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  • German terror bombing of British cities was intended to crush morale and that didn't work did it.

    You can't really compare. Total civilian deaths for the UK were 67,000, of which half were in the Blitz. Total civilian deaths for Germany were between 1.5 and 3 million.

    The sins of the dead do not compromise our moral standpoint today.

    They do, especially if you pretend they didn't happen. War crimes are tried in court, where legal precedents usually determine the outcome.

    Personally I think Russia's invasion is a crime, whether they kill anyone or not. i'd say that every war of aggression is criminal. But the law doesn't work that way, because if you class the invader as a criminal just for stepping over the border, you don't give him an incentive to feed POWs or not use chemical weapons.

  • I'm not comparing, I'm saying that killing lots of civilians doesnt mean you break the opponent, as Dibble has also.
    Yeah, you can have legal precedent for what makes for a war crime and who's pretending Dresden didnt get bombed? Your argument came across very much as we can't point the finger at Russia when at a point in our history our ancestors did something that would today be a war crime.
    And now I will go back to not debating things on the internet.

  • My point was that if you kill more and more civilians - far more than were killed in the Blitz - eventually the angry will to fight is overcome by hopelessness and despair. Generals know this, which is partly why they sometimes target civilians. In other words they deliberately commit war crimes if they think there's a military benefit.

    Some British war crimes are very recent. It's not that long ago that the majority of British citizens said they wanted Blair tried as a war criminal.

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