What is Evil?

This is becoming much clearer looking at the Middle East, but also myself.

The world is not equal. Some things are near to us and some things are far.

What is near is particular to us and just those people close to us, but what is far like a mountain is part of the lives of many, and the stars high above in the cosmos are far but belong to us all. 

So this is the problem for people: seeing what is near and also what is far at the same time.

In the skies is a bright star that everyone sees that is called "Don't Kill." Everyone knows this star and is familiar with it, and knows it from long ago and holds it dear. We all know it is not nice to be killed, and we know its not nice to kill.

But then things near-by turn up like we get angry, or we feel indignance about something and want justice or revenge and the distant star Don't Kill seems faint and not so important. We get angry and we kill. Yet knowing the star is still there but it is overwhelmed by nearby things, we look down, get distracted and forget about it. 

Distant things don't change much, nearby things are ephemeral and change quickly. So before long whatever was near and seemed so important is gone and then what is left is the distant star "Don't Kill" and we remember and we suddenly realise that what we did transfixed by what was near was wrong.

And this is the moment when a Sinner is made. It is not the action itself, which is simply ignorance, short sightedness and lack of skill and wisdom. A Sinner cannot bear the shamed and can no longer look upon the star "Don't Kill." They turn their eyes down and lose sight of what is far. Now they are stuck with what is near, and what is changeable. They have no compass any more and determine their days by what is near.

This is how Sin causes suffering.

The only way forward is Repentance. And this requires extraordinary bravery to face what we have done, and see the distant star again and know that we and what was close and what seemed right is really wrong.

But to do that we need relativise and weaken our grasp on what is nearest: Our Self. Indeed it is this Self that makes things nearby at all. Our Self was wrong and that is an existential crisis. To move on we must abandon that wrong self and grow. But the Self or Ego fights to survive and does everything to mask awareness that it was wrong. It tries to blinker us to see just what is near and close to the Ego, and sets up a smoke screen to stop us looking into the distance and seeing the star. When asked to look into the distance we get irritable and fidgety and go looking for near by things to distract us.

When Jesus died on the Cross, he died for our sins, and that means that he kept his Mind on the distant stars and completely abandoned what was nearby and temporary. He struggled with what was near, the pain, humiliation and suffering; but he never stopped looking at what was far (except arguably at the very end where even Jesus came to know the despair of mortals "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?") The Saint is such a person who is prepared to abandon local concerns for what is distant, eternal and right.

And so a soldier going to fight may be seen as one such person. Putting their own welfare aside they step up to defend others, prepared to die with their eyes fixed on the stars.

But the Ego is non other than the Devil and is extremely subtle. Having a "cause" or "distant beacon" to follow is a great way to validate ourselves, to in fact distract us from what is distant and true. "I am a hero", "I am a worthy part of this war", "I will save you", "I have sacrificed myself nobly for the cause" &c.

It is no accident that people find great relief from themselves and their nearby concerns by climbing mountains, but what is not talked about is this is always a temporary relief. True mountains are far away, but they are not really far away like the stars. We need tackle the furthest mountains, the Mountains of Goodness to get real relief.

People say similar things about the relief that comes from being with Nature. Nature is interesting, it is very close by to the Mountains of Goodness. If you can abide in Nature, peaceful and tolerant of the rain, the sun, the discomfort, the comfort, the sublime and the mundane*: if you watch all these things peacefully then you are actually getting very far away towards the stars indeed.

We know deep down when we are quietly looking at the star "Don't Kill," when the heat of battle and life has calmed down and we have a quiet moment of reflection, when we are strong and full of shame for what we are and what we have done: then we look upon "Don't Kill" and we know it for what it really is, quietly shining in the clear sky telling us what we deep down know is true: don't kill.

So we look to the Middle East and everyone is currently consumed by what is near. Everyone is concerned by the temporary things. But even when this dies down there are mountain ranges of more permanent concerns around the area so people look at the peaks and think they know. The Devil has managed to completely corrupt the region and must be laughing His loudest. All those people who think they are noble and close to God have been tricked and now stand as puppets of the Devil. And the more they think they are fighting for what is Good the more the Devil laughs and drags them deeper into his web of evil. Satan is dancing a brilliant dance right now, baptising people's souls with his urine, trampling over the holy sites, and defaecating on the places where the prophets spake. Great days for the Great Deceiver.

High above it all however shines the eternal star "Don't Kill" but the eyes of mortals are turned away for the shame is too great for frail creatures to bear.

Cranberries "Zombie" actually the ultimate anti-war statement.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/13/ireland-embrace-zombie-song-rugby-world-cup-stirs-debate-lyrics

Good to see Zombie having a resurgence during World Cup.

The song is so much more important than just the Anglo-Irish war.

There is never war without humans. There is no natural disaster called "war", it is purely invented by humans.

And where things have no natural existence then they are by definition "in your head."

That is why people like Churchill devoted their entire later life to getting a version of WW2 into people's heads.

Its what the NEWS exists for. Why are there "free" papers like Metro in UK in a world driven by profit? Where is the profit in "free news"? Its because of what ends up "in our heads."

And yes the people who fight are always Zombies controlled by nothing more than whatever is "in their heads".

But people may go "but my reason to fight is so *real*". Well if its so Real then let Reality do the fighting for you.

The Sun rising at dawn: now that is "real." and no one needs to push it, or indeed do anything about it. It happens by itself. That is what is real. Everything else is "in our heads." If we need to do it then its completely "in our heads."

Humans literally need a Reality check. Most of us (no exaggeration - myself included) are complete Zombies, so totally dominated by what is "in our heads" that we almost completely miss what is Really going on.

I wonder if the Cranberries really understood the universal nature of what they were trying to say.

===

So someone may argue: well isn't everything in your head?

1) Can apply SRH (see previously in blog) here. Well if *everything* is in my head then my head must is in my head. In which case my head is both inside and outside my head. So not everything is inside my head. So its a contradiction to say this. (You can see the parallels here with Godel's Theorems.)

2) There are many ways to see this same truth. Another is that if everything is "in your head" then it makes no difference whether we say it or not. "in your head" becomes surplus and the more we include in "everything" the more surplus it becomes until it is meaningless.

Consider another statement: "Everything is Detromahesive".

Is a banana Detromahesive? Yes.
Is the planet Detromahesive? Yes.
Is God Detromahesive? Yes.
Are ideas Detromahesive? Yes
Is Detromahesive itself Detromahesive: Yes.
Is anything not Detromahesive: No.
SO you can't get an absence of Detromahesive: Yes.

Ok this is not as clear as I wanted, because you need get into the real boundary stuff of existence/non-existence.

But general point: if it adds nothing to say something then you can just as well leave it out. SO adding "oh btw that is Detromahesive" is just a waste of ink. And that indicates its pointlessness in the context. And if its pointless in all contexts then its meaningless. So "everything is in your head" is meaningless.

3) Another problem is the "your head" bit. For that to be meaningful we must have encountered other heads so we need to call this one "your head." If there was just one head, we would say "everything is in The head." So we know there are many heads already. Is the person saying "your head is special because everything is in your head but not our heads." Starts to get stupid, this rabbit hole not even worth it. 

Its actually absurd to take sides in war

There must always be two sides to a war. If there was not then we would be fighting ourselves.

If there are two sides to a war the actual problem is not the war itself, but which ever side we find ourselves.

We could be on either side.

Now this seems a bit counter intuitive. But if we think that everyone could only ever find themselves on one side then this is another way of saying there is only one side. We already established this is absurd.

What we end up doing is thinking "well the other side is just mad or bad or both and needs to be destroyed."

But of course this is just what the other side thinks, and so which ever side we end up on we will think this.

The point is that only small minded creatures who cannot see beyond their own side could ever get tricked into war.

It is an illusion that once you gain the vision to see both sides can never fool you.

So there is only one rational approach to war and that is not to take sides. This is the third and correct option. 

Ah says the antagonist, but you just took sides: just a new 3rd side. Your side is the "anti-war" or the "conscientious objector" side. You are thus still involved in the war just another side.

And this is true. The "Anti-War" movement in its simplest form "opposes war." Where there is war it stands against it and everyone involved.

But the higher perspective is not this. It is understanding of everyone involved in war without regard for sides. Médecins Sans Frontières for instance ignores which side you are on, they are only concerned in offering relief to those injured in war. Given that 99% of people injured in war are innocent civilians this approach makes immediate sense without any profound wisdom.

It is easy to hate those who foment and build wars to further their own political power. The West has spent the last 300 years creating wars in every country on the planet in order to expand its influence. There are those who believe the lies, who believe that it is normal to be in a permanent state of war like the US or UK. But just look at other countries like China or India who are rarely at war, and only ever with neighbours. They do not export war around the globe like US or UK.

But in truth we should not even take sides against The West. We should practice the highest wisdom of not taking sides at all, which is the same as taking all sides. When someone asks you do you take sides you say no. When they then ask you so you do not take sides you also say no. "sides" is not your thing either positive or negative. Its like asking a blind person which colour shirt they like. "Sides" are simply meaningless to the wise. And obviously so too, nothing that profound here. Most people don't get confused by their mirror reflection. Even though it appears over there and I am over here, we still see it as the same as us. With just a little bit more insight and illumination a war becomes nothing more complicated than a mirror. And your enemy punches you and you think "this is no mirror! That hurt!", but how many times have we looked in the mirror in the morning and got a punch cos we look dreadful. Mirrors can hurt more than punches. You can walk away from your enemy, but you can't walk away from your reflection. So if we can understand the mirror, why not our enemy? Sometimes the world is ugly, we just learn to accept it. It is interesting that Jesus said **exactly** this. How many Christians join the army and wage war not understanding what Jesus said. Do they really think Heaven awaits them? Do they really think they will be saved if they die in war? That is just as stupid as breaking the mirror and thinking we now look great again. That is not the way to Heaven.

Its an irony, that will be lost on the war mongers, that if everyone took "all sides" then war would end. War only exists while people take particular sides, and while it suits the politicians who seek to control us and use us to promote their interests. But you ask them why they took sides and they will probably say cos there is a war and I need defend myself. Not realising of course that this is the very same reason that the enemy is entering the war.

We do not take sides because of war; there is war because we took sides.

That is the core truth of war. we should never forget it under any amount of provocation.

Who is racist?

Racism is where we treat people according to their race without due respect for the personhood.

A non-racist world is not a world without race. But it is a world where people come first and arbitrary features like their age, skin colour, intelligence, disability, religion, hair colour, nationality, employment status come second.

We see racism all the time. A black person in the UK is 62x more likely to stab another black person than you would expect at random. This is likely linked to black people only mixing with other black people. And that means that black people in the UK select their friends based on skin colour and that is racist. The UK is doubly racist because rather than asking black people to mix more with white people, it is asking just white people to mix more with black. the UK establishment is itself racist. 

Right now we have another extreme out break of racism in the UK. There have been more deaths in the on-going Israeli/Palestine War.

A quick look on the internet puts this in perspective.

https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties?fbclid=IwAR0FeJQQ8apR1sOIgMhWJin1fB7kQPJDbhly4zIGxUXvKa9BHuDbSpqnl64

Fatalities in the Israeli/Palestine war for the 15 year period 1/1/2008 - 19/9/2023:

Palestine: 6,407
Israel: 308

Given that the two countries are of different sizes and Israel is 1.9x as big as Palestine you can increase the Palestine count so the rate of murder matches per capita:

Palestine: 12,173
Israel: 308

Recently 700 Israelis have been killed so the death tolls currently look like this:

Palestine: 12,173
Israel: 1,008

So in the last 15 years for every Israeli killed 6 Palestinians have been killed, and if we scale the two countries that is as if 11 Palestinians have been killed for every Israeli. As non-racists we believe that every human life counts.

To put that in perspective 335 people died on Israel's streets in car accidents in 2019. So the entire effort of the Palestinians to fight the Israelis in 15 years amounts to 3 years of car fatalities. Hardly worth worrying about.  

Now if we are political and allow state murder it is worth pointing out that in any conflict at least 99% of the casualties are always innocent civilians (collateral damage as the US calls it). In the case of the US War on Terror 99.4% of casualties were innocent civilians and that is with the best weapons and best intelligence and yet the US still has to kill 165 innocent people to get just one enemy.

So Israel can claim that Palestinian deaths are terrorist deaths, but we know this is pure unproven wishful thinking. And equally the Palestinian can claim that all the Israeli deaths are terrorist deaths and we know that too is pure unproven wishful thinking. In ALL conflicts it is innocent civilians who are by far the most affected. This is why sane civilians will always try and stop wars at any cost. It is a serious error of judgement to ever promote war as a civilian: your fellow civilians will suffer by far the most for that mistake.

And so how do we explain the western media perspective. They should be reporting a massacre of Palestinians over the years. The evidence is there for a massacre of Palestinians so why are they not saying this.

It can only be because the Western media judges people according to race and a massacre of Palestinians is not important while the relatively trivial loss of Israeli life is important. And so unfortunately the western media and the people working in it are racists.

There is much to do in the world of anti-racism then. Firstly we need educate and change our own racist media.

Gay behaviour is the norm for most animals (really?)

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12588175/Gay-behaviour-norm-animals-Scientists-study-homosexual-acts-1-500-species-say-sex-displays-evolved-repeatedly-increase-social-bonding-reduce-conflict.html

"same-sex displays evolved repeatedly to increase social bonding and reduce conflict." exactly which is why gay-marriage is nonsense. Marriage is about procreation. It evolved so that males could ensure female fidelity if they were going to invest that much in child rearing - the only way a male knows who his children are is through trust of his wife (so feminists basically don't even understand the problem yet). Homosexuals, feminists and a raft of idiots hijacking marriage simply destroys it.

Although with the advent of DNA tests a male should have the legal right to request a DNA tests and that be the basis of liability for child rearing. A male may wish to honour the proceeds of an EP copulation but that should be a known choice. Marriage is dead really, and gay marriage was the final nail. As for children the genetic family is dead, you belong to the world now. This was the socialist dream anyway its the only way to equality. Inheritance needs die with it: after death everything belongs to the state, at birth everything comes from the state (well most of it does already). This is what you get for to tinkering with marriage. #BraveNewWorld indeed!

p.s. not new science, but the observations of the 60/70s was that "homosexuality" was all about social hierarchy. Subordinates have sex simulated on them by their superiors in most animals and their submission is what maintains social cohesion. Didn't read the NS but suspect they just rediscovering what already known. Interesting parallel how often sex is used in human conflict. This is where expressions like "go fuck yourself", "fuck off", "screw you", the middle finger etc get their meaning. Its a linguistic version of homosexuality, expressing superiority through sexual expression. All old stuff. It must be a mystery for most how the "romantic" "love" of a constructive, healthy heterosexual relationship built around the long term investment and commitment required by childbearing has anything to do with "fuck off." How far we have fallen.

Romance is itself rather odd. A fairly recent invention of the French that developed through Chivalry into chivalric love and reheated Platonic ideas of ethereal perfect idealised love. Really very far from its origins in procreation, or even social bonding.

Emptiness

Not a great post, but just vague summary of current journey.

I made a bad mistake as a kid.

When we discover science and knowledge there is a hunger and also an ego that makes us think perhaps we can understand it all.

In particular the Platonic idea that there are fundamental laws that in some way replace the phenomena they explain.

Newtons simple laws of motion, with rudimentary calculus seemed to explain all the previously complex motions of planets and earth bound objects. Its as though armed with this book we can miss out reality and speak directly to God.

Perhaps there is a law of everything?

Well in a way there is, but not like this.

The problem with this type of thinking is we start to step back from what we experience and put it in a suspicious box where we can examine it as something alien, not satisfactory, something that is to be understood in terms of something better.

This alienation from reality, is essential in a way for the scientist so they keep looking, but it produces a fundamental misunderstanding of the world.

It has taken me all my life since a teenager to really understand this mistake.

There was a time when I asked "why" to everything. Especially interested not in the law of physics like the acceleration, momentum and gravity but interested in why even they were true. Why does a football move when kicked was the perennial question seeking to get into that deeper layer of understanding of how the world is.

I came to a normative, empirical kind of understanding. We expect it to move simply because that is what it does. But this still didn't satisfy that need to get to deeper laws.

Eventually that all ends up with SRH. The question of why? runs aground when you start asking things like "why are there questions?"

Anyway the normative understanding was actually very close to the exit, but I was facing the wrong way and went back in.

The thing about life is that first and fore most it is here. That IS the most important thing. No getting away from that.

We can sit there and puzzle over how weird it is that we have a hole in our faces that we put food in periodically. We can explain this through need for nutrients etc but it doesn't get away from how weird this is, and also the sense of "is this really all life is?" or "is this really what we got?" It starts getting religious "why did God make it like this?", "have I a purpose?". And if perhaps "why am I in such a world as this; why isn't it different?". To think that my whole life will be spent under this particular set of star constellations like this and not another. It seems to "need" more reality and significance to it than it has. Its all the same kind of thing.

But when sensing these questions we are actually very close to the truth, but probably facing the wrong way.

The thing is, it IS like this. Its good to have seen the way it is. That shows unattached and clear mind. But the problem becomes when the Self/Ego takes a grip on that. It is threatened by things "just being this way." How can I change it? Why do I have to put up with it? Why does a profound and magnificent being as "me" which is beyond description end up in a world that is actually like "this". In the world of fantasy we are used to changing things all the time. Don't like it, change it. The idea that the world is a particular way, is refreshing in a way but also has an uneasy feel. IS this really IT?

If we are a being able to fly around the universe and occupy many other being and lives we might think of our life, well when I die I get a new life, or go to a different universe where there is no longer breathing and eating and I can fly and be magical. But actually which ever existence we take it will still be a certain way. Unicorns are still stuck with horns. Somewhere along the line the very nature of existence is "things being a certain way" and the Ego must suck that up. I am not handsome, suck it up. I am short, suck it up. I am not rich, suck it up. Its raining today, suck it up etc etc etc

So there begins meditation. Suck it up.

Once we are no longer opposed to the world, then it no longer needs explanation. We are happy with it being which ever way it goes. Like a leaf dropping into a stream we just go with flow. Does the leaf ever stop to think how weird it is to be drifting down on water?

Well this is where we are close to the answer. There is a way of just being with things where they look odd, but its not an unfriendly suspicious "need to know". Its not like meeting a stranger and sitting them in an interrogation chair to find out all about them. We can just enjoy being with them and all their "strangeness" without needing to smash it open to see anything more. The leaf can indeed feel how weird to flowing down the river now after a summer in the branches, but without drifting off into mental inquisition of the events, it can just sit with the new situation and go for the ride.

Not needing to smash the world open to peak inside is a great step to recover from the mistake I made.

And it leads to a wonderful thing about life. It doesn't need to be this way or that. There are those moments, particularly when we see other people living lives we have a desire for , of thinking that our life is not good enough. Our life is like this, and we think it should be like that. Standard self-alienation. This can get really bad to the point of really hating our own life and not wanting to live it or even not wanting to be ourselves. This is no different from the leaf deciding its had enough of the ride and wants to get out of the river. Leaves never do this. The world never actually does this.

But then we are back to the meditation and having to "suck it up." Turns out the world is like this, so suck it up.

What is interesting is that no matter how great our desire to be someone else, actually we didn't always have this desire, and so we know we will not always have this desire. That car our mate got which is so much better than ours; well yesterday you were happy with our car. What we notice is not so much that our mate got a new car, but that we got a new envy ;-) Suck it up, this is the way it is. Its odd how much we do just to get rid of envy, we end up with all this junk that we think we want, when actually it was the envy that we wanted to get rid of.

So looking at reality, but not wishing to undo it, change it, understand it, replace it with equations, fix it etc is the key.

Its got to be some way, turns out today it's this way.

This is actually what in Buddhism is called emptiness.

Not that we need a rationalisation of that, we can just accept it as it is. But what we are doing when we accept reality, is we are not grasping onto reality this way or that, but we are indeed getting to the underlying truth. How ironic that the journey above that we though was get us to the underlying truth was actually taking us away. Its very hard to say what the truth is in fact because its more an attitude of being with the world rather than holding on to a knowledge. As said above you can get to the door, but we are looking the wrong way. Stand right next to truth and not see it because we are expecting to get given something to hold and take away. The point about reality is that it is a certain way, we can examine that as deep as we want, but the moment we grasp hold of it to bring it "closer" it becomes like a fish out of water and we end up eventually with a dead museum specimen. Reality cannot be separated, not for very long at least, into bits and pieces. We can't go around saying "his life is better than mine" for very long because quickly we lose reality. "his life" and "your life" belong in the same fish tank, you can't go pulling one or the other out. Grasping at "his life" to "want it" and try and "have it for oneself" will kill it and you. It all goes together, including the envy or whatever other things turn up in "your" life.

This everything-going-together is only possible because of emptiness. Things are what they are, but they also go seamlessly together. It seems like a contradiction, but only when we try to hold the "strangeness" and get closer to it. How can the water and the fire go together? Yet they do don't they. You can go swimming on a sunny day feeling the burning of that fire in the sky, while having the waves gently washing over your shoulders. If you took one and left the other it would make no sense. True you can go to a parasol to get shade from the sun, but its just for now you are not going to extinguish the sun. It all goes together and there is nothing in particular to grasp or get the truth of, the truth is that everything goes together.

===

Reading that back its interesting that one path of Buddhism, the oldest in fact, is the Four Noble Truths. The first Noble Truth is almost like an alienation describe above. Buddha famously experienced this alienation. When he saw that life was not a single beautiful thing but fundamentally tainted by death and disease he was alienated from it. He didn't recognise it any more and he realised that there was a problem in life. So he set out to fix it. And that did not go very well. We can start with some basics: you are not and never will be immortal. Indeed nothing is. We can't fix it like this. Indeed like above there is no underlying truth or secret that if you could just discover like an alchemist could give you immortality and solve the problem of death. This is not the right way to go about it. Anyway just noting how science's Platonic removal from the world is also one of the starting approaches of Buddhism.

Atomic Bombs were actually irrelevant.

It's gradually coming into focus that the whole of the US is just one big fabrication and lie. Literally nothing about the US is true: a world of shady salesmen and con artists.

Much is made of the Atomic Bomb drops on 1945 but is it really true Japan surrendered because of that?

If A-Bombs were that scary how did the Korean War (1950 to 1953) happen? Russia had literally only just tested there first A-bomb on 29th Aug 1949 while the US already had 700 war heads. Besides USSR had no means to deliver it until 1953 with the R-7 Semyorka. So the US had overwhelming nuclear capability at the start of the Korean War who would dare fight them if A-bombs were such a threat?

Given their overwhelming nuclear superiority why didn't US just threaten any berligerents with A-Bombing ? In fact why didn't the whole world just surrender to the US?

The truth is that the worst terrorist attack in human history was the firebombing of Tokyo. Official figures put the death toll at more than twice the A-Bombs. These figures are obviously conservative to hide the true horrific scale of mass slaughter of innocent civilians at the hands of the Americans. Given that the US was capable of such vast destruction anyway why should Japan have cared about A-Bombs? America was set to genocide all Japanese with or without A-Bombs. So its clearly nonsense that the A-bombs achieved anything. The real reason the Japanese surrendered was Russia entering the war. At 11 PM on the 8th August Russia notified Japan that from the following morning they were at war. Japan could not fight on both fronts and so the war was over. Now the US could not realistically drop an experimental weapon on a country that had surrendered, although they may have wanted to, their propaganda is not so great they could lie about this crime. They knew the Russian plan so they knew exactly how much time they had to test their weapons. The morning of 9th they flew a pre flight to drop test devices on the city as they had Hiroshima and then dropped the bomb killing 10s of 1000s of innocent men, women and children as literally only the Americans seem able to do. No other country or people have ever even conceived of destruction on this scale.

In one bomb drop the US killed 8 times more people instantly than the NAZIS had killed in the whole of their bombing campaigns on the UK.

It is a total injustice in fact to like other countries with the scale of destruction that the US seems to think is normal. And those great slaughters the US likes to talk about are often vastly exaggerated and lacking any real evidence. The most famous is the NAZI Holocaust of Jews. It is not controversial to say that the majority of Holocaust victims died from starvation not from gas chambers. And its interesting that over half died from the effects of starvation after liberation. What appears to have happened is a vast starvation event. Now people can discuss whether it was the cruel intentions of the NAZIS to eradicate the Jewish race by starvation, but you might have though they could have done this before the end of the war. Why keep so many starving until the end? It seems much more likely that whatever the NAZIS did was overwhelmed by a humanitarian catastrophe as the Allied Invasion destroyed the country, its agriculture and supply lines. It was not just in the 1000 work camps where people starved, they starved across the whole of Germany. And to underline the problem when the US liberated Germany Eisenhower refused food aid to German nationals to quell any rebellion. Food was clearly the defining feature of the end of the war. And its doubly suspicious that according to official figures no one in German died from starvation caused by the war. The US says that every death was a "war crime." How suspicious and convenient.

It is blantant lies like which I believe the US uses to hide the real war crimes of WW2 that were in fact committed by the Allies.

This is not the forgive the NAZIS for the vast atrocities. But its to put them in perspective. The mass shooting and massacres of Russians and Jews by the NAZIS are no less unforgivable and appalling. But sat side by side the mass bombings of the Allies they are actually quite small war crimes. A man with a machine gun mowing down a line of villagers verses a week of fire bombing or an atomic bomb don't really compare in the world of war crimes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo