Alex:
Unfortunately, when someone is telling you to be decent, that means you've already passed beyond decency. And it gets a little worse, as you are also a hypocrite, by not judging the Communist massacres by the same standards you judge the nazist ones.
Correct. That's the double standard of allied hypocrisy. Specially the western one, because soviets were soviets, they were not civilized. But the western ones always claimed to be figthing for civlization as the raids on Dresden prove.
Trying to justify torture and mass murder is just as bad, no matter if it was perpetrated by Italians, Japanese, Germans or russians.
No need to justify anything if you are throwing incendiary bombs over civilians. But still Guernica is brought as a great crime but no mention of Hamburg.
you're trying to justify communist opression, mass torture and mass killings by some anachronistic interpretation of hsitory as "punishment" or "reward" for fighting "for" or "against" various enemies, in this case occupation being punishment for attacking USSR.
The allies didn't have a reason, for later generations, to justify why they fought mainly because they started "defending Poland" and at the end they left it alone, betraying it. Later they had to acknowledge that their soviets "allies" were no more than a real time enemy, a tyranic opression that didn't abide the signed treaties and occupied half of Europe, changing one dictatoship for another one. How to justify that they started fighting for Poland only to leave it in the hands of a dictator such as Stalin and afterwards that "allied" dictator becomes your worst enemy AFTER you have given him money, weapons, support and your trust? So that's why the Holocaust is so important for the alllies, even if they knew nothing of it during the days of war, because it is the justification. But the allies didn't fought for the jews (and those that were liberated were almost all in the soviet sector), there were other original reasons that, once obsolete, required for a new one to come. THe outcome of a war for freedom was sending those countries to be liberated into slavery again. Of course, the real purpose of fighting for the US (FDR and Eleanor) was to help Stalin against the "fascists" that were an enemy for leftist ideologies. All the allied leaders knew that no single allied country could fight and won Germany on their own, which is why the strategic diversion of Western Europe, to pin down one million german soldiers there instead of fighting the soviets in their way to ensalve eastern Europe.