Comments by "bakters" (@bakters) on "Deliberate or Accident? The German Blitz of Rotterdam 1940" video.

Bombing civilians can be justified on two occasions. 1. You genuinely try to avoid it but it happens anyway, or the enemy is using human shields approach. 2. They started it. Human shields are problematic in execution, so firing at them may prevent the enemy from using this approach at all, which in the end will save more lives than it initially costs. Retaliation is a necessity for similar reasons. You simply have almost no choice. The gas was not used tactically in WWII only because of the fear of retaliation. The same goes for cold war nukes. So it demonstrably works.
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@dovetonsturdee7033 "Why is the civilian who makes the shell regarded by some as less of a foe than the soldier who fires it?" I believe there are grades here. A soldier who actively shoots at you is more of a foe than the one on guarding duty somewhere deep in the rear. A civilian worker in arms factory is less of a foe than the one working at the post office. I find that many moral "paradoxes" come from our unwillingness to admit, that it's not a black and white kind of a deal. With that said, the law can't be written in such a way, that it reflects this complexity all too well, so we are stuck with a more crude, but arguably also a more robust approach.
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