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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I think honestly all wars are like this. Nobody giving a neutral account thinks any of the allies were specifically going to war for human rights in any strip. Russia notoriously did not like Jews all that much. Our empire is fairly civilized as empires go, and I’m not at all disappointed that a genocide was stopped or that France was liberated.

And I think any fair analysis of history has to take into account the perspectives of everyone involved if it’s to avoid being simply propaganda for whichever side happens to be telling the story. The Germans had an opinion of the allies, talking about what that perspective was isn’t apologetic, it’s simply telling the truth — they didn’t like us because we were bombing the crap out of them. And while I think most of the deaths in the camps were absolutely deliberate, I think it’s reasonable to suggest a small role for logistical failures simply because again, we are bombing their supply lines and factories and so on, and yes, they undoubtedly prioritize their own people over prisoners they consider less than human. All of this can be absolutely true, the holocaust still happened, we might have made it worse.