Collectivistic thinking serves to excuse state crimes.
Question:
In what way do the atrocities committed by the Imperial Japanese Army in China in 1937-38, especially those included under the rubric of "the Rape of Nanking," justify the U.S. government's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945?
Answer:
In no way whatsoever.
Question:
Why then do so many of the Americans who defend the atomic bombings bring up the Rape of Nanking as a leading part of their justification?
Hypothesis:
They do so because their thinking is completely collectivistic. They think: "The Japanese committed atrocities in Nanking; therefore it is only just that the Japanese suffered the retribution of having atomic bombs exploded over Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Comment:
This argumentation, by making "the Japanese" the alleged moral agent that committed a wrongful act and therefore deserved to be punished for it, lumps every Japanese person, regardless of actual individual culpability, into a moral category that is nothing but a meaningless abstraction divorced from recognition of which specific individuals committed wrongs and therefore might justly have been punished for those wrongs. An attempt to justify killing, in particular, a lot of babies, children, old people, women, and others who had nothing to do with the crimes committed in Nanking -- or with the war in general -- substitutes tribal savagery for defensible moral thinking.