Human Shields and Choice

[FoxBat]

Was the fire bombing of Dresden strategically necessary?  Maybe not, but you might find a Brit or two in 1945 who felt it was emotionally necessary.

This revisionism strikes me as naive in the extreme.  War takes emotion to successfully conduct, it takes, really, all you have to win when it is an all or nothing struggle.

Revisionism may be invalid for the purposes of assigning moral blame to people, or expecting them to be capable of having behaved any differently.

However, it's essential to "learning from one's mistakes." It rarely appears as a mistake at the time of decision. In as much as revisionism may prevent similar occurences in the future, it is valid.

While we ourselves may have made similar decisions in X general's shoes, that does not mean we should not look to shaping future situations and understandings so that the same decision is never repeated. It is this very tactic by which slavery, racism, women's rights, and many other "injustices" have become morally questionable after so many years of it being just a given.