I'll throw out that there are two different things Arthur is talking about, and they're getting conflated a bit. One is the issue of vengeance, did the Germans get off "easy" -- debatable. The other is who bore the bigger costs of defeating the Nazis (the USSR, no question)
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Replying to @Mad_Science_Guy @ForestaWriter and
I don't think it's crazy to say that visiting vengeance on the German populace would have been the best plan, much as it might feel better from a moral perspective. Speaking as one of those who'd have been in the camps, and all that.
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Replying to @Mad_Science_Guy @ForestaWriter and
And there are a lot of pretty practical and self-interested reasons - and even moral ones, when it comes to it. Otherwise there'd be no point in the Nuremburg trials, or the ICJ, or doing anything except for example, razing Serbia.
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Replying to @ForestaWriter @Mad_Science_Guy and
Okay so there's quite a lot of room between "Kill every single German citizen outside the camps and leave the country empty" and what actually happened The most punitive approach actually proposed, the Morgenthau Plan, would've probably led to many deaths but wasn't "genocide"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ForestaWriter and
You can say that depopulating Germany would be bad, and deindustrializing Germany would be bad, and all manner of things would be bad, without saying that the enormously conciliatory terms of the Marshall Plan were the best of all possible worlds
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ForestaWriter and
I quite often say the South didn't suffer nearly enough in the aftermath of the US Civil War but the goal, in and of itself, isn't suffering The point isn't how many slaveowners lived or died, it's that the former slaves *never got their forty acres and a mule*
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ForestaWriter and
The point is to give the liberated slaves the forty acres and a mule they were promised, or whatever they actually need to thrive in safety and comfort after the war And since this will, of course, be very expensive, the cost should be taken out of the ass of their oppressors
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ForestaWriter and
Germany "got off very easy" in multiple senses of the term There's a lot of people who wished they'd suffered more after the war, and they have a strong moral case that I empathize with deeply But in the pragmatic sense, I'm mainly mad at how long it took anyone to get paid
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Replying to @arthur_affect @ForestaWriter and
If you want to take a peek over at the Pacific Theatre, this is a really big fucking issue in the history of China and Korea and helped pave the way for lots and lots of 20th-century "instability" in Asia
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Ask someone who had relatives in the Rape of Nanking how they feel about the Japanese "economic miracle" in the 1960s, and whether said miracle and the myriad benefits it provided the world through Japanese technological innovation proves the value of forgiveness and compassion
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