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The A/T military history thread has no such division, and tends to rehash WWII a lot. I think having two threads is good.
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Oct 1, 2021 02:16
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The US doctrine against Japan was to kill as many Japanese people as possible and eventually they'd surrender. It worked, and it was a war crime. Maybe they could have won the war with fewer casualties if they hadn't done war crimes but that's not a question history is equipped to answer.
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Oct 14, 2021 04:09
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Some Guy TT posted:so im curious about something at about what time does hitlers kill count exceeds churchills kill count in terms of the competition for historys greatest monster It's estimated that 10 million people died of deprivation in India per year of British rule. 45 million people died in the European theatre of World War II, so if we attribute all those deaths to Hitler and all the deaths in India to whoever is the current prime minister, Churchill passes Hitler's death toll around late 1940, and Hitler never catches up again. This is obviously an oversimplification. The moral culpability of Churchill maintaining a murderous system is different from Hitler creating a new murderous system, but they're both pure evil. Maybe the greatest monster for what they did to India is King George III, or Robert Clive, who established East India Company rule in the country.
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Feb 13, 2022 06:48
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Until the discovery of penicillin, disease during wars always killed more people than violence.
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May 11, 2022 03:56
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Some of the Canadian schools had a 25% death rate. When children caught tuberculosis, it was legal to shoot them, up until the 1960s. Forcible non-consensual sterilization of Indigenous Canadians was outlawed in 2017, although it has still taken place afterwards. The US might have killed a higher absolute number of Native children, but I don't think the death rate could have been as high as Canada's.
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May 12, 2022 21:54
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Punkin Spunkin posted:History Dads know pretty much the least about history possible (followed by White Dudes in Military Jackets) so this is more of a tragic moment "You see, after World War I was started by Gavrilo Princip going for a sandwich after the failed assassination attempt, the Treaty of Versailles was so harsh that it forced the Germans to arm themselves."
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Jun 18, 2022 09:10
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Spanish sources will talk about the "myth" that they were eating indigenous people, and explain that they were only boiling them in large pots to grease their cannons and make ointments. Also, we don't have accurate numbers of Aztec human sacrifices, any numbers you see are based on the Spanish witnesses comparing the mass sacrifices the Spanish Inquisition.
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Jun 21, 2022 22:06
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In terms of casualty rate the Eastern Front has to be one of the worst in modern history. You could narrow it down to parts of the front like being a civilian in Tribuchowce, where there were 50,000 people and the Nazis left fewer than 100 survivors.
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Jul 27, 2022 04:31
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Calico Heart posted:hey goons, I am working on a project and need some help. What is, for your money, the worst thing McDonald’s has ever done? business practise or knowingly endangering customers/workers? Hiring loggers with chainsaws to kill everyone from a small Indigenous people that was blocking attempts to build beef farms in the Amazon. Either that, or cancelling the McPizza.
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Aug 2, 2022 21:19
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500excf type r posted:He witnessed at least one a bomb test with his own eyes iirc he said Oppenheimer dropped some sand or grass or something and did some quick napkin calculations on the bomb that were remarkably accurate compared to the real data later That was Fermi, using Fermi estimation and small pieces of paper. He calculated 10 kilotons, but pretty much all the predictions for the test were that it would be between 5 and 20 kilotons if it succeeded.
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Aug 26, 2022 21:35
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Allen Dulles was on the advisory board of Scholastic, which partnered with the Texas Book Depository Building. Lee Harvey Oswald was hired to work there a month before the assassination; at this time, CIA informant George de Mohrenschildt, who was in contact with George H.W. Bush, suspected that Oswald had already tried to shoot General Edwin Walker. The physical and video evidence all lines up with JFK being killed by Oswald's rifle. I think the notion of a second gunman is a red herring not supported by the evidence. The connections between Oswald, Dulles, and Bush are highly suspicious, but there's no smoking gun proving they orchestrated the assassination. https://twitter.com/nirol__/status/1562626125775642624
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Sep 5, 2022 02:30
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A Polish pilot parachuted onto a tennis court and won a doubles match while waiting for the RAF to pick him up.
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Sep 14, 2022 10:00
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"Why did the chicken cross the road?" "I don't know, why?" "To get to the other side." I'm annoyed by the claim that the 'other side' means death and this is a joke about suicide. So I looked into the history of the chicken crossing the road, and it turns out it's originally a racist joke. According to Ken Burns' Jazz, it was popularized by minstrel shows, as a sketch where someone in blackface would be too stupid to solve the simple riddle "why did the chicken cross the road".
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Sep 21, 2022 09:03
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East Germany was very poor before the reunification, having paid heavy reparations to the USSR. Their economy seems to have recovered better than the countries in the former Soviet Union.
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Oct 4, 2022 09:16
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Did anyone ever interview the construction workers who built the Chicago Pile 1? I'd love to know their thoughts about that scene - it's the middle of World War II, and a short guy with an Italian accent is telling you to stack 350 tons of black bricks on a squash court, occasionally sending you away to discuss secrets with his colleagues.
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Dec 12, 2022 02:41
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StashAugustine posted:Apparently the Manhattan Project did have trouble with workers being careless with radioactive material because they couldn't be properly briefed on it, yeah Yeah, Feynman wrote about it a bit. It's hard to find anything written by the workers in the Manhattan Project who were kept in the dark, but it's always fascinating. I found one quote from a security guard outside the Chicago Pile who saw the workers bringing in the bricks - "For all I knew, they were building a little house."
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Dec 12, 2022 22:40
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Slavvy posted:drat he must've been like shooting people full-time all day long Yeah, at the Katyn massacre he shot 250 people a night for four straight weeks. Blokhin knew that some troops would become too shell-shocked to fight if they had to execute defenseless prisoners, so he personally shot about 7,000 Polish military officers, police officers, and industrialists. They had an assembly line for executions, with loud machinery so that the prisoners wouldn't realize they were about to be shot.
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Mar 7, 2023 10:07
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Weka posted:What's the source of this rather outlandish claim? If he shot people all night it's a person every 2 minutes. Ultimately the source is the Soviet archives released by Gorbachev - but I haven't read them, I've just read about Blokhin on Wikipedia. The prison at Kalinin definitely executed 7,000 people in a one-month span in 1941, and the archives say almost all of them were shot by Blokhin with a .25 ACP pistol.
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Mar 7, 2023 11:18
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Orange Devil posted:Do the Amish still do that poo poo, because lol and furthermore lmao if they do. Most Amish communities use gas-powered washing machines, except some of the really patriarchal ones.
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Mar 30, 2023 20:05
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Raskolnikov38 posted:has anything been released on the decision making to drop the bomb before august 6? everything i can recall seeing was a post-hoc justification after the bombs had already been dropped Wellerstein argued that there wasn't exactly a "decision to drop the bomb". The decision had been made years earlier to bomb Japanese cities with TNT, and then with napalm, and then with the atom bomb. To Truman and his generals, there was no question whether it should be done, only the question of what target would be best.
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Jul 25, 2023 06:41
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War and Pieces posted:The bananas they were eating went extinct in a plague and it's why banana taffy tastes so weird This is one of the most common misconceptions of modern history. Banana candy tastes the way it does because of a chemical called isoamyl acetate - nicknamed banana oil because it smells somewhat like bananas - that was used to water-proof canvas airplane wings. It's made by combining a byproduct of alcohol distillation with vinegar, so it's cheap to produce. When airplanes started to be made of metal, there was a glut of banana oil, so companies used it to produce banana-flavoured candy. It was never intended to be a close match to the scent or flavour of bananas, it's just an extremely cheap chemical that happens to be close enough.
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Oct 14, 2023 11:10
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Some Guy TT posted:so im reading this short story that takes place during world war two in okinawa and theres this line in here about civilians being ordered to commit suicide to make the supplies last longer im just wondering if theres literally any documentation of the japanese doing anything like this because even my okinawa comic book by susumu higa didnt go that far I don't think that was the stated motivation. The Japanese military in Okinawa coerced civilians into suicide on the grounds that it was better to be dead than an American subject. Of the 150,000 civilian deaths in the battle of Okinawa, at least 40,000 people committed suicide or were killed by Japanese troops.
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Nov 26, 2023 02:48
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Some Guy TT posted:if not the stated motivation could it have been the actual motivation in the story i was reading the claim was being made from the perspective of someone associated with the japanese military That's a totally fair question. I've been googling it, and I think the 40,000 number includes Okinawans who were impressed into the military before and during the battle and died in combat, which according to this article is 25,000 people. It also includes death by starvation and execution, so the actual number of suicides may have been much lower than I thought, but I haven't seen a detailed breakdown. Most of the sources are in Japanese. Okinawa Prefecture made a peace monument in 1995 with the names of 240,000 people who died in the battle of Okinawa, so they must have done the research by then. There's a controversy over this that resurfaces periodically in Japan, as conservative nationalists try to rewrite the textbooks to say that very few civilians were killed by the IJA.
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Nov 26, 2023 04:58
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A Buttery Pastry posted:American-style: Nobody puts the knife down, and that makes it sound ridiculous. You just swap the fork and knife between your hands so that you can use your dominant hand for the current action, which is a lot faster than the European method.
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Feb 25, 2024 07:56
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Danann posted:short thread about marsh arab community in iraq plus photos There was a culture of marsh-dwellers in Gascony who walked around on stilts. It's hard to tax or conscript people who live in swamps, so the French government drained all the marshes and destroyed this culture in the early 19th century.
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Mar 23, 2024 02:08
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mawarannahr posted:I had to explain the difference between North Korea and North Vietnam to an American yesterday and it lowkey blew my mind My mom is generally well-informed but she somehow thought that South Vietnam still exists. I guess the reunification happened when she was too young to be watching the news, then it was too recent to be in any of her history classes.
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Apr 16, 2024 01:32
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Some Guy TT posted:update on some guy itt reading the sympathizer i got to the part where the title character a vietnamese spy is helping some auteur director make a movie where the viet cong are psychotic savages and im feeling a little bewildered because this book seems to just be making up falser and falser history as it goes along thats just gone completely uncommented on in the wider discourse because the main point of all this is that white people are racist which of course the target audience totally agrees with Full Metal Jacket portrays the Viet Cong as psychotic savages, while also portraying the Americans as psychotic savages. That came out in 1987.
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Apr 29, 2024 16:30
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Cerebral Bore posted:i want a vietnam war film where the heroic viet cong squad drop cool one-liners while they gun down waves upon waves of yankee imperialist pigdogs I watched a Vietnamese war movie called The Liberation of Saigon, and it was almost entirely about the peace process after the war was over. There was maybe five minutes of shooting at the start to remind you that a war happened, then it's entirely discussing terms of surrender and treaties. The American diplomats in the movie are clearly random tourists with no acting experience, though that wouldn't matter to the audience.
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Apr 30, 2024 00:56
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Name a country, and someone can tell you how its food was shaped by foreign contact. Vietnamese subs were invented under French colonization because Vietnamese people rarely ate bread before that. Pierogies were introduced to Eastern Europe by the Mongols, who ate a lot of dumplings. Japanese curry was invented to meet the demands of British sailors who assumed that any country that eats rice must serve curry. Chili con carne was invented by the Spanish adding beef to the traditional Mexican chili of tomatoes, peppers, beans, and fish.
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Apr 30, 2024 17:58
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In the unlikely scenario of the war following a similar course, but McLellan winning the 1864 election, I think that the political violence, and the inability of Congress to resolve anything, would be even worse than the 1850s.
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May 14, 2024 05:54
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