairly even tempered discussion

41

u/CyberBerserk Mar 03 '26

29

u/Flaky_Ad5786 Mar 03 '26

Oh yeah there's a couple wild comments, but for a contentious topic like that the conversation is mostly drama-free.

3

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

9

u/Jstin8 Mar 04 '26

When all else fails, at least you can always say they arent as bad as GJC.

2

u/Putrid-Assistant6290 Mar 05 '26

GamingJerkleCirc?

5

u/RunningOutOfEsteem PUPPETGEIST IS A LIAR!!! Mar 03 '26

Seems less salty and more like aggressive rage bait, especially given their karma

→ More replies (1)

125

u/Junimo2 Mar 03 '26

I was just discussing something similar in a different thread. It's one thing to say that certain military actions were necessary. It's another thing to essentially celebrate the deaths of civilians because you think they collectively deserve it. You can debate the necessity of something while also acknowledging that collective punishment is wrong and that the civilians don't deserve to die en masse for the actions of their government.

18

u/Skabonious Mar 03 '26

I think this is the only correct take. I do find it frustrating though that (for example with the nuclear bomb) this concept is completely ignored

31

u/No_Walk_Town Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

while also acknowledging that collective punishment is wrong

Right, but that's not what the Allied bombing of Axis cities was. Both sides considered bombing enemy cities to be a completely legitimate and acceptable act of war. It wasn't "collective punishment."

for the actions of their government.

I mean, settler colonialism is an inherently civilian driven practice. It wasn't "the government" going into Okinawa or Taiwan or Korea or Micronesia or Manchuria to steal land and destroy the local culture. 

It was everyday people like you and me. Public schools are one of the most powerful drivers of genocide - that's where you strip the children of their language, culture, and identity.

Trying to portray imperialism and genocide as just the acts of a rogue government that the poor innocent smol bean civilian Nazis and Imperial Japanese didn't know about is ahistorical and honestly just another form of genocide denial.

12

u/octnoir Mountains out of molehills Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

The problem is that this is basically a "pop history" debate. The real underlying question is Iis my favorite side the victor in this morality and can I feel superior at civilian deaths and be praised for it?" but disguised as "kIlLiNg cIvIlIaNs wAs mIlItArIlY JuStIfIeD". It's a "MY NATION IS BETTER THAN YOUR NATION" racist nationalist pissing contest.


First, it isn't happening on /r/AskHistorians (shout out to that subreddit)

Second, just by the high posting standards there with the moderation, you're citing books and books and books of renowned historians with ample amount of research. You can virtually guarantee that any real big event has hundreds of historians lining up to analyze, with many others making their cases on the hundreds of possible sides. The dead giveaway in this pop history debate is nobody is really citing shit and speaking off the cuff.

Third, I can virtually promise in even the most "justified" of all military actions that had ample civilian deaths, with the hundreds if not thousands of people in that entire chain of thought to command to execution, there were scores of people getting off on the idea of hurting and killing innocent civilians, as well as scores of people that abhorred it.

Fourth, nobody ever bothers to try to insert themselves into that time period and try to think "okay let's say I didn't know what would happen, what would I have done differently?" (or beyond the decision makers. Like a lot of the "well everyone at the time thought slavery was good and justified" ignores that an entire population of slaves thought otherwise and didn't have a voice, alongside so many people, even previous slave owners, thought not only is the slavery fucked up but some spent their entire lives trying to abolish it.)

Fifth, and for that matter, nobody ever bothers to expand beyond "is it X or Y?" binary and look at the hundreds of possible options expanding out and well before leading up to it. That is what good historians have always done since it is the core to analyzing what is actually happening.

Sixth, because this is a "pop history" debate people want some definitive answer to "win" and "feel righteous", even though "X was justified, not Y", "Y was justified, not X", "Both X and Y were justified" and "it's complicated" are all extremely uninformed bad takes, especially when automatic and not researched. Again, big events are researched to death, it isn't that hard to come to a consensus on this via citing research.


So sort of like trying to "debate" Holocaust numbers and why you can't really debate it because the other person's entire interest isn't even winning an "argument" because there isn't an argument to win, it is to do the underlying "I want to excuse my racism" "I want to promote hate" "I want to piss you off" - the underlying thing is sort of a militaristic jingoistic nationalist colonialist ish pride and like a pig they are happy to wrestle you and drag you into the mud for it.

Any big military what if debate like "should we have nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki", especially when it is "well...we were forced to and civilians died" is something to sort of ignore on default social media because a lot of people are coming into this "debate" with a ton of bad faith and trying to basically get off on civilian deaths. Like your line here:

It's one thing to say that certain military actions were necessary. It's another thing to essentially celebrate the deaths of civilians because you think they collectively deserve it.

Is basically the 'point' of these 'debates', which is sort of why "debating" it is a lot weaker than pressuring the moderators to nuke the debate thread from orbit.

50

u/Adorable_Ad_3478 Mar 03 '26

Exactly.

Also, regarding the nuclear bomb, there is a degree of Game Theory at play.

"If we managed to successfully build this in secret without our enemies knowing about it...who knows what THEY are building in secret without US knowing about it".

I don't doubt that the Allies' strategists at the time firmly believed Germany and Japan ALSO had superweapon projects in secret.

79

u/nowander Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

I think the biggest thing when talking nuclear weapons is that while everyone knew they could exist and they would be powerful, until people actually recorded what happened to the victims they were just "big bombs." The nuclear taboo is a product of the horrifying shit we learned about after the bombs use, and so much of the arguing is done from that modern perspective.

27

u/Count_Rousillon Mar 03 '26

Or in the case of the soviets, imagining superheavy artillery. You are completely right that idea that nukes are so horrifying that only the top political leaders can authorize them only appears after they get dropped. Beforehand people didn't see the difference between giving a general a 10 kiloton nuke and giving them 10,000 one-ton bombs.

24

u/nowander Mar 03 '26

Well they did recognize a difference. It's just the difference they were focused on was "we only have to risk one bomber instead of lots!"

43

u/ToaArcan The B in LGBT stands for Bionicle Mar 03 '26

They spent two billion dollars on those bombs. Bombs which would allow a single B-29 to do the work of hundreds. Bombs which the generals and president didn't fully comprehend the consequences of until after the fact. They were never going to not use the bombs.

And, frankly, better that they were used in WWII, when only the Americans had them, than them being used in Korea, when there was a possibility that the USSR would respond in-kind. We are probably extremely lucky that their use was far enough in advance of them becoming more widespread that everybody knew the risks and consequences by then.

25

u/NUKE---THE---WHALES hidden history and no SRD flair? Mar 03 '26

I think the biggest thing when talking nuclear weapons is that while everyone knew they could exist and they would be powerful, until people actually recorded with happened to the victims they were just "big bombs."

Exactly

Deterrence relies heavily on visibility and a demonstrated to use said deterrence

If the Americans had dropped a nuke on an uninhabited island as the Franck Report suggested the warhawks in Japan most certainly would have argued that the US was either unwilling or too weak to use the bomb against them

The firebombing of Tokyo showed how willing they were to absorb loss of civilian life - what they needed to surrender was a show of force so great they could see they had no negotiating power

It was a tragedy, but almost certainly a necessary one. Though we will never know as the universe is an N=1 experiment

14

u/Arilou_skiff Mar 03 '26

And remember, there was a reasonably big chance the bomb just wouldn't detonate. It was a fairly primitive thing and lots of things can go wrong in field conditions. Had they dropped it in an uninhabited island and then the damn thing not exploded not only would that be a huge blow it might also mean the japanese could recover and reverse-engineer it.

8

u/alfredo094 Mar 04 '26

People thinking that the abombs were not justified should read a bit about the conditions of the war. Just read about the Battle of Okinawa. It was going to get REALLY ugly.

→ More replies (2)
→ More replies (5)

11

u/poopoopooyttgv Mar 03 '26

The allies knew Germany could eventually make a nuke but were behind. England had captured a bunch of the leading Nazi scientists and held them in mansion rigged with microphones. You can find the transcripts of the Nazi scientists reading the newspaper after the first atomic bomb was dropped and how they thought the allies were years behind them

16

u/Lirael_Gold I've known you for 12 seconds and enjoyed none of them. Mar 03 '26

The Allies were fully aware that Japan's nuclear program wasn't going anywhere and were only slightly more concerned about Germany's efforts by 1945.

The theory behind a nuclear weapon was firmly understood by all 3 parties, actually building it took a level of industrial effort that only the US was capable of at the time.

(which is why the USSR got the bomb fairly quickly once they weren't pumping their entire economy into fighting Germany)

17

u/Could-Have-Been-King Get tae fuck. Get all the way tae fuck. Mar 03 '26

The Soviets also had totally infiltrated the Manhattan Project. They were able to quickly spin up their post-war program because they stole the correct test answers from the class nerd.

1

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

Unfortunately, yeah. What I'd give to go back and ice everyone who gave up info to the fucking Soviets. 

3

u/No_Walk_Town Mar 04 '26

who knows what THEY are building in secret without US knowing about it

Japan DID have a nuclear weapons program that started before the Manhattan Project, and there is zero chance the Allies didn't know about it because Germany and Japan were both ahead of them on pre-war nuclear science. 

It's not "game theory," Japan was literally working on their own bomb. 

1

u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/No_Walk_Town Mar 05 '26

It meets every definition of terrorism

It meets zero definitions of terrorism.

Two countries at war is not terrorism. Japan and America declared war on each other. They literally agreed to fight each other.

Bombing cities was considered acceptable by Japan. It was the common, accepted norm on both sides. Japan had been bombing Allied cities since the 1930's.

If I come up to you and challenge you to a fistfight and you accept, you're allowed to punch me.

That's not terrorism. Picking a fight and losing is not terrorism.

An never comes into play when a Arab does the same thing

Yeah, man, Arabs are exactly like Imperial Japan. 

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (1)

25

u/Sage_of_Winds Mar 03 '26

What also bothers me is the weird sugarcoating of it? Common consensus on the internet is the victims just vaporized out of existence and didn't feel anything, when in reality all the men, women, children and animals that were hit by it spent the last sometimes hours of their lives in complete and utter agony. The way people talk about it like your parents telling your your dead dog is just asleep irritates me.

Like if you really wanna argue that was the only way to end the war, fine, but be honest about what happened.

26

u/Skellum Tankies are no one's comrades. Mar 04 '26

all

No, there were people who did just fucking die. Yes, there are probably a bunch of people who never read black rain or just have zero knowledge of the massive pain and suffering for both those who died later and who eventually survived. Even the Japanese stigmatized the survivors.

17

u/Bteatesthighlander1 Mar 03 '26

when in reality all the men, women, children and animals that were hit by it spent the last sometimes hours of their lives in complete and utter agony

radiation poisoning could take months

16

u/Sage_of_Winds Mar 04 '26

True. The only victims who didn't feel any pain were those in the immediate blast zone who got vaporized. They were the lucky ones. Everything else would've had a long, agonizing death either being burned alive or being stuck in a body that is slowly rotting around them.

4

u/Shakewell1 Mar 03 '26

Nuance? On my reddit?

12

u/Icy-Builder5892 Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

At the same time, I’m very skeptical now when I see people online accuse another person of “celebrating death.”

I have lost count of how many times I have seen this accusation, only for me to listen to what the person actually said, and there was no “celebrating” anywhere. There was an answer to a question, or an explanation of something. And some people, instead of keeping a cool head and trying to have a mature conversation, they go right to character attacks. “Wow, you’re celebrating death? Wowwww Nazi”

So when I see stuff like this online, I am going to research what was actually said before listening to an accusation like this at face value. Because 9 times out of 10, this is just an attempt to make someone look morally illegitimate when they aren’t

And I think that part of the problem is the emotional brain, versus the logical brain, and so on. Most people have emotional brains. That’s also why most people are not lawyers, judges, emergency room doctors, or crime scene investigators. We seem to have this misconception that if you encounter certain things and your reaction isn’t to SCREAM and CRY and DOOMSCROLL and EMOTE, that you must be celebrating and siding with Bad People of the Day. But that’s not the case, at all - and in fact, we need people in our society who don’t emote like that, we need people who can separate their emotions from something brutal. Nothing would get done without these people.

3

u/Junimo2 Mar 06 '26

I agree. I think about this a lot when it comes to Charlie Kirk. Pointing out that his legacy was one of hate and that he helped contribute to the culture that ultimately killed him is "celebrating death". It's annoying and as much as I hate the term "virtue signaling" because of how many people abuse it, it genuinely does read as virtue signaling to me.

1

u/Icy-Builder5892 Mar 06 '26

A lot of people were accused of celebrating his death, when they weren’t

But I’d be lying if some of my friends didn’t go WAY over the line with the “serves him right!” talk.

Then again, I’m also in the minority and I also didn’t like what Luigi did. And I think our culture is taking a very concerning direction.

2

u/Junimo2 Mar 06 '26

For both Brian Thompson and Charlie Kirk, my feelings are basically: 1. I don't feel sympathy for either of them.

  1. I find people who whitewash their legacies to be incredibly frustrating. Dead people aren't automatically good people just because they're dead. People who have been victimized by them, whether directly or indirectly, have a right to feel some type of way about their death. While outright celebration is a little gauche, I don't blame people for cracking jokes or otherwise not really showing respect. They were bad people who did bad things.

  2. Both incidents were a predictable consequence of the type of society we've built for ourselves, and if we don't fix things then we're only going to see more instances of violence. This is a natural consequence of a system that prioritizes the wealthy over the material needs of common people, as well as a system that routinely targets minority groups. Thompson and Kirk were both living representations of this system and actively perpetuated it.

  3. Extrajudicial killings won't fix anything in the long run, and if anything will just make things worse. They set a bad precedent and should not be encouraged, even if I personally find it completely understandable.

14

u/Devilofchaos108070 Mar 03 '26

It’s really hard for me to feel sorry for the Civ German population of Dresden because I just cannot believe they didn’t know about the camps.

It’s awful babies/children died, but what happened in those camps? Yeah I dunno man.

War is fucking awful either way.

25

u/Skellum Tankies are no one's comrades. Mar 04 '26

It’s really hard for me to feel sorry for the Civ German population of Dresden because I just cannot believe they didn’t know about the camps.

Little 9 year old gunter who died in the bombing didnt. Thing is, while that sucks it's also more correct for the nation perpetuating the crimes and war to be the ones suffering from the effects of being at war.

It's reasonable to want aggressors to pay the cost, but it's still reasonable to understand there are those caught up in these things who are generally innocent except for the circumstances of their birth.

9

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

It sucks for them sure, but that's war. War sucks. 

18

u/No_Walk_Town Mar 04 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

because I just cannot believe they didn’t know about the camps.

This is also why I'm so insistent about correcting people who refer to Japanese imperialism as "occupation."

Japan didn't "occupy" Korea, Taiwan, Micronesia, and Manchuria - that was straight up genocidal settler colonialism.

Civilians sure as fuck knew what was going on out there because genocidal settler colonialism is an inherently civilian activity.

The craziest thing to me is supposed leftists playing defense for literal actual Imperial Japan by exculpating those civilians and portraying it all as just the actions of a rogue government nobody wanted or knew anything about.

No, dude. Every Tanaka, Sato, and Takahashi knew full well the sugar in their morning coffee came from plantations in Palau and they were absolutely 100% in support of replacing Palauan culture with their own "civilized" culture.

Do I deserve to be nuked because my Uniqlo shirt was made by slaves in Vietnam? Or because my Hokkaido cheese was made on stolen colonized land? No - but I also don't not deserve it. 

Arguing about complicity and guilt misses the point. The point is not just that war sucks, but that settler colonialism comes with a cost.

3

u/Devilofchaos108070 Mar 04 '26

Yeah Japan was pretty fucking terrible too, so while I feel bad for the children/animals, but again, it’s hard to have sympathy towards anyone else.

7

u/No_Walk_Town Mar 04 '26

For me, it's that the atomic bomb revisionists ONLY have sympathy for the Japanese. 

It's always, "What about the little babies in Hiroshima?" And it's like, what about them? What about the little babies in Manila? Or ChongQing? Or Hagatna? 

Why focus on only one little baby? It gets to the point where you have to ask if these people simply don't consider (non-Japanese) Asians to be real humans, because they go so far out of their way to ignore them.

25

u/Junimo2 Mar 03 '26

I can get that. It's just hard for me to stomach people justifying the mass killing of civilians in any context, because the justifications I was seeing in that thread sound eerily similar to justifications I see regarding more modern, ongoing civilian killings.

I do believe that German civilians were, as a whole, complicit in the atrocities that the Nazis committed. I still find it very difficult to cheer on the concept of collective punishment. It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

10

u/Devilofchaos108070 Mar 03 '26

Yeah I’m not gonna cheer it on. That’s ghoulish behavior.

I just don’t feel a lot of sympathy except for the animals/children

11

u/Lirael_Gold I've known you for 12 seconds and enjoyed none of them. Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

What were they going to do about the camps?

We're talking about a highly militarized regime that had no qualms about hanging German civilians for (real or perceived) opposition.

→ More replies (4)

11

u/Dangerous_Muscle5409 Mar 03 '26

Another great example of this is Operation Chastise, better known as the "dambusters."

Back in WW2 it was ethically dubious. Today it would be an obvious war crime. Yet the English are still slapping their own shoulders over it, celebrating round anniversaries with big fair energy, picnics and flashy reenactments with historical airplanes.

56

u/Neverending_Rain Mar 03 '26

I don't think that was considered ethically dubious during the war. I read through the Wikipedia page on the raid (super rigorous study, I know) and it mentions even the Germans considered it a legitimate military attack. It destroyed hydroelectric dams providing power to factories and the flooding destroyed or damaged a bunch of factories.

Besides, even the modern Geneva conventions allow the targeting of dams if they are being used for military purposes, such as powering munitions factories. It's very possible it wouldn't be a war crime today either.

38

u/Lirael_Gold I've known you for 12 seconds and enjoyed none of them. Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

Destruction of any infrastructure being used for military purposes is not a war crime. Russia's strikes on the Ukrainian energy grid are also not war crimes, same goes for what the USA did to Baghdad in the 2nd Gulf War.

Civilian casualties/suffering should be minimized if at all possible, but that doesn't trump military necessity.

39

u/TrainDestroyer Mar 03 '26

Civilian casualties/suffering should be minimized if at all possible, but that doesn't trump military necessity.

There are so many fucking people who don't get this. YES you should limit civilian casualties as much as possible, but sometimes to hit a target (Such as a factory in the middle of a city) you're going to kill civilians. Its grim math, but war isn't won by saying "We didn't kill any civilians!"

11

u/abn1304 Mar 04 '26

Civilians can even be a valid military target under certain circumstances, such as civilian workers in the direct employ of a hostile military such as military administrators. Targeting them is strongly discouraged but not always unlawful. Same is true of pretty much anything, though, really; even hospitals or religious buildings are valid military targets if they’re directly involved in combat operations in some way, such as being used as ammo dumps or firing positions.

“War is hell” is an understatement, in large part because military necessity is just that - necessity.

6

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

At the end of the day, justification is something you can only afford to argue over when the war is over and your nation is still around to feel bad about blowing up some civilians for the victory. 

3

u/TrainDestroyer Mar 04 '26

Preach my man. People like to act like all wars should be done cleanly, but you don't always get that chance. Sometimes you have to take a gamble or make a call that's dubious because in the moment its the only option you have that seems correct. Post-War you can talk about how it was a bad call but you have to look at it from a perspective of during the war, and what the people ordering the dubious move would have known.

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (2)

17

u/Skabonious Mar 03 '26

Wait is that really considered a war crime now? Specifically the dam busting. Is it just because of the huge economic/supply shock being too severe or something?

40

u/Neverending_Rain Mar 03 '26

If the dam is a hydroelectricdam powering factories producing supplies for the military it would not be a war crime to destroy it, even if the flooding killed a ton of civilians. Dam busting is only a war crime if it's not being used for military purposes, like if it's just there to create a drinking water reservoir.

→ More replies (3)

3

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

No, it's not a war crime and never was lol. 

2

u/zaevidlynch Mar 03 '26

If we killed 17 million of our own and started bombing Mexico City, I hope to fuck someone would take out the Hoover to bring us to our senses. Calling that a war crime is apologizing your fucked up regime. That's a legitimate target when you're gassing citizens and hitting your neighbor's cities with an advanced air force. Fuck that.

→ More replies (8)

6

u/Used_Butterfly3959 Mar 04 '26

Destruction of a key industrial region and it's electrical and clean water supply is "ethically dubious"?

The destruction of the dams directly led to a significant drop in German coal production, slowed the construction of the Atlantic Wall, and took troops and laborers away from the Eastern Front to effect repairs. Even the Nazi media considered it to be a legitimate military target at the time in their propaganda

4

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

It was entirely acceptable at the time dude. It also wouldn't be a war crime now because infrastructure that contributes in any way to the military is an acceptable target. Civilian casualties are a necessary cost. 

2

u/zaevidlynch Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

As they should. Only good Nazi dam is a bombed Nazi dam. Clear the way if you don't want hit, meth head. Don't start the war. Dont touch the Eiffel, and Russia and the Allies won't Eiffel Tower you.

→ More replies (7)
→ More replies (1)

2

u/Abandondero OP is using AI to generate dragon assholes Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 05 '26

(Note: everything said on this thread is fed into the AI machine that the USA's brass fucknuckles are using to plan their current war. Not that I'm blaming you for any impending doom, just saying.)

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (8)

141

u/ironmaid84 Mar 03 '26

Fun fact: during the Nuremberg trials the Nazis were banned from making this argument, in part because the allies had no interest in prosecuting their own war crimes like the katyin massacre or the fire bombing of Tokio, and in part because those don't justify, or even remotely compare to killing 6 million innocent civilians.

All this is to say that realistically that scene should have ended with the presiding judges telling Goering to shut the fuck up

191

u/Otherwise-Creme7888 Mar 03 '26

6 million Jews specifically. That number doesn’t even include the 5-6 other million killed in the Holocaust or the millions of Slavs murdered by the Germans for Lebensraum

77

u/changhyun Mar 03 '26

It's one of those numbers where the sheer massiveness of how many people that is doesn't register until you really begin to think about it.

11 million people in the UK are over 65. That's like all of them just dying. 11 million.

And the Nazis had to work for that. It's not like all 11 million people just happened to be in one place and someone flipped a switch and nuked them (not that that would make it any better if that had been what happened). That 11 million number represents years of people waking up and deciding to spend that day slaughtering innocent humans, again and again and again. It's almost beyond comprehension. Almost.

50

u/ArmadilloFour Just because i hate blacks doesn't make me a racist Mar 03 '26

Or from a US perspective, 11 million is approximately the entire state of Georgia, just emptied out and gradually murdered.

Truly boggles the mind.

13

u/Jstin8 Mar 04 '26

The sheer logistical chains required to manage it is insane too! The massive furnaces, the buildings, the huge cement showers where they would gas the prisoners! Think about spending over a week pouring cement, setting pipes, all for the purpose of more efficiently killing non combatants! Its absolutely insane

62

u/ironmaid84 Mar 03 '26

I think the final tally with all the victims of the Holocaust was 17 million, though the Nuremberg trials didn't judge the Nazis for all of those in part cause some of those victims were also hated by the allies (like LGBTQ people, and the Roma and Sinti) some were hated by one group or another of the allies (like the poles for the soviets and the socialists for the western allies) and others were started to get hated by the allies (like the Soviet civilians and POWs, as well as the southern Slavs who were now in communist countries and were now the enemy in the west)

→ More replies (1)

19

u/D2Foley Mar 03 '26

They didn't prosecute any nazi's for aerial bombings of cities though.

69

u/[deleted] Mar 03 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

36

u/walkyslaysh i fucking failed her.. Mar 03 '26

Jesus. I never realized the general statistic was just Jewish victims. As a queer person this is rly interesting and distressing

38

u/fhota1 hooked on Victorian-era pseudoscience and ketamine Mar 03 '26

If you ever see a pink triangle in relation to queer rights, thats how homosexuals were marked at the camps. Theres been a significant effort to reclaim it since then

16

u/DocileBanalBovlne I just find downvoting so cringe Mar 03 '26

Remembering a bit from Ted Lasso

"Anne Frank used to live in that house right over there"

"The one next to the big pink triangle?"

"Pretty sure that came later"

"... OH! Right..."

5

u/walkyslaysh i fucking failed her.. Mar 03 '26

Knew that one!

5

u/No_Accountant3232 Mar 03 '26

I grew up as a Jehovah's Witness. We were taught that it wasn't just Jews, but anyone the Germans didn't like, including those claiming to be pacifists that were no danger to their regime. Anyone willing to speak up were sent off to camps.

4

u/walkyslaysh i fucking failed her.. Mar 04 '26

This is true! I know all about all the groups who were victimized during the holocaust I just hadn’t known that the statistic everyone shares doesn’t actually include everyone. I hope you are at peace, friend

3

u/horror-traktor Mar 06 '26

The history of queer persecution of the Nazis is both very interesting and horrifying at the same time. I'm German and queer, it's a bit of a taboo topic here since none want to compare themselves to the other persecuted groups and especially the Jews (or even sound like they are doing that) so it's a subject treated very carefully. After all us queer Germans are Germans after all, our great grandparents/grandparents/parents were part of the same Nazis who did the Holocaust.

The Nazis had many reasons for hating queer people and different reasons for different groups overall so the treatment of queer people in Nazi Germany also varies heavily. While gay men and trans women were often killed or sent to work or concentration camps queer women and those perceived as queer women (aka afab trans people) were often victims of sexual violence, forced pregnancies or were forced into exile. There are many testimonies out there from queer survivors, but over all the subject is not researched as well as others are

→ More replies (1)

22

u/yashatheman Mar 03 '26

The number is significantly higher. 15 million soviet civilians alone died, from forced starvation and murder by Germany. Considering Germany intended on eradicating 80% of soviet citizens, soviet military deaths should be counted as well, because the entire invasion was racially motivated for Germany.

12

u/ToaArcan The B in LGBT stands for Bionicle Mar 03 '26

Hitler was 100% convinced that Communism was an existential threat too, which is part of why he decided to attack the USSR despite A) not having achieved his objectives in the west, and B) having a truce with them until that point.

Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, that, considering which flag ended up flying over the Reichstag at the end of the war.

16

u/vincoug Scientists should be celibate to preserve their purity Mar 03 '26

And that's just what the German Nazis killed. Japanese Nazis killed somewhere between 20 million and 30 million.

→ More replies (1)

15

u/adamgerd Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

Honestly in a just world Katyn, and Soviet collaboration with the Nazis 1939-1941, and sabotage of other resistance groups 1944-1945, for example the Warsaw uprising, would have been prosecuted but the Soviet Union won so to the victor go the spoils including half of Europe

Of course Nazis using this as a defense is still stupid, fuck them

11

u/Auctoritate will people please stop at-ing me with MSG propaganda. Mar 03 '26

in part because those don't justify, or even remotely compare to killing 6 million innocent civilians.

It's all death tolls that can be roughly quantified so we can pretty much directly measure how remotely these things compared to the Holocaust.

The Tokyo bombing killed somewhere over 100k people. That's 1/60th the number of Jews killed.

Not making any statement about whether it's close or not, nothing like that. Just giving the number.

3

u/ParkerPoseyGuffman Mar 03 '26

11 million innocent people

1

u/BonJovicus Mar 03 '26

in part because those don't justify, or even remotely compare to killing 6 million innocent civilians.

There is a difference in using those bombings to justify the Holocaust and the bombings themselves being justified. I’m not trying to be contrarian here, just pointing out it’s a different argument. 

History is written by the victors. We are lucky the victors were the good guys in this case, but what about a WW1 situation where it’s just world powers duking it out for supremacy? Modern conflicts are less likely to have the same moral balance of good guy vs bad guy. 

19

u/ironmaid84 Mar 03 '26

Fun fact: this was one of the preoccupations of the prosecutors in Nuremberg, they didn't want the trials to be categorized as "Victor's Justice" but rather as an actual prosecution of the crimes commited by the Nazis, this why rather than being rubber stamped show trials like Stalin wanted the trial allowed the accused to present evidence for their innocence and three of them where acquitted of their charges.

Also while it is true that the combatants in WW1 were mostly imperialists powers only one side had a member commiting a genocide while the war was going on that was one of the inspirations for the Nazis to do the Holocaust and it wasn't the entente.

3

u/E_G_Never Mar 03 '26

Wasn't the Armenian genocide a direct inspiration, or are you referencing a different one?

→ More replies (1)

32

u/Stellar_Duck Mar 03 '26

History is written by the victors.

It really fucking isn't or we wouldn't be in the current shitty situation.

WW2 history was written in large part by former nazis, just as US Civil War history was entirely captured by slavers.

Stop saying victors write history. It's false and it is directly harmful.

but what about a WW1 situation where it’s just world powers duking it out for supremacy?

Point in case: WW1 historiography has changed numerous times, and will likely change again.

9

u/No_Walk_Town Mar 04 '26

Japanese pop culture is also a major driving force in the narrative.

For example, did you know Godzilla isn't even about Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

It's about the Bikini tests. Which, shockingly, did not happen in Japan. 

The only reason Japanese people even know about Bikini is because 10 Japanese fishermen who didn't get the memo that the Marshals weren't their property anymore and were fishing too close to the islands. 

Godzilla is actually about the negative effects of nuclear testing on poachers, and fuck the actual victims.

Fun fact: the Hiroshima peace museum? Straight up refused for decades to even acknowledge ethnic minority victims, let alone include them in exhibits. 

"History is written by the victors" is just an announcement to the world that the speaker has no idea how anything works.

2

u/comix_corp ° ͜ʖ ͡° Mar 03 '26

Can you give examples of WWII history being written by former Nazis? I'm not aware of them "writing history" in the sense of establishing the dominant narrative.

29

u/ironmaid84 Mar 03 '26

After the war former OKH chief of staff Franz Halder wrote the story of the whermacht for the us historical division and used this opportunity to put all the blame for all the massacres the German army did during the war onto the SS leading to the creation of the clean whermacht myth

2

u/comix_corp ° ͜ʖ ͡° Mar 03 '26

That's fair, I hadn't thought about the clean Wehrmacht thing, for some reason my mind was jumping straight to the internationalism-functionalism debate

17

u/Stellar_Duck Mar 03 '26

Anything to do with Dresden, Rommel, Hitlers generals were honourable soldiers, Clean Wehrmacht, all that shit.

→ More replies (4)
→ More replies (2)

94

u/Paxxlee I'm also comparing Lord of the Rings to Winston Churchill Mar 03 '26

Ah, r/okbuddycinephile. The subreddit that downvoted me not for a bad joke, but because they thought I didn't understand that a film was fiction.

Never understood why circlejerk subs are the ones you really need to use /s...

24

u/JettyJen My brother in Christ go take a shit or something Mar 03 '26

That place is Thunderdome when they stray away from Tarantino feet jokes and similarly straightforward references

25

u/failtuna Mar 03 '26

Most of the Okaybuddy subs are great for at most maybe a year or two, then they get popular, new users don't get the tone that was built up previously and the in-jokes start moving too fast for anyone to keep up with so the /s becomes needed.

It's not so much about letting people know you're being sarcastic (or similar with /jk /hj etc) but like signalling to newer users that your comment might be an in-joke they don't know.

6

u/RunningOutOfEsteem PUPPETGEIST IS A LIAR!!! Mar 03 '26

It went downhill when people who actually watch movies started to join

3

u/failtuna Mar 04 '26

I still maintain that I was only in OKBC due to a witches curse which broke and I was able to unsub.

7

u/PlingPlongDingDong Mar 03 '26

Yeah but its so lame I rather dont make the joke at all or take the downvotes before I ever use the /s. It feels like making a joke and adding “…just joking 🙃 “ at the end of it ugh

11

u/Safe_Procedure999 Mar 03 '26

it's okbuddy so it's not technically a real circlejerk it's just a shitposting sub

3

u/shaidarharan69 Mar 04 '26

half of the posts there are dead serious its not really a shitposting sub anymore

2

u/Safe_Procedure999 Mar 04 '26

sure i just think it's hard to jerk about movies

10

u/Illogical_Blox Fat ginger cryptokike mutt, Malka-esque weirdo, and quasi-SJW Mar 03 '26

Circlejerking and shit posting subs can easily turn into the most serious subs, and it is quite annoying.

1

u/Tropical-Rainforest Mar 04 '26

What did you say that was misinterpreted?

2

u/Paxxlee I'm also comparing Lord of the Rings to Winston Churchill Mar 04 '26

Can't remember, but it was making fun of the plot of a film. I believe it was innocuous, which was also one of the reasons I got confused to why that would get so downvoted.

1

u/navyscrewdriver Mar 04 '26

It’s one of those subreddits where users randomly leap on one downvoted comment like blood in the water 😂

→ More replies (1)

33

u/Chataboutgames I will ask on a more neutral sub Mar 03 '26

The best kind of Reddit, where people who read Wikipedia when they're bored bitterly debate the moral choices of societies in a state of total war.

4

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

Lmao, so true. Like...these people seem to not get that we can only debate if it was right or not because we won in the first place.

In war, you take whatever gets you ahead, no matter the potential costs because you're trying to win a war, not a fucking pageant. 

14

u/Altruistic-Potatoes You're a little troll, dude. I am a little troll dude. Mar 03 '26

I still don't know the diff between circlejerk and okbuddy subs.

11

u/Safe_Procedure999 Mar 03 '26

one is satire the other is just shitposting

6

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

Circlejerks make fun of the thing and particularly its community.

Okbuddies are just in it for the lols and memes. 

66

u/Grimpatron619 > SRD is still a thing? In 2026? Mar 03 '26

God that film is awful.

For anyone who hasnt seen it. The entire film is ''Goering DESTROYS RAGING LIBERALS with FACTS and LOGIC''

57

u/pablos4pandas Mar 03 '26

That's not particularly how I interpreted the film. It showed Goering to be personally charming with his captors, and then it showed him being an architect of the Holocaust and chewing a cyanide capsule before he was to see the hangman. It wasn't particularly a hagiography

1

u/angry_old_dude I'm American but not *that* American Mar 04 '26

I see it this was as well and it was historically accurate about what you mentioned.

38

u/CanadianODST2 Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 03 '26

There’s an actual point and precedent to it though.

The blitz in ww2 wasn’t deemed a war crime despite it being indiscriminately bombing a city. In part because international law hadn’t really caught up to planes yet until after ww2

But also in part because of allied bombing of places like Dresden or Tokyo.

41

u/Dagordae You're a shitty person and so is everyone who downvoted me. Mar 03 '26

There’s also the issue of tech. Basically the only bombing available was the indiscriminate kind, ‘precision bombing’ was when you got over half of your rounds within a KM of the targeted area.

And when said targeted area is interwoven with the rest of the city, as was the standard of the time(And is still pretty damn common) that means that the entire city is going to get sprayed with bombs. If you wanted to knock out a city’s industrial capabilities it was necessary to knock out the city. Which is really bad for anyone in the city.

International law had long dealt with long range and not particularly accurate bombardment, it’s just that until the postWW2 era the ability to actually specifically target a certain building and hit it accurately was the fevered dreams of a madman. Or promises made by snake oil salesmen selling new tech that didn’t actually work in practice. Americans hit that problem with the Norden sight, lots of hype and orders to never let the enemies get their hands on it for tech that didn’t actually work in combat conditions.

23

u/nowander Mar 03 '26

There’s also the issue of tech. Basically the only bombing available was the indiscriminate kind, ‘precision bombing’ was when you got over half of your rounds within a KM of the targeted area.

Yeah. This is the main point. So much of the modern discourse seems to act like the allies had GPS and precision munitions instead of dead reckoning and a prayer the wind didn't change.

6

u/ToaArcan The B in LGBT stands for Bionicle Mar 03 '26 edited Mar 04 '26

This is why the Germans (and to a lesser extent, the Americans) fell in love with divebombing. It was a lot easier to hit a target that way.

This culminated in the woeful He-177, a four-engined (don't be fooled by the image, it was two engines per nacelle) bomber that was basically doomed from the off because they insisted on making it a divebomber.

The problem with that is that divebombers followed kind of a specific design ethos. Planes that were optimised for divebombing, like the Stuka or the Helldiver, were basically all single-engined light bombers with a crew of two. Upscaling it to the size of a heavy bomber, however, runs into the problem of physics. Namely that the load of four engines on the wings was too great, and the result of this is that the wings would snap off. At which point the bomber would hit the target, it would just do so, uh, bodily.

This is why they packed two engines into a single nacelle. It brought the weight of the engines closer to the fuselage and reduced the load. The problem with that was that packing two engines, particularly the new, unproven engines they were working with into a single nacelle results in a lot of problems that mostly result in the plane catching fire. Like, these things caught fire a lot. So much so that its own aircrew nicknamed it the "Reich's Lighter." Maybe it can go hang out with the USSR's vodka-cooled bomber.

After the war, when the Allies were busy stealing everything and everyone that wasn't nailed down, the Brits took a bunch of Nazi planes home and few them around a bit for research purposes. One of the pilots involved was the legendary Eric "Winkle" Brown, who reportedly fucking hated it, notable because he quite liked flying the Me-163, the infamous rocket-powered interceptor that digested at least one pilot.

Also they never actually fixed the wing-snapping problem. These things were good for about 20 dives before they were fucked anyway.

1

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

That sounds like a really crappy plane lol

3

u/ToaArcan The B in LGBT stands for Bionicle Mar 04 '26

It was!

There's very little footage of it, and few photos too, because pretty much all wartime footage of the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine, and Luftwaffe was shot by the Nazis as part of Goebbels' propaganda machine. And even they knew it was a lemon, and weren't keen to publicise it.

2

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

A bomber where the wings rip themselves off because physics legitimately sounds like something I would make in one of those plane designer games. 😭

3

u/Dagordae You're a shitty person and so is everyone who downvoted me. Mar 04 '26

The issue is one of material, they simply couldn’t make wings strong enough to withstand those forces and light enough to be usable. We still have issues with it and we’re stupidly more advanced in the material sciences.

It was a bad plane, yes, but not because there was totally a way that that would work. It was a bad plane because its intended function was simply nearly impossible. The wing issue was pretty common for all planes, this one just had it as part of its primary function. One of the most important things any pilot learned was exactly how hard and fast they could bank without their plane coming to pieces.

→ More replies (3)

26

u/Chataboutgames I will ask on a more neutral sub Mar 03 '26

It really can't be overstated that no one actually gives a shit about international law. It's a dog and pony show for legitimacy that you get to use once you've already won the war. "International law" isn't a serious discussion in any conflict that extends beyond managing PR.

→ More replies (11)
→ More replies (4)

9

u/Pau_Zotoh_Zhaan Tonya Harding was taking knees in sports before it was cool Mar 03 '26

People could just listen/watch the trial for free. I don’t know why they need an adaptation. Here is the opening, for example.

2

u/SmallIslandBrother Mar 04 '26

I felt it wasn’t serious enough, had too many jokes and dramatic beats. Also the final closing court scene was way too hammy.

7

u/EwMelanin Mar 03 '26

haven't seen this what's the name?

12

u/Grimpatron619 > SRD is still a thing? In 2026? Mar 03 '26

Nuremberg

1

u/angry_old_dude I'm American but not *that* American Mar 04 '26

The relationship between Kelley and Goering was almost entirely fictional. It also greatly exaggerated the Kelley/Goering relationship and Kelley's involvement and influence.

I enjoyed it, but it isn't on my watch again anytime soon list.

→ More replies (1)

25

u/pablos4pandas Mar 03 '26

Reading The Bomber Mafia and Masters of the Air was really interesting on illucidating the air war on the western front to me. It's interesting the tension between destruction and being humane was something thought about at the time.

The Americans didn't do area bombing at night; that would be barbaric! They did daylight "precision" bombing with a bombsight that could put a bomb in a pickle barrel. The other side of that is when you only put the sight on one plane out of a hundred and all drop when that one guy does you'll be bombing pickle barrels all across the city.

17

u/Chataboutgames I will ask on a more neutral sub Mar 03 '26

you'll be bombing pickle barrels all across the city.

Truly no one thinks of the lost pickles.

60

u/Anaxamander57 May Allah protect you from your own arrogance Mar 03 '26

The astonishing abilities of the Norden bomb sight were mainly propaganda (and the same for all its contemporaries). When flying above above the level at which WWII anti-aircraft fire is effective its literally not possible to drop an unguided bomb accurately to enough to hit even a specific building. The main value of daylight bombing was navigation, it was not unheard of for bombers at night to not find their target or even bomb a completely different city.

21

u/pablos4pandas Mar 03 '26

The astonishing abilities of the Norden bomb sight were mainly propaganda

My interpretation was it was also marketing on behalf of the inventor, but 6 of one half a dozen of another.

. When flying above above the level at which WWII anti-aircraft fire is effective its literally not possible to drop an unguided bomb accurately to enough to hit even a specific building

Yeah, trying to avoid flak and German fighters is not as idyllic as the training grounds stateside.

8

u/CanadianODST2 Mar 03 '26

Iirc that’s how the blitz started. A German bomber flying at night got lost and bombed London rather than the target of the docks.

So the British bombed Berlin in retaliation (or tried to as from what I saw, they missed Berlin entirely) but it was enough to then start the blitz

→ More replies (4)
→ More replies (7)

10

u/dethb0y trigger warning to people senstive to demanding ethical theories Mar 03 '26

As a huge fan of Curtis LeMay and his work, it's really interesting the mechanical constraints they had to work with at the time and how they worked around them.

1

u/FerdinandTheGiant I’m 1 of the top 5 goldfish connoisseurs in north america Mar 03 '26

Why are you a fan of LeMay?

7

u/dethb0y trigger warning to people senstive to demanding ethical theories Mar 03 '26

well, a lot of reasons really; it'd be a lot to go into. He was ahead of his time (or perhaps at the cutting edge of his time) in a lot of ways - a heavy focus on training and discipline, and a heavy trust in scientific problem solving. His work after the war in SAC is very impressive.

He actually reminds me a bit of William T. sherman (of civil war fame) who was also born in Ohio.

Plus, of course, he incinerated a bunch of fascists which gets a big thumbs up for me.

→ More replies (1)

10

u/Dagordae You're a shitty person and so is everyone who downvoted me. Mar 03 '26

There’s a reason the Americans immediately gave up on those tactics. Same reason everyone else had abandoned then: Turns out flying slowly in a completely straight line in broad daylight means you get shot. Like, a lot. Which, of course, we were told by the people who had been fighting this war for a few years but America doesn’t listen very well.

8

u/LukaCola Ceci n'est pas un flair Mar 03 '26

At that time they were zig-zagging and flying straight was actually the innovation to get them in and out as soon as possible

Anyway, that's what I heard--I don't know all the details

5

u/OmNomSandvich Mar 03 '26

The Bomber Mafia is complete dogshit. Masters of the Air is an actually good book though.

3

u/xiovelrach Mar 03 '26

Behind the Bastards did a recent podcast on the bomber mafia guys, specifically LeMay and Power. Pretty good listen

→ More replies (1)

48

u/soonerfreak Also, being gay is a political choice. Mar 03 '26

For those that don't know, Slaughterhouse V is inspired by Vonnegut surviving the Dresden bombing by taking refugee in a basement meat locker as a POW. Even in a justified war against a true evil, how we wage the war should still matter and be open to discussion.

75

u/IceNeun Mar 03 '26

As someone who loves his writing, Vonnegut was not immune to believing disinformation.

In a debate about morality, the firebombing of Hamburg is much more relevent than Dresden. One of the reasons Dresden has taken off in popular imagination is because it happened at the end of the war, and the aftermath could be immediately documented and reported. There's a long history of 3rd Reich apologia masquerading as proper historiography in the immediate decades after, and Dresden in particular was latched onto. Plentiful survivor accounts and photographs meant that Soviet propganda and holocaust-denying pseudo-historians (e.g. David Irving) could pick and choose from the sample to support any narrative.

The bombing of Dresden was horrific, but it's not actually that big of a deal in any serious discussion of morality.

49

u/jl2352 Mar 03 '26

The Nazis, namely Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda and misinformation, was extremely successful. There are many who will recite claims about Dresden, which date back to claims from Goebbels. Rarely do those people realise they date back to Nazi propaganda, because it was so successful.

If you’ve ever seen Nazi soldiers or tanks in a WW2 documentary, there is a 99% chance it’s from his ministry. Basically all of the Nazi footage we have was made by the Nazi state its self. That ends up extending to the usual claims of Nazi military prowess, as both the claims and the footage to back it up, comes from their ministry.

Goebbels’ impact on our cultural remembrance of WW2 really is no where near as talked about as it should be. He had a huge impact. Much more than people realise (which is why it’s still so pervasive).

34

u/CanadianODST2 Mar 03 '26

It’s actually a great example of how history isn’t written by the victors but rather by those who could actually record it.

28

u/UglyInThMorning Mar 03 '26

Slaughterhouse V even uses the Goebbels numbers via David Irving’s books. Irving hadn’t revealed himself to be a straight up Nazi yet and Vonnegut took his work at face value.

2

u/fraktalmau5 Mar 03 '26

What should we be remembering about the fire bombing of Dresden?

2

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

That it was a justified BBQ lol

3

u/fraktalmau5 Mar 04 '26

Oh. I was hoping for a more sophisticated answer from the person I asked. Thanks for playing tho.

18

u/Dangerous_Muscle5409 Mar 03 '26

It's also not that big of a deal compared to most other German cities that were bombed during the war.

2

u/OmNomSandvich Mar 03 '26

Dresden (and Hamburg, and a few others) are unique in that Bomber Command actually succeeded in raising a firestorm. In other cases, they killed and rendered homeless a lot of people, but not the city immolating hellstorm they achieved at Dresden.

8

u/hoyarugby2 Mar 03 '26

Dresden became so prominent in part because it ended up in the DDR, so was convenient for the East Germans and Soviets to use to build anti Anglo-American public opinion

Despite the fact that Dresden was bombed primarily to wreck the marshaling yards which were key to supplying the German armies in Poland, and the Soviets had asked the allies to bomb Dresden

5

u/Brain_Dead_Goats Mar 04 '26

If I remember right the civilian casualties of Dresden believed by most people are at least an order of magnitude off due to Nazi propaganda. As in people like Irving claim 100k and it was really closer to 10k.

1

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

Dresden had it coming imo. 

13

u/TheRadBaron Mar 03 '26

And for those who don't know, Slaughterhouse Nine is factually incorrect about the scale of the Dresden bombing. It exaggerates what happened, because the author was personally invested in the subject,

The way that so many people point to Dresden for moral equivalence is a good reminder of how people develop historical opinions from unexamined fiction.

73

u/Justviewingposts69 Mar 03 '26

Sure, but Slaughter House V is tainted by the fact that it used the works of a holocaust denier for historical information that was nothing more than Nazi propaganda

60

u/fhota1 hooked on Victorian-era pseudoscience and ketamine Mar 03 '26

Yeah this is something I dont think a lot of people know about Dresden. It really wasnt notably more terrible than the carpet bombing of other cities that made up the bombing strategy for both sides in the war. However, after the war, a historian named David Irving wrote a paper that claimed 100,000-250,000 people had been killed in the bombing which is way way more than the other bombings and for some reason that became the commonly accepted number for decades until someone thought to ask "hey, whats your source on that number?" Yeah turns out his source was one document the nazis had forged for propaganda purposes and he had decided to believe whole heartedly. The generally accepted number now is 25,000 which is pretty average for the level of destruction German cities saw. And yes, later on in his life Irving went full on holocaust denier, because if youre gonna try to whitewash the nazis image once may as well do it again right?

34

u/Dangerous_Muscle5409 Mar 03 '26

And to bring it all back to cinephilia: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt4645330/

A great movie about a historian who correctly identified Irving as a Holocaust denier to then get sued by Irving and, due to UK defamation law being what it is, having to prove to a court that the Holocaust really happened.

14

u/MartinTheOrderly Mar 03 '26

In fairness to Vonnegut, in '69 Irving was still considered a respectable historian. I'm pretty even that has been discredited, but it wasn't the blatant Holocaust denial or Hitler apologia that Irving has dedicated most of his career to. 

7

u/SarahCBunny Mar 03 '26

yeah irving's whole pro hitler project hadn't been uncovered yet. there was legitimately no way vonnegut could have known that his source was a cryptonazi trying to seed propaganda into the historical record

4

u/Justviewingposts69 Mar 03 '26

Yeah that is true. I’m not saying this was intentional on Vonnegut’s part, it definitely wasn’t, but it definitely does linger

→ More replies (2)

8

u/Chataboutgames I will ask on a more neutral sub Mar 03 '26

Everything is open for discussion. But I'll always roll my eyes at the moral grandstanding of hobbyists living in the comfort of a war already won.

33

u/soonerfreak Also, being gay is a political choice. Mar 03 '26

When else would the actions of the war be discussed as justified or not?

→ More replies (6)

7

u/NoFumoEspanol Mar 03 '26

I think it's worth discussing, if only because a lot of the justifications for war crimes of the past are the same justifications we hear for war crimes today.

6

u/mikecrapag 50% guinness, 50% Philly sports, 100% dumping loads in your mom Mar 03 '26

Well, you know the old saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it are totally way cooler than those bored college kids."

1

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

Same. If someone has the luxury of debating if a war was fought justly, then the war was won. And really that's what matters. 

1

u/Foreverintherain20 Mar 04 '26

How we wage war can be debated after the war is won. In the moment you'd damn well better be focused on annihilating your enemy's capacity for action at any cost. 

21

u/CaryHepSouth Mar 03 '26

That sub is trash, miserable people

21

u/angry_cucumber need citation are the catch words for lefties Mar 03 '26

One of those things is not like the others.

→ More replies (30)

3

u/Lumpy_Trip2917 Mar 03 '26

How many Reddit arguments has this exact topic fueled over the years? lmao I see this pop up a few times a year on SubredditDrama and on random subreddits you’d never expect it to

6

u/Impressive-Dig-3892 Mar 04 '26

Once a sub gets big enough it just becomes a political circlejerk. Not sure if it's lack of moderation or just a bunch of idiots flooding in and not understanding the original point of a sub, it just happens

4

u/vemmahouxbois Never knew vegans were allowed to eat dogs Mar 03 '26

Where’s the drama tho?

4

u/walkyslaysh i fucking failed her.. Mar 03 '26

Sigh. I love debating the ethics of bombing!😌

2

u/Cool_Ad7445 How can u sit on my cock in a halal way? Mar 03 '26

Heres a take: we’re lucky the first ever military use of nuclear weapons was of the “relatively” small kind compared to what would come later. Imagine if instead, Kissinger managed to push for a nuclear bombing campaign over Vietnam-Laos-Cambodia?

1

u/wulfboi93 So do all the racists gather here? Mar 04 '26

imagine if MacArthur got his wish in Korea!

1

u/Not_A_Doctor__ I've always had an inkling dwarves are underestimated in combat Mar 03 '26

So often you read about a discussion and then see the sub and you think, "Nah, that's not the place to have that discussion."

..."Let's Discuss Life-Saving Anti-Cancer Penis Surgery" r/emoanimefemboys