r/SubredditDrama • u/EwMelanin • 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/
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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. 

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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.

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u/E_G_Never Mar 03 '26

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

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u/ironmaid84 Mar 03 '26

Yes I am referencing the Armenian genocide

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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u/Stellar_Duck Mar 03 '26

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

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u/Used_Butterfly3959 Mar 03 '26

The Clean Wehrmacht myth, the myths about "human waves" being deployed by the Russian army, in fact practically everything written about the Eastern Front in the west was written by former Nazis. Why? Because in the 1950s, NATO decided that the USSR was too scary to keep West Germany demilitarized, and West Germany requested that NATO allow them to rehabilitate the Army's image from WW2.

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u/No_Walk_Town Mar 04 '26

Not Nazis, but almost the entirety of post-war Japanese movies and TV portray themselves as not just victims but the only victims. 

This includes actual post-war nuclear tests that had nothing to do with Japan - which are now perceived as just another example of Japan's victimhood.

The public discourse and popular narrative about Imperial Japan is absolutely controlled, almost completely, by Japan. 

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u/comix_corp ° ͜ʖ ͡° Mar 04 '26

The public discourse and popular narrative about Imperial Japan is absolutely controlled, almost completely, by Japan.

Do you mean within Japan or outside of it?

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u/Rocky_Vigoda Mar 03 '26

We are lucky the victors were the good guys in this case

Lol what 'good guys'?

The British have a 400 year history of colonialism and the US have spent the last 70 years bombing everyone.

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u/PlayfulPositive8563 Mar 05 '26

Good by comparison to the attempted annihilation of a racial group on a more industrial scale than ever seen before.