Summary
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticized Elon Musk after he made a gesture during Trump’s inauguration resembling a Nazi salute.
Musk and his allies dismissed the comparison, calling such accusations exaggerated.
Ocasio-Cortez, however, called the gesture unacceptable, emphasizing America’s history of opposing Nazis and the Confederacy.
She also condemned the Anti-Defamation League for defending Musk, accusing it of losing credibility.
Her comments sparked broader debate on symbols, gestures, and their implications amid Trump’s return to office.
I’d kind of be willing to wager that we actually hated nazis mostly because they were foreign, more than anything else. I think all that ww2 valorizing history schlock about me and the good old boys from ken-tucky and all over going out and killing all the nazis has totally cooked america’s understanding of that war. I dunno, towards the end we did nuke a country, twice, in a totally superfluous and cruel act, and we also concentrated the domestic immigrant population that we were bombing during that war into camps. Everyone brushes over that part, though, and america is truly faultless. These aren’t our true characters, being revealed, no, this is just some errant deviation from a much more civilized and reasonable norm! Surely, that must be the case.
thats… a tough one. I’m not saying you’re wrong. We have a global standard we decided after ww2 about the extent combatants can “legally” injure civilians in a war.
When you look at the level of resistence by the Japanese during battles in Iwo Jima and Okinawa in particular, It points to the idea that they would not have surrendered, especially on their sacred island homeland. They had a split definition for “defeated” and “surrendered”. They could logically acknowledge being defeated, but they still would not tender their surrender, and would have fought for every inch, to the death. Even now they say this. They expected to lose on the beaches in Kyushu, but they were still not going to envision surrender. Westerners don’t think with this model of war, so we have to take this into account when introspecting what was an optimal path back then-- already a dicey path, as armchair-warrioring the past always is.
The firebombing of Tokyo killed double the number of civilians that the two nuclear bombs did. And yet we dont talk about those events so much. Its an interesting distinction to ponder.
I’m not an expert or military person, but I hear “war crimes” are actually very common in war. As an example, people note that the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam was particularly heinous, but I’ve seen documentaries which say that that sort of thing happened all the time It just seldom got acknowledged. Mai Lai was extraorindary in its unusual amount of publicity. If this interests you, check out Kill Anything that Moves
On the other hand with my modern understanding of justification for using nukes, my heart agrees with you. There are always possibilities to do something else, or wait. But can I apply that to pre-UN pre-nurembourg pre-geneva convention times? tough one.
I can tell you that I am married into a Japanese family now, and many of them feel it possibly had to be done, but that it was heinous, along with the rest of the war. They also feel the start of the war was more or less mandatory, as the US had locked Japan away from resources it needed to continue existing in the form it was in. No apologies tendered for the initial attack. They feel the US started it, and not expecting the pearl harbor attack was simply stupid.
My wifes mother (still alive) talks about running as fast as she could from place to place in tokyo to get away from the firebombings, and the starvation that followed where people even ate all the grass, then laid down and died or wandered into the countryside. Her parents died in the fires so she walked into the countryside and walked 350 km to Nagoya as an 11 year old alone to find her relatives.
It was just cause of the war, they were popular before.
I was about to comment this. The American National Socialist group had massive rallies, if we never got involved with WW2, we’d probably be massive friends with Hitler and use his policies as a springboard.
Hitler was influenced by America’s mistreatment of natives and black people for his solutions to the “Jewish question”. We would have probably agreed if he was born in Mississippi and not Austria.