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Having a Japanese wife automatically makes you an expert in Japanese military conflicts. What's not to get?
Imagine seeing that much suffering and being like "Yeah, but white people could have suffered!"
It’s literally the dumbest argument. It would’ve been fucking SOLDIERS who suffered. Even if you accept the idea that a ground invasion would’ve caused more suffering than NUKING TWO FUCKING CITIES, we’d be talking largely about military casualties. Even if you accept the pro-bomb argument it basically boils down to “we think American soldiers are worth nuking little fucking babies and children”.
I know there was conscription in WWII, but Jesus Christ, THEY NUKED BABIES.
The firebombings of places like Tokyo was just as bad if not worse than the Nukes, though imho. They get all the attention because of the sheer destructive awe, but for example the firebombing of Tokyo over 2 nights in March 1945 left 100,000 dead, a million homeless, and burned out 16 square miles. The heat from the flames causes a convection system of hot air to rise extremely rapidly and displace the colder air, which forms basically a mini-hurricane made out of fire, where even if you are trying to shelter indoors, the flames will bust through the windows and suck you out into the conflagration.
If I recall correctly from the Oliver Stone special, one of the higher ups in the US airforce referred to the raids directly as "terror bombing raids" or something to that effect in official documents
Yeh but it’s not a binary choice of firebomb or nuclear bomb. You can just not bomb babies?
Even if you accept the idea that a ground invasion would’ve caused more suffering than NUKING TWO FUCKING CITIES, we’d be talking largely about military casualties.
We killed plenty of civilians at Dresden and in Tokyo, long before we dropped a nuke.
And quite a few of the WW2 ground troops were drafted. Kids as young as 16, handed a gun and shoved up on to a beach as cannon fodder. Younger than that, on the Japanese side, fighting a rear guard against a collapsing eastern front.
The whole affair was insane. Japan's military was defeated at Midway. Their industrial capacity on the mainland had been smashed six months earlier, through continuous aerial bombardment. Their imperial ambitions had been extinguished and they were already suing for conditional surrender. But Americans didn't want surrender, they wanted conquest. What Truman's government believed was that they would literally need to genocide the population of the country in order to secure it.
The nukes expedited the transformation of Japan into a vassal state.
The argument doesn't just hinge on white lives, the claim is that additional Japanese lives would have been lost too, as a result of prolonging the war.
Doesn't mean they're right though.
I have translated this into real-speak
"I'm a liberal in a strained relationship with a Japanese woman who resents me for constantly brings up her nationality, and I went to a museum to one of the greatest mass killings in Japan and concluded that murder is good actually because I am a bloodthirsty psychopath who values white American lives than any amount of non-white lives."
sexpats
That's an incredibly useful portmanteu, I love it.
"I have zero knowledge on the topic but I fuck a person that should yet don't either, so let me tell you..."
expats on average don't have any knowledge on topics concerning where they live so one shouldn't be surprised that the ones who do fuck and bring that up out of the blue wouldn't either.
Wanna hear a worse take? My views radically changed, but years ago I defended the bombings to the entire Japanese press corp. Like I had one interview after another saying the bombings were justified. Oof so glad to not be a centrist anymore, so many bad takes.
It has almost definitely never occurred to him that she even has an inner life or thoughts of any kind
even if you assume the bombs beat japan, the concept of the bomb beating them is predicated on them having been cowed by a sufficient display of might, which could have just as easily been done off shore, rather than to two civilian population centers. which is what people at the time and involved with the project said.
and if the bombings were done on civilian population centers because such a display would otherwise be ineffective, then the idea is "if you murder enough civilians, you win the war"
which while relevant to, and an accurate assesment of, the u.s stance in every war since... is not usually the kind of argument youd hear said outloud
It is, literally, terrorism. Rather than attempting to beat the Japanese through military strategy and might (y'know, warfare), they instead decided it was much easier to murder millions of civilians and say "If you don't surrender to our demands, we'll murder millions more". It is utterly indefensible.
Terrorism is sometimes justifiable when the terrorists are operating in self-defense or in service to some inherently just cause. But terrorism to win a war you're already winning faster so fewer of your own soldiers die (and the ebil gommunists get a smaller share of the spoils) is literal supervillain shit.
yes. correct.
the u.s and military doctrine of fomenting terror, name a more iconic duo
twitter searched for "from:@asahitoussaint shortening"
https://twitter.com/AsahiToussaint/status/1348829385390911490
Listen to the Nukes episode of "Prole Pod". It's heartbreaking. One thing that will stick with me forever from that episode is that the flash of the bomb was so hot that the survivors had the pagterns of their Kimonos burned into their skin and that because of radiation the orphaned kids couldn't find any food for days after or ate radiated food
Americans will never admit their use of Nuclear weapons was bad because we're the only ones that ever used them and therefore you can't falsely equivocate or blame both sides to wave away the criticisms. Edited for clarity.
My comrades come in many colors. And flavors. Don't forget flavors.
Stalin defeated the Japanese by scaring the US into accepting Japanese surrender conditions, nothing to do with the atomic bombs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090311170134/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v46i3a07p.htm
