(February 24, 2015 at 12:36 am)Parkers Tan Wrote:(February 23, 2015 at 8:37 pm)watchamadoodle Wrote: ...
Of course there is still a big difference. Usually the victims of genocide are helpless militarily.
No, this is inaccurate. The reason I say that is because while death from aerial bombardment is random and (as in the case of US firebombing of Japan) that bombardment is aimed at hampering the enemy's economy (through destruction of factories, homes housing workers, or entire swathes of cities), genocide is specifically aimed at a targeted population, with a systematic mechanism in place to do that population to death.
LeMay most likely committed war crimes, and the nuclear attacks were not the worst ones. In early March of 1945, around 300 B-29s each carrying 4.5 tons of incendiary bombs attacked Tokyo. The pathfinders for that force marked the target by fire-bombing an "X" on the city center with each leg a mile long. That was as precise as it got: X marks the spot. Subsequent American bombers flew in as low as 8,000 feet scattering cluster bombs containing 1,600 incendiaries per bomber. The city was burnt out, and over 85,000 people were killed -- the biggest casualty list of any single bombing raid, including both atomic bomb attacks.
That, however, is not genocide, in the sense that while we Americans were happy to kill copious amounts of Japanese, we weren't aiming to exterminate them as an ethnicity, nor did we have a system in place to ensure that end. Americans didn't kill Japanese with the intent to wipe that ethnicity off the face of the Earth. We killed Japanese in order to win the war. Once the Japanese surrendered, we stopped killing them.
There is a clear difference between war and genocide. Learn it.
Yes, that is another difference - probably more significant from a legal perspective than the difference I mentioned.
