I think you're arguing from a privileged position; you clearly know far more about history than is the norm. Look at how WWII is taught in High School. Dresden is often mentioned in text books, but it usually just that, a mention.
I think it's wrong to believe that any side was good in WWII, it leads to mistakes like thinking that burning hundreds of thousands of innocent people to death is justifiable. It was a specific strategy, there was an option of destroying military infrastructure and making the military less effective, or firebombing cities to create terror and break the will of the German people; let's not make the mistake of saying this was the "right" thing to do just because Hitler was evil. After all, Hitler (for a brief while) saved many Germans from slavic subjugation.
Imperial Japan effectively ended European Colonialism in Asia. Sure, they replaced it with Japanese Colonialism, but they were just as much liberators as Americans and Russians were in Germany.
I guess the whole point of this is that it's ridiculous to have a "good" side and a "bad" side in a war if we're talking about international justice. There are sides, often many. Sometimes, people on all sides do things that as a species we've decided is too far. However, it's only if you're on the "bad" side of the war that you're held accountable for that. How about we just start calling war criminals war criminals, rather than war criminals and anglo-saxons.
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I think it's wrong to believe that any side was good in WWII, it leads to mistakes like thinking that burning hundreds of thousands of innocent people to death is justifiable. It was a specific strategy, there was an option of destroying military infrastructure and making the military less effective, or firebombing cities to create terror and break the will of the German people; let's not make the mistake of saying this was the "right" thing to do just because Hitler was evil. After all, Hitler (for a brief while) saved many Germans from slavic subjugation.
Imperial Japan effectively ended European Colonialism in Asia. Sure, they replaced it with Japanese Colonialism, but they were just as much liberators as Americans and Russians were in Germany.
I guess the whole point of this is that it's ridiculous to have a "good" side and a "bad" side in a war if we're talking about international justice. There are sides, often many. Sometimes, people on all sides do things that as a species we've decided is too far. However, it's only if you're on the "bad" side of the war that you're held accountable for that. How about we just start calling war criminals war criminals, rather than war criminals and anglo-saxons.