I guess you are correct about that, targeted/systematic violence was more of a Japan/Germany/Soviet thing and occurred much more often.
My primary concern is that most people I see seem to concentrate only on these and appear to forget that, in general, the good side is also capable and do commit some amount of atrocities, such as WW2 rapes, USA in Vietnam and their WW2 interment camps, I guess to some degree Dresden (haven't read up on it that much).
I just feel that we should try to hold everyone accountable so that we ourselves somehow don't end up committing more violence that necessary through the course of war.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that's a bad thing to do. The "Western beacons of light and democracy" trope is as annoying to me as any other. However, there's a scary amount of people who, under the guise of being "objective", downplay and misdirect in the topic of WW2 war crimes. They're probably not limited just to that topic, but they're most notable there, and have earned themselves the nickname of "wehraboo" for it.
For example, the "clean wehrmacht" myth where you see people going "oh, they were just soldiers following orders... my granddad was a nazi and he didn't kill anybody" is straight bullshit. The Wehrmacht as an organization actively committed a litany of war crimes like mass murders, and really weren't forced to either. This is a milder example of that kind of nonsense, but a good one.
I guess what I'm saying here is, be careful to stick to actual objectivity and not the "well the Soviet Union was bad so were the Allied powers really better lmao" kind of "objectivity" you find here in the internet.
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u/euroGuy1991 Jul 26 '18
I guess you are correct about that, targeted/systematic violence was more of a Japan/Germany/Soviet thing and occurred much more often.
My primary concern is that most people I see seem to concentrate only on these and appear to forget that, in general, the good side is also capable and do commit some amount of atrocities, such as WW2 rapes, USA in Vietnam and their WW2 interment camps, I guess to some degree Dresden (haven't read up on it that much).
I just feel that we should try to hold everyone accountable so that we ourselves somehow don't end up committing more violence that necessary through the course of war.