‘US government documents admit that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington’s Cold War on the Soviet Union. Ben Norton reviews the historical record.’
The level of propaganda to not only justify turning innocent civilians into dust and basically fuck the land for the next life, but to also convince your population that it was necessary is something else
Honestly it doesn’t take any convincing to make Americans support atrocities. The US can just do them and Americans will invent justifications all on their own.
I think it’s because of patriotism “oh the US did this atrocity? Well I am usonian and I did nothing wrong, therefore the atrocity was ok”.
Every aspect of culture and education in the US is dedicated to drilling into the minds of people that the US are the most good, the most just, the most honest, that their systems of governance are based on these values, and the majority of people work hard towards maintaining that.
So when a USonian is faced with this narrative being broken, they fall back into cognitive dissonance. It’s only recently we’ve seen a reversal of this to a significant scale, but ask anyone and they’ll likely tell you that they still believe these things were true a couple decades ago and it’s only now that the US has become bad.
Whatever the US has accused communists of doing to their people, the US has already perfected it.
Moral superiority over even their alleged hwite brethern in Europe, is a FUNDAMENTAL part of the American Empire. Almost all things are seen by a Americans, through a lense of self-superiority. Every falling that an American espouses suddenly becomes a moral virtue that should be celebrated.
There’s a heavy dose of shame and denialism too. To be told your whole life that you are the good guys and that your country gets into every war for noble reasons, you have to really reconcile atrocities in a way that doesn’t conflict with that myth. To do so otherwise is admit your entire upbringing is a lie, your leaders are malicious psychopaths, and that you’ve been complicit in voting for them your whole life. That can really really break people. It’s a greatly traumatic thing and is on par with losing your religion or estranging yourself from family.
I’d say for the majority of American liberals, they understandably have a difficult time facing the truth. Because the truth is fucking dark.
Japan’s Holocaust was as bad as the Nazi’s. They were killing, raping, mutilating, and enslaving millions of Chinese, Burmese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other peoples on a daily basis. Every extra day the Japanese empire was in power was another day of hell for millions of innocent people. Japan’s rulers know the War was lost after Germany fell. They were happy to keep the killing going.
I guess that justifies the murder of civilians for you?
By that logic, 9/11 was justified
Please explain, in detail, why the lives of the Japanese civilians in Hiroshima were more important then the lives of the Korean/Burmese/Chinese people being killed every day?
I don’t think you understand what the word “civilian” means
The Japanese Empire was killing a lot of civilians. Chinese civilians, Burmese civilians, Vietnamese civilians. Explain to me why their lives shouldn’t be considered important?
To repeat something that I wrote a dozen days ago, it is good to see somebody acknowledging some of the Empire of Japan’s violence against civilians, but two wrongs don’t make a right. Most of the victims of the bombings were civilians who had no direct involvement in their government’s atrocities, and we’ve seen from the Axis’s reprisals how counterproductive it was to use the local civilians as whipping boys, so punishing them for ‘their’ military’s atrocities is not only grossly unfair but wasteful.
That said, I should get around to talking more about the Eastern Axis’s atrocities against other Asians. I already talked about the famines in Java and Vietnam, but that is far from enough.
Explain to me how murdering a bunch of Japanese grandparents, children, babies, and non-combatant adults does anything to remedy that.
By that logic, it’s A-OK for Iraq to come murder everyone in NYC and for Afghanistan to kill the entire state of Wyoming.
Your description of the conditions is correct but your conclusion is a non-sequitur. It does not follow logically that the only or best option to stop those atrocities was to mass murder civilians. Despite what the propaganda about the bombings that has since been inculcated into the western public claims, they were not in fact necessary for compelling Japan’s surrender. There were already internal disputes about this in the Japanese leadership for some time, but after their decisive defeat in Manchuria at the hands of the Red Army the decision to surrender as soon as possible became pretty much unanimous. Every day that went by was another day that the Soviets took more territory and came closer and closer - through the Kurils - to the Japanese home islands. The Japanese imperialists knew just as well as the Nazis that they stood a much better chance of avoiding punishment for their crimes (and some of them even being allowed to retain some power in the post war state) if they surrendered to the US rather than the USSR. Moreover we now know that the US leaders knew this. Their primary motivations were to have a live weapons test and to intimidate the Soviet Union.
You say there were ‘options,’ yet somehow managed to avoid actually naming them.
What would you tell the Koreans/Chinese/Burmese whose families died while the negotiations stretched out?
Not much since there’d be quite few of them. Japan would be on the retreat at that point and would have very limited capacity to carry out further atrocities.
What would you tell people that lost their families in the Korean war to support the atomic bombs, since Japan surrendering to the US instead of the USSR all but guaranteed that war?
“A limited capacity.” Or, they might have decided that if they were going to lose, they would take as many people as they could with them.
Read up on biological warfare Unit 731 and tell me that there was no chance they’d have killed as many people as they could.
Fascists are often cowards, I’m not saying they wouldn;t callously kill people during their retreat, rather that atrocities take planning and coordination, ergo time, time they wouldn’t have if they wanted to flee and they would have,
If your logic held up there’d be little stopping them from committing these light-speed atrocoties between the second bomb and the surrender.
And what of the Japanese civilians? Are their lives automatically forfeit because they had the gall to be born in the bad guy country?
Do not justify atrocities with other atrocities. And do not ignore the bulk of another person’s argument to pretend they had no argument. You just look like an idiot when you do that.
What of the Japanese civilians?
You haven’t given me one word about why their lives were more valuable than the enslaved peoples.
Even after accepting your premise there is a huge amount of middle ground between doing nothing and nuking civilian centres.
Like what, exactly?
Remember two things. First were the Asian peoples who were being slaughtered by the Empire. Why should they go on suffering one extra day? The other is that Truman had an obligation to protect American lives; that was his sworn duty. Why should he allow any US service men to die to protect the lives fo Japaense?
First were the Asian peoples who were being slaughtered by the Empire. Why should they go on suffering one extra day?
Nice grandstanding, too bad part of the victims the US nuked included Korean slave workers brought against their will from Korea, so that reasoning doesn’t fly. Or are Korean lives worth less than non-Koreans?
The other is that Truman had an obligation to protect American lives; that was his sworn duty. Why should he allow any US service men to die to protect the lives fo Japaense?
Zero American lives would’ve been lost if they just held a naval blockade while the Soviet Union launched the invasion from Manchuria to Hokkaido. Nobody said it’s the US who had to invade Japan. Whatever casualties the Red Army would suffer would be Stalin’s problem, not Truman’s. Like you said, why should he allow any US service men to die?
dropping the bombs did not end the conflict sooner. and it certainly didn’t bring justice for anyone. the US prevented that from happening by exonerating the people who actually conducted the atrocities.
The Japanese imperial military machine was responsible for those atrocities. Not the toddlers and grandmas the US bombed.
if you want an even deeper dive Shaun made an amazingly bluntly horrifying video about the same topic that is 2 hours long and very very detailed!
