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Forever On The High Ground On A Mountain Of Skulls

The logic here would be akin to saying America lost the moral high ground after bombing the civilian center of Tokyo in World War II. While that bombing cost America any claim to moral perfection, no one was making any such claims in the first place. America still held the moral high ground because it […]

The logic here would be akin to saying America lost the moral high ground after bombing the civilian center of Tokyo in World War II. While that bombing cost America any claim to moral perfection, no one was making any such claims in the first place. America still held the moral high ground because it wasn’t us that wanted to establish a global totalitarian dictatorship and exterminate inferior races. ~Dean Barnett

Wow, the dreaded “nostrism” rears its ugly head, as if Barnett had leapt directly from the pages of Black Banners.  

I suppose the same logic would apply, which would make the statement about losing the moral high ground in WWII with the mass bombings of civilian targets pretty much true.  I do find it intriguing how apologists for latter-day atrocities and war crimes will always run to past war crimes as some sort of trump card: “Our government used to kill a lot more civilians with indiscriminate bombing!  What do you have to say that to that, huh?” 

Never mind, also, that the Japanese weren’t trying to create a global totalitarian dictatorship, nor were they primarily interested in exterminating inferior races, though the militarists certainly believed in Japanese supremacy.  Granted, the war crimes our government committed in Japan were done at a greater remove than the war crimes their soldiers committed.  Strange how the two sets of crimes are remembered, though, isn’t it?  Except in revisionist Japanese textbooks, the Rape of Nanjing lives on in infamy (as it should), but the fire-bombing of Tokyo, Osaka, Yokohama, and on and on, was all in a day’s work and shouldn’t give us a moment’s pause.  How could “we” lose the moral high ground just by killing a few hundred thousand Japs, right?  Our cause was just and noble and true, which permitted us to do whatever we wanted.  Because we had the right end in mind and the right intentions, mass murder was really just like getting our hair a little mussed in the process.  That’s what Barnett is saying, pure and simple. 

At least he allowed that slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people made our side less than perfect.  Mighty magnanimous of you, Barnett.  Mind you, these bombings were doubly vicious in that they didn’t even serve any obvious objective according to some purely amoral calculus of “necessity”–not that strategic necessity could or should be able to make right the massacre of innocents.  Where is our Mike Gravel to say, “These people are frightening”?

Update: The voice of barbarism and decadence speaks:

The anti-torture argument sits on a fragile branch of moral vanity. [!] The torture opponents’ entire premise rests on the erroneous notion that one can successfully wage war without cruelty and savagery. I wish they were right. But they’re not.

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