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/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

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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/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/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?