692
Samurai -> Anime (media.piefed.social)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/memes@lemmy.world
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Kawaii

Samurai -> Anime
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[–] 86 points 1 year ago (81 children)

Just a few days ago, it hit me on some new level that we fucking NUCLEAR BOMBED a country. TWICE.

We are literally the only country that has done that. And it's just sort-of this fun footnote of history. "Fine, maybe that was a whoopsie, but blah blah blah something about land invasion blah blah blah. Our baaaaad!"

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Still a war crime against civilians.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Most bombing is. Firebombing of Dresden for example. The V2 bombs falling randomly on Londoners. I’m not in any way trying to handwave away your premise at all, just offer that war is hell and civilian targets are always targets to reduce the opponent’s will to fight. In historic times we’d burn the town and light the fields on fire, starving the population. WW2 firebombed cities. Even today nuclear weapons would be launched at strategic military targets, critical infrastructure, and city centers. War crime? I guess. Seems like plain old war, even if the US used the weapon that dialed it up to 11 first. (IMO nukes shouldn’t exist on any arsenal, but it’s not up to me)

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Just as an aside, due to the use of slave labour from nearby concentration camps and the horrendous conditions at the Mittelwerk factory that an estimated 12,000 people died making V1s and V2s, more than the estimated 9,000 people that died as targets.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    "War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse."

    "There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them - little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander."

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    France nuclear bombed Algeria lots of times and nobody makes such a big deal of it.

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  • [–] 50 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (62 children)

    In the last days of WW2, the Japanese military were getting children to make sharpened bamboo spears and training those children to attack American soldiers on sight. The elderly and women were told that they should kill themselves before potentially coming under American control.

    The Japanese civilian population had been indoctrinated into the belief that western soldiers were absolute monsters who would carry out unspeakable acts on them should they become prisoners (ironic considering the IJA/Ns actions during the conflict).

    In the battle of Saipan, hundreds of mothers leapt from cliffs with their babies in their arms to evade capture, men would slit their children's throats and booby trapped the bodies to injure Americans and then themselves fought relentlessly, before mostly killing themselves or being killed to prevent capture.

    The level of blood shed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unprecedented but it did in fact save untold Japanese civilian and American soldiers' lives.

    Crucially, even after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima Japanese High Command still refused to surrender.

    *edit: all you 4edgy5me America Bad commenters really need to do some reading about Japanese atrocities during the Pacific War here are some suggestions:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhejiang-Jiangxi_campaign

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    So prior to the nukes Japan had just lost their entire navy, their air force, and practically all their conquests in Asia where they killed well over 20 million civilians and lost 2 million soldiers in the process.

    After Hiroshima the US gave them three days to surrender.

    They didn't. One of most inevitable defeats in modern history and not only did they not surrender after the first, they tried to call America's bluff, and there was a coup attempt to prevent surrender after the second.

    If you'd like some reading on the Japanese militarist cult and propaganda campaigns that enabled a people to be so delusional there's quite a lot of scholarly work available.

    In any event the cause of their delusional dreams was the same cause that led them to having baby-bayonetting contests in China: ethnic supremacist rhetoric functionally identitical to Nazism that told them Americans and Soviets would be doing to them what they'd just done to China, Korea, the Phillipines, and many other nations.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Japan appealed to the USSR to arbitrate surrender. The USSR responded by holding to the Yalta conference agreements and declaring war on Japan and occupying Manchuria and Korea.

    USSR broke the neutrality pact they had with Japan to do so, and the US dropped the second nuke after that pact was broken.

    The bombing, declaration, and surrender was a period from August 6-August 15. Eleven days.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (32 children)

    Bombing Japan = good?

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (22 children)

    It's literally the trolley problem writ large. Do you kill a few hundred thousand civilians to prevent the deaths of probably several million.

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    But thats dishonest. It assumes that:

    1. The nuking of Japan was the reason they surrendered

    2. The nukes were gauranteed to make then surrender.

    Like would it still have been justified if Japan hadnt surrendered? Then youve committed an atrocity for no reason.

    Or what about if it was a different atrocity? Would tourturing a few hundred thousand Japanese to death be justified for the same reason?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

    Especially since it probably wasn't the reason they surrendered. There are multiple papers on the subject. They didn't really grasp the difference between the atomic bombs and regular bombing, and the US were carpet bombing multiple other cities at the time. They probably surrendered because of the Soviet advance after failed talks with them, which definitely reduced their chances to zero.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    I used to think along the lines of this too until I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial where they tell you about all the ways the US min-maxed the bomb to kill as many people as possible and did it truly as an experiment.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (18 children)

    Well, idk much about history and politics and war, so I'm just gonna trust 'Muricans claiming they need to bomb other countries to bring peace to the world

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

    What part of @Denjin@feddit.uk's statement do you disagree with?

    In the last days of WW2, the Japanese military were getting children to make sharpened bamboo spears and training those children to attack American soldiers on sight. The elderly and women were told that they should kill themselves before potentially coming under American control.

    The Japanese civilian population had been indoctrinated into the belief that western soldiers were absolute monsters who would carry out unspeakable acts on them should they become prisoners (ironic considering the IJA/Ns actions during the conflict).

    In the battle of Saipan, hundreds of mothers leapt from cliffs with their babies in their arms to evade capture, men would slit their children's throats and booby trapped the bodies to injure Americans and then themselves fought relentlessly, before mostly killing themselves or being killed to prevent capture.

    The level of blood shed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unprecedented but it did in fact save untold Japanese civilian and American soldiers' lives.

    Crucially, even after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima Japanese High Command still refused to surrender.

    The Allies had just fought the Battle of Okinawa, the bloodiest battle of the Pacific Theater.

    Have you ever even read any of the history of the proposed plan for the invasion of mainland Japan and the casualty estimates? How about the reasoning for opposing the Imperial Japanese Government?

    Or Is this your opportunity to virtue signal to people on the internet by implying Americans are murderous pigs and the jApAnEsE dId NoThInG wRoNg?

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Arguably fighting against Japan and Germany in WW2 is one of the only times the US used their military in a justifiable way. Fascism had to be stopped.

    The Japanese military expected to lose 20 million people in the very first battle of the invasion, and the Americans were considering using poison gas because the casualties of fighting it out in the streets would have been in the millions of troops. People don't realize how dark it was in 1945, food shipments had all but ceased, Japan was entering a famine; if the war had dragged on through a land invasion it would have been cataclysmic.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    When the US nuked Japan, almost everyone in my homeland (China) knows what's coming next. It maked the end of a terrible age of war, and era of subjugation by inperialists. The japaneese invaders are soon gonna be gone. It was a huge relief.

    Then when the news of japan's surrender hits the news, there was celebrations throughout China. And I'm sure those in Korea and various Southeast Asian countries would also be celebrating that.

    It would've taken months and possibly years for the US to do a non-nuclear attack of japan, and that would've allowed them to continue doing massacres across Asia. Civillians shouldn't have to die for the crime of their government, but there were not many options, and this was the lesser evil.

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  • [+] 17 points 1 year ago* (5 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    The only fair way to solve this is going to be for someone to nuke us for nuking Japan, then someone needs to nuke whomever nukes us, etc...until everyone gets nuked. Then we can get along.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    I wonder when, if ever, this narrative will finally be laid to rest. Perhaps, as long as the US military exists as a globe-spanning hegemon, we will always have to hear some version of this story.

    No contemporary historian or political scientist takes this view for granted. It is one of many, and I encourage you to read about more than the wikipedia articles about Japanese atrocities. All militaries commit attocities. This is not the point.

    The argument you offer is that the United States had a moral imperative to invade and occupy the Japanese home islands. What is the justification for this? Why would this have been necessary? Everyone who has seriously studied the history knows that the Soviet Union was preparing to invade Japan and its leadership was preparing to surrender in one form or another. The bombs were dropped because the US wanted to ensure that they were the negotiating party and occupying power.

    The justification to avoid further violence is extremely cynical. Nowhere in the rules of war does it say that the only way to end a conflict is to utterly annihilate your oppnent. That rule was invented by expansionist empires. You can go back to the history of Rome's wars with Greece to see this type of logic (or lack thereof) play out. It is a message. It says that we are not your equal and we will not broker any deals on equal footing. We are your hegemon and we will dictate the terms. And then we'll blame you for any atrocities we commit, and everyone will know that we did what we did in the name of peace and justice.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    The Japanese attacked and brought the USA into the second world war, I mean you seem to forget that.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    And so therefore it had to carry out a land invasion? Can you explain why this necessarily follows?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    There's no false equivalence. There is no equivalence at all. There's absolutely no point trying to figure out the most atrocitiest world power. Atrocities do not justify further atrocities.

    In terms of whether the bombings were justified or not, I don't think it's impossible to say. Same with the firebombings, which were carried out under false pretenses of total warfare hypotheses that were later disproven.

    There was talk of doing a nuclear demonstration in Tokyo harbor before the decision to annihilate two cities was undertaken. Yes, these were decisions made with limited information and lack of 20:20 hindsight, but that doesn't mean they weren't war crimes or that the people who made them aren't mass murderers. This kind of zero-sum my atrocities vs. your atrocities thinking is an intellectual dead end, but it's great for justifying American exceptionalism.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Ironically I can even apply this thinking to matches of the Civilization game. In general I don't do war if I can avoid it, I enjoy just expanding my own country and trying to focus on science and culture. But whenever some country declared war on me, I would defend myself and then move on to invade the aggressor, because I saw conquest as the only way to "win" a war. And then I would think "it's so unfair that every other country now hate me just because I took some cities from the country that attacked me out of the blue".

    Then one day I lost some war and the other country didn't take any of my cities. They declared war not because they wanted to conquer me militarily, but because they wanted to stop me from dominating the world in other ways (culturally for example - something I saw as pacific but that also allowed me to win the match and therefore caused others to lose)

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Crucially, even after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima Japanese High Command still refused to surrender.

    Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very much the first stages of the Cold War pivot as the USSR declared war on Japan and took Manchuria and Korea from Japanese occupation.

    Imperial Japan had hoped the USSR would arbitrate peace with the Allies as they had not fought or invaded, but the Soviets chose to declare war, sealing their fate.

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