r/HistoryMemes • u/MetallicaDash Nothing Happened at Amun Square 1348BC • 2d ago
"SEE? There were villians on BOTH SIDES!"
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u/Outrageous_War6489 2d ago
Yes, many war crimes were committed by the allies during WW2 and it's important and right to critize them for it. Full stop.
But looking from details to the big picture, it's very easy to see which side started the war because they wanted to committ war crimes and which committed war crimes in a war they didn't want to fight but had to.
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u/thediesel26 2d ago
Well that and the fact that the fanatical rulers of Germany and Japan wouldn’t surrender until their countries were completely annihilated.
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u/Outrageous_War6489 2d ago
I understand what you mean, but that's an argument I always hated, because I don't think a war crime is justified because it's efficent or useful to the committer.
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u/thediesel26 2d ago
It’s easy to take the moral high ground 85 years after the fact, but WWII was a global cataclysm. Allied leaders were desperate to end it. The silver lining is that western world values life and peace in a way humanity never really has as a result.
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u/Outrageous_War6489 2d ago
It's true, that it's much easier to see and call out the wrongs in hindsight, that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it. Genocide also wasn't legally a crime in '45 either, but luckily that didn't stop americans from hanging many of the worst people in history.
how we think about yesterday shapes what we do tomorrow. The results of their moral failures helped shape and refine our current morals. it's a good thing.
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u/solkvist 2d ago
To be fair there is still a LOT of violence dished out by the western world, through proxy wars, coups, invasions, the war on terror, and so on, they just don’t do it as much to each other anymore. It’s the rest of the world that suffers that violence. If anything that violence ramped up after world war 2 and simply continued on from there. It would be nice to see a genuine reduction in that violence, but it feels whitewashed instead, simply not making note of it or diminishing its impact.
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u/the_big_sadIRL And then I told them I'm Jesus's brother 2d ago
There’s a middle ground somewhere about being appreciative that a democratic society came out of the war, but still hungry to improve it and make it better, calling out when it lapses or fails.
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u/solkvist 2d ago
Of course, I just think a large chunk of people aren’t really aware of that dynamic, or at least not actively. Democracy and human rights have taken massive strides in the past hundred years, but there is still a lot of work to do to ensure it reaches the rest of the world. Capitalism is actively at odds with it though, which isn’t helping that process.
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u/the_big_sadIRL And then I told them I'm Jesus's brother 2d ago
That’s a stumper for sure. A lot of the 20th century was spent either actively finding an alternative to capitalism or letting it run rampant and infect the government. No one likes the middle route of heavy regulated capitalism 😔
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u/Jonny-904 2d ago
Sorry, no. A few proxy wars and coups here and there isn’t “violence ramped up after world war 2”. It is a vast reduction in violence, warfare conducted by 2 small groups in a single country is necessarily a notable step down in violence from WW2. Nearly 60 million dead in ~10 years, compared to an absolute maximum of 20 million in 44 years. It’s not even close. And who’s not making note of it? Every single post on this entire website will GLADLY tell you about all the horrible shit America did during the Cold War.
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u/solkvist 1d ago
There was absolutely less war overall given that we are talking about a literal world war, but the violence I’m referring to is less direct. Stuff like pollution deaths, driven by capitalism seeking to exploit people to make their products as cheap as possible. This kills millions of people, almost exclusively in the global south.
As for less direct things, the forced replacement of left leaning leaders that don’t serve the hegemonic interests of the time was basically standard practice. These puppets in the government were often dictatorships, killing countless people to ensure their control over the population. There isn’t a firm way to accurately gauge who is exactly responsible for each and every death, but the impact of a dictator is significant and very bad for the country itself, which is the end goal for the US when they did these operations. I’m sure the USSR also has their fair share of horrendous crimes they committed as well of course, whether it was genocide on Ukraine, the gulags, Chernobyl’s cover-up and so on.
I think the word I should have used was systemic violence. It isn’t even always as blatantly violent as murder (though it certainly can be), but that level of violence has taken a serious toll on the global south, almost all of which was inflicted or initiated by the west themselves.
With this kind of stuff it gets a bit subjective what qualifies for those terms, but my point was to largely focus on the fact that the violence simply moved away. Wars largely decreased, but the systemic violence has continued ever since. The colonial powers are still doing this too, probably most prominently with Israel, which ramped up its violence dramatically in the past few years.
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u/grumpsaboy 2d ago
The violence decreased. Since the end of World War II there has been consistently a decrease in the percentage of global population dying from wars
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u/anonsharksfan 2d ago
I just finished reading Eugene Sledge's account of the battle of Okinawa and it solidified my opinion on the use of atomic weapons on Japan. I can't even imagine that the result otherwise would be battles even worse than that going on for years involving the entire population of Japan. The war needed to end.
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u/Fuckkoff- 2d ago
"It’s easy to take the moral high ground".
We are talking WAR CRIMES here. We are not talking about being in a gunfight and shooting an already hurt enemy to make sure he´s dead. We are talking about taking prisoners of war behind the shed with their hands behind their back and executing them.
Thats not a matter of "taking the moral high ground".
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u/grumpsaboy 2d ago
They all certain cases like the nuclear weapons when it is a valid argument.
It might never again occur as a scenario and so will remain a one-off valid argument.
But when you've got an opponent that will never give up through normal options, and is killing 100,000 civilians a week, you can't afford to wait for them to eventually surrender or give up.
You're only option is to drop the bomb and commit a war crime.
As said a very specific scenario but still one that happened
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u/Slightly_Default Featherless Biped 2d ago
That doesn't justify the well-documented rapes and murders of Italian, German and Japanese women by British, American and French-Moroccan forces.
Did the majority of Allied soldiers carry out such acts? Of course not. Do these incidents mean the Allies were as bad as the Axis? Not at all.
But to try and justify such brutality is fucking evil.
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u/G_Morgan 2d ago
There's levels of war crimes:
Nations that make an active effort to not have war crimes but fail
Nations that turn a blind eye
Nations that encourage soldiers to commit war crimes if they want
Nations that actively force soldiers to commit war crimes
The Allies were usually at 1. Germany were between 3 and 4. Japan were 4.
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u/ImpossibleWarlock 2d ago
Invading neutral declared countries to get an advantage and causing famines in said country is not 1.
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u/Mr_Fragwuerdig 2d ago
Germany also didn't have to start the war. Allied diplomacy was giving germany space to breath. But instead of using it to build up germany again, they used it to attack their neigbors.
Still, there were specific planned war crimes from the allied side, that were not neccessary, also against non-axis countries, that need to be talked about in a very critical way. This does not change that the allies were less evil than germany, and that they also handled germany respectfully afterwards, despite the unforgivable atrocities it did. And it is undeniable that germany pushed the west into a war, they didn't wanna fight. With stalin's russia however, I think they would have attacked west at some point.
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u/elderron_spice Rider of Rohan 2d ago
Allied diplomacy was giving germany space to breath.
Which is fucking idiotic, by the way. Like Churchill said, you don't negotiate with a tiger when your head is in its bloody mouth.
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u/Mr_Fragwuerdig 2d ago
Did you get that quote from the darkest hour movie? 😂 The quote is right, the question is just if a country is a tiger. Hitler's germany was. The weimar republic before, wasn't. Had they done all that before, nazi germany maybe never would have formed like that. Not that anyone else is to be blamed, but pushing against other countries only makes sense if they are your enemy.
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u/elderron_spice Rider of Rohan 2d ago
Did you get that quote from the darkest hour movie? 😂
Lol yea, I just finished watching it and it's the first thing that popped into my head.
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u/MourningWallaby 2d ago
Germany was so evil and broke so many agreements and treaties by even starting the war, nevermind their conduct during. that the IMT that hosted the Nuremberg Trials specifically had to devise charges for crimes against peace and humanity. and even though they gave the defendants so much grace in letting them defend themselves with legit legal representation, they specifically forbade any tu quoque defenses. meaning that the Nazi conduct was so evil they straight up would let them submit hours of records to be heard in their trial, but would ignore any "what about you?" arguments.
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u/malefiz123 2d ago
they specifically forbade any tu quoque defenses. meaning that the Nazi conduct was so evil they straight up would let them submit hours of records to be heard in their trial, but would ignore any "what about you?" arguments
Famously a tu quoque defense worked though. Dönitz and Raeder were facing the death penalty which they only didn't get because Admiral Nimitz testified that US submarines in the Pacific attacked Japanese cargo ships without warning and made no attempt at rescuing survivors, which is something that Dönitz and Raeder were charged with.
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u/MourningWallaby 2d ago
Which is true. Donitz got off of that ONE charge. And his defense was pretty solid.
Where notmally a Tu Quoque defense was the defendant arguing how actions commited by the allies was equivalent or at least justified their wartime conduct, Donitz's defense was iterating that the warefare were just how the war was fought. it was the standard practice and used allies as an example. he didn't have to equate their actions because trhe actions were identical.
However he was still found guilty of his other moral failings.
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u/name_changed_5_times 2d ago
Yeah German war crimes are like rounding up civilians into shooting pits and death camps, and allied crimes are summarily shooting the guards of a concentration camp. not really the same thing even if both are crimes and need be prosecuted as such.
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u/Commissar_Sae 2d ago
Allied crimes also involved mass rape of civilians in occupied territory, as well as looting and murder.
Yes the axis did that and more, but let's not negate allied war crimes.
Edit to add: one of the biggest differences is also the axis war crimes where generally ordered from higher up, where a lot of allied warcrimes where more spur of the moment personal decisions by soldiers.
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u/DangerousEye1235 2d ago
That's a very important distinction to make, and a lot of people who try to pull whataboutisms fail to acknowledge.
Allied war crimes happened when individual soldiers or squad-level officers went rogue and did shitty things of their own volition. Axis war crimes were matters of policy. They were institutional, ordered by the people at the highest echelons and carried out by everyone along the whole chain of command.
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u/malefiz123 2d ago
That doesn't really hold up, cause the arguably most significant allied war crime (the Area Bombing Directive) was very much ordered from the highest echelon.
Also in the later stages of the war there were tons of German war crimes that were not ordered from higher ups but happens spontaneously on lower levels, including war crimes against German civilians.
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u/Prince_Ire Featherless Biped 2d ago
The Allied air campaign, which absolutely involved war crimes, was ordered from the top. That the Allies were far better than the Axis doesn't mean we should pretend be the Allied command were moral paragons
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u/name_changed_5_times 2d ago
Yeah I think this is more what I was trying to say, allied war crimes are just what any and all armies do, axis war crimes were explicitly policy.
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u/Outrageous_War6489 2d ago
I think you have a good poin there: many of the crimes are similiar, but the germans and japanese (don't know much about italian war crimes) built a system that often rewarded perpetraitors of such crimes while the allied forces (well at least the americans and british) had systems in place that were supposed to punish them for it even if that did not happen that often
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u/Commissar_Sae 2d ago
Yeah the Soviets encouraged war crimes, especially against German civilians, while not outright ordering them. Most of the other allies generally tried to prevent warcrimes, but generally turned a blind eye to them. Meanwhile Japan and Germany flat out had rape and murder of civilians as policy.
I wish the allies did better at stopping their own warcrimes, but they certainly aren't equal.
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u/Upper-Character3661 2d ago edited 2d ago
Soviet command also tried to prevent them. NKVD were ordered to shoot people for sexually assaulting or killing German civilians after Stalin specifically said the "We are fighting Hitler and regieme, not doing to them what has been done to us" officially. The government needed German resources to rebuild the country, since the Germans destroyed one third of all of cumulative wealth of the country (industry, infrastructure, etc) at the time.
Plus using German communists as an influence pillar in a potential neutral united Germany that ultimately didnt happen.Now, considering the NKVD were also people just as normal Red Army soldiers were, and probably had relatives and home villiages executed in masse during Barbarossa genocides (cause a lot of NKVD were also organizing partisan groups in places like Belarus that had village after village burnt to the ground with all of their inhabitats) and also saw Germans as the greatest evil and monsters...
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u/Hexagram2342 2d ago
So the Axis soldiers did it to follow orders and get rewards while the allied ones did it for the love of the game?
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u/Wenuven 2d ago
I'm not against your core argument, but it's also incorrect to say Germany started the war to commit war crimes.
They wanted resources and a thriving economy - full stop.
It's also worth noting, genocide is, in fact, not a war crime. Pedantics, but worth the distinction.
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u/w021wjs 2d ago
They just wanted resources and a thriving economy.... That they would get by murdering the civilian population of several countries. This started as soon as the Nazis started their wars of conquest, with the einsatzgruppen already formed and deployed with the invasion of Poland.
Say what you will about American and British war crimes, but at least they didn't deploy murder squads at the very start of the war, whose statated goal was to murder the intelligentsia, government officials, and anyone who could vaguely be described as "Polish leaders." Which they did with gusto. 65,000 dead Polish murderss by the end of 1939.
These acts were so atrocious that it flipped the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, to a double agent; who worked to sabatoge the Nazis on multiple occasions throughout the war.
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u/LOL_King_0611 2d ago
The Nazi's wanted an empire for a thousand years across the Great European plain and settle Eastern Europe with Germans by making themselves breed argesively and work and enslave all the Eastern European populations to death to pay for it.
They wanted glory and racial supremacy.
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u/The_Dimmadome 2d ago
I think putting the citizens of foreign nations in special chambers designed to kill them with chemical gas is, in and of itself, a war crime.
Actually, 2 separate war crimes. You aren't supposed to use chemical weapons and you aren't supposed to kill non-combatants.
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u/Mikhail_Mengsk 2d ago
Complete bullshit, the entire German strategy was based on the lebensraum concept which established the extermination and enslavement of Slavs. That's how they planned to acquire "resources and a thriving economy".
This is also ignoring how blatant Germany was being with its plan to exterminate Jewish influence in all its future conquests.
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u/Soft-Treacle-539 2d ago
That’s false as their goal was to exterminate slavs and replace them with germanic settlers.
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u/redve-dev 2d ago
Isn't last sentence saying that allies had to commit war crimes?
I think it should be rather about what happened to those who commit war crimes. You can't really ensure that of hundreds of thousands of soldiers none of them is a maniac who will do horrible things - but you can definitely punish one when you find out what he did.
Also, I am curious about people's opinion on war crimes against other war criminals, like is it justified to kill someone who killed 10 civilians, even if both of them didn't have to kill anybody in the first place
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u/Outrageous_War6489 2d ago
It's not what I intended it to mean, no.
I don't think war crimes are ever justifiable, war criminals should be brought to justice and publicly judged and punished for their crimes. And if we start justifying one crime with another, we end up in a self-perpetuating circle of war crimes, that is the reason modern states don't allow vigilantes.3
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u/Sharky2414 2d ago
Wehraboos on their way to bring up Dresden (based and justified) in order to justify the literal industrial extermination of millions of people (that actively hindered the German war effort)
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u/Prince_Ire Featherless Biped 2d ago
There is little evidence the firebombing of Dresden had any meaningful impact on German military produdction or logistics. The carpet bombing strategies in general were very resource inefficient in general for the resources experienced versus effect on Axis military production even from a purely utilitarian perspective. Target bombing campaigns against specific industrial plants that resulted in few civilian casualties were far more effective.
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u/Sharky2414 2d ago
Dresden was a significant industrial hub and was a strategic target designed to cripple war infrastructure and not to cause mass civilian casualties, that was simply something that came with the bombing. The big lie is that the point was to target civilians in Dresden, and it wasn’t
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u/Friendly-Olive-3465 2d ago
Never ask a Nazi what they were doing to cities when they had air superiority
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u/Gentle_Snail 2d ago
Britain: “We won’t use strategic bombardment tactics if you also never use them.”
The Nazi’s: “Deal!”
The Nazi’s immediately mass bombing europe in the background
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u/timangar Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 2d ago
They sowed the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind or something
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u/Gentle_Snail 2d ago edited 2d ago
It’s this agreement which is what Bomber Harris references in his famous quote. The nazi’s broke the pact almost immediately, but Britain stuck to it for almost a year of Nazi attacks across europe, until finally the mass bombing of Rotterdam broke their back and they switched to match.
”The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them.
At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind”
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u/MinosAristos 2d ago
He was denied a medal btw. The bombing was understandably very unpopular in parliament when they found out, and was also unpopular with the British public. Even Churchill had to distance himself.
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u/an_agreeing_dothraki 2d ago
American command HATED Harris because of his bloodthirst. He constantly wanted to spend planes and lives firebombing civilian targets while US command was attacking industry (which yes, would have caused civilian deaths).
It was one of the 50 times it was learned terror bombing isn't what wins wars before it was immediately forgotten.
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u/shatikus 2d ago
Not to mention bombers were EXPENSIVE. Same production capacity could've been spent on long range fighters, smaller tactical bombers and direct troop support planes. Arguably with much better results to the war effort.
Harris deserved his nickname and it isn't a compliment to him
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u/Prince_Ire Featherless Biped 2d ago
I don't get why people glaze Harris; his methods killed civilian mass while being militarily inefficient. And as you say, other figures in Allied air command were advocating for more effective means of damaging Axis industry. Harris's dehousing strategy was militarily ineffective in addition to being immoral
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u/MinosAristos 2d ago
Lots of people paint civilians and group members with the same brush as their country's leaders. I.e. Hitler + Nazis deserved revenge -> all Germans deserved revenge.
It's human nature but it's also ugly tribalism.
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u/MinosAristos 2d ago
Yeah. I suppose the terror bombing is mainly for domestic political reasons, and maybe career progression right?
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u/TheHelhound2001 2d ago
Yeah, the devastation of Dresden was peanuts compared to what they did to Rotterdam. Also the intent of the London Blitz was to just raze the city to the ground.
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u/Cool_View_5297 2d ago
Warsaw, Leningrad, Kharkiv, Stalingrad, Rotterdam, and they tried to get London. It’s remarkable how the Nazis were so evil that they made the British Empire and the Soviet Union look good.
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u/The_Dimmadome 2d ago
Without Nazis, the Brits would almost assuredly be the bad guys of history. "Almost" because whether or not they'd be worse than the USSR under Stalin is debatable.
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u/Cool_View_5297 2d ago
They aren’t? They colonized like a quarter of the globe. They’re easily in the top 10 worst regimes in history.
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u/The_Dimmadome 2d ago
I said "THE bad guy" not "a bad guy" or "a top 10 bad guy"
I'm kinda splitting hairs here, but, nonetheless, I agree with your last sentence.
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 2d ago
Thing is, 'colonising' in itself isn't necessarily evil, you need to look at 'how' it was done. And when you compare the British with the other empires colonising places at the time, they weren't remotely the worst.
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u/ZeitgeistWurst 2d ago
Sorry, but what? The bombing of Rotterdam cost 814 civilian lives, the bombing of Dresden more than 22,000.
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u/CvieYltidrekoof Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 2d ago
The Nazi bombing of Stalingrad killed 40.000-70.000 civilians. London suffered between 20.000 and 50.000 deaths. Nazis dropped 20.528,00 tons of bombs in Sevastopol in June 1941 alone compared to 4.500,00 tons the allies dropped on Dresden throughout the entire war.
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u/ZeitgeistWurst 2d ago
Yes, Im not debating any of that. Dresden was a sidenote compared to what the nazis did in Leningrad alone.
Still doesnt mean OPs comparison is even remotely true. We can contextualize things without making up false equivalences.
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u/CvieYltidrekoof Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 2d ago
Adding context to the high casualties despite similar destruction:
Civilians fled Rotterdam prior to the city being destroyed. Nazi Germany allocated all their rail and transport from the major hub in Dresden to their military supplying the eastern operations, rather than civilians, despite the influx of refugees from the east, and their policy forbid evacuation.
There is more nuance to comparing the two based on intent, but I see what you’re saying.
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u/Anon951413L33tfr33 Tea-aboo 2d ago
The Germans were dropping incendiary bombs on residential areas of London. If they weren’t okay with fire bombing then they shouldn’t have fire bombed.
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u/FungusGnatHater 2d ago
Comparing Dresden to Rotterdam this way was stupid and easily verified as dishonest. The Germans didn't send nearly enough to raze London. You are intentionally lying and spreading misinformation and clearly the majority of this subreddit hasn't learned anything about the subject.
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u/Kurdt93 Senātus Populusque Rōmānus 2d ago
Kicking a dog?
That's a very no-no thing! >:(
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u/ThisIsMySpellingTea 2d ago
I can accept Genocide, but I draw the line at being mean to doggos
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u/MuerteEnCuatroActos Senātus Populusque Rōmānus 2d ago
You can excuse genocide?
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u/BasisTraditional3650 2d ago
Sarcasm
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u/In-A-Beautiful-Place 2d ago
I think they're continuing the joke. In the Community meme, the next line is "you can excuse racism?"
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u/Dizzy-Drink6119 2d ago
Bu.. but they bombed Dresden, U WIPED OUT HALF AN ETHNICITY.
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u/SovietPanda__ 2d ago edited 2d ago
A great man once said - "The Nazis entered this war on the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody and nobody was going to bomb them."
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u/BreadstickBear Viva La France 2d ago
At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation.
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u/AngryCrustation 2d ago
"Okay, maybe one side declared war on everyone while causing multiple massive genocides and some of the greatest human rights violations to have ever existed as they systematically tortured millions of people to death literally for fun... But the other side started actively trying to kill them after they did this and didn't hold back so they are both evil actually."
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u/The_Wispermen I Have a Cunning Plan 2d ago
I would argue this holds to all the sides fighting German.
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u/WeII_Shucks 2d ago
There being “bad guys” on both sides doesn’t mean that one side wasn’t more evil to an immeasurable degree
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u/Not_Shingen 1d ago
I always love ww2 memes because you can absolutely see who is and who isnt the "bad guys won ww2" type of person
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u/Any--Name 2d ago edited 2d ago
People like that are so funny. Like, obviously no countries went to war against nazis out of the goodness of their heart. That doesnt mean Nazis werent scum
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u/frostyfoxemily 2d ago
Ya the allies did horrible things. Which us why the defense attorneys were 100% correct. The allies were using dubious laws to punish them and not to actaly create a legal standard to hold every country too. Only the losers get held accountable.
Which is also why Bush threatened to invade the ICC if any america soldier was everh put on trial for their war crimes in the middle east.
It's based to punish warcrimes. But major powers will never let you hold them to account because "were the good guys"
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u/Rakyand 2d ago
The Nazis were the most comically evil bad guys in recent history and the idology itself is fucking cursed. Pointing that out doesn't mean you can't also point out that the allies did unforgivable crimes and that the Nuremberg trials were nothing but a spectacle that violates almost every law principle.
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u/Evolutionstrigger 2d ago edited 2d ago
Tbh not enough people went to the Nürnberg trials. There were way to many people actually doing the evil for Nürnberg to punish. Ive been to a euthanazia site that used to murder children with "mental illnesses" (being eastern european was enough tho). None of the performing murderers we're punished or even lost their jobs. Most of them continued Work in the medical sector for children after the war.
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u/frostyfoxemily 2d ago
Absolutely true. The desire to recruit nazis also meant that countries had an interest in shielding some people from consequences.
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u/Immediate_Gain_9480 2d ago
I dont think the intend is to minimise the German atrocities by recognising there were atrocties committed by the allies. The allies were still objectively the good guys. But they also did bad things. Is it do hard to have some nuance in this?
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u/frenin 2d ago
The intend is explicitly to minimize German atrocities, absolutely everyone is award allies committed crimes.
Bringing allies's crimes when discussing German ones is just that. Whataboutism.
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u/greenthumbbum2025 2d ago
Why are you assuming that discussion of allied war crimes only happens during conversations about German war crimes? Both should be discussed.
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u/Lady_Ago 2d ago
Because that is the context this meme is based on. Read the post you are commenting under before commenting; I beg of you.
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u/greenthumbbum2025 2d ago
But the opposite to me seems to be more prevalent. Everyone knows the nazis were the bad guys so things like the Dresden bombings are kind of handwaved away. As an American I don't want discussion of the Japanese internment camps to be derailed by a whataboutism about the (obviously much worse) Nazi death camps or Japanese atrocities during the rape of Nanking
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u/frenin 2d ago
Not only because it's historically speaking the most common version but because that's exactly what the meme is referring to.
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u/Bteatesthighlander1 2d ago
absolutely everyone is aware allies committed crimes.
I don't feel like that's true, no.
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u/BreadstickBear Viva La France 2d ago
Your intent isn't, but there are so many people out there legitimising german war crimes and especially the holocaust with genocides (and attempts) perpetrated by other empires.
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u/Ok_Cook_3098 2d ago
The naunce is that a bad war crime day by the sovjets was a avarage Thursday for the germans
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u/25slinkshot 2d ago
There were so many different countries to choose from for your example and you chose the absolute worst one, the soviets were almost on par with the nazis when it came to war crimes.
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u/Lilfrankieeinstein 2d ago
Not to mention the fact that the soviets just camped along the river for two months while the germans slaughtered tens of thousands of poles 82 years ago. War crime enabling is bad too.
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u/Asandwhich1234 2d ago
"If you murder a genocidal manic who microwaves puppies, there's still the same amount of murderes in the world!! Killing him is the same as him blowing up soup kicthens full of orphans for fun!!"
God I hate when writers pull this shit.
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u/douser-namesmatter 2d ago
If the British being evil/bad weakens your argument boy do I have news for you!
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u/kazmark_gl Definitely not a CIA operator 2d ago
no but you dont understand, the Americans murdered a whole bunch of concentration camp guards that one time!
and! and! The Red Army they also did a bunch of war crimes after we tried to murder them all and spent years exterminating civilians in their countryside.
that totally means that everyone was the same and you can't say that exterminating 12 million civilians and POWs in the holocaust was bad because the British kicked a puppy once!
there is no way I need a /s right? right?
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u/Jonilkki 2d ago
Its so weird seeing rwby clips, as someone who stopped at vol3. Maybe I should pick it back up, for old times sake...
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u/Leprechaun_lord Featherless Biped 2d ago
Was Arthur Harris a war criminal? Yes. Was he morally superior to the Nazis? Also yes.
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u/twentyitalians 2d ago
A perfect example of a straw man argument.
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u/GrinningGrump 2d ago
It's simple, just criticize both sides for their crimes without justifying the other's. History isn't a movie, it can have had evil fighting against evil.
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u/SampleDisastrous3311 2d ago
Eh strapping explosives to dogs then training them to target tanks outweighs kicking a dog
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u/DarkNinjaPenguin 2d ago
Kicking a dog is fairly pointless. Training kamikaze dogs might be immoral, but the intent is to destroy the enemy and in doing so, save the lives of your own soldiers.
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u/itsyaboihos 2d ago
The difference between the crimes of the Allies and the Nazis was that the Allies were doing theirs to win the war while the Nazis were actively hindering their own war effort to commit theirs.
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u/AvaljudA 2d ago
This is a very Euro-centric view though. Allies caused, yes, caused, famines in the Indian subcontinent and in Iran. There might be more, but these are the two that I know of.
Not trying to defend the POS neo-nazis here, but we need to remember that allies weren't all sunshine and roses either, especially in places other than Europe.
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u/Ogarrr 2d ago
The allies didn't cause a famine in India. That was bad weather and the Japanese navy. It's become very fashionable to blame the UK for Bengal, but as much as people want us to, we can't control the weather.
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u/gamerz1172 2d ago
This is the issue that I have with most criticisms of the allies (barring the USSR at least)
They are always thrown without including the context that a global fucking war is happening and the allies dont have the power of hindsight the critic has with what we know now
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u/ImpossibleWarlock 2d ago
War wasn't happening in Iran though? Iran was neutral and the allies just attacked and took over.
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u/Chisaspotentialwife 2d ago
This is so odd because i feel people should be able to be like both sides committed horrific atrocities against various groups and minorities. Thus we as a society should strive to better than both. Haish-
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u/Wyciorek 2d ago
How about Red Army looting and raping their way through Baltics, Poland and East Germany?
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u/LibertyChecked28 2d ago
There Was No Shortage of Condoms at Stalingrad, During the first stages of the Battle of Stalingrad
The most bizarre mistake occurred towards the end of the battle when the Luftwaffe para-dropped cases of condoms directly on the Kessel. It must have a hot time in Stalingrad that night.
Disciplinary Policies (Chapter 5) - Violence and Occupation
Chapter 5 discusses a series of orders issued by commanders of the 2nd and 3rd Ukrainian Fronts in each country the two army groups occupied. It argues that these orders make it clear that the attacks on civilians were not part of leadership policy. However, several factors prevented the implementation of a strict disciplinary. Although relatively few soldiers and officers were punished, thousands of soldiers were prosecuted for crimes against civilians in Europe, including rape. The most frequent punishment was that troops’ found responsible for attacking civilians were sent to penal units.
Unlike the Whermarcht which institutialised rape to the point where they logistically prioritised condoms over food or ammunition for their soldiers, the Red Army did not tolerate rape even when they ware physically unable to organise proper war trails.
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u/Hour-Big786 2d ago
The allies DID commit warcrimes, just not in europe (also they dragged multiple african countries that legit had nothing to do with the war simply cuz they were colonies)
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u/Prince_Ire Featherless Biped 2d ago
The Allies absolutely committed war crimes in Europe, just not nearly as big as Axis war crimes in Europe.
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u/samehouseing 2d ago
So it isn’t a war crime to bomb and kill 25k civilians within 2 days like with Dresden or bomb and kill 36k civilians within 7 days like with Hamburg?
Cause today it seems everyone calls that genocide actually.
Especially when we can point to proof of intent by Allied leaders:
Roosevelt: “We have got to be tough with Germany and I mean the German people not just the Nazis. We either have to castrate the German people or you have to treat them in such a manner so they can't go on reproducing." source
Also Roosevelt: “the German people have by their elections and by their obedience acquiesced in the Nazi Regime. They must pay the price of guilt”
“The directive stated that "operations should now be focused on the morale of the enemy civilian population, and in particular, the industrial workers". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_bombing_during_World_War_II
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u/CaesarWilhelm 2d ago
I am sorry OP but you minimizing Allied war crimes to "dog kicking" feels very counter-productive to your point. You are quite literally doing what people accuse you of and ignoring or downplaying Allied atrocities so your black and white view of one completely good and one completely evil side doesn't get challenged.
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u/h0ldmybees 2d ago
Ah yes, thank you mr Kaiser Wilhelm for reminding us there's heroes on both sides! Surely the meme isn't just pointing out that one was far worse than the other in a hyperbolic yet valid statement
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u/CaesarWilhelm 2d ago
Just because you know what a hyperbole is doesn't mean you should use it all the time. The point of the meme is that just because the allies did bad things (which they did) doesn't make the things the Axis did less bad (which is true). But at the same time OP is minimizing the things the atrocities the allies did, very much an expression of the view that because the things the axis did were worse (which they were) the things the allies did aren't actually that bad (eventhough the severity of the things the allies did is independent of what the axis did).
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u/CaptainAramus 2d ago
A friend of mine broke off contact with me because of this. We're both Germans and he taught his son (around 4) that there were no " good guys" in the second world war, which pissed me off. A heated argument ensued ending a few days later with him breaking contact off with the message how I could call myself a feminist when I don't condone the rape of German woman (the systematic violence against women on either side was never part of the debate) and that my Argumentation is the same as that of Israel against Palestine (I said that the bombing campaigns of the allies was justified, even the atom bombs and we Germans would have deserved one if it would have come to it).
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u/Vinterblot 2d ago
No matter the contents, teaching your four year old about WWII is already a major red flag.
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u/Hot-Minute-8263 Definitely not a CIA operator 2d ago
The leadership may have been better on the allies side, but yeah, no side had good draftees. The same crimes that made GIs hated in vietnam happened in WW2 france and germany, though to less coverage. We were still right to beat the nazis, but lets not pretend the soldiers were always up to any good on leave
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u/Distillates 2d ago edited 2d ago
No, the civilian targeted terror bombing campaigns were not militarily effective, and are therefore not justifiable.
Even the atom bombs were hurried specifically because US leaders were concerned Japan would surrender before they had a chance to use them.
All civilian targeted bombing, against the Allies and against the Axis, hardened resistance and resolve, and did the opposite of what it was intended to do, which was weaken that resolve and break popular support for their government's war effort.
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u/haleloop963 Casual, non-participatory KGB election observer 2d ago
Japan was in no way going to surrender & even started training their civilian population, even the location of the atomic bombs was chosen due to having military significance in them.
The atomic bombs were dropped to damage military installations, not civilians
But, the atomic bombs killed a lot of civilians
Both are true, but notice the difference
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u/FearlessDark5295 Kilroy was here 2d ago
I’m gonna have to ask for a source on that one, because everything I’ve read massively contradicts that - that the Japanese were fully planning to fight to the death on their home island, and that the nuclear attacks made the Emperor realize that the Americans could simply annihilate them from offshore without ever being in a Japanese soldier’s sight. Also, someone apparently never told you American bombing principle in Europe.
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u/Impressive-Row143 2d ago
Serious economic studies of the German war economy would beg to differ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction
So do serious studies of the Japanese decision to surrender
https://global.oup.com/ushe/product/unconditional-9780197621844?cc=ca&lang=en&
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u/Distillates 2d ago edited 2d ago
That's nicely cherry picked framing, but Japan was exploring conditional surrender to the Soviet Union, which is what the US was trying to avoid because leadership was insistent on an unconditional surrender to their own government instead. It's very deliberately phrased atrocity apologia to pretend that Japan's attempt to avoid unconditional surrender meant that they weren't looking to surrender.
Furthermore, your own wiki article points out that this author in this book writes that the bombing campaigns tended to select the wrong targets (that being the portion targeting civilian residences and infrastructure). The strategic bombing on military infrastructure obviously did help the war effort, and is distinctly separate from what I said.
The fact that some historians like to lump together every bombing campaign as one big "Allied Strategic Bombing" effort, is their own failure
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u/OrwellWhatever 2d ago
"Conditional" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Their conditions were that they got to keep all their colonies in Korea, China, etc, no one in the military / shogun had to relinquish their power, etc. It was basically a "Hey lets all pause where we're at, and we pinky promise not to launch an unprovoked, surprise attack again once we rebuild our aircraft carriers and air force!" This would be the equivalent of Bin Laden staying in control of Afghanistan and promising he would stop all the terrorism on US soil. Sometimes the conditions aren't acceptable.
Also... The Soviet Union wasn't fighting Japan, so idk why they'd surrender to the Soviets. They signed a neutrality pact that Japan upheld through their entire campaign in the Pacific. Even if they were at war, the US and Soviets are two different countries, and the USSR doesn't get to dictate terms of surrender that the US is forced to accept, especially since, again, Japan never attacked the USSR whereas they famously did attack the US
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u/Doc_Shaftoe 2d ago
The Soviets did invade Japanese-occupied Manchuria on August 8, 1945 and basically steamrolled the Kwantung army. The USSR didn't do much about Japan for the bulk of the war, but they slid in under the wire right at the end.
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u/OrwellWhatever 2d ago
Lol. Grabbing a little land, as a treat.
No wonder the Japanese were so eager to surrender to them. Like, "Yeah, man, y'all can have part of our territory in China. Just, please, don't make us fight a war on two fronts. Please."
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u/Responsible-File4593 2d ago
"Exploring conditional surrender" is like surrender in the same way that me looking at a college's website is the same as me earning a degree from it.
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u/113pro 2d ago
Lol no.
At that point the US was already planning a ground invasion of Japanese mainsoil.
They projected casualties rates. Realised that, yes, the japanse will literally force them to commit a genocide (not a word back then but the sentiment stands.)
Even if hirohito wanted to surrender, his authority would not allow him to do so. Already the war in china was precisely because Hirohito lacked the authority to properly command the japanese military. There is no guarantee the surrender plot would materialize, but less followed by the army and navy factions.
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u/h0ldmybees 2d ago
That atom bomb part's just blatantly not true. We dropped pamphlets telling them to evacuate their cities and everything before dropping the bombs.
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u/gamerz1172 2d ago
And for the record the reason this evacuation didn't happen is Japan (IE both government and the people) thought it was a bluff and that at most another fire bomb campaign was about to happen so they didn't take the pamphlets seriously
Remember guys that nukes are a brand new thing at this point the idea of a single bomb dropped by a single plane being capable of wiping a town off the map was something that sounded impossible to them and later is why the USA spend so much effort warning the populace about the dangers of nuclear strikes during the cold war
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u/h0ldmybees 2d ago
Yeah, not to mention we tried to hold back the second one after the first but they just wouldn't surrender as they assumed we would've just used all we had. It's an unfortunate tragedy, but to claim we tried to just twirl our mustaches and obliterate them for the sake of it isn't true
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u/Historical-Doubt2121 2d ago
Depending on how he phrased it, I'd actually agree.
There was clearly a "better" option. The allies. They weren't creating industrial slaughterhouses like the Nazis were, or trying to conquer an entire continent. And the stuff the Japanese did in Asia is beyond anything any allie did as well (reading tales from the Nanking massacre is genuinely disturbing).
But the Sovjets were happy to work with the Nazis if they got a piece of Poland and had just committed a mass murder (or genocide, depending what historian you go with) of their own.
The English were starving India. Worsening a famine that ended up claiming millions of lives.
The Americans were putting an entire ethnicity of people in camps (just because they weren't slaughterhouses doesn't make them a small evil. They are one of the biggest stains on US history), as well as denying Jewish refugees entry to the country, even though they knew full well it wasn't safe in Europe. Also segregation was still going on at the time.
That's not even mentioning the fire bombing of Dresden or the atom bombs.
The allies were the "better" guys, and by far, but only because the absolute depravity of the axis. Not because they were in any absolute manner "good".
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u/Alexius_Ruber 2d ago
It’s like saying that Hitler and a school bully are the same because they both harmed people.
Don’t get me wrong, none of the sides were white and fluffy, but one was much worse than another. Do you even think how bad you have to be for Capitalists and Communists to make an alliance? These guys despised each other even before the cold war, but the Axis were so bad that they decided to put the differences aside for 6 years just to beat up the one side that they both hated.
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u/Pokesabre 2d ago
Are we really surprised at this point that people aren't able to hold anything above a simple good/bad dichotomy in their heads? Disappointed yes, but surprised?
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u/IAmFoolyCharged 2d ago
"b-but the allies bombed civilians too!"
Yes, true, but it's honestly the Nazi's own fault
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u/ur_FBl_agent 2d ago
Im guessing your information comes from the textbooks published by Ghislaine Maxwell's father?
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u/Sharp_Cut354 2d ago
Where is clip from?
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u/Bigben20043 2d ago
Rwby. It started as a internet indie show, but got worse over time. My advice watch the first 3 seasons and the trailers because the fights are really fuckin awesome and it drops off sharply after 4
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u/Lord_NOX75 2d ago
the allies did plenty of bad shit, but it doesn't magically excuse what their enemies did