Before I go on to further flesh out what I'm asking, I'd like to be clear that I'm writing this from the perspective of a relatively young 20 year old American.
Whenever I see any material describing WWII, America is glorified. We are saints that more or less come down from heaven to then beat submission into the hellish German and Japanese soldiers. However, when I, myself, try to look at WWII in a critical manner, all I see are corrupt, Orwellian governments fighting each other and committing atrocities left and right simply because that's what governments do.
The United States sent over 100,000 Japanese inhabitants into internment camps with no justification, and Harry Truman was either stupid or vile enough to drop not one but two atomic bombs onto Japanese cities. Germany killed over 11 million political dissenters, including Jews, homosexuals, and communists, and equivalently, the U.S.S.R sent over 14 million political dissenters to the Gulag. Furthermore, the Japanese military almost gleefully carried out the Nanking Massacre as well as various other atrocities.
I understand that objectively Germany killed the most, but its intentions were no less malicious than any other government's at the time. When then, if ever, will we no longer view ourselves as saints in this period? This has already happened with WWI. I remember when being taught about it, my teacher pointed out that no side was easily identified as good or bad, and to me, the same is true with WWII as well.
So then, will my opinion ever be shared, or am I going to always be in the minority with my view?
Also, to be clear, I'm referring to how contemporary media portrays WWII. I would hope that historians at least have an unbiased perspective.
Edit ---
I realize that many of you dislike most of this post, but I'm still enjoying and learning from this discussion. So, thank you.
I understand that objectively Germany killed the most, but its intentions were no less malicious than any other government's at the time
This is a seriously questionable assumption. Most governments at the time were not bent on the wholesale expulsion and destruction of entire religious/ethnic groups.
This has already happened with WWI. I remember when being taught about it, my teacher pointed out that no side was easily identified as good or bad
Be very, very, careful with this. Who being "right" and "wrong", the idea of the "pointless war", etc., are still very debated topics in regards to World War One.
The idea of even being able to easily identify any side as "good or bad" is all a bit useless, in my opinion, because it encourages a very vague and almost lazy overview of a very important period of time. Being content with just throwing your hands up and going "Well, it must be a grey morality" can be a bit of a disservice to the history, because if you choose to dig deeper like many have, you will find more a lot more unsettling, and in some cases damning, events and information of policies and actions especially committed by the German Empire. There's a reason that historians like Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius consider the German occupation of Russian/Eastern European lands in the First World War to be the precursor and influence to the racial attitudes and policies of the Nazi Germans in the Second World War.
It's not supposed to be a verdict of "evil" on the Germans, but I'm also uncomfortable with the popular perception that World War One was this foggy area of morality where everyone was on the same level of wrongness. Just a thought.
I think a great deal of your questions will be answered if you do some basic research. To understand how beyond the pale the actions of the Nazis were, you first need to know them, and know what they were prevented from accomplishing by the actions of the, admittedly, less than saintly Allies.
Germany, in the five years or so they occupied Poland, killed six million people, or about 21% of the population, including 90% of the country's Jewish population. Before the invasion of the Soviet Union, Nazi economists devised a comprehensive plan for the deliberate murder, through overwork and starvation, of tens of millions of Soviets, and the expulsion of the remainder east of the Ural Mountains. In the course of the war, they succeeded in bringing about the deaths of fifteen or so million Soviet civilians. This is to say nothing of the millions of Soviet prisoners of war deliberately killed in POW camps that were barely more than open fields surrounded by barbed wire.
Against such a backdrop, the worst atrocities of the Western Allies looks quite tame. The imprisonment of the Nisei, while a barbaric, unconstitutional overreaction, was one brought about by the massive fear and uncertainty that followed the crippling of the American Pacific fleet. The atom bombs, rightly or wrongly, were dropped at the bitter end of an incredibly nasty, protracted war. The only other options available were to invade, or to blockade Japan and wait for starvation to force a surrender. The former would have entailed hundreds of thousands of Allied casualties and probably caused the deaths of millions of Japanese. The latter was untenable for two reasons; firstly, that it would have taken a considerable length of time, three or four years perhaps, and the American public was extremely war weary; secondly, because the Japanese military would have been quite capable of prioritizing the limited food, medicine, etc for its soldiers, while leaving the bulk of the citizenry to starve and die. Either option would have resulted in a huge number of deaths. Whether it would have been more or less than the atom bombs caused is a matter of conjecture.
Not exactly an answer to your question, but I addressed a similar one a little while back, here:
Well, this is necessarily a question of opinion, but I think I can take a stab at it (Speaking mainly just for the US):
First off, the US won. America loves a winner, especially when it is themselves! You don't see anyone celebrating the Korean War because it ended on such a mediocre note.
The war was fought within living memory. Both of my grandfathers fought in the war, as did a number of great uncles. Most people know (or knew, at this point...) a good number of WWII vets and heard their stories and what not. Baring those long-lived outliers, WWI vets have for the most part been dead for a generation, and practically no-one of my own generation ever met one, so lack that personal connection to the history of it.
The war is thought of as a crusade for freedom and democracy. Hitler is a synonym for the ultimate evil, and Nazis can be characterized as comic book villains with pretty minimal deviation from established fact. Likewise Japan launched a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, and committed all kinds of atrocities in the Pacific and Asia. While we can point out plenty of deficiencies in the Allies cause, it is nevertheless pretty easy to say we were the good guys. You don't see anyone wanting to celebrate the Mexican-American War because, well, it wasn't really that well intentioned of America.
To compound that, it was just at the perfect mid-point for media coverage. The war was covered like never before, but the ability to broadcast live into the home wasn't quite there yet, and of course the government could still control information with little outcry from the news organizations. Contrast that with Vietnam and Walter Cronkite telling America "But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could." I wrote only yesterday a piece about perception of war, and how as kids we only see the good, but as adults we are much more able to form a complete picture of the other side of the coin, and that is a product of the modern era. But without that exposure, it is hard to get that full picture of war, and easier to maintain the, for lack of a better word, childlike wonder about war.
Additionally, and this is something that someone who is more studied in the evolution of pop culture will want to expand on, the post-war era was a period of massive growth and media consumption. The 'Baby Boom' for starters, and the rise of middle-class wealth that contrasted previous generation's experience in the Great Depression. It was a popular topic, both as it appealed to many veterans who wanted to remember their service fondly, or the next generation who looked up to them. I'm not a fan of Ambrose, but in his Citizen Soldier, he talks about interacting with veterans of the war as a kid, and how in awe he was of them.
On that note, there is also the "Greatest Generation" thing. We have mythologized them as a special group who rose to the challenge of WWII. I don't say that to denigrate what they did of course, merely to point out that the idea of the citizen soldiers who fought that war make us want to set them apart.
And this doesn't really touch on the larger effects of the war, how it cemented America's place as a leading super power and all that, although I would just tie that back to the first point about living memory.
The only other wars remembered with anything approaching the level of fondness as the Second World War would be the Revolution, for obvious reasons, and the Civil War, which is remembered for very different reasons, as it is such an ingrained part of American identity and the story of the nation. The image of WWII just hits that perfect spot in the American psyche of validating everything that we want to think of the country as representing.
There are other reasons that can be offered certainly, but that is some of it right there.
In what world can the non-violent internment of civilians (although problematic on a legal philosophical level) be equated with the attempt to wipe out entire social and political groups?
The world being moral shades of gray rather than simple black and white does not mean judgments cannot be made, or that one cannot be worse than another. Yes the US engaged in a mass bombing campaign of Japanese cities, and yes breaches of the laws of war occurred against Japanese soldiers.
However, the US did not murder thousands of civilians in a city it was about to lose in 1945. It did not horribly mistreat hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war for four years. It did not experiment with biological warfare on unwilling and unwitting civilians. It did not transport prisoners of war in overcrowded ships to be abandoned when these were in danger of sinking. It did not have systematic organised sexual slavery.