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Fair enough! But those acts were also condemned at the time by most people. And it's not like they helped the war, they actually made things much worse by making the Japanese public more angry. Even the Greeks in the Iliad understood that desecrating dead bodies was not justified.
I think what you are seeing is less a difference in kind between WW2 and WiA and more that a) the memory of WW2 is heavily sanitized b) there are marked values dissonances within American subcultures.
In a modern context, compare and contrast reactions to, e.g. the Haditha Massacre and the Eddie Gallagher case. Nobody was like "actually the Haditha Massacre was good". There were excuses and denials, but approximately nobody was pro-massacring civilians. By contrast, the Gallagher case was divisive. Plenty of people were appalled, but no small number took the view that Gallagher did nothing wrong. Sure, he murdered a prisoner and desecrated the body, but the victim was ISIS so the whole thing was really an act of justice.
To be honest, I had actually never heard of either of those cases. Maybe I heard about them in passing but I don't remember. So I assume the general public was the same. They're both bad, but not enough to be an extended major news story in the US.
Reading up on it now... they seem pretty similar? In both cases you've got enlisted men going way over the line, committing multiple war crimes. Murdering civilians and prisoners. They're caught red-handed, and either let off with a warning or given only a minor punishment. I... don't see how that's supposed to make me feel good? It seems like the military has learned nothing from its 20 years in the war on terror and is still playing coverup to people who would have been hung in the Nuremburg trials.
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