Garyapostle said:
The only difference between the US and the Nazi's and some Japanese who were executed as war criminals, is that they lost the war and the US won. If it had been the other way, I am sure that some Americans would have been tried as war criminals.
No, Gary; if it had been the other way, thousands of Americans would have been executed in brutal, gruesome ways for no other reason than that they were "Yankee barbarians", no better in the Samurai mind than the millions of Chinese and other Asian and Pacific people they brutalized between 1936 and 1945; and if it had been the other way, thousands of innocent American girls would have ended up being used as "comfort women" for the Japanese garrisons stationed here.
If it had been the other way, every American of Jewish descent would have ended up in a gas chamber, not to mention other Americans of Slavic descent, African descent, Hispanic descent; and our schoolchildren would have been taught a paganistic, racist ideology including the idea that Adolf Hitler was God.
There is more to this than the number of people who died in armed combat.
You can talk all day and all night, you can talk for the rest of your life, if that's what you feel like---and if you think that the United States was or is no better than Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany, bully for you, but you will not convince me. I flatly reject any idea based on such a preposterous premise.
I cannot do better than to quote Stephen Ambrose, on page 473 of his superlative book
Citizen Soldiers:
"At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed."
Look around, Gary. I don't see any gas chambers or crematories; I don't see heaps of bodies stacked like cordwood. I don't see open pits full of bleeding corpses. I don't see brothels full of high school girls that were deliberately pulled off the streets for the purpose of unpaid forced prostitution.
I don't see anything here even remotely approaching any of that, which is certainly what we
would have had if it had been the other way around.
So if you want to go on thinking that the United States is no better than Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany, you go right ahead; but I personally will go on record as saying that such an idea is one of the most completely ridiculous concepts I have ever heard of in my life.
I would also like to thank you for insulting my father, who had to deal with the kamikaze pilots you think we were no better than, and who was almost killed by a strafing Japanese fighter pilot that you think he was no better than. And also for insulting my uncle, who liberated the Dachau concentration camp which you think was no worse than what we did---and who was also almost killed in Italy from German artillery and in France from German snipers, whom you think he was no better than.
Thank you very much. It is indeed gratifying to know that my father, who lost a portion of his right hand thanks to Japanese fighter pilots, and my mother's younger brother, who carried shrapnel from the Ruhr Valley in his lower back and behind until the day of his death, were both no better than the Japanese germ-warfare human-guinea pig experimenters in Unit 731, or the
SS-Totenkopf guards who beat prisoners to death at Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
They were just two more guys who fought and won World War II to prevent us from having to deal with people like that---and if either one of them could read this thread, I have no doubt that they would both ask themselves why the hell they even bothered.
This will be my last statement in this thread and on this topic. Good evening to you, sir.
