Here's how Dresdens most popular church looked after the war. The :GDR-emblem: left it like that on purpose - not as an indictment of the allied bombings, but as a reminder what fascism leads to. It leads to getting your shit kicked in when you become too much of a threat for humanity as a whole.

As a German whose grandparents became refugees after the war, i still have to say that the Germans back then ... well, they had it coming. They really did, even most of the civilians. While Hitler never had an absolute majority as long as there still were halfway fair and open elections, there was a strong majority for a coalition of reactionary, ultra-nationalist parties who directly enabled and cheered on his rise to power and his popular support only solidified in the years leading up to the war. You cannot seperate the crimes of the nazi regime from the masses, eager and fervent popular support was the backbone of the nazi reign of terror. If you're fine with chuds getting the wall, i don't see why you'd morally object to OG nazis getting merced (strategically objecting is another issue, see below). The majority of the people killed in the raids were reactionaries who had fully supported the revanchist, expansionist course of Germany and the deadly persecution of Jews, communists and many, many other groups that had no place in the fascist order. Oh, but they were women and children, you say - yes, women and children who snitched on their neighbors. Women who saw it as their duty to the Fatherland to birth and raise little nazi soldiers and children who learned maths by calculating how much money can be saved by exterminating people with disabilities. And then they went off to the Hitlerjugend to learn how to shoot and how to hate Jews and how to serve the Führer. As harsh as it sounds, Germany's people largely deserved what they got, the scale of the crimes they enabled was just too massive to say otherwise and all casualties of WW2 are ultimately the fault of the nazis anyway, after all they kicked the whole thing off when they were actively trying to set the world on fire for their imperialism speedrun. It's a clear case of fuck around, find out, even though ofc there are always innocent people getting lost in indiscriminate carpet bombing and even though WW2 proved once and for all that such a doctrine is strategically pointless. The plan to destroy enemy morale through these bombings was a total failure, their only military worth was in destroying infrastructure important to the war effort. So while i don't feel any pity for Dresden burning down, it would be inexcusable to repeat what happened there in following wars.

Which brings us to Vietnam and Laos. Unlike in WW2, there was ample experience with the pointlesness of strategic bombing. Unlike with Germany, there was a clear focus on an exterminationist maximization of Vietnamese casualties, as the US believed they could win the war by genociding their way to a better KDR (that's literally what they planned, google McNamara fallacy). The bombings also happened on a scale that is not even remotely comparable to WW2. America had seen that indiscriminate mass bombing campaigns don't win wars and still doubled down, after they had already seen again that this does not work in Korea. It's just not the fucking same. Not to mention that in WW2, the US tried to stop a bunch of literal nazis who wanted to subjugate and ethnically cleanse all of Europe, whereas Vietnam was a bunch iof communists who only wanted the right to govern their country themselves, free of imperialist meddling. And the people of Laos did even less than that.

So no, Dresden doesn't even come remotely close to the crimes of the War of Imperialist Aggression against the people of Vietnam and Laos.

I'm not saying anything about Japan here, i know too little about the Pacific theatre during WW2 to pitch in on that. Shaun has a pretty thorough video on Hiroshima, though, i can highly recommend that one.

Just one last thing, neonazis are holding protest vigils in Dresden every year were they cry about the "allied bombing holocaust". Mythologizing, exaggerating and misrepresenting the bombing of Dresden is a core part of their victim blaming narratives. It should not be repeated in leftist circles, the US did enough undoubtedly bad things against communists to be criticized for. We do not have to show sympathy for dead fascists to do that.