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My Imaginary GF posted:We never faced 4 million Japanese on open plains. You have no idea how much it pains me to say that Rahm is right, but he absolutely is. Japan was beaten after Midway just as much as Germany was beaten after Kursk. That we never faced a large Japanese army due to the nature of the war in the Pacific doesn't mean they weren't soundly beaten by the US before Russia opened a second front.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:24
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You're debating whether dropping the bomb was a moral choice, what you know at the time is part of that morality. From the perspective of the US, Japanese soldiers had fought to essentially suicide, and the country as a whole continued to participate in a war they must have known they couldn't win. Internal divisions and what the Imperial Command was ~really thinking~ is irrelevant, you act based on what you know and see.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:24
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DeusExMachinima posted:So if we prosecuted the war without strategic bombing, would Germany have gotten the nuke and used it in a more restrained way? Discuss. No, it was determined after the war that Germany's nuke program was a hilarious joke for many reasons: poor funding, ridiculous infighting, the expulsion of Jewish physicists to name a few.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:25
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rudatron posted:You're debating whether dropping the bomb was a moral choice, what you know at the time is part of that morality. From the perspective of the US, Japanese soldiers had fought to suicide and had continued to participate in a war they knew must have known they couldn't win. Internal divisions and what the Imperial Command was ~really thinking~ is irrelevant, you act based on what you know and see. no, i'm debtating why japan surrendered. i haven't said one word about whether or not dropping the bomb was justified
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Aug 7, 2015 18:25
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rudatron posted:You're debating whether dropping the bomb was a moral choice, what you know at the time is part of that morality. From the perspective of the US, Japanese soldiers had fought to suicide and had continued to participate in a war they knew must have known they couldn't win. Internal divisions and what the Imperial Command was ~really thinking~ is irrelevant, you act based on what you know and see. This is a fair point, honestly.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:26
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Popular Thug Drink posted:we aren't US decision makers in 1945, we are discussing the reasons japan surrendered, in 2015, who have access to this information To be valid historians, we must argue from the policy perspectives at the time, and not from hindsight. More firebombing of German would have produced a more rapid end to the war. America did not firebomb enough; we could have, we should have, taken women into the armed forces for the purpose of additional manpower available to firebomb.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:26
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Cerebral Bore posted:It doesn't follow that nukes ereased that thin hope, because we know that they didn't. The documentation exists, and the Japanese high command didn't consider Hiroshima significant. The evidence pointed to by the FP article doesn't support that. It supports that a single request for a meeting was rebuffed. The timeline the FP gives is also unclear if that was before or after the oral report from the military about what occurred. If you have stronger evidence or think I'm mischaracterizing it, by all means quote it and explain how, but I read the FP article and it does not quote any documentation of the Japanese not considering Hiroshima significant except for that meeting refusal. If there's more on that that supports that it was because "who cares about that", and that they knew it actually was a single bomb instead of another city destroyed in a bombing, happy to look at that. But one of the other issues I see with that article is that it swaps between understanding that they may not have understood what happened immediately (by pointing to the timeline on the military reports), but then fails to connect that with the meeting rebuff. Both the oral report on the bombing, and the meeting rebuff, happened on August 8th - but it's never made clear which happened first. It's also not clear when that oral report spread to the rest of the cabinet. The entire article relies on a timing argument that does not hold up - that the gap between Hiroshima and the August 9th meeting makes it untenable to link the two. But there's several problems with this. First, that preliminary reports were correct on the damage does not mean that the preliminary reports were relied on - just because the information was available right after the bombing does not mean it was considered reliable. Importantly, the damage wasn't the issue - it was that a single bomber, with a single bomb, caused the damage. That issue is unaddressed in the FP article entirely. Then, you have the first verbal report on August 8th, which presumably is spread to the rest of the high command, then the meeting on August 9th. That is entirely consistent with the Japanese determining that yes, Hiroshima was wiped out by a single nuclear bomb, and then holding a meeting to discuss surrender as a result. The article relies almost entirely on timelines for its argument - it says the timeline doesn't match Hiroshima being important but it does match the USSR being important - so as soon as it's clear that the timeline argument works for Hiroshima as well it collapses. Then, you're left with simply the throwaway of a meeting on Hiroshima being declined, without any additional information on what was known and why the meeting was declined. Against that, you have the many public statements about Hiroshima being decisive. The argument absolutely requires more to be debatable. It is nowhere near the definitive proof some people have read it to be (which is stronger than everything in the article but the article's headline actually says about itself) even before the timing argument is knocked down. The other issue you're missing is that the nuclear weapons pretty clearly made an invasion of Japan unnecessary (well, they didn't because we used up our last stocks of fissile material, but we didn't tell the Japanese that). Perhaps they wouldn't have forced the Japanese to surrender without the USSR knocking out their other hope - but the USSR intervening didn't end the fantasy of repelling the invasion.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:27
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Japan surrendering and being broken and remade by the Americans was probably the best thing that ever happened to it. Japan is a free, prosperous and respected nation today. The death and suffering of the Japanese during the war was a small price to pay for the atrocious crimes they committed against their neighbors. Letting them surrender on any kind of terms risked not teaching them their lesson. They gave fanatic aggressive militarism their best try, and they had to learn that it was doomed to fail, that the outcome would be the destruction of their whole nation, it's erasure from the earth. It broke their belief that they were a divinely important people, it broke their warrior spirit.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:27
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rudatron posted:You're debating whether dropping the bomb was a moral choice, what you know at the time is part of that morality. From the perspective of the US, Japanese soldiers had fought to essentially suicide, and the country as a whole continued to participate in a war they must have known they couldn't win. Internal divisions and what the Imperial Command was ~really thinking~ is irrelevant, you act based on what you know and see. Okay but plenty of high-ranking American officers said it wasn't justified by military necessity or morality even at the time.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:27
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rudatron posted:You're debating whether dropping the bomb was a moral choice, what you know at the time is part of that morality. From the perspective of the US, Japanese soldiers had fought to essentially suicide, and the country as a whole continued to participate in a war they must have known they couldn't win. Internal divisions and what the Imperial Command was ~really thinking~ is irrelevant, you act based on what you know and see. It would have been immoral to have spent all that money on the bomb and not drop it. To Americans in 1945, what is the value of a Japanese civilian? They, like the nazis, were the enemy engaged in total war against the continued existance of democracy. We had to nuke Japan. For democracy. For freedom. It would have been unjust not to.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:28
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Popular Thug Drink posted:yeah they often don't cover that on hirohito's henchmen or whatever, it doesn't play well with an american audience who like to think of the pacific as america's war Hey.. Why don't you tell the thread who stripped Japan of Indonesia? Who firebombed the primary islands of Japan? Who destroyed the Japanese military industrial complex? Japan couldn't face the Russians given that their ability to support and wage war had been broken. By the Allied forces in the Pacific. And if you try to argue this you are functionally retarded.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:29
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VitalSigns posted:Given the conditions that are necessary for the ascent of fascism and militarism, I'd wager that our decision to build Germany and Japan back up with huge capital injections after WW2 instead of charging them a whole bunch of gold and leaving their economy in shambles had more to do with it. That probably had a lot to do with it as well. But I think that the extent to which the Germans didn't believe they lost WWI has gotten forgotten, and it's a huge reason why the Nazis were able to seize power. It is not the only reason - it doesn't explain Italy or Japan - but it was a huge factor in Germany's rejection of the post-WWI peace and it crippled the legitimacy of the democratic government. The Nazis may not have seized control without the great depression, but one of the conservative militaristic parties would probably have come to power eventually and caused another war. I've always really liked this book - http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Third-Reich-Richard-Evans/dp/0143034693 (and its sequel, which is about how the Nazis actually governed Germany and maintained their control). It's a really good book.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:31
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Make no mistake, we were justified in killing the Japanese and destroying their country until they surrendered unconditionally and stopped fighting. So the use of the atomic bombs is automatically justified. The Japanese were still fighting and hadn't surrendered. The atomic bombs, a single plane dropping a single bomb and destroying a whole city, was a demonstration that A) we were able to destroy every city in Japan, destroying their whole country and killing them all and B) we were going to actually do it. Also remember that nuclear weapons are perhaps mankinds greatest invention, the first invention to create lasting peace. All the lives that would have been lost in world war three were saved, in large part, because atomic weapons were actually used in war. They stopped being something theoretical.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:32
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Genocide Tendency posted:Japan couldn't face the Russians given that their ability to support and wage war had been broken. By the Allied forces in the Pacific. And if you try to argue this you are functionally retarded. Well they probably couldn't have stopped the Russians in any case, in 1945 Russia had the best tank forces and the largest army in the entire world, the IJA in Manchuria was hosed. You're still right that America actually did the heavy lifting in the war against Japan though.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:32
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hakimashou posted:Japan surrendering and being broken and remade by the Americans was probably the best thing that ever happened to it. Japan is a free, prosperous and respected nation today. While it doesn't justify their actions, to put this in perspective the only thing particularly unique about Japanese imperialism was that it wasn't European, and was a little bit later than Europe's. The core friction between them and Europe/the US was that they were invading areas that we had already invaded and 'owned'. We didn't really object to the various territories being owned by a foreign power, just which foreign power. The Japanese actions in China were atrocious but atrocities weren't uncommon in European imperialism either. Germany was more of a divergence from the norm because it conquered other imperial powers instead of people outside the clubhouse, and because of Hitler was murderous even by the lax standards of the era. They certainly were no worse than the French, Dutch, or English in their imperialism in the area except when it comes to China, and frankly that might not have been worse than any of the European atrocities in their various campaigns (I'm sort of weak on that area of history, unfortunately).
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Aug 7, 2015 18:37
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VitalSigns posted:Well they probably couldn't have stopped the Russians in any case, in 1945 Russia had the best tank forces and the largest army in the entire world, the IJA in Manchuria was hosed. And the elephant in the room. How would Russia have fared at all if not for lend-lease and America entering the war against Germany? I sort of get the foreign obsession with pretending they can minimize the role of the U.S. in World War Two, but I can't respect it
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Aug 7, 2015 18:37
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A Winner is Jew posted:You have no idea how much it pains me to say that Rahm is right, but he absolutely is. Japan was not beaten after Midway. None of the top commanders believed this. The United States wanted to pull 30 divisions for Operation Downfall. The Soviets had 11. Japan had 30 fully equipped divisions and 60 total divisions prepared for the home invasion. This is post-historical nonsense. For LeMay, the fire bombings were convenient because it didn't mean losing 500,000 troops on a ground invasion. The US had no interest in Japanese civilian casualties before or after the bombs dropped. evilweasel posted:To put this in perspective though, the only thing particularly unique about Japanese imperialism was that it wasn't European, and was a little bit later than Europe's. The core friction between them and Europe/the US was that they were invading areas that we had already invaded and 'owned'. We didn't really object to the various territories being owned by a foreign power, just which foreign power. The Japanese actions in China were atrocious but atrocities weren't uncommon in European imperialism either. Germany was more of a divergence from the norm because it conquered other imperial powers instead of people outside the clubhouse, and because of Hitler was murderous even by the lax standards of the era. The British Empire enabled the Japanese imperialism and the occupation of China by striking a deal with Japan over attacking the German occupied Tsingtao during WW1. Job Truniht fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 18:37
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evilweasel posted:To put this in perspective though, the only thing particularly unique about Japanese imperialism was that it wasn't European, and was a little bit later than Europe's. The core friction between them and Europe/the US was that they were invading areas that we had already invaded and 'owned'. We didn't really object to the various territories being owned by a foreign power, just which foreign power. The Japanese actions in China were atrocious but atrocities weren't uncommon in European imperialism either. Germany was more of a divergence from the norm because it conquered other imperial powers instead of people outside the clubhouse, and because of Hitler was murderous even by the lax standards of the era. The outcome of breaking Japan was unambiguously good for all its would-be colonies though. The consequences of the act were good, so the act was right.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:38
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Fojar38 posted:The alternative to dropping the bombs was to starve them into submission, in which case we'd be sitting here arguing about the morality of the US starving a defeated country into submission. I think the use of the bombs makes that permissible when one considers the numbers of Japanese that could have easily starved.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:39
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hakimashou posted:The outcome of breaking Japan was unambiguously good for all its would-be colonies though. The consequences of the act were good, so the act was right. The problem with the peace settlement is that there were no Nuremberg Trials for all the war criminals that ran the Japanese government- many of which continued to run it after the war. hakimashou posted:Make no mistake, we were justified in killing the Japanese and destroying their country until they surrendered unconditionally and stopped fighting. This brings up another problem: Nobody on the Manhattan Project agreed to deploy the A-bombs in actual combat. They were under the assumption that testing the bomb would be enough. There was a huge petition by the scientists at the time against what they perceived as being unethical. Job Truniht fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 18:41
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Job Truniht posted:Japan was not beaten after Midway. None of the top commanders believed this. The United States wanted to pull 30 divisions for Operation Downfall. The Soviets had 11. Japan had 30 fully equipped divisions and 60 total divisions prepared for the home invasion. This is post-historical nonsense. Japan had essentially no hope of maintaining even local naval superiority after Midway. As an island war, the navies were much more important than divisions. Japan had no ability to protect its empire once it lost its ability to project naval power after Midway, especially since it couldn't keep up with American production. It could potentially resist an invasion of the core islands, but getting driven back to its core islands alone was a loss considering their goal was an empire.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:41
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hakimashou posted:Make no mistake, we were justified in killing the Japanese and destroying their country until they surrendered unconditionally and stopped fighting. This is correct. quote:Also remember that nuclear weapons are perhaps mankinds greatest invention, the first invention to create lasting peace. All the lives that would have been lost in world war three were saved, in large part, because atomic weapons were actually used in war. They stopped being something theoretical. This isn't. It prevented both the US and the USSR from actually pushing the button (barely), but it didn't create peace. It created a situation where both sides waged war by proxy. Such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the entire 'stan conflict (which created the Taliban and Al-Qaeda). And at times it wasn't even war by proxy. See the Korean conflict and Vietnam. Nuking Japan did two things. Ended Japan's will to fight in WWII and stopped the rest of the world from using nukes again. It didn't create peace.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:41
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Job Truniht posted:The problem with the peace settlement is that there were no Nuremberg Trials for all the war criminals that ran the Japanese government- many of which continued to run it after the war. Indeed, but it's mitigated by the fact that Japan became a good actor. I think that to some significant extent, letting the guilty people live was possible because we had destroyed their culture, which mattered more.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:43
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evilweasel posted:The evidence pointed to by the FP article doesn't support that. It supports that a single request for a meeting was rebuffed. The timeline the FP gives is also unclear if that was before or after the oral report from the military about what occurred. If you have stronger evidence or think I'm mischaracterizing it, by all means quote it and explain how, but I read the FP article and it does not quote any documentation of the Japanese not considering Hiroshima significant except for that meeting refusal. If there's more on that that supports that it was because "who cares about that", and that they knew it actually was a single bomb instead of another city destroyed in a bombing, happy to look at that. But one of the other issues I see with that article is that it swaps between understanding that they may not have understood what happened immediately (by pointing to the timeline on the military reports), but then fails to connect that with the meeting rebuff. Both the oral report on the bombing, and the meeting rebuff, happened on August 8th - but it's never made clear which happened first. It's also not clear when that oral report spread to the rest of the cabinet. quote:First, Hiroshima’s governor reported to Tokyo on the very day Hiroshima was bombed that about a third of the population had been killed in the attack and that two thirds of the city had been destroyed. This information didn’t change over the next several days. So the outcome — the end result of the bombing — was clear from the beginning. Japan’s leaders knew roughly the outcome of the attack on the first day, yet they still did not act. So the Japanese high command knew what nukes were. They knew approximately what had happened. They knew that a single bomber had done this. Incidentally I'm still unclear about why the Japanese high command would consider it significant that this was done by a single bomber. You keep claiming this like it's some silver bullet, but you provide nothing to back it up. Than again, you have provided nothing but speculation to back the rest of your point up as well, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Besides, even if we assume that your nitpicking has merit and that the Japanese high command didn't convene on the 8th because they hadn't gotten the report yet, if this report in fact was so super-critical, it would stand to reason that the Japanese high command would convene after getting the report despite rebuffing a request earlier. Your entire song and dance about this doesn't make sense. evilweasel posted:The other issue you're missing is that the nuclear weapons pretty clearly made an invasion of Japan unnecessary (well, they didn't because we used up our last stocks of fissile material, but we didn't tell the Japanese that). Perhaps they wouldn't have forced the Japanese to surrender without the USSR knocking out their other hope - but the USSR intervening didn't end the fantasy of repelling the invasion. quote:And Japan’s leaders had reached this conclusion some months earlier. In a meeting of the Supreme Council in June 1945, they said that Soviet entry into the war "would determine the fate of the Empire." Army Deputy Chief of Staff Kawabe said, in that same meeting, "The absolute maintenance of peace in our relations with the Soviet Union is imperative for the continuation of the war." Maybe you should read that article a bit more cloesly? Also I note that you're still completely ignoring both the meat of my post and the actual logically sensible and well-documented explanation for why Japan surrendered with it in favour of nitpicking about timelines when you yourself haven't mustered any documentary evidence to support your claim that the nukes were significant.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:44
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Genocide Tendency posted:This is correct. Peace is just the absence of war, and Mutually Assured Destruction prevents war on the scale the was common before the bomb. There have been little local wars around the world, but there hasn't been another wold war, and that's because of nuclear weapons.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:45
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Popular Thug Drink posted:uh i keep pointing out that if you look at what the japanese government was actually debating on august 9 it's pretty clear the USSR was the major trigger for ending the war, saying that this is all irrational to handwave how our magic bombs were actually important despite evidence to the contrary is not actually a good argument so i can see how you might get confused The one in which you made multiple posts taking evilweasel to task for things that were literally the opposite of what he said? I said your argumentation was poor, not that I necessarily disagreed with all of your positions. I guess to some extent it's unnecessary tone policing on my part, but to my eye there is a pretty big difference between irreverent/disrespectful argumentation and demonstrating such active contempt that you either deliberately or inadvertently mis-characterize someone's clearly stated position as the opposite of what it is (and racist to boot). Hard as it may be to believe, some people can find this behavior asinine enough to be worth objecting to without needing some sort of hidden grudge as additional motivation.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:45
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evilweasel posted:The other issue you're missing is that the nuclear weapons pretty clearly made an invasion of Japan unnecessary (well, they didn't because we used up our last stocks of fissile material, but we didn't tell the Japanese that). Perhaps they wouldn't have forced the Japanese to surrender without the USSR knocking out their other hope - but the USSR intervening didn't end the fantasy of repelling the invasion. it absolutely did. the japanese were prepared to fight an american invasion in the south. all of a sudden the russians were two weeks away from getting on lovely little rowboats and landing in the north completely unopposed. even if the japanese were willing to fight russians too, they could not counter any attempt to land on the home islands which suddenly threw all of their surrender plans out the window. the longer they waited to surrender the more they'd have to concede to the soviets boner confessor fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 18:46
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hakimashou posted:Indeed, but it's mitigated by the fact that Japan became a good actor. The fact that Japan went from a nation/culture with a long and proud history of militaristic fighting and conquest to one where they've banned even having an offensive fighting force for 70 years is testament to this.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:47
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Cerebral Bore posted:It's more accurate to say that the USSR invading was the immediate cause of Japan's surrender, but naturally it was not the only or even remotely close to the most significant cause. Sure but neither were the nukes or the bombing campaign in general. evilweasel posted:Japan had essentially no hope of maintaining even local naval superiority after Midway. As an island war, the navies were much more important than divisions. Japan had no ability to protect its empire once it lost its ability to project naval power after Midway, especially since it couldn't keep up with American production. It could potentially resist an invasion of the core islands, but getting driven back to its core islands alone was a loss considering their goal was an empire. The definition of 'loss' used by you and others ITT keeps switching back and forth between unconditional surrender and US military occupation, and losing their imperial prospects. Their imperial prospects were done after Midway but unconditional surrender was not icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 18:48
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evilweasel posted:Japan had essentially no hope of maintaining even local naval superiority after Midway. As an island war, the navies were much more important than divisions. Japan had no ability to protect its empire once it lost its ability to project naval power after Midway, especially since it couldn't keep up with American production. It could potentially resist an invasion of the core islands, but getting driven back to its core islands alone was a loss considering their goal was an empire. The US harp on Midway after the fact because of how slow and costly the campaigns of the Pacific theater were. Any ground invasion of Japan looked bad on paper and would've been bad in reality, and the Japanese would've gotten what they wanted from us had the Soviets not stepped in and started stripping them of their key territories in China. Truman was ready to sue for peace on the fact that, while US production was up, we were already running a very expensive war for far too long.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:51
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icantfindaname posted:Sure but neither were the nukes or the bombing campaign in general. I think you underestimate the difference between Japan just giving up and accepting that they were foiled -this time-, and Japan completely surrendering, it's historical culture being broken forever, it's belief system being destroyed, and it being willing to rethink its whole place in the world and fundamental values. The Japanese pre-surrender, going back centuries If not a thousand years, believed that their emperor was essentially a god, that they were a special race of people favored by heaven, with a right to kill and dominate lesser people, both inside Japan and outside. It was only being faced with failure and humiliation to the point of actual extermination and extinction at the hands of supposed "barbarians," who it turned out were far superior to them in the ways they believed mattered, that destroyed their historical culture, belief system, and centuries old idea of themselves. And they are -better off- for it.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:55
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Cerebral Bore posted:So the Japanese high command knew what nukes were. They knew approximately what had happened. They knew that a single bomber had done this. Incidentally I'm still unclear about why the Japanese high command would consider it significant that this was done by a single bomber. You keep claiming this like it's some silver bullet, but you provide nothing to back it up. I consider the difference between what you can do with one bomber, and what you can do with hundreds, so immediately obvious that it doesn't require explanation. I have yet to see anyone but you seriously argue that there is no real difference between nukes and conventional weapons, and that's such a self-evidently dumb point that I'm happy to see you continue repeating it thinking that you've got a zinger. That "They knew that a single bomber had done this." is nowhere in what you quoted. The article only suggests that Japanese High Command was immediately aware of the extent of the damage to Hiroshima, but not that it was nuclear instead of conventional. In fact, they didn't and that was why they'd sent someone to investigate: quote:Military headquarters repeatedly tried to call the Army Control Station in Hiroshima. The complete silence from that city puzzled the men at Headquarters; they knew that no large enemy raid could have occurred, and they knew that no sizeable store of explosives was in Hiroshima at that time. A young officer of the Japanese General Staff was instructed to fly immediately to Hiroshima, to land, survey the damage, and return to Tokyo with reliable information for the staff. It was generally felt at Headquarters that nothing serious had taken place, that it was all a terrible rumor starting from a few sparks of truth. I mean, that the Japanese government didn't know for sure what had happened immediately is one of the basic facts of this debate and that you're ignorant of it, but trying to talk down to people and act like you know, well, anything, is stunning. I am generally assuming a base level of basic knowledge about what happened but you seem to know essentially nothing. The fog of war and the effect it played is a full explanation of the delay between the first bomb, and the meeting to discuss surrender. Cerebral Bore posted:Also I note that you're still completely ignoring both the meat of my post and the actual logically sensible and well-documented explanation for why Japan surrendered with it in favour of nitpicking about timelines when you yourself haven't mustered any documentary evidence to support your claim that the nukes were significant. The documentary evidence is so well known - specifically, the many public statements made by Japanese officials referenced even in the FP article, not least the Emperor's surrender message broadcast to the people - that I don't consider it necessary: if you don't know that exists I don't really have any patience for discussing the issue. The FP article's main argument relies on timelines, and by "nitpicking" to demonstrate the timeline doesn't support their argument, it collapses. If you think that's nitpicking you don't even understand the argument you're pointing to. But here: quote:Moreover, the enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
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Aug 7, 2015 18:56
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It's funny that the same people who will poo poo all over the US' flippant disregard for civilian life in Vietnam or Iraq (to the point of insulting individual soldiers) will happily accept "We had no choice! The japs were beasts! Our boys!!" when the very same military, only racister, says it in WW2. Maybe, just maybe, being congratulated on blowing up loads of people for dubious reasons is the why the US military continues to prosecute wars by blowing up loads of people for dubious reasons. Meanwhile in the japanese cabinet: "More bombings? Well poo poo. Ok. The soviets invaded? Oh poo poo gently caress it we give up we give up please take us america-sama :3 :3"
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Aug 7, 2015 18:58
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So why are we blaming the Americans for the deaths of all those Japanese people and not the Japanese government again?
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Aug 7, 2015 18:59
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Fojar38 posted:So why are we blaming the Americans for the deaths of all those Japanese people and not the Japanese government again? Gotta be edgy rebels who know how things really work, maaannn. 
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Aug 7, 2015 19:01
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evilweasel posted:I mean, that the Japanese government didn't know for sure what had happened immediately is one of the basic facts of this debate and that you're ignorant of it, but trying to talk down to people and act like you know, well, anything, is stunning. The Japanese government knew Hiroshima was decimated by a bomb the same day it happened. They were warned repeatedly that it would be happen after the Potsdam Conference. Which comes back my question: Why did Japan wait 3 days to discuss the surrender? The likely scenario is that the Japanese government didn't give a poo poo about civilian casualties. Japan sure didn't surrender because of the fire-bombings, which were a lot more destructive.
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Aug 7, 2015 19:01
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icantfindaname posted:The definition of 'loss' used by you and others ITT keeps switching back and forth between unconditional surrender and US military occupation, and losing their imperial prospects. Their imperial prospects were done after Midway but unconditional surrender was not Anything less than the unconditional surrender of the Axis nations was politically unacceptable by literally everyone in the Allied nations.
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Aug 7, 2015 19:01
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Plastics posted:Gotta be edgy rebels who know how things really work, maaannn. Like, even the organizations that represent A-bomb survivors don't point their fingers at the US, they point their fingers at Tokyo.
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Aug 7, 2015 19:02
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Also lol at the "Abandon unconditional surrender" arguments. Replace "Imperial Japan" with "Nazi Germany" and see how far that stance gets you.
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Aug 7, 2015 19:03
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Fojar38 posted:So why are we blaming the Americans for the deaths of all those Japanese people and not the Japanese government again? Why blame the responsible parties when you can blame the awful Americans. Also, as the poster above points out, when the Japanese God Emperor addressed his people for the first time to order their surrender, the reason he gave was the fact that the U.S. had a terrible new weapon with which it would destroy Japan completely. Now, maybe you know more about his motives now than the emperor of Japan did at the time, but I have my distinct doubts.
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Aug 7, 2015 19:04
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