Berlin will no longer be required to ensure that US drone strikes coordinated through an air base in Germany are in line with international law, a top court has ruled, in a “severe blow” to a case brought by human rights groups.
I appreciate a principled stance on foreign policy, but i have to object here. The bombing of Dresden is heavily instrumentalized by nazis to this day, they are cynical enough to refer to it as "the bomb holocaust", they are holding commemorative marches there every year, in the reconstruction of their city that was built by revisionist chuds after the wall fell. That may bias my response, yes, but it also makes it needed that i respond here.
You're giving Palestine as an example. Why? Palestine is objectively not even a viable state rn. The peak of Palestinian military technology are kids with slingshots, or unguided missiles built in somebody's garage that are going up against the Iron Dome. Which is also done from a defensive position against an occupying force. By contrast, Germany in February of 1945 was a military juggernaut that had conquered almost the entire continent, left scorched earth all the way from Danzig to Moscow, rained down V2s on London every day, reduced humans to ash in the camps with every passing minute and would not stop any of that until it got broken completely. It's the one example where there's not a shadow of a doubt that military interventionism was not only justified, but an absolute necessity. There simply are no comparable cases in postwar history.
If we regard the bombing of Dresden as a war crime is a hypothetical. It was a response to Germany doing worse than that all the damn time. Just ask the population of Coventry. It was also done against the background of Germany being entirely unimpressed by any setback in the war, no matter how brutal. We're talking about a country that didn't stop when Hamburg and Lübeck burned in response to the German air raids on the UK, that didn't stop when literally anything around the Cologne cathedral was reduced to rubble, that doubled down after losing an entire army at Stalingrad. Yes, you could infer from that that destroying one more city would not make a difference. You could also infer that giving ground based on this lack of a response equals surrender, that you're in a confrontation where holding your punches is just outright suicidal. If you're up against an enemy like that, you can't show mercy. It's just not an option, and not comparable to any of the conflicts that the US and the UK got into, or started themselves, later in history.
I'm saying this as a German myself. My grandparents all lost their homes after the war, my great-grandmother got shot at on the forced march westwards, took two bullets through the lungs from a Soviet Mosin-Nagant, two shells that punched straight through her, and she had to recover from that while being dragged along by my grandparents in a carriage. Do i feel bad for them? Yes, of course. Imagining that is heartbreaking. Do i blame Stalin for having this done to them? Fuck no. While i can pity individuals who suffered from the war without any fault of their own, i cannot condemn what was done to us as a country in any way. As a collective, we brought this upon ourselves and have nobody to blame but us. We failed to stop Hitler when we had the chance, and we paid the price for that failure. Having Dresden burned to a crisp was part of that price.
Kinda off topic but do most Germans share your view on WW2? I know you're taught extensively about the Holocaust, but do most people agree that total warfare was necessary for the complete destruction of the Nazi state?
If the roles were reversed, most Americans would probably see themselves as victims I think.
If the roles were reversed, most Americans would probably see themselves as victims I think.
I get where you're coming from, the US in particular seems to have a real problem with being attacked by anybody, probably because there just isn't any experience of having war within your own borders in American living memory. It's incomprehensible to us that people in the US still get worked up about Pearl Harbour, for example. When we see that, the immediate response is "that was almost 80 years ago, you won, you killed a hundred times as many Japanese when you nuked them, get the fuck over your stupid ships getting bombed." In general, everybody who isn't at least nazi-adjacent views Germany as the bad guys in WW2, and you'll probably get yelled at if you disagree. It's just consensus that 1933-45 where the worst years in German history, that what happened during these years where the worst crimes ever committed and that we're all responsible for this never happening again. There is no kind of conscious revanchism in the left, the center or even the moderate right. Maybe some of the German attitudes towards America or towards the USSR are subconsciously influenced by a revanchist streak for some people, i wouldn't rule that out completely, but i don't think that's common.
I mostly hope that America falls without nuking anybody. srs, though, the potential to learn and move on is definitely there once the entire propaganda aparatus crumbles and people are not profiteering off US imperialism any longer, but it takes time to develop. People say that the German attitude today stems from US denazification, but it actually didn't take root until the late 1960s, when the first postwar generation began to realize what their own parents probably did and started to confront them. It wasn't spoken much off before, everybody actually involved wanted to forget and America was oboard with that as soon as they realized they needed West Germany re-militarized to contain the Soviets.
As far as Japan goes, i find it a lot harder to apply the same reasoning as for Dresden - largely due to the sheer scale, the long term effects and the aspect that it was partially motivated by giving a show of force to the USSR. I agree that the allies did atrocious things besides that as well, such as the internment of the Japanese before the war, or the Bengal famine. The pillaging and the rapes by the Red Army were atrocious, too, it's just that the USSR had endured worse at the hands of the Wehrmacht and the SS-Einsatzgruppen immediately before that happened. I'm not saying revenge is a good thing in any way, or that it's justified, because it isn't. But in 1945, commanders and troops going too far out of previous injuries is understandable. Doesn't make it right, but explains it.
I appreciate a principled stance on foreign policy, but i have to object here. The bombing of Dresden is heavily instrumentalized by nazis to this day, they are cynical enough to refer to it as "the bomb holocaust", they are holding commemorative marches there every year, in the reconstruction of their city that was built by revisionist chuds after the wall fell. That may bias my response, yes, but it also makes it needed that i respond here.
You're giving Palestine as an example. Why? Palestine is objectively not even a viable state rn. The peak of Palestinian military technology are kids with slingshots, or unguided missiles built in somebody's garage that are going up against the Iron Dome. Which is also done from a defensive position against an occupying force. By contrast, Germany in February of 1945 was a military juggernaut that had conquered almost the entire continent, left scorched earth all the way from Danzig to Moscow, rained down V2s on London every day, reduced humans to ash in the camps with every passing minute and would not stop any of that until it got broken completely. It's the one example where there's not a shadow of a doubt that military interventionism was not only justified, but an absolute necessity. There simply are no comparable cases in postwar history.
If we regard the bombing of Dresden as a war crime is a hypothetical. It was a response to Germany doing worse than that all the damn time. Just ask the population of Coventry. It was also done against the background of Germany being entirely unimpressed by any setback in the war, no matter how brutal. We're talking about a country that didn't stop when Hamburg and Lübeck burned in response to the German air raids on the UK, that didn't stop when literally anything around the Cologne cathedral was reduced to rubble, that doubled down after losing an entire army at Stalingrad. Yes, you could infer from that that destroying one more city would not make a difference. You could also infer that giving ground based on this lack of a response equals surrender, that you're in a confrontation where holding your punches is just outright suicidal. If you're up against an enemy like that, you can't show mercy. It's just not an option, and not comparable to any of the conflicts that the US and the UK got into, or started themselves, later in history.
I'm saying this as a German myself. My grandparents all lost their homes after the war, my great-grandmother got shot at on the forced march westwards, took two bullets through the lungs from a Soviet Mosin-Nagant, two shells that punched straight through her, and she had to recover from that while being dragged along by my grandparents in a carriage. Do i feel bad for them? Yes, of course. Imagining that is heartbreaking. Do i blame Stalin for having this done to them? Fuck no. While i can pity individuals who suffered from the war without any fault of their own, i cannot condemn what was done to us as a country in any way. As a collective, we brought this upon ourselves and have nobody to blame but us. We failed to stop Hitler when we had the chance, and we paid the price for that failure. Having Dresden burned to a crisp was part of that price.
Kinda off topic but do most Germans share your view on WW2? I know you're taught extensively about the Holocaust, but do most people agree that total warfare was necessary for the complete destruction of the Nazi state?
If the roles were reversed, most Americans would probably see themselves as victims I think.
I get where you're coming from, the US in particular seems to have a real problem with being attacked by anybody, probably because there just isn't any experience of having war within your own borders in American living memory. It's incomprehensible to us that people in the US still get worked up about Pearl Harbour, for example. When we see that, the immediate response is "that was almost 80 years ago, you won, you killed a hundred times as many Japanese when you nuked them, get the fuck over your stupid ships getting bombed." In general, everybody who isn't at least nazi-adjacent views Germany as the bad guys in WW2, and you'll probably get yelled at if you disagree. It's just consensus that 1933-45 where the worst years in German history, that what happened during these years where the worst crimes ever committed and that we're all responsible for this never happening again. There is no kind of conscious revanchism in the left, the center or even the moderate right. Maybe some of the German attitudes towards America or towards the USSR are subconsciously influenced by a revanchist streak for some people, i wouldn't rule that out completely, but i don't think that's common.
Hmm interesting, I hope whenever the American Empire falls we can look back at our history with as much honesty as ya'll do.
I mostly hope that America falls without nuking anybody. srs, though, the potential to learn and move on is definitely there once the entire propaganda aparatus crumbles and people are not profiteering off US imperialism any longer, but it takes time to develop. People say that the German attitude today stems from US denazification, but it actually didn't take root until the late 1960s, when the first postwar generation began to realize what their own parents probably did and started to confront them. It wasn't spoken much off before, everybody actually involved wanted to forget and America was oboard with that as soon as they realized they needed West Germany re-militarized to contain the Soviets.
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As far as Japan goes, i find it a lot harder to apply the same reasoning as for Dresden - largely due to the sheer scale, the long term effects and the aspect that it was partially motivated by giving a show of force to the USSR. I agree that the allies did atrocious things besides that as well, such as the internment of the Japanese before the war, or the Bengal famine. The pillaging and the rapes by the Red Army were atrocious, too, it's just that the USSR had endured worse at the hands of the Wehrmacht and the SS-Einsatzgruppen immediately before that happened. I'm not saying revenge is a good thing in any way, or that it's justified, because it isn't. But in 1945, commanders and troops going too far out of previous injuries is understandable. Doesn't make it right, but explains it.