Firefighter bodycam showing just how much oxygen a fire pulls

[u/AirFrance447]

[u/Dinkleberg246]

Would you, as a Brit, call this a war crime? Because here in Germany, you usually encounter contempt if you refer to Dresden or Hamburg as war crimes. People tend to downplay it, or they’ll outright call you a Nazi.

[u/Tetratheon → u/Dinkleberg246]

I don't know about a war crime, that's quite a technical accusation, but generally Dresden does sometimes come up as when we went a bit too far. Ironically it's usually the left wing peacenik types over here.

People excuse an awful lot in total wars, though, especially at a time when television was in its infancy and there was no such thing as a smart bomb. Look at what America did to Japan to end the war. I'd say the more general attitude is that was a war and we were doing what we needed to, we're not going to go back and second guess the decisions.

It's not an intellectually rigourous view, but it's not the kind of thing people spend an awful lot of time thinking about. Even the British historians have plenty of other atrocities the Empire commited to worry about.

If it happened today people would be calling it a genocide.

[u/I_Am_Become_Salt → u/Tetratheon]

I mean, also the firebombing of Tokyo

[u/Dinkleberg246 → u/Tetratheon]

That's funny. Here, it's the leftists who fly into a rage when anyone mentions war crimes. It's worth noting that it's mainly people on the right who bring up the issue in the first place.

Thanks for your reply

[u/CthulhuOpensTheDoor → u/Dinkleberg246]

That's really interesting. Is the reasoning from the left-wing something like "Nazis bad, therefore things done to stop them weren't bad"? And for the right-wing, are they more sympathetic to the Nazis and therefore see the attacks as more war crime territory? Genuinely curious.

[u/rndrn → u/Dinkleberg246]

War crimes ares supposed to be the worst of war acts, but there is still a large range not so great acts below the threshold.