"Good guys" committing perfidy (fake surrender) and it's treated as a clever heroic ploy instead of a war crime or something morally dubious

[u/AporiaParadox]

1. Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Anakin pretends to surrender to the enemy multiple times during the Clone Wars. And no, it's not used to indicate that Anakin is falling to the Dark Side, other characters like Obi-Wan do it too.
2. The Iliad. The Trojan Horse was a real dick move, a fake surrender compounded by a fake peace offering, followed by a massacre. I get that it was a different time, but still, most modern adaptations just treat it as a cool thing. One thing I'll give Nolan's The Odyssey credit for is that Odysseus recognizes that what his "clever plot" was wrong.

Perfidy is a serious war crime, because morality aside, in exchange for one victory, you're dooming all of your allies who might want to legitimately surrender in the future because now the enemy is just going to execute them, not to mention that now the enemy won't surrender to you and will just fight harder.

[u/Dartz_Reverse]

Wasnt an issue from their perspective.

According to their code, anybody trying to surrender in earnest deserves to die anyway.

[u/Blitz_Prime → u/Dartz_Reverse]

Reminds me in Fallout New Vegas Caesar’s Legion has their soldiers trained to kill themselves rather than be captured, but Centurion didn’t as he saw his death as a useless waste of resources and planned to escape. Caesar however has him marked for death, and would sooner spend even more lives to have him killed than rescued.

[u/Johnny_Banana18 → u/Dartz_Reverse]

Their code was pretty arbitrary, the no surrender idea wasn’t a long held idea but was added as a perversion of bushido.  

[u/Cory123125 → u/Johnny_Banana18]

They had a crazily disorganized set of military institutions.

They ended up doubling up on development work a lot of the time due to it.

[u/Johnny_Banana18 → u/Cory123125]

And every faction in the military basically hated each other and disregarded each others ideas 

[u/elderlybrain → u/Dartz_Reverse]

The resulting legal, financial and psychological penalties were enormous.

Japan's treatment of its prisoners was so monstrous that the penalties on Japan were probably the highest of any axis power bar Germany.

It basically was dismantled as a nation. It lost 2 cities in the atomic bombings. It totally lost its overseas territory completely, the entire political system was restructured and it had to contribute 42% of its GDP to war reparations. It's entire leadership, bar Hirohito was hanged.

It was such a devastating and powerful punishment that Japan's entire psyche was changed from an imperialist warrior led hierarchy to what it is today.

There's a reason why so many Japanese still venerate the clsss-a war criminals at Yasakuni shrine, they recognise that Japan was utterly and totally neutered after world war 2. They refuse to accept that it was consequences.