cumbrianruss comments

Wow! How many offensive stereotypes can we cram into one thread? Let's have one more.

American bengoshi talks about the way the Japanese are hated throughout the world but uses a Japanese word as part of his handle. Perhaps it's a half-hearted attempt to hide the fact that he belongs to the world's most reviled minority; lawyers.

I don't think MistWizard's point is ridiculous at all. When a country decides to use bombs against another, it accepts that civilians, including women, children, the handicapped and the elderly, are now targets. I believe this is defined as a war crime. As I've stated elsewhere, all sides did it in WW2; it still doesn't make it right. There are people in Coventry rightfully bitter about the German bombing of their city; and citizens of Dresden just as rightfully bitter about the allied destruction of theirs. Limboinjapan makes the point of having seen an innocent victim of war but doesn't draw the conclusion that all innocents deserve protection, which was one of the purposes behind the Geneva Convention. To say that the Japanese started the war (long before Pearl Harbor!) doesn't make the civilian population (of a military state terrorised by a secret police force) culpable. Why did so many commit suicide on Okinawa? Fanatical women and children or a populace terrified by propoganda into believing the horrors they would face when the Americans arrived? Ultimately, it's in the past and there is nothing we can change. However, those of us with a voice in our own democratic nations can learn from the past and say that taking war to civilians is unacceptable.