One thing is true about Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki

[Dreamer Tatum]

...there weren't any more Nankings or Bataans, were there? What about Manila massacres? How about Unit 731 "activities"?

Nope, none.

[geek tragedy]

1. Japan paid a terrible price for its crimes. It seems the Abe government is determined to ignore the

lessons of history by ramping up the militarism.

[branford]

5. North Korean and Chinese sabre rattling is also not helping to reduce Japanese militarism. n/t

[The Link]

2. Amen. No more Korean slaves either...

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

3. And, there wouldn't have been if the bombs hadn't been dropped.

[Dreamer Tatum]

4. The Manila Massacre was in February 1945. Hiroshima was August 1945.

Think that over.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

6. And, that justifies killing 10s of thousands of civilians?

They do it, so we do it, is a piss poor excuse for murder.

[The Link]

8. How about to stop more Korean civilian deaths? Or is 500,000+ not a high enough bar?

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

9. The bombs didn't stop anything except a lot people continuing to live.

Japan was defeated everywhere. It had no navy. It posed no threat. It wasn't going anywhere. The bombing was PR to scare the Russians.

[The Link]

12. Bullshit. My grandfather was still a conscript in the Japanese military.

Thousands of Korean slaves died in the atomic bombings. Those fuckers were still killing thousands of civilians up until the bombs being dropped.

[hack89]

15. Civilians all over China and SE Asia were dying on a daily basis.

due to starvation, disease and atrocities. Six months more of war would have meant hundreds of thousand needless deaths.

[Yo_Mama]

21. You know, nothing, NOTHING about the history

http://www.dontow.com/2009/04/japans-biological-and-chemical-warfare-in-china-during-wwii/

You know when the Japanese surrendered in China, don't you? Or don't you care?
http://www.taiwandocuments.org/japansurrender.htm

If the life of not one Allied soldier had ever been at risk before the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the bombings would still have been ENTIRELY justified by what was still going on in China. Not to mention other places in Asia.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

31. Killing 10s of thousands of civilians to save 1 life is worth it.

Gotchya.

[branford]

32. That's not what he said at all. But you know that . . . n/t

[Yo_Mama]

34. One life? How absurd.

The die-hards in the Japanese army leadership were so convinced that they could reach a negotiated peace and maintain much of their gains in China and Korea that they drew up plans leaving almost all of their troops in China and Korea. Over two million Japanese troops were deliberately left in place in Manchuria, China and Korea, with the idea that these troops, which were largely self-supplying, could be used to eventually continue the fight even if the Japanese home islands were invaded and dominated by the allies. This was an entirely deliberate strategy which intentionally contemplated offing huge numbers of Japanese civilians.

By 1945 the Japanese were conscripting millions of school children to work in the factories. There was nothing that you would consider of normalcy about the decision making. This plan was real, and it contemplated a near endless war in which the Allies would be fighting remotely in Japan while being subjected to an endless round of attacks from the foreign-deployed forces, especially from China.

That's why the biowarfare attempts are so significant. The Japanese had planned and tested (on the unfortunate Chinese) biowarfare instruments, and they intended to use the subs to deliver these agents to the US homeland. They also almost certainly intended to unleash these instruments among the Allied solders who occupied chunks of Japanese territory. Horrific, yes, especially since they would be exposing their OWN people at the same time, but the history is clear that this was an organized campaign.

Here's a paper if you care about reality.
http://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/cryptologic_quarterly/The_Uncertain_Summer_of_1945.pdf
The hardliners in Japan were not willing to surrender a lot of their territorial gains. Indeed, after Hirohito broke the tie and voted for surrender, they launched a coup August 14th in the hopes of reversing the decision. The aim was to capture the Emperor and prevent the surrender announcement. This came from the War Office and the Imperial Guard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_Incident

The Allies, primarily the US, had already started major bombing campaigns on the Japanese islands, which were already inflicting huge civilian casualties. The Tokyo raid of March, 1945 (Meetinghouse Raid), is supposed to have been the most lethal air raid in history, with more people immediately dying than did at first in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo

The Japanese had no intention of surrendering. They were willing to negotiate a peace if it left them in control of chunks of China, Manchuria and controlling Korea.

[tumtum]

35. If it meant saving my dad's life, who was a Marine

tasked to be in the first wave of Marines to hit the Japanese beach, then, yes, those 10's of thousands of lives lost were worth 1 life and I won't apologize for that.

[Dreamer Tatum]

10. You said there would have been no more atrocities.

I merely pointed out they were happening when Japan was already pretty much defeated.

Ask someone in Manila in March 1945 if Hiroshima would be a good idea. Ask a Chinese mother who watched her baby tossed in the air and skewered on a Japanese bayonet if Hiroshima would have been a good idea.

It's OK - when you post from the comfort of wherever you are with no one torturing you for centuries, it's understandable that you wouldn't have much empathy.

[godai]

7. Exactly...The atomic bombs weren't needed.

Now the US forever bears the scar of being the only one to use atomic bombs. Something some people seem proud of, or need to rationalize.

[Yo_Mama]

22. Ask a Chinese person n/t

[Dreamer Tatum]

29. I guess they don't count in the analysis. nt

[godai]

30. So, without the A bombs, you think Japan would have won the war?

You indicate that the bombs prevented something after the bombings. Exactly how does that work?

Stick to the meme that the bombs saved American soldiers lives. That's more defensible.

[GalaxyHunter]

11. You have a point...

[Octafish]

13. How un-democratic can you be?

There's a difference between making war on a military and killing civilians.

[Dreamer Tatum]

14. Oh, there is? Guess no one told the Japanese that for, oh, CENTURIES. nt

[frazzled]

24. This is the moral dilemma of war we continue to face

But it is particularly pertinent in these times, I think, when we ponder the more surgical ways in which war is able to be waged today. Technology continues to change the face of warfare. In World War I it was mustard gas; it World War II it was aerial bombing and, eventually, nuclear weapons; in Vietnam it was agent orange; in the era of non-state warfare it is the drone.

My father, who is going on 97 this year, has become rather philosophical of late. A veteran of World War II (he flew 60 missions in the South Pacific, as a tail gunner), he has been reassessing what he was asked to do back then, especially since one of his grandsons married a Japanese woman and moved to Japan. He even says that he believes they were dropping agent orange on towns and villages, and he looks sad. He has been morally challenged. But he recently said something to me that got me thinking. We bombed whole cities full of innocent civilians in World War II, he said—Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. Why is it that people today think we can have wars but not kill anyone?

Well, it's a good question. Partly it may be that we have not had a war that anyone has believed in the way people believed in the great World Wars. We just don't think they should be waged at all, and any collateral damage is unacceptable. But it got me thinking about the current conversations we have here about drones, and about the Apache helicopter footage exposed by Manning, in which two Reuters cameramen died among the 8 people who were killed. This tragedy (the kind of mistake that hapens in the fog of war) has become the rallying cry for many. Yet how it pales in comparison to what was done to Dresden, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. Let's take Dresden alone:

In four raids between 13 and 15 February 1945, 722 heavy bombers of the British Royal Air Force (RAF) and 527 of the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city.[1] The resulting firestorm destroyed fifteen square miles (39 square kilometres) of the city centre. Between 22,000 and 25,000 people were killed.

And those weren't the only European cities bombed (I think of Rotterdam, for example). I can't imagine what it must have felt like to be an American citizen watching this from home at the time. I can only think how conflicted I would have felt. How many tens of thousands of innocent civilians were killed; and how many cities were devastated. It seems to me at times a tad hysterical to consider the collateral damage from today's surgical strikes in even the same breath. War is horrible; it kills innocent people. I can't ever quite come to terms with it.

If these questions concern you, I can recommend no more beautiful and contemplative film than Anand Patwardhan's War and Peace, which examines these subjects from the perspective of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the nuclear escalation between India and Pakistan.

Filmed over 4 years in India, Pakistan, Japan and the USA following nuclear tests in the Indian sub-continent, War and Peace is a documentary journey of peace activism in the face of global militarism and war.

As we enter the 21st century, war has become perennial, enemies are re-invented and economies are inextricably tied to the production and sale of weapons. In the moral wastelands of the world memories of Gandhi seem like a mirage that never was, created by our thirst for peace and our very distance from it.

[branford]

33. That was not really the case in 1945 for any party. Military morality has changed over time. n/t

[CBGLuthier]

16. Hey no worries, america took over the duties of atrocity dealing just fine

Massacres in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan..........

Wonder wtf it will take to stop US?

[Dreamer Tatum]

17. What's the name of the logical fallacy

wherein someone brings in irrelevant ex post facto information to attempt to diminish an argument?

I'm pretty sure that logical fallacy, which you just exhibited, has a name. I'll go look it up and report back
so you'll be sure not to commit it again.

[Iggo]

18. Oh good gawd!

Trash thread.

[Rex]

19. The Russians would have been cruel to the Japanese after the war.

It was a foot race with the USSR and we won. People that complain about ONE war, sure are strange since they don't complain about the other ZILLION wars throughout history.

[hunter]

20. My thoughts...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=3414264

In war, everyone loses. There is no moral high ground, just the evil and the greater evil.

[Arugula Latte]

23. I guess Iraq should Shock and Awe us to teach us a lesson, then.

[Dreamer Tatum]

25. And after, they'll rebuild our economy into the most efficient in the world?

Um, no.

[Arugula Latte]

26. So economics justifies all, huh?

Got it.

[Dreamer Tatum]

27. Oh brother.

I hope you at least enjoyed the breeze from the point passing over your head.

[Arugula Latte]

28. Oh I got your point.