All out war is hell and pretending like civilians get a pass from the wave of destruction is naive.

However, one main difference people in this thread seem to forget is that America’s civilian kills were about dealing damage to an enemy country within enemy territory. It’s horrific but the main difference was that Germany mass executed and actively tortured civilians within its own territory. America never did that and as horrific and regrettable Japanese internment camps were, and full of racism and prejudice, and failing to even uphold the Constitution and just being abject failures in treating people humanely, comparing them to Nazi concentration camps indicates a complete and utter failure in understanding how different the situation was; America was not trying to actively exterminate Japanese citizens within its borders as a matter of policy.

The closest American came to Nazi Germany was the persecution of black people within its borders but even while Nazi germany was inspired by Jim Crow in terms of how to treat Jews, it’s a failure to recognize that Nazi Germany ran off with the idea when they started setting up death camps. The closest American came to that was lynchings which never reached the scale or official government sanction that concentration camps did.

The closest American could be said to have done that was the Trail of Tears and their treatment of Native Americans; American has always struggled to contain the racist instincts of a significant part of their population but it is not unique in this challenge.

> All out war is hell and pretending like civilians get a pass from the wave of destruction is naive.

Collateral damage is one thing, the deliberate targeting civilians en masse is another. I understand the US Armed Forces and IDF currently justify their excesses by blurring the two concepts together, but they are legally distinct concepts.

"Fair enough, we've a long history of lynching black people and killing native americans, but we're not as bad as the Nazis"

That's some position to take.

In no way am I excusing the horrible treatment black people and indigenous people have received in the USA. It’s awful and definitely crimes that should have been prosecuted and the failure to do so is a stain on America and the ideals people want it to hold. But noting that it’s qualitatively and quantitatively different from a government organized industrial extermination machine doesn’t seem like something crazy. And pretending like power dynamics aren’t in play in terms of prosecuting Nazis is naive - it’s literally what Nazis said at the Nuremberg trials - it’s a sham trial because it’s just the victors killing the defeated. But it did manage to establish some kind of minimum legal framework even if it’s not as far as we’d have liked. Also important to remember that the US committed abhorrent legitimate war crimes in Vietnam even by Nuremberg standards - but the US is a super power and it’s an unsolved problem about who will hold a superpower (or even a nuclear power) to count for crimes against humanity.