Laos and Cambodia weren't participants in the war but that doesn't really feel like it matters all that much. Whenever I talk about the bombings of Cambodia and Laos with Americans (who - liberals and conservatives alike feel they must always defend) I sometimes here "well we bombed cities in Germany and Japan in WW2 and no one talks about those being war crimes". But were they? I really don't know much about those bombings. My gut says yes they were also war crimes but we just accept them because they were combatant countries?
The difference is that bombing Japan and Germany was targeting a fascist war machine.
No other instance of US military force have ever been justified. I would also argue that nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima, while horrible and definitely war crimes have their justification in a roundabout way because of what Japan was doing to China at the time. I don't think it was done with the Chinese people in mind but if it ended that genocide even one day earlier then it can be seen as justified. Of course the true reason was to have Japan surrender wholly to the US undermining any such justification.
Of course this could have done without nuclear weapons as well. And obviously the point there was to demonstrate that we were willing to use this new weapon.
Edit: Yes I realize I just justified the use of nuclear weapons but I stand by the distinction.
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't even necessary to end the war, they were definitely not important to ending the genocide in China. Japan's war in China, and the war in general, was fully lost in 1945; their genocidal rampage through the country had basically withered and fallen apart through the year before. The US seeking an unconditional (except the Emperor condition, eventually) surrender from Japan has nothing to do the atrocities they committed in China, it was pure realpolitik, as any war of that scale is. Nuking hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in militarily insignificant cities, in a war already nearly over, perpetuating the strategy of terror bombing which only made the war deadlier to civilians instead of hastening its end, is not any kind of just retribution for Japanese war crimes. It's not even effective punishment; it murders all the wrong targets. Fascist dictatorships don't care about civilian deaths, there were many in the Japanese leadership who wanted to keep fighting, including in China, even after the nukes dropped. None of the military leadership, none of the war criminals who brutalized China, Korea, Indonesia, the Phillipines, and Indochina died from nukes, only civilians subject to fascism and a decade of total war.
I thought Japan's war in China was going fine. It was the war in the Pacific that was going badly.
Japan was in no danger of losing in China. They were hip deep, of course, because China is virtually unconquer-able, but they weren't actually losing.
From what I remember there were several million Soviet soldiers ripping through Manchuria when the nukes were dropped, and American command was worried that if they didn't stop the Soviets then the Soviets would invade and occupy at least China, and maybe Japan too.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria destroyed their logistics chain, caused a majority of their force in the North to rout, and basically made field operations in China impossible. They'd have lasted 3 months tops with 1.5 million Soviet Guards pressing from the north.
In fact those fascist were kept in power by the US,
I think on the surface it would be justified to kill in order to stop those genocides.
But there is apparently evidence that the whole allied bombing campaign over Nazi Germany targeting civilians was actually just prolonging the war.
Because Germany was not at all democratic, there was not any real pressure applied by bombing civilians. Additionally, the main victims were city dwellers, who were more likely to be opposed to Hitler, however quiet that opposition was. So we kinda just killed his German enemies for him, which he wouldn't have been able to do without some real work to justify it
I'm not sure how it applied to the bombing of Japan but it could be a similar dynamic.
Turns out that murdering entire cities of defenseless civilians really motivates people to fight harder, especially if they're convinced that you'll exterminate them if they stop fighting. British command didn't care though, they had power over people and they had the moral and emotional intelligence of a kid lighting off fire crackers in an ant hill because one of them stung his toe.
Yeah this is absolutely not it.
1.) Killing group A because group B is killing group C doesn't make any sense.
2.) That's not what happened, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no real military significance and didn't change the course of the war in any meaningful way
3.) Collective punishment is morally wrong. Killing a bunch of civilians because a soldier from the same country killed a bunch of civilians is just, you know... Nazi shit. Like literally how the Nazis (and Americans, and French, and British, and many others) behaved when they were attacked by Partisans. Bad look, don't do it.
4.) The fate and wellbeing of Chinese civilians was never considered by the US at any time so far as I am aware.
5.) Japan was ready to surrender and everyone who mattered knew it before the bombs were dropped. America wanted to kill as many Japanese as possible because the Americans who mattered hated Japanese people, and because they spent a lot of money on the bombs and wanted to see what they would do, and because they wanted to show the rest of the world that America could now destroy entire cities with a single bomber, and because they wanted to cow the Soviets who were invading Manchuria at the same time, and for a few other reasons.
I still don't understand this though- why not just set off a bomb near the island first to demonstrate its power? The U.S. had another one it could use if Japan didn't surrender.
America wanted to kill as many Japanese as possible. Like killing them was an active goal and viewed as a positive. America had completely, totally dehumanized all Japanese people. It differed from genocide only in that America never made any effort to kill all Japanese people.
The people who were drawing up the bombing plans didn't think "Well, we want to maximize our effect while minimizing civilian casualties." They literally said "This city hasn't been bombed much, let's kill all the people here". They picked the targets they did because they knew it would maximize the death and suffering of Japanese people.
It's even worse than that. They left the cities unbombed so that they could gauge the destructive power of the weapon on a clean slate. They were literally called tests 2 and 3. Monstrous given the fascists were already on the ropes.
:what-the-hell:
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I was just saying that it's been retroactively justified this way by people I've actually spoken to, I don't agree with it but :shrug-outta-hecks:
I guess I should have said "made a case for" idk I was just remembering a huge struggle session in the discord about it where someone made this case to me.
:downbear: