Right. American troops even sang Kumbaya in Vietnam. Napalm, agent orange cough cough. Remind me again which country has dropped the most amount of explosives in other countries and how does that measure up with the second highest.
Know what's different? When they were running amok in My Lai, there were American civilians protesting against the war back at home.
There were American civilians being shot by national guardsmen because they were opposed to what the military was doing to strangers on the other side of the planet.
The Japanese had been preparing to fight to the last man before those bombs dropped. It was the right thing to do.
It should also be pointed out that My Lai and Kent State were aberrations, the former punished, the latter unsuccessfully prosecuted, but the authorities did attempt it.
The mass murder of untermenschen in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere by every means known to man, the Bataan Death March and general savagery towards POWs, was Imperial Japanese policy.
To me what is very amusingly different is the holier than though, upholder of freedom and democracy chip on their shoulder many wear to a fault. Given history (both old and recent) it takes some chutzpah (and perhaps ignorance / indoctrination) to wear that attitude when one is responsible for enslavement of one race and, for all practical purposes, political depopulation of another. I bear no ill will, far from it, just something that tickles my funny bone in some dark way.
My ancestry contains enslaved Africans, indentured servant Irish and Native Americans.
The history of this country isn't some dry, academic matter for me. It's how I came to exist.
This country isn't perfect. This country has done some terrible things, especially to non-whites and Jews but that doesn't change any of my previous points.
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