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Comment count is 25
simon666 - 2021-07-24

Oh, this is the lady who did the blue eyes, brown eyes experiment on the white elementary school kids, ya?


casualcollapse - 2021-07-24

Yuuup


Anaxagoras - 2021-07-24

She was doing so well until she got to the part about us dropping atomic bombs on Japan.

Hey lady.... they were the aggressors in that conflict. And they were showing no signs of surrendering. It was either drop the bombs or invade the home islands and suffer horrendous casualties.

(Actually, as internal records have shown, it turns out that the atomic bombs seem to have had no effect on the Japanese decision to surrender; it was the Russian entry into the conflict that finally convinced the Japanese to surrender. But we had no way of knowing that at the time.)


Cena_mark - 2021-07-24

And we didn't nuke Germany because they surrendered before the bomb was made. Berlin was already taken and Hitler was dead.


poorwill - 2021-07-25

"And we didn't nuke Germany because they surrendered before the bomb was made" Japan was about to surrender and the US knew it. The atomic bombs were a display of power to the Russians, who were moving to invade Japan.


Binro the Heretic - 2021-07-25

The world is never made less awful by adding more awfulness to it.


Hazelnut - 2021-07-26

Ehhhm I dunno. The world is complicated. The awfulness of the French Revolution and Napoleon's invasions probably did Europe more good than harm in the long run. I'm glad the Allies fought back against the Fascists even though that involved all kinds of awfulness. For that matter I"m glad the American Revolution happened, awful as it was at the time.

History is messy. Trying to predict what would have happend in some alternative history where we hadn't dropped the bomb is as impossible as predicting the world 50 years from now -- and for the same reasons.


Anaxagoras - 2021-07-28

Poorwill:

I've read several historians who've studied this period. As far as I know, there's zero documentary evidence that the U.S. "knew" that Japan was about to surrender.

To the contrary, all the current evidence (up to that point) suggested that Japan *wasn't* going to surrender; they had literally fought to the last man (and last woman, and last child, on a couple occasions) on several islands, and we had every reason to believe that they were going to do it again on their home islands.

So we were hoping that using these unprecedently powerful weapons would convince the Japanese leaders to finally surrender.

As for why we also bombed Nagasaki, we did so because after Hiroshima we didn't receive any indication that the Japanese had changed their minds about surrendering. So hopefully a second demonstration would change their minds. They had no idea how many of these weapons we had, so maybe they would think we would nuke their entire island. Which, frankly, would have been justified if they had refused to surrender.

Keep in mind, the Japanese were the genocidal maniacs in this conflict. Oh, we were no angels, And if you add in all the crimes against humanity that Americans have committed, we would have deserved to also be destroyed. But in this particular conflict, at this particular point in time, fuck the Japanese.


SolRo - 2021-07-28

I’m glad we finally got the point where we associate Japanese children with Unit 731, because they all were aware of and supported Japanese war crimes…

Genocide justifies even more genocide! Or something.


poorwill - 2021-07-28

@ Anaxagoras: you're hopelessly wrong. there's plenty of documented evidence that truman and eisenhower were well aware japan was going to surrender. the internal debate in japan was over conditional surrender or unconditional surrender.
this video is over 2 hours long but it quotes primary sources and it's all very clear cut https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go


Jet Bin Fever - 2021-08-04

Misinformation on both sides. We thought that the Japanese would fight, every man woman and child, until the last one was killed, because of State Shinto and fanaticism. In reality, it was only a few hard-liner generals and admirals who would resist. The atomic bombs could have been postponed or avoided entirely.


Anaxagoras - 2021-07-25

I should add: I really like what this lady had to say. It's just that the "We shouldn't have nuked Japan" thing is kind of a pet peeve for me. Like hell we shouldn't have.


SolRo - 2021-07-25

Should you have nuked untouched cities, thereby ensuring maximum casualties? Maybe nuking some military outposts would have produced the same show of power?

I believe the American mindset at the time was to carry out a semi-genocidal bombing campaign of mainland Japan until the government surrendered or collapsed, as evidenced by the already active fire bombing campaigns carried out before the nukes dropped.


poorwill - 2021-07-25

"Like hell we shouldn't have."

why not?


Coax_Current - 2021-07-25

It's weird to be so cavalier about rightness the US military's decisions to drop the atom bombs. Plenty were opposed, including then Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower, who arguably understood war better than anyone else making those high-level decisions. Certainly the atom bomb changed what the US did at Potsdam, but not clearly for the better.

It's worth reading (or re-reading) the relevant chapter of The Making of the Atomic Bomb to understand, from their own words, the multitude of perspectives and motivations behind the US decision. The foreign policy part does have a lot to do with the USSR, although not solely as a show of power. The US wanted to remove legitimacy from extended Soviet territorial expansion as well. But judging the inevitability of dropping atom bombs on Japan depends more on understanding the key players in the decision-making process than it does making an armchair strategic assessment. Scholars still trade blows on this subject, its hardly settled that the US military "should have" dropped those bombs on Japan.


Stopheles - 2021-07-26

My grandfather worked on the atomic bomb, and only drank once a year, to silent oblivion, on VJ Day.

Even if bombing Hiroshima led to Japan's surrender, ending the war etc etc etc, bombing Nagasaki was dick-waving at the Soviets to the tune of 40,000 dead civilians.


Hazelnut - 2021-07-26

Do remember the Soviets had already deliverately starved 175 Nagasakis worth of Ukrainian civilians in the Holomodor. Dick waving or not, there were pretty good reasons to keep them away. Which is why we also rightly condemn the West when they failed to wave their dicks at Stalin hard enough, like at Yalta.

If Japan had ended up divided between a Russian-occupied half and an American-occupied half, something like Korea, they would be vastly worse off than today.

Not justifying a damn thing, just reminding that history is complicated.


glasseye - 2021-07-26

Capitalism starves nine million people A YEAR.


Hazelnut - 2021-07-27

Well, that's the ugliest justification for the Holomodor I've read in a while


teethsalad - 2021-07-27

"If Japan had ended up divided between a Russian-occupied half and an American-occupied half, something like Korea, they would be vastly worse off than today."

10000% - if imperial japan had won, the zaibatsu and kuromaku would have looted that country dry, if russia occupied them, they'd be effectively n. korea, if china would have invaded them, they would have wanted revenge (and rightfully so, honestly)

with the americans at least they got the short-lived economic bubble from not having to pay for the majority of their national defense. you would have got a higher body count from pretty much any other invading force, with or without nuclear weapons. even if america just packed it all in and went home the second they surrendered japan was going to have to pay that bill one way or another


SolRo - 2021-07-27

Feels like the conversation has drifted away from “is it okay to drop nukes on civilians” to “is it okay that imperialist Japan lost in WW2”.


poorwill - 2021-07-28

If Russia had invaded Japan we wouldn't have anime so it's a wash imo.

Also, up to 25 million Chinese people died in WWII. Not a lot of people know that. Nobody worked harder to kill more people than Imperial Japan in WWII and few people understand the scale of the slaughter.


Crackersmack - 2021-07-28

"actually the soviets were the bad guys" is something I haven't run into in a long time, I'm surprised you didn't get into how they raped millions of women or were cannibals or had red eyes, which are all common themes of this old tired trope


SolRo - 2021-07-28

@poorwill

I feel like Germany would have tied or beaten them if they didn’t have so much wiggle room in their racial purity dogma, ie, most Europeans were okay to keep alive. There weren’t enough Jews to skew the percentage, and the “subhuman” Russian Slavs fought them back before they could run up the score past Japan.

Japan had a very narrow definition of racial purity (and mostly still has…as do other Asian countries), and were fighting Asian countries with little industry in order to protect themselves.


Hazelnut - 2021-07-29

Why am I not surprised to see SolRo praising the supposed "wiggle room" in Nazi doctrine


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