:liberalism: But also mass murdering war criminals and complete monsters like Unit 731 are just precious smol beans who should be forgiven, and the USSR was doing a heckin evil fake show trial when it charged the ones it caught and that's why the US had to criminalize the distribution of the court proceedings.
Gotta love that the position that every civilian caught up in US bombing campaigns was guilty and deserved death can coexist in the same heads that also believe the actual, literal monsters carrying out atrocities stopped being a problem or deserving punishment the instant the war was over.
Fuck, now I'm realizing there's a thread there about people fundamentally accepting war as a legitimate thing, that in war there's a collective guilt in the enemy that extends to civilians but still a fundamental legitimacy to soldiers and state actions, especially when it's expedient to simply absorb the defeated state and faction into part of the imperial machine. The crimes of Imperial Japan couldn't be prosecuted because its Co-Prosperity Sphere effectively became a part of the US imperial machine, just as Nazi Germany became part of the US imperial machine in Europe with the FRG, just with a few token measures to distance the FRG and its Nazi-party-alumni leadership from the Nazis themselves.
I don't think there's an antidote to it: it's cynical and shaped by commentary by accepted propaganda mouthpieces. I'm not even entirely sure how applicable it is to modern conflicts: it applies to things like WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam wars, where even regarding the designated "enemy" there's a more tacit acceptance of formal state forces than insurgent groups, like the VC gets demonized by Americans while nobody talks about the formal North Vietnamese army, but in more modern conflicts it seems like this idea has shifted to "enemy bad and illegitimate, whoever we like good and legitimate" in a way that doesn't distinguish between state and non-state actors, which makes me think this is more shaped by formal propaganda than some innate "formally accepted violence man violence good, non-formally accepted violence man violence bad" phenomenon.
Like you can't really inoculate a population, and especially cynical jingoists, against the stance of the formally accepted propaganda mouthpieces.
One could probably tie this to how the FRG/modern Germany and Occupied Korea each consider/considered their counterpart to be fundamentally an illegitimate insurgency against their authority, or how the really terminal liberals try to insist on describing Taiwan as the legitimate Chinese government even in contravention of the US's own position, and how the entire liberal idea of a legitimate state is at once paramount in their geopolitical worldview and at the same entirely cynical and shaped by what they're told to believe, but I'm already too drunk to articulate what I'm trying to say here so I'm not sure I can follow this thread of thought to fruition.
:liberalism: But also mass murdering war criminals and complete monsters like Unit 731 are just precious smol beans who should be forgiven, and the USSR was doing a heckin evil fake show trial when it charged the ones it caught and that's why the US had to criminalize the distribution of the court proceedings.
Gotta love that the position that every civilian caught up in US bombing campaigns was guilty and deserved death can coexist in the same heads that also believe the actual, literal monsters carrying out atrocities stopped being a problem or deserving punishment the instant the war was over.
Fuck, now I'm realizing there's a thread there about people fundamentally accepting war as a legitimate thing, that in war there's a collective guilt in the enemy that extends to civilians but still a fundamental legitimacy to soldiers and state actions, especially when it's expedient to simply absorb the defeated state and faction into part of the imperial machine. The crimes of Imperial Japan couldn't be prosecuted because its Co-Prosperity Sphere effectively became a part of the US imperial machine, just as Nazi Germany became part of the US imperial machine in Europe with the FRG, just with a few token measures to distance the FRG and its Nazi-party-alumni leadership from the Nazis themselves.
What would stop this from happening next time?
I don't think there's an antidote to it: it's cynical and shaped by commentary by accepted propaganda mouthpieces. I'm not even entirely sure how applicable it is to modern conflicts: it applies to things like WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam wars, where even regarding the designated "enemy" there's a more tacit acceptance of formal state forces than insurgent groups, like the VC gets demonized by Americans while nobody talks about the formal North Vietnamese army, but in more modern conflicts it seems like this idea has shifted to "enemy bad and illegitimate, whoever we like good and legitimate" in a way that doesn't distinguish between state and non-state actors, which makes me think this is more shaped by formal propaganda than some innate "formally accepted violence man violence good, non-formally accepted violence man violence bad" phenomenon.
Like you can't really inoculate a population, and especially cynical jingoists, against the stance of the formally accepted propaganda mouthpieces.
One could probably tie this to how the FRG/modern Germany and Occupied Korea each consider/considered their counterpart to be fundamentally an illegitimate insurgency against their authority, or how the really terminal liberals try to insist on describing Taiwan as the legitimate Chinese government even in contravention of the US's own position, and how the entire liberal idea of a legitimate state is at once paramount in their geopolitical worldview and at the same entirely cynical and shaped by what they're told to believe, but I'm already too drunk to articulate what I'm trying to say here so I'm not sure I can follow this thread of thought to fruition.
Thank you for the thoughtful answer! It’s depressing but it’s correct.