Again? First time I’ve brought it up. It was tongue in cheek as I know they have issued official apologies. But one should appreciate the contrast between a late train and the Rape of Nanking.
Sorry if that came off as personal. Obviously you are in fact aware of the many official apologies. Unfortunately too many aren’t and I guess I was “triggered”. My bad.
The WWII Japanese militarist state was a particularly intense concentration of suck, yes.
OTOH, the USA has been at it for longer and on a much larger scale.
Soldiers in action will commit war crimes; this is pretty much inevitable. Young men, trained to celebrate violence, placed under extreme stress, facing people who they are encouraged to dehumanise (and who are often racially and culturally distant from them), will predictably do horrific things. Not all of them, but some of them.
You can reduce the incidence of war crimes by (a) stomping the perpetrators hard when they occur, and (b) not deploying military force unless there is no other option. The fact that atrocities are an apparently inevitable part of war needs to be part of the calculation when evaluating the cost of military action.
The US is a notable failure at (a) as well as (b), and has been throughout its history. Hence, the US military commits an unusually large number of war crimes.
Both nations have committed egregious war crimes, and as @Wanderfound points out, they’re not alone. But I see any value in trying to comparing war time atrocities any more than any other kind of crime. At best, one of the atrocities will be minimized. At worst it’s whataboutism. I think the goal should simply to be hold all nations and war criminals accountable, while acknowledging that’s more difficult with more powerful countries.
Taking a slightly different tangent, though: whataboutism has been an important word of late.
Jeremy Scahill had some sensible things to say about it in the first twenty minutes of this (transcript at link):
The way I see it, whataboutism is deployed in two ways. One of them is dodgy, the other not so much.
The first is to use it as a deflection. “You say that X is bad, but Y is bad too, so ignore X’s badness”. The reasons why this is dodgy are fairly obvious.
The second is to use it as deflation. “You say that X is better than Y because of Z, but Z is common to both X and Y”. Personally, I don’t see that as an invalid argument.
It may still be the case that X is better than Y, but the existence of Z does not establish that difference if Z is shared. Which may, at times, lead to a discussion of “your Z is worse than mine”, which is not always invalid. Or it may lead to “yes, Z is shared, but Q is unique to one side, and Q is important”.
TLDR of that: whataboutism is a dodgy rhetorical tactic when used for deflection, but not all arguments that are labeled as whataboutism deserve to be ignored.
(I’ll quit with the off-topic rambling here, though; if anyone wants to continue, we should probably spin off a thread)
I think there is a big difference between the US policies and the policies of WWII Japan or German in WWII.
Yes, you’re right there have been war crime perpetrated by the US. But the big difference is in general most of those were not sanctioned by military leaders. i.e. we weren’t rounding people up into concentration camps, nor beheading POWs or rounding up women to be used as “comfort women” for soldiers. Instead of systemic atrocities, it was soldiers going outside the ROE and people losing their humanity and killing civilians or executing prisoners. Some of that was swept under the rug, and others were actively prosecuted. I recall a small group of soldiers are now in Leavenworth due to them killing civilians in Iraq.
The exception to this would have been our campaigns during the Indian Wars. That certainly included rounding people up and killing civilians. I’d say those were our most egregious sins. There are probably other examples in our earlier history, but I am a little fuzzy on pre WWI actions.
Well, and then there are people who think the whole Iraq war was a war crime, which I don’t think quite fits the bill here, but I acknowledge some people do think that.
Yeah, but that’s a horrible tactic people are using anytime something bad happens. I kind of see your point, but but it still distracts from the original topic (though I am the last one who complains about veering off the road of it is organic). You seem very quick to interject something like this at any opportunity, though in general I get the sense it is to keep people honest about things. i.e. before you fly off the handle on this, remember this and that didn’t warrant the same response.
Though, I guess one could accuse me of this with my original comment, but I wasn’t really seriously trying to deflect from the train apology. It was more tongue in cheek.
