See up thread AndyRoss' pic of Japanese child soldiers. The argument seems to be the whole of Japan were military so it doesn't count as a civilian 'massacre' either. 'Doing it to save lives' is just another rationalisation 'because they were the baddies' from the Allied Forces POV.
That's not what the reasoning was. The reasoning was that many of them would be killed in an invasion (millions) along with quite a lot of Allied service personnel. You should read what happened to the civilian populations of several Japanese islands captured by the Allies before the surrender. Quite a lot of citizens committed suicide.
King Charles. Saxe-Coburg and Gotha is not triple hyphenated. It's not even double hyphenated. It was the family name of Prince Albert and his children took that name because the convention was that you take the name of your father. It's just a name. It doesn't mean you are from the country it refers to. My family name isn Portuguese. I'm not Portuguese by any stretch.
Edit: Nobody said the British are superior to the Japanese.
And American and Allied nations sailors, airmen and sailors.
I didn't say any of that.
Once again, no, that was never the argument.
The concept of nationality and Nationality Acts is a very modern one. Not so long ago, people moved about freely without passport (cf Orwell; Hemingway) so your identity focused on your parents, not where you were born.
Sounds more like stories, not history; Heligoland was never Swedish. I don't know what the Göteborg lot refers to, but Ynglingaätten (Skilfinger in Beowulf - they never really existed, other than in Norse tales) was supposedly descended from Frey/Freyr, the Norse god, not his twin sister Freya.
The author is Erik Gustave Geijer, 1832 - 1836, Professor of History, Uppsala (errors are probably mine [well, almost certainly mine]).
They went on three fronts. Operation Barbarossa was the one in the North and unlike the Ukrainian Holodomor, it was most definitely a plan of genocide by mass starvation; people dropping dead in the street, etc. Only 1,000 calories allowed per diem by Hitler's scientific nutritionists. Off the top of my head, 2m civilian people estimated to have died as a result. Helen Dunmore's, The Siege is a good fictionalised account.
I agree. This book is part of the Forgotten Books series. Some of it is actually very good (useful for research).Ah yes, that makes sense; Geijer was part of the National Romanticism movement of the late 18th/early 18th century, a poet as well as a historian, so it's safe disreagard most of what he says if you want historical facts, but he is safe to enjoy as a teller of tales, and a spinner of stories!
Erik Gustaf Geijer - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
You are conflating documents and nationality. Your national identity is more to do with your environment: where and how you were brought up.
Well the Allied soldiers towards the end of the Second World War who dies, died attacking another country and the Germans who died did so defending their country and the Nazi regime. And yet we claim that the Allies were morally more justified than the Germans, even at that stage of the war, when they had clearly stopped posing us a threat.
Operation Barbarossa was the plan for the invasion of Russia. It was supposed to be done and dusted before the winter of 41-42, but the Germans underestimated the determination of the Russians and the ability of Britain and the USA to keep them in the war. All the distractions happened after Barbarossa had already failed.
As a point of correction, the so-called Rive Gauche (Left Bank) writers - Maddox Ford, Hemingway, Rhys, Bowen., et al - travelled about Europe freely. It was quite normal for the rich and adventurous to traipse the world without passport control or documents, albeit mostly pre-WWI but also, even in the '30's.
Yup, and in the thread on this, someone pointed out that right up to the surrender, Imperial Japanese forces were advancing in China, and the death toll from the atom bombs was about equivalent to the monthly civilian deaths in the occupied territories, meaning that if the bombs shortened the war by only a couple of months and there was a bloodless occupation of Japan (implausibly optimistic in both cases without the bomb) the bombings saved lives.
Famously cited by the Austrian Painter, "who remembers the Armenians"Well not exactly, but the Armenian Genocide was a relatively early example.
Armenian genocide - Wikipedia
There is no doubt that Stalin was excellent at torturing, terrorising, and oporessing his people, one of the very best, in fact, but to me, there is something about the nazi killing machine (not least in what it might have led to, but bad enough to outdo others while it lasted) that seems like evil on a mythological scale; evil as a logistic problem, industrial evil - modern, cold, calculated, rather than the older kind of feudal ruler evil. Impersonal and efficient, rather than personal and capricious. Something about that scares me more.
