Not a new revelation, but the article pulls from good sources and it's nice to see this myth repudiated in a mainstream outlet.
Not a new revelation, but the article pulls from good sources and it's nice to see this myth repudiated in a mainstream outlet.
That whole narrative smacks of racism and cowardice
"We had to kill 200k civilians or else we would have had to invade the mainland and risk the lives of our soldiers, who are expected to risk their lives. White lives matter. Anyway they were fanatical, the women would have hurled themselves off of cliffs, dashed their babies against rocks and even the children would have taken up bayonets. How many of our boys would have died? 200,000?
What nation is going to prefer the death of its own citizens over the death of civilians of a country they are at war with? Did the Soviet Union treat Nazi Germany with that kind of grace?
The Soviets might have actually been justified in dropping the bomb if they had it since the Nazis were fighting to exterminate them, something that can't be said of Japan towards America at any point, let alone near the end of the war, and don't tell me America even slightly cared about the Chinese being slaughtered or the Korean slaves they would blow to ash.
But the myth about the Soviets being especially cruel to the Nazis is one of many fascist myths propagated to reverse the roles of victim and genocidaire, let alone the idea that they did anything so cruel as eradicate the better part of two entire major cities of civilians along with most traces of their existence. There is no comparing the conduct of the two countries in WWII, and the fact that people believe the Soviets were substantially worse is a product of Cold War revisionism.
I'm not talking about Soviets being especially cruel, but taking actions to preserve their own forces over protecting civilians of countries they were at war with.
I don't think you can really equivocate between "accepting that there will be civilians who die when you fire artillery at military targets" vs "vaporizing civilians by the tens of thousands in an instant to make a point".
It's also, again, completely false that the bombs even protected American soldiers, let alone anyone else.
It can when the numbers of casualties under your direct command number in the hundreds of thousands while the death rate of the belligerent side doesn't meaningfully change between the two options. A landing in Japan was never going to be as easy as the landing in Normandy, and the landing at Normandy was the most logically difficult of the war.
I think you've already been told this, but that's a false dichotomy based on bald-faced lies. Japan was already trying to conditionally surrender! Literally just take their offer and let them keep their stupid Emperor (which the US let them do anyway!) or wait a little and let the Soviets make more progress and see if that changes Japan's attitude at all. As someone else said, it's 200,000 mostly civilians dead over semantics and sticking it to the Reds. It is unjustifiable.
The three options were invasion, bombing until submission, and accepting a conditional surrender. Conditional surrender was off the table.
The US was already in the process of leveling Japanese cities due to strategic bombing and would have continued to do so if it didn't drop nuclear weapons. A blockade was also implemented, in part to starve the population into unconditional surrender.
It is funny how much anti-nuclear people focus on the dropping of two bombs when they were only a fraction of the total deaths caused. And try, those two bombs were a major part of the deliberations on the Japanese side when deciding to surrender in which we have first account records while the decision was being made.
Why? You are accepting the framing of the US military when it is overwhelmingly obvious from how negotiations transpired after the bombs were dropped that there was no particular use for unconditional surrender! They still kept their Emperor! Again, it's 200,000 dead for semantics and sticking it to the Reds, and you clearly have no answer to that.
"It is funny how" Yeah, I'm sure you're just rofling over firebombed slaves and children. People mainly focus on the bombs because the case of the bombs is extremely simple, as we've demonstrated in this conversation where you completely ignore the reality of the situation in favor of arbitrary axioms that question-beg your desired conclusions. I'm not in favor of how the US conducted most of the war against Japan, but that's a much larger topic that is tangential to the rest of the thread. Fighting a war against Japan was plainly justified, but the way the US approached it -- by annihilating as much of the population as it could manage both through indiscriminate bombing and, as you say, blockades that starved the population, served as a grim foreshadowing of what the US would do to Korea and then Vietnam.
I'm accepting the premise of the Allied powers including the Soviet Union. Japan had hoped that the Soviet Union would meditate a peace after the war with Germany given that the two countries made peace with each other in the 1941. There were even preliminary negotiations that the Soviet Union dragged on in July 1945. Then, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan roughly around the time that the bombs were dropped.
And Japan wasn't just arguing for the emperor. There were other conditions to the surrender, including no occupation and internally trying Japanese for was crimes instead of an international tribunal. Those conditions were unacceptable. By the time there was only one condition, an atomic bomb had been dropped.
This is nonsense when the SU was deliberately cut out of the deal anyway. Obviously the SU didn't want a Japan that didn't go through a de-fashifying process, but that's mostly what they got with the American occupation, which is how we got the modern liberal state that literally worships its fascist forebears and maintains an ethnonationalist ideology. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you about Unit 731 getting off scot-free or the rest of it.
This was not entirely a coincidence. Again, you are completely ignoring the significant "sticking it to the Reds" angle. A fantasy US that actually cared about sparing lives would allow the Soviet Union to begin its invasion to it and the SU can negotiate for conditional surrender that keeps the Emperor from a still-stronger position.
I don't know how to explain to you that the US was a deeply racist state that held Japanese lives to be subhuman to the point that they fully were non-factors in proceedings other than as a vector of attack to twist Japan's arm. See the Korean and Vietnam wars were there was also extensive reporting on the dehumanization of "g**ks" done by all facets of society, civilian and military.
Remind me, how strongly connected were these two events? Right at the end, as you have somewhat noted, many things were happening at once.
The most generous interpretation, which I don't uphold, still neglects that there was not only one bomb dropped and the second one has remained without even a gesture at justification.
Soldiers and civilians are the same, I am very smart
I never said that.
How else to interpret that? Were you suggesting Japan at the end of WW2 posed a risk to US civilians?
No. I said that a country is going to value the lives of its own people over the lives of others in making military decisions. This isn't just an American thing.