Laos and Cambodia weren't participants in the war but that doesn't really feel like it matters all that much. Whenever I talk about the bombings of Cambodia and Laos with Americans (who - liberals and conservatives alike feel they must always defend) I sometimes here "well we bombed cities in Germany and Japan in WW2 and no one talks about those being war crimes". But were they? I really don't know much about those bombings. My gut says yes they were also war crimes but we just accept them because they were combatant countries?
Really weird to see people defending the bombing of Dresden in this thread, especially in the same breath as recommending Shaun’s Hiroshima video. In that video, Shaun discusses how the strategy of strategic bombing was pretty useless and that the bombing of Dresden was unjustified. Winston Churchill even ended up calling strategic bombing a pretty useless strategy that didn’t contribute much to the war effort, and there was that dude (I think someone quoted him in this thread) who said if the allies hadn’t won the war these things would absolutely be war crimes. This is also what they will tell you if you ever visit Dresden. I met some guy who gave me a tour of some of the ww2 sites in Dresden, was very nostalgic for East Germany, but he also said yeah the allies shouldn’t bombed Dresden in the way they did.
Even worse is people defending Hiroshima. Both were absolutely unjustified. People are defending these things bc the countries were fascist, which like, yeah, but the actual levers of power of fascism are not being bombed, just a bunch of civilians. Meanwhile these things did very little to actually end the war, so not much damage is actually being done to these fascist countries.
Idk too much about Cambodia and Laos to compare, but the bombings of Hiroshima and Dresden both were absolutely unjustified, contributed very little to the war effort, and were absolutely war crimes. No one here should be defending them
I’m like half asleep and lieing in bed so might try to flesh this answer out once I get up
To add some additional information, the firebombings carried out by the US on Japan killed more people than a nuke and are often forgotten about in the face of the two nuclear detonations. The Japanese were looking for an out for any reason possible before the nukes were dropped and the US was decently aware of this fact which makes the dropping of the nukes all that more unjustifiable. I would argue that both are equally evil but that come Laos and Cambodia the technology advanced enough for this campaign to be more brutal just like how technology has advanced enough now for us to remotely drop bombs on poor people in the mountains of Afghanistan.
ffs they were literally called "terror bombings".
They cite it as McNamara, but McNamara is actually quoting notorious lizardman Curtis LeMay
and here's another of LeMay's quotes: