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In reply to the discussion: Every year, I see the same thing re Hiroshima and Nagasaki [View all]Violet_Crumble
(35,992 posts)I don't know where you got the idea that people on the Left would think German civilians would have deserved that...
Despite yr opinion to the contrary, the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were victims and deserve to be remembered as such just like other victims of the war. You can trot out the same stuff I already know about Japanese atrocities during the war to try to justify yr opinion, but it doesn't fly for me...
And, no. American civilians were never going to have suffered terrible casualties, so that's not a justification for the mass killing of Japanese civilians. It's possible that there could have been large losses of Allied soldiers, but civilians are supposed to be protected in war, while soldiers are combatants. To justify the possible saving of some soldiers by intentionally killing a large number of civilians is wrong. Maybe it wasn't wrong then, but people now shouldn't be saying there's nothing wrong with it...
There was nothing moral in why the US dropped the bomb. They were working out of pragmatism and I'm not going to second guess and say what they should and shouldn't have done. It happened, so that's it. What I'm sick of seeing is people who portray civilians as evil and inhumane monsters who weren't victims and who act as though the US acted with morality as a guiding light. They didn't....