The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is honestly one of the single most effectively altruistic actions in all of human history.
By helping persuade the Japanese to surrender (they were open to doing that with preconditions, but that was hilariously at odds with the military balance by mid-1945), the Americans helped make the world a much better place.
(1) Military death estimates for the invasion of Japan ran into the hundreds of thousands, which would have been equivalent to America’s military deaths for the entirety of World War II. The US was under no obligation to sacrifice masses of its troops to spare citizens of a country that had underhandedly initiated war against them.
People who are against nuking the Japanese hate Americans.
(2) The USSR would have lost tens of thousands of soldiers occupying Hokkaido and perhaps northern Honshu (only to lose said Hokkaido People’s Republic in c.1991 anyway).
People who are against nuking the Japanese hate Russians.
(3) Japanese troops were still occupying Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, and large parts of China. Japanese occupation was not nice. A timely Japanese surrender saved many Allied troops and third country civilians.
People who are against nuking the Japanese hate Chinese and other East Asians.
(4) Previous fire bombings killed more Japanese than the two atomic bombs.
So what even makes nukes so revolting to many people? They’re just more efficient at their job.
(5) An Allied invasion of the home islands would have killed millions of Japanese civilians, or an order of magnitude more than were killed by the atomic bombs.
People who are against nuking the Japanese hate the Japanese.
(6) Showboating American nuclear capabilities to Stalin made the Soviet dictator warier of taking more liberties with the Western Allies in Europe. Since the postwar USSR was a depopulated wreck, while the much wealthier and reinvigorated US was accumulating dozens of nukes per year (thousands from the late 1940s), this must have reduced the risks of a Russian atomic genocide, which quite a few American generals were calling for.
People are who against nuking the Japanese really, really hate Russians.
Moreover, all of this truly psychopathic hatred comes wrapped up in supercilious moralization.
But I for one would like to take a moment of my day to thank the brave American aviators who nuked the Japanese. Glory to Atom!
PS. It is now commonly accepted that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria – or more precisely, the Japanese losing any hopes of the USSR intermediating a more favorable peace with the Americans – played no less a significant role in prompting the Japanese to accept unconditional surrender. However, the nuclear bombing did help things along – Japan’s civilian leaders were truly demoralized by it – and in any case, the American perspective that nukes could force the Japanese to peace was a perfect reasonable one.
Not sure if this is an attempt to emulate the Onion style of writing or not. Regardless what this is supposed to be, one can seriously argue that using nuclear bombs on Washington, New York (and Silicon Valley would also be a nice target) is good for Americans.
The Japanese were forced to attack the USA (due to sanctions) and they had legitimate fears of the spread of Communism in Asia. There was already a lot of Communist intrigue in China and the Soviets were expanding into Asia too. The USA probably wanted to save the Soviets from an Eastern invasion from Japan after operation Barbarossa. The USA wanted the spread of communism in Eastern Europe as well as Asia.
All this brilliantly explained by Mr. James Perloff in the video below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDrUcjzEalY
Who, exactly? Other than nutcase Patton ofc
I would add that nuking two Japanese cities demonstrated it in a way that no tests ever could. It also upset the good people with values for about 70 years acting as a deterrent. Somebody was going to get nuked, probably in Asia, so why not the Japanese? They have been very polite about it, accepting that their betters vaporised them as an act of tough love.
The good people with values have lately been losing their abhorrence of nukes. Some think it might be worth the pain if the gender-confused could then march freely. Or assure that hanging chads are not remotely manipulated from St. Petersburg (I know, I know, but it could happen, evil people are resourceful, especially in Russia).
It is time for another preventive nuking. Any volunteers? Only white countries can apply. (And, please, put the silly helmets back, no false flags. We are trying to be serious here, old ladies are watching…)
OK got me there.
Well if that’s how you wanna play.
How about this. Russia should have been nuked in Operation Unthinkable, because this would have prevented them from attacking the 2016 American election, which was another Pearl Harbor and Annuda Shoah.
Killing 20% of North Korea’s population in the Korean war wasn’t enough, they should have been genocided completely by the good uncle Sam so that they wouldn’t threaten America with nukes.
Iran should be bombed to prevent yet annuda shoah.
Blustering with the atomic bomb was actually fairly common for awhile.
In September 1945, at a reception held during a London meeting of the foreign ministers of the United States, Soviet Union, and England, Secretary of State James F. Byrnes chided Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov, “If you don’t cut all this stalling and let us get down to work, I am going to pull an atomic bomb out of my hip pocket and let you have it.”
http://www.americanforeignrelations.com/E-N/Nuclear-Strategy-and-Diplomacy-The-futile-strategy-of-atomic-monopoly.html
Ehh, Anatoly trying to be edgy.
This post reeks of effort and insecurity.
Actually, Japan tried to surrender before the nukes were dropped. So the nukes didn’t save anyone.
The real purpose of dropping the nukes were to back of the Russians and it worked!
Japan had been trying to surrender for months and simply wanted to keep their emperor. After the brutal and pointless atom bomb attacks, the US let them do that anyway.
Lame. You’re far too Americanized. I admit, it would be misguided to use the atomic bombings for America-bashing after all those years. But still, there’s no reason imo why you should just regurgitate the talking points of US nationalists.
“Thank God for the Atom Bomb”
The New Republic – August 1981
by Paul Fussell
https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/hf/iakh/HIS1300MET/v12/undervisningsmateriale/Fussel%20-%20thank%20god%20for%20the%20atom%20bomb.pdf
Warning: Excessive atomophilia may cause you to become an apologist for the war crimes of your country’s greatest enemy.
The best way to fight communism was obviously to attack the anti-communist Republic of China, seriously weakening it and paving the way for the communists to take over after the war.
There are several errors in this article:
-Japon certainly sought to surrender before BUT without modifying his government and without allowing occupation.
-For nothing is “comfortably accepted” that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria forced the surrender of Japan, that thesis is ridiculous, Emperor Hirohito mentioned atomic bombs as fundamental element of surrender.
Here’s a decent, non-hysterical article that is sceptical of the “The nuclear bombings saved millions of lives” narrative:
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/the-ultimate-weapon-or-the-ultimate-mistake-should-america-22218
And the USA did backstab the Nationalists.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=fQmFaZbWIIg
The video talks about the big capitalist Rockefellar’s role in creating and helping Communist China
Here Andrei Fursov says Stalin was reluctant to create Communist China. He was forced by the great American capitalist, owner of big oil company Standard Oil, Rockefellar, to help the Communist “hero” Mao Zedong.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1Ofep13FY4
As Prof Oliver says
http://www.revilo-oliver.com/rpo/Enemy_3.html
“Given the small extent of their territories and the concentration of their populations, a real war between Britain and France, for example, could be only the equivalent of the situation that was once much debated by theorists of the code of honor, a duel to be fought with pistols at arm’s length. At the present time, the only powers that could fight a real war are the United States and the two that it created for the destruction of civilization, Soviet Russia and China.”
“France possessed Indo-China until it was taken from her by American treachery (15) and Communist China, which the Americans had created by stabbing their Chinese allies in the back.”
The above statement completely matches Prof Fursov’s assertion in the above video that the American banking elites backstabbed the Chinese Nationalists and supported and brought Mao to power.
Special objections to atomic bombing as American war crimes are quite silly.
Operation Meetinghouse, the fire bombing of Tokyo, killed 80,000 people in one night. But I suppose dying instantly from an atomic blast is much worse than being burned alive.
Estimates vary wildly, but it seems that around 350,000 Japanese were killed by American air raids.
I don’t have any figures off the top of my head, but there’s also the fact that by the middle of 1944 Japan no longer had sufficient food supplies. Starvation began sitting in.
If you want to see how truly horrible the end of the war was for the Japanese civilian population, I recommend the 1988 anime film Grave of the Fireflies.
Then of course there were Allied war crimes in Europe. Germany suffered at least half a million civilian deaths from the Allied bombing campaign. A large number of Germans also died after the war had ended owing to partial implementation of the Morgenthau Plan and the Disarmed Enemy Forces camps. Nobody even has any idea how many people died.
The atomic bombings were just part and parcel of a pattern of massive war crimes committed by the Allies. These war crimes formed the basis of their air war plans and were developed even before the war. And since Allied strategic bombing proved effective, from a purely military point of view the war crimes were justifiable.
Where America can and should be faulted is its ridiculous insistence on unconditional surrender from the Axis powers. If it’s true that Japan was willing to surrender and its only condition was the preservation of the Emperor, then American political leadership pointlessly prolonged the war.
Good points. War crimes seemed to be the order of the day. Le May recognized that he had committed war crimes in order to win the war.
Grave of the Fireflies is a great film – highly recommended.
Peace.
Based yankee banking elites
Incredibly rich to complain about Allied war crimes when the Japs (aside from their indiscriminate rape and slaughter of Chinese, Filipino, etc. civilians) blatantly disregarded established protocol regarding treatment of POW’s: easy to talk about how brutal the Allies were now, when you haven’t heard about your comrades being eaten or vivisected.
Who’s complaining? I’m American and stated strategic bombing was effective and militarily justifiable. See also the Paul Fussell essay I linked in this comment, which discusses Japanese barbarism (among other things): http://www.unz.com/akarlin/nuclear-altruism/#comment-2450687
The war crimes of the Axis are very well known and not the subject here.
Unless you take the view that war crimes committed by one party seem to require retaliation with war crimes of your own. Like how Churchill goaded the H-man into the Blitz by repeatedly bombing Berlin when the Germans were still avoiding terror bombing.
But yes, no doubt if Allied POWs captured by the Japanese had been in charge then the atomic bombings of Japan would have continued indefinitely.
My point is that people idiotically obsess over the atomic bombings while glossing over all of the other massive attacks the Allies made on Axis civilians. Not only is this stupid, but it betrays their real motivation: atomophobia.
Want to troll Liberals (US) and Leftists (Euro)?
Ask them why Hiroshima & Nagasaki look so nice & clean & orderly, while other diverse locations cannot even get basics right!
Asgard is its’ people, not a place.
Yes it was not nice but how not nice was it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guHN3dK7Clc
The Truth about the Nanking Massacre
Well the people who died, it was unfortunate. But I think both sides of the story should be listened to.
You said it better than I could have. The US could have dropped its demand for unconditional surrender, and failing that could have nuked a more purely military target.
That said, my 8th-grade history teacher, a fairly zealous American patriot, used to say that the Nagasaki bomb was unnecessary and was due to a poor translation of the Japanese response to Hiroshima.
The problem with nukes is that they can’t discriminate between civilians and non combatants, that is not the Christian way to wage war.
To speak of altruism one must indicate where was the self-interest and how the action was against the self-interest. If somebody kills Anatoly Karlin even if it was the most beneficial act for the world one can’t invoke altruism if the self- interest was also involved. If Karlin’s mother had decided to have an abortion because she wanted to pursue a career it would not be altruism but if she did it despite of wanting to have a child but because she did not want to bring another sociopathic punk to existence in this world this could be considered an altruism. Obviously she did not do it. No altruism in Karlin’s genes.
That suggests the Japanese leadership didn’t care much, if at all, about civilian casualties, which suggests area bombing played little to no impact on their decision to surrender.
I think simply focusing on precision bombing of strategic targets+further Allied territorial gains (especially in China) would have been enough to have convinced the Japanese to surrender long before any invasion of Japan would have become necessary.
That’s fair enough, the US bombing of Korea was also even more brutal than either WW2 theaters IIRC, but it’s nearly forgotten
And how does this attitude make the Allies morally superior to the Axis (assuming what we know about the Axis is true as the official sources are the alies themselves, the same USA which claimed WMD in Iraq)? Are all Germans, Italians and Japanese responsible for the actions of all other Germans, Italians and Japanese? If an Indian beats you up in a bar will you attack any other Indian person to get revenge? Were the people of Hiroshima or Nagasaki or Dresden all responsible for all the evil actions of all Japanese and Germans? The babies too?
https://justice4germans.wordpress.com/2013/07/03/the-kaufman-and-morgenthau-plans-to-exterminate-the-germans-prior-to-during-and-after-ww-ii/
http://reasonradionetwork.com/20090505/mark-webers-worldwatch-tue-may-5-2009
An Unknown Holocaust: Mass Killing, `Ethnic Cleansing’ and Brutal Mistreatment of Germans by the Victorious Allies
Patton a nutcase? Eccentric yes, but we have a high level of tolerance for individualism in NW Europe.
The Politically Incorrect Truth About Japan in World War II
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InTvB8ZR4S0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0wXKfNpKHA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4T5U4zTbJ8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwOWtfArvQw
Joshua Blakeney Japan Bites Back: Allied Demonization of the Empire of the Sun
In 2014, after extensive archival research at the Diet National Library in Japan, Blakeney published Japan Bites Back: Documents Contextualizing Pearl Harbor, the topic of our discussion. Joshua begins with an overview of his journey into the world of WWII revisionist history, a subject that is far less taboo in Japan than it is in the west. He speaks about the backdrop of Japan as the perceived aggressor in the Pearl Harbor operation, and the threat of communism that went against Japan’s unique, homogenized and autonomous way of living. Joshua explains the history of Japan’s interests in preserving the Asiatic agrarian societies and the need to expel White influence. Then, we compare Pan-Asianist ideology to Iran’s attempt to unify its region today. Joshua makes connections to false flag events such as Pearl Harbor and origins of wars that have been interpreted in a fraudulent manner.
Person who wants Russia to nuke Israel for occasionally lobbying a bomb at Syria feels entitled to make online psychiatric assessments.
I read his blabber just for laughs and to see what new idiotic statements will he make.
The Japanese were also against American occupation, war crimes trial, changing the internal nature of the Japanese government (e.g. democracy), disarmament (!), or even giving up Japanese control over Formosa and Korea (!!!).
The nuclear bombs jolted them into a reality aligned with the military balance.
Yet despite the nuclear bombings, and the Soviet declaration of war, there was still an attempted coup by a bunch of Army hardliners who did not want to surrender.
And a flight of a thousand high-altitude bombers equipped with high explosive and incendiary bombs can?
More ridiculous atomophobia.
This is incorrect. The Japanese were in “negotiations” for some time prior to the atomic bombings. I say “negotiations” because realistically it seemed they were mostly just stalling because their terms were wildly unrealistic by 1945. The Japanese didn’t just want to avoid modifying their government or avoiding an occupation, they wanted to keep everything they had captured up until December 1941. When you offer withdraw military forces from the Asian mainland in exchange for a several hundred thousand strong “policing force” to remain for the next 50 years even as your armies as are crumbling around you as the Japanese did, it shows a certain lack of seriousness of the entire endeavor.
He went to America and “went native”, it happens. He loves America and wishes he wasn’t Russian, that is the essence of it.
That may have been something like a first offer. And as I recall they agreed to disarmament…but it should be done by Japanese officers (yes, obviously unacceptable condition).
And frankly wishing to keep control of Formosa and Korea isn’t really unreasonable. These territories had been internationally recognized as Japanese for decades. If American politicians had more foresight they would’ve recognized that allowing Japan to stay in Korea and Manchuria was strategically advantageous in the postwar world.
But anyhow, like I said supposedly Japan later did offer a more complete surrender: https://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
I think carpet bombing is implicitly included. Christian nations basically pulled all stops in WW2 – the slaughter was industrial.
I agree with your stance, it make no sense to distinguish between atomic bombs, indiscriminate bombing, poisoning water supplies, biological warfare (though this one can be prolonged and quite painful and unnecessarily cruel) or a host of other ways humans have come up with to eliminate other humans wholesale.
Something in me tells me a lot of the loss of religion in the West comes from this era – I’m not sure Europeans are able to forget that that completely disregarded Christian principles in waging war upon each other.
Peace.
I think you are missing out that Karlin is being somewhat facetious, or perhaps we are simply witnessing his Atomophilia in full bloom or a combination of both. Dead is dead, whether by atomic fire or starvation. More Japanese were going to die before the war ended, on that all parties are in agreement. The deployment of atomic bombs as far as I am concerned was mere expediency. The Americans had spent all that money and resources. They had the weapon, so why not use it? All the post facto moral justifications are just hollow American lies of course, but the criticism of using the bombs is equally stupid moralistic posturing. Whether or shoot you or stab you is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things if I the end result is you still being dead.
But hey, it was funny.
Like Truman said, “When you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.” Note that the Jap vivisection and cannibalization of American POW’s was a tiny fraction of what they did to the Chinese and Filipinos
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2015/04/04/national/new-kyushu-museum-breaks-taboo-with-pow-vivisection-display/#.W2iSiyhKi70
The Nanking Massacre does appear to have been real, but, as with many such atrocities, the account of it grew out of all proportion to reality with the help of Chinese propagandists and counting soldiers as civilians:
https://books.google.com/books?id=T3iHDgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=nanking+massacre&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiv6o_O99jcAhXNJDQIHVJNDnQQ6AEIRTAG#v=onepage&q=%22david%20askew%22&f=false
Deep personality of Karlin with these topics, does not seem Americanized – but not an uncommon personality type in Russian, with his freedom for provocative points of view.
Where he is maybe Americanized, is in his interest in (a bit boring and depressing) topics of recent Russian history. At least all people I know in real life with personality like his, are not interested in these topics. And people interested in local history topics, are usually from a very different point of view or personality type.
But he’s here in the room and can answer better than us.
As for the actual topic. I cannot agree with this view at all. The original plan of nuclear weapons development, was to use them first on an empty area of Japan.
Gen Curtis Lemay?
See Operation Unthinkable, the planning for defending Western Europe / attacking Eastern Europe in the event of a Russia swing west in the closing days of WWII.
When you have to deal with a beast, you have to treat him as a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.”
By becoming a beast. Now who will treat this beast like a beast by becoming a beast and so on.
Not a good enough explanation.
It’s just down to changes in military technology. The rules of warfare were codified before the existence of strategic bombing.
In the 19th century, it wasn’t possible to reduce the enemy’s war potential from great distances. Thus there was no benefit to harming civilians. Instead you defeated enemy armies in the field and then overran territory. Thus the rules of warfare were intended to eliminate pointless cruelty to civilians.
Things changed in the 20th century.
And in any case, is there really a significanmt moral distinction between killing enemy conscripts and enemy civilians?
There were war crimes on both sides.
Of course you are not going to hear much about the allied crimes because victors write the history books.
But be careful what you wish for. That same logic could be used against us to take out an American city.
I’m not sure there were any purely military targets left in Japan at the time where nuclear weapons of the era were appropriate. Had the bomb been available before the Battle of the Philippine Sea then a sensible military target would’ve been Kure Naval Base (incidentally–located in Hiroshima).
Thus it would’ve been the “demonstration blast” proposed by various weaklings, cowards, and atomophobes.
Yeah it is, you have to go to extreme lengths to subdue a barbarous foe that is as callous with its own people as with the enemy. Note that the US occupation troops didn’t bayonet Japanese pregnant women or eat prisoners
Where America can and should be faulted is its ridiculous insistence on unconditional surrender from the Axis powers.
This is even more true for the European theater where the insistence on unconditional surrender prolonged the war unnecessarily, and led to untold millions of extra deaths (Jews as well).
Ironically, of course, FDR’s justification that he was simply following in the footsteps of “Unconditional Surrender” Grant simply betrayed his historical ignorance: the moniker arose from Grant’s insistence at a particular battle (Fort Donelson in 1862) not as a condition for ending the Civil War, which in fact ended (at Appomattox) as a “Gentleman’s Agreement” between Grant and Lee, not as unconditional surrender.
I agree – modern warfare is an aberration. The destruction levels in WW2 would have impressed the Mongol Hordes. Avoidance of war is thus high priority in our day and age where armies don’t duke it out on plains away from civilian centers. Mini-Stalingrads are basically a feature of every modern theater of war.
Yes, there is always a difference between armed military-age males and women, children, elderly, etc. One can feel bad for conscripts and be completely morally justified in eliminating them with extreme prejudice at the same time.
Peace.
Anatoly and other like Thorfinneson are just trying to be edgy.
Too much playing video games from their mother’s basement and not enough real world experience.
Typical of millennials in America.
If they were to ever step foot onto a real battlefield and had to make real decisions about life and death they would shit themselves.
I am of the similar opinion.
There was an Indian representing British India in the Tokyo trials.
From
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhabinod_Pal
Radhabinod Pal (27 January 1886 – 10 January 1967) was an Indian Bengali jurist, who was a member of the United Nations’ International Law Commission from 1952 to 1966. He was one of two Asian judges appointed to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the “Tokyo Trials” of Japanese war crimes committed during the Second World War
…snip…
While finding that ‘the evidence is still overwhelming that atrocities were perpetrated by the members of the Japanese armed forces against the civilian population of some of the territories occupied by them as also against the prisoners of war’, he produced a judgment questioning the legitimacy of the tribunal and its rulings. He held the view that the legitimacy of the tribunal was suspect and questionable, because the spirit of retribution, and not impartial justice, was the underlying criterion for passing the judgment.
He concluded:
I would hold that every one of the accused must be found not guilty of every one of the charges in the indictment and should be acquitted on all those charges.
Judge Pal never intended to offer a juridical argument on whether a sentence of not guilty would have been a correct one. However, he argued that the United States had clearly provoked the war with Japan and expected Japan to act.[5]
In his lone dissent, Judge Pal refers to the trial as a “sham employment of legal process for the satisfaction of a thirst for revenge.” According to Norimitsu Onishi, while he fully acknowledged Japan’s war atrocities – including the Nanjing massacre – he said they were covered in the Class B and Class C trials.[6]
Furthermore, he believed that the exclusion of Western colonialism and the use of the atom bomb by the United States from the list of crimes, as well as the exclusion of judges from the vanquished nations on the bench, signified the “failure of the Tribunal to provide anything other than the opportunity for the victors to retaliate.”[7] In this he was not alone among Indian jurists of the time; one prominent Calcutta barrister wrote that the Tribunal was little more than “a sword in a wig”. In general, fear of American nuclear power was an international phenomenon following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The American occupation of Japan ended in 1952, after Tokyo signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty and accepted the Tokyo trials’ verdict. The end of the occupation also lifted a ban on the publication of Judge Pal’s 1,235-page dissent, which Japanese nationalists used as the basis of their argument that the Tokyo trials were biased.[6][8][9]
It’s only provocative regarding the tone of the article, the argument itself is merely the standard view of American patriots. Totally predictable, has all been discussed a million times before. I don’t want to bash AK too hard, but I do find his fake edginess in this pointless post rather silly.
That sounds interesting, are there many local history associations in Russia? What kind of subjects are they interested in?
No it is not, morally the allies are different than the axis forces. Anyways the USA brought the war with Japan on itself to get at Germany.
It was a matter of timing. The records of Japanese overtures through third parties to the US at the beginning of 1945 showed that their peace overtures were farcical. They actually expected to maintain garrison forces in the Asian mainland and the allies to accept the legitimacy of their wartime puppet governments. By the time they started thinking of making concessions, such as recognizing the independence of the Philippines, US military forces had already destroyed all pretensions of Japanese control there. Japanese concessions amounted giving away what they didn’t have and demanding to keep what they could longer hold because they were strategically fixated on the mistaken belief of one giant decisive battle where they could bloody the Americans to such a degree that they would be tempted to give more favorable terms. This never happened and even in July of 1945 the Japanese still weren’t willing to concede to any realistic demands about territory.
The idea that the Japanese were about to give it all up is really the result of some kind of quixotic post war American guilt at having used the bombs in the first place. The actual war time notes and memorandum from the Japanese side from a few weeks before the bombs were dropped showed that their idea terms and American terms were vastly different and while this was beginning to shift, it was by then either too late or not completly supported by the all of the decision making powers in Japan to be recognized as a legitimate offer.
The Japanese were also against American occupation, war crimes trial, changing the internal nature of the Japanese government (e.g. democracy), disarmament (!), or even giving up Japanese control over Formosa and Korea (!!!).
You say “The Japanese” as if it were a unified entity. Clearly there were widely different views on continuing (or not) the war, but what is essentially undebatable among serious historians is that if the US had offered the eventual surrender terms in spring 1945 the Emperor would have accepted — of course there would almost certainly have been a revolt among some elements in the military (as occurred in August 1945) and one can’t be sure exactly how it would have played out.
They just burned them alive, which is nothing right?
Morally the Allied are no different than the Axis forces. If real justice had to be done many on the side of the Allies should have been tried too. The Soviet commies were even more callous with its own people than the Axis forces. It was nothing but victor’s justice, basically injustice. No moral superiority here, all gas and propaganda.
This is straight up wrong. In April 1945 Hirohito still held onto the idea of a decisive battle with the Americans at least as indicated from the diaries of the time of major Japanese political decision makers. The Japanese military command were likewise in agreement. Even by June they weren’t willing to entertain giving up any territory beyond what they had already lost on the battlefield.
All well explained in this video
James Perloff on the Myths of the “Good War”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shkTR8iuV2Y
All that b.s that it was a “Good War” was just mere propaganda.
America could have dropped a black bomb on Japan and Germany, saving itself from the fatal explosion, instead it selflessly threw itself down to absorb the cataclysmic blast, saving Japan and Europe.
But the leaders of postwar Europe immediately picked up another and played with it like an inebriated Boris Yeltsin, as though blacks were the true source of the America’s power, while Japan and China looked on helplessly in horror.
My dad was in the Okinawa invasion. Without the atomic bombs my brothers and I would have been orphans. thank you Truman and Paul Tibbets.
What negotiations? They weren’t negotiating with the US. They were sending out feelers to the USSR in the hopes the neutral USSR would broker a peace more favorable to them. The US was never part of it and Roosevelt and Truman both publicly commented at every opportunity that they would only accept unconditional surrender.
The reason Japan attacked the US was because they would not accept the American terms to end its embargo – a complete withdrawal of all Japanese troops from China.
Yes, strategic bombing forced them to surrender, otherwise who knows how many more would have been slaughtered in the invasion and in areas of the Asian mainland still under Japanese occupation.
Yes a semantic mistake on my part. The Japanese never made anything official, only reaching out to the US through third parties like China, the Vatican and as you mentioned the USSR. However, Japanese internal debate on this issue is fairly settled, the conditional surrender that the Japanese thought were reasonable would have been totally rejected by the US because it wouldn’t have been a surrender so much as a ceasefire.
In that case, he should have lamented that not more Japanese cities and towns were nuked.
One Japan is not enough.
https://orig00.deviantart.net/9674/f/2017/073/3/8/decisive_darkness__2017_by_bolshiekiwi-db2ccsn.png
OK fine dealing with beasts right?
Lets check out the massacre of Palestinians of Deir Yassin?
The massacre:
The Deir Yassin massacre took place on April 9, 1948, when around 120 fighters from the Zionist paramilitary groups Irgun and Lehi attacked Deir Yassin, a Palestinian Arab village of roughly 600 people near Jerusalem. The assault occurred as Jewish militia sought to relieve the blockade of Jerusalem during the civil war that preceded the end of British rule in Palestine.
According to Irgun sources, the village guards felt surprised by “the Jews” entering their village at night and opened fire on the Irgun force. The village fell after fierce house-to-house fighting. During and after the battle for the village, at least 107 Palestinians were killed, including women and children—some were shot, while others died when hand grenades were thrown into their homes. Despite an original boast by the victors that 254 had been killed, Aref al-Aref counted 117 victims, 7 in combat and the rest in their homes.According to a count conducted by International Red Cross representative Jacques de Reynier, apart from bodies left lying in the streets, 150 corpses were found in one cistern alone, among them people who had been either decapitated or disemboweled. Israeli historian Benny Morris wrote that there were also cases of mutilation and rape. Several villagers were taken prisoner and may have been killed after being paraded through the streets of West Jerusalem. Four of the attackers were killed, with around 35 injured.
From Dougles Reed’s book
“In Israel four months later two Stern Group leaders named Yellin and Shmuelevitz were sentenced to eight and five years imprisonment in this connection by a special court, the president of which, in reading the judgment, said there was “no proof that the order to kill Count Bernadotte had been given by the leadership.” The two men (according to the Jewish Telegraph Agency) “scarcely paid heed to the proceedings in view of the fact that the State Council was expected to approve a general amnesty,” and within a few hours of their sentencing they were released, then being escorted in triumph to a popular reception. The “Commander-in-Chief” of Irgun, a Mr. Menachem Begin, some years later made “a triumphal tour” of Western cities, being received in Montreal, for instance, by “a guard of honour of the Montreal police headed by Rabbis bearing Scrolls of the Law” (the South African Jewish Herald). Speaking at Tel Aviv during an election campaign in 1950 Mr. Begin claimed credit for the foundation of the Zionist state, through the deed at Deir Yasin. He said the Irgun had “occupied Jaffa,” which the government party “had been ready to hand over to the Arabs,” and added:
“The other part of the Irgun’s contribution was Deir Yasin, which has caused the Arabs to leave the country and make room for the newcomers. Without Deir Yasin and the subsequent Arab rout, the present government could not absorb one-tenth of the immigrants.””
OK NOW, are the people who mutilate, decapitate and disembowel and rape people not beasts? Why did the Great Truman not treat the criminals who did this not as beasts? Why were the Americans selective? Why was Begin not tried in a court of law but became the leader of a country and the world accepted it? What beastliness and justice are you blaterring about?
Seriously, look at the massive evidence, there are no nuclear weapons, they are as big of a hoax as the alleged 1968-72 ‘trips to the moon’
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in fact, other versions of the Tokyo, Osaka or Yokohama firebombing horrors, and began what is a global hoax regarding ‘nuclear weapons’ … From a recent overview of why Hiroshima was not a ‘nuclear’ or ‘atomic bomb’ explosion:
http://www.newnationalist.net/2017/08/01/was-hiroshima-firebombed-and-not-nuked/
US military Major Alexander de Seversky, surveying Japanese cities shortly afterwards, found wooden-house-burned Hiroshima to show no signs at all of anything other than chemical fire-bombing, just like Tokyo, Yokohama & Osaka … central iron-steel buildings were intact, fragile objects undamaged, even flag poles still up beneath ‘ground zero’ … no spot where things had been ‘vapourised’
The ‘smoking gun’ proving Hiroshima was fake, is in 1945 US military records, logging 66 aeroplanes as ‘chemically fire-bombing Imabari, Japan’, close to Hiroshima, at the same date & hour as the alleged ‘atomic bomb’ … Imabari which no longer existed, having been totally destroyed in 2 previous fire-bombing raids … this was the fleet that fire-bombed Hiroshima
German Jesuit Rev John Siemes, eye-witness in Hiroshima, documented local witnesses reporting planes spreading incendiary material
At the time of Hiroshima there was huge intimidation, ‘death penalty for unauthorised speaking’, suppression of Japanese & USA witnesses & involved persons … whilst allowed statements seem scripted & false-seeming
Photographs of Hiroshima smoke look exactly like columns of smoke from chemical fire-bombing, confirmed by Japanese witnesses who eventually did speak … in general, the ‘mushroom clouds’ eventually marketed as the ‘nuclear weapon signature’, are also from certain types of chemical explosions, as recently exploding Chinese factories have shown
A 1990 medical study, completing 40 years of investigation of Hiroshima & Nagasaki survivors, showed no genetic damage, as is typical of those exposed to too-high radiation
It seems indeed that ‘nuclear weapons’ as a whole have never existed, and that he United Nations etc initiative to ‘ban nuclear weapons’ is actually a concerted effort to bury the hoax.
The political context for the nuclear weapons scam after Hiroshima, was the USA-Moscow deal in Stalin’s later years, that Stalin would pretend to be a ‘nuclear weapons power’ too, riches & tech would be passed on to Soviet elites (as Antony Sutton, ‘Best Enemy Money Can Buy’ proved was happening); and the world would be in fear of ‘nuclear terror’ supporting big-power domination of the earth & trillions of profits for oligarchs via ‘weapons industries’. All the ‘nuclear powers’ have their reasons and motivations to continue colluding in this hoax today.
Swedish nuclear engineer Anders Björkman, once asked to investigate ‘nuclear weapons’ for Sweden, has been showing in detail for years that nuclear weapons are impossible, fake, & have never existed (versus nuclear power, which does work).
Recently, there has been a move to wind down the nuclear weapons hoax, with this year’s ‘UN resolution to ban & destroy all nuclear weapons’ … a ‘great favour’ the coming one-world globalist government will do for us, putting the nuclear weapons hoax to rest. They can claim to dis-assemble all the nuclear weapons like South Africa claimed to do in the past.
But over 72 years, all 10 alleged ‘nuclear bomb nations’ have played along, in what has been a global scam, trillions for oligarchs owning armaments industries, the ‘nuclear weapons’ scam a major tool for the big and medium powers who are allowed to claim to have them … Consider the history:
1945 – USA chemically bombs Hiroshima & Nagasaki (like Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg…), also dumping illness-inducing radioactive rubbish. Witnesses ordered to shut up under threat of death, chemical-blast ‘mushroom clouds’ in film & photos – USA HAS NUCLEAR BOMBS
1949 – Soviet Union accepts deal for Russian elites to get wealthy by playing along with Cold War & global nuclear terror – COMMIE RUSSIA HAS THE BOMB
1952 – UK Brits & London financial centre don’t want to be 2nd class – UK HAS THE BOMB
1960 – France chafes not to be 2nd class to Brits – FRANCE & DE GAULLE HAVE THE BOMB
1964 – China upgraded to major league – COMMIE CHINA HAS THE BOMB
1966 – Israel joins the club in time to terrorise & blackmail Arabs in 1967 & 1973 wars – JEWS HAVE THE BOMB & JEWS ARE READY TO SAMSON OPTION EVERYBODY, later ‘confirmed’ by Mordechai Vanunu to MI6 London Times & then maybe living on Haifa beach, not ‘in Israeli prison’, like ‘not really in Ecuador Embassy’ Julian Assange
1974 – India accepted as big power, debasing its heritage naming its bomb programme ‘Smiling Buddha’ – INDIA HAS THE BOMB
1979 – South Africa’s white apartheid gov gets to play – WHITE RACIST SOUTH AFRICA HAS THE BOMB READY TO KILL BLACK PEOPLE … but ‘dismantles bombs’ before Mandela & black government can find out the scam
1998 – Pakistan becomes central player in new Western anti-Muslim theme – PAKISTANI MUSLIMS HAVE THE BOMB & OSAMA OR TERRORISTS MIGHT GET AHOLD OF IT
2006 – North Korea, always making deals, gets to upgrade – CRAZY NORTH KOREA HAS THE BOMB
‘Nuclear terror’ – A greatly profitable business, & a superbly sticky piece of hoax propaganda
From
https://cnduk.org/hiroshima-the-truth-about-the-bombing/
By the time the bomb was ready for use, Japan was ready to surrender. As General Dwight Eisenhower said, ‘Japan was at that very moment seeking some way to surrender with minimum loss of face. It was not necessary to hit them with that awful thing.’ So if Japan was ready to surrender, why were atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? A significant factor in the decision to bomb was the US’s desire to establish its dominance in the region after the war.
..snip…
Whilst many leading US politicians, diplomats and military figures thought it unnecessary to bomb Japan, the group around the US’s president at the time, Harry S Truman, pressed strongly for it. Secretary of War Stimson, for example, described the atom bomb as the ‘master card’ in US diplomacy towards the Soviet Union.
..snip…
It was also claimed that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets. Again, this just wasn’t true. Hiroshima was home to the Japanese Second Army HQ, but it was primarily a big city with a huge civilian population. About 10,000 of the total 200,000 deaths in Hiroshima were military personnel. Nagasaki had no military units and, of the total 140,000 deaths there, only about 150 were military. In total, over 95 per cent of the combined casualties of the two cities were civilian.
As well as securing political, diplomatic and military advantages for itself, the US also secured the otherwise impossible opportunity of testing its nuclear weapons on human beings, and determining their impact on buildings and other materials. The US was also able to monitor the impacts of radiation on humans in a way that would otherwise have been impossible. In dropping two bombs, one of uranium and one of plutonium, in different physical settings, a variety of effects could be tested.
Opened the Wikipedia page on Japanese war crimes.
THE 6 MILLION!
Oh these Japanese, engaging in such barbarisms, much like the lampshades made of skin that another Axis power was famous for making.
Pattton? Patton hated the idea of nuclear warfare. He advocated for war against the Soviet Union, but I don’t recall him ever advocating nuclear war. Cite your sources if I’m wrong.
That article never provides any analysis that would either support or contradict the claims relating to how many lives would be saved. It simply states what everybody already knows now, that Japan was willing to surrender but not unconditionally.
The problem was the Japanese military was against surrender. They wanted an opportunity to punch the US in the nose and force the US to negotiate on better terms for them. Unless the US accepts something less than unconditional surrender (and both Presidents never suggested accepting anything less) you either have to invade the home islands or you have to starve Japan into submission.
The civilian population was preparing for an amphibious assault on the islands by practicing human wave attacks to overwhelm the assault on the beaches. Given that the assault boats were those slow moving Higgins boats, it is quite possible that the assault could be repelled if you don’t care about your own casualties. Such a success would only bolster the military to continue to fight until better terms are offered by the US. Even if the US establishes a beachhead, the population was still being prepared for human wave attacks. How many Russians lost their lives (probably needlessly) because Russian officers were willing to just throw men at the Germans (and those Russians were armed unlike the Japanese (well they were practicing with spears) would have been)?
The idea that only 93 thousand US servicemen had died in the Pacific Theater is irrelevant in relation to attacking the Japanese home islands. In many of those island hopping operations there was never more than thousands of Japanese troops in total on an island. I think Iwo Jima only had 21,000 and it was part of Japan before the war. The home islands had millions of men at their disposal.
The US could resort to siege tactics. Essex class aircraft carriers were flowing out of US ship yards. I think there were something like 43 commissioned at the end of the war. The US could have easily destroyed the infrastructure and farmland. They could have sunk any fishing vessel leaving Japan. They could have left the entire population subject to the elements without any significant medical supplies. How many civilians would have died in a siege, although it might take years for Japan to finally surrender.
Are the Moon landings also fake?
As an edgy schoolboy, I told my history teacher it was racist that we spent so much time talking about the Holocaust but didn’t pay any attention to the larger number of Chinese that died.
Big if true.
With this revelation, can we be sure that World War 2 even took place?
… the Maldives would make an excellent test location … for obvious reasons …
Hail friend. Japan was the first colored society to defeat a white imperial power in war and 1905 made Japan a hero to all Asian peoples from Finland to Manchuria.
It’s hardly surprising that the white supremacist regime of the United States found Japan particularly abhorrent and pushed hard for war in the Pacific.
On the one hand, Gospodin Karlin and various armchair warriors; on the other hand:
That was a bit much, wishing death upon our kind host.
Hail buddy.
Radhabinod Pal (check comment 53 on this page) had a similar view.
In other words defeating Japan through starvation and disease.
All while the US, Britain, China, Australia, and the Soviet Union continue to suffer military casualties.
How humanitarian.
This on the other hand may well be true. If nothing else America should’ve offered.
The Indian National Army had taken over the Andaman Islands & was planning an invasion of Delhi within 2 weeks.
Given the political climate, and most Soldiers being pro independance or fighting on the front it would have succeeded.
A nuclear pakistan, the horrors of partition & the slow genocide of Hindus all across the subcontinent would have been avoided.
This was stalled because Japan, the main patron of this army was nuked.
As expected,
People who want to Nuke one type of Pagan also hate the other.
https://www.dailyo.in/politics/the-missing-hindus-in-south-asia-and-a-conspiracy-of-silence/story/1/1149.html
—
Karlin used the expression Holy Land to refer to Israel he betrays the christian virus still infecting his soul.
Japan got rid of the colonies and in many places re-established Monarchy.
Why should Japan have wanted the Poz to enter society?
Russian women are found in brothels all over the world, is this the progressive Model karlin wants everyone else to follow??
If not for Christianity Europe would be a Persian speaking continent, Whites continue to futilely resist the course of history.
Nuclear weapons are fake and gay.
The INA was present at Imphal and Kohima, and nothing of the sort happened.
Are you one of those crazy Indians on Unz review?
Who knew that Jorjani read AK?
I have noticed that you display more human sentiments than one would expect from somebody raised by computer games. Perhaps the future is not as dire as I tend to think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9yKqcs699k
Is that right? In the publication: “DS02: A New Dosimetry System for A-Bomb Survivor Studies” (https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/07/f17/DS02.pdf) it lists some sources of irradiation measurements:
Gamma ray measurements made in thermoluminescent materials, such as roof tiles, etc. used in DS86
to confirm the gamma ray calculations, have increased in number and quality over the years and have been
carefully reviewed in DS02. Agreement between these measurements and DS02 calculations is very good,
better than for DS86.
A wealth of measurements of materials activated by thermal neutrons from the explosion is
available for comparison with DS02 calculations as compared with the rather few measurements on 152Eu and
60Co available originally at the time of DS86. These now include both new and older re-evaluated
measurements from Japanese and American investigators on 152Eu in roof tiles, granite pillars and rocks, 60Coin
steel in concrete reinforcements, and measurements of 36Cl in granite (or concrete). Extensive 36Cl
measurements have been carried out in the U.S., in Japan and in Germany on samples from Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Previously reported (1990’s) 36Cl data have been re-evaluated and problems identified, which led to
new and improved measurements.
Most importantly (because fast neutrons contribute directly to the neutron dose, while thermal neutrons
do not and are also heavily influenced by local effects such as moisture) fast neutron activation of 63Cu to 63Ni
(n, p) has recently been measured in samples from Hiroshima by accelerator mass spectrometry in both the
U.S. and Germany and by measurements of the radioactivity of 63Ni (T½ = 100 y) made in Japan. These new
measurements are in striking agreement with DS02 calculations, although some questions about the composition
of the measured fast neutron background remain. Older measurements of fast neutron activation of 32S to 32P
(n, p) made soon after the explosion at Hiroshima have been re-evaluated and demonstrate agreement with
calculation.
There’s millions of people in Russia which are interested in Russian history.
But Americanization of Karlin is expressed, if anything – aside from English language blog and forum – by fact such a person could find things about local history in Russia interesting and exotic. Because I know a lot of people which are thinking in his kind of provocative and radical ways (which is why he is not seeming very Americanized), but topics of interest of people like this are cryptanalysis, or if interested in humanitarian sciences, then things like “King Arthur’s Holy Grail”.
While people interested in local topics, are usually more conventional and, it will be said, less entertainment.
This is something Americanization or what happens when you live in another country – to make a blogger whose natural interest “radical IQ augmentation” and “space colonies”, find interesting a topic like Yaroslavskoe uprising (well I feel guilty me and Daniel Chieh were using that comments section to debate about genetic engineering and “Rat Utopia”).
Utu – future is not “dire”. See how it was in last weekend’s sunshine – most people outside, in good condition, and flourishing . Which is the real world? Dark one portrayed by text in the screen in the comments section of Unz.com, or light one you experience with your actual senses?
There’s a difference between intentional targeting of civilians, which is what America does in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and targeting of military targets as Red Army did in Germany.
And especially there is something completely unjustifiable in America’s actions, considering the radical new potential of these weapons, which could have been dropped on unpopulated areas or Mount Fuji, and made the same impact on decisions of Japanese leadership. (Well Mount Fuji – an active volcano, so maybe not the best option. But it’s unpopulated and visible from much of Tokyo).
American bomb production was quite limited at the time.
The militaristic Japanese could’ve viewed such a demonstration as evidence of cowardice. I would certainly consider such a demonstration to be pathetic and embarrassing and wonder if my opponents were crazy for not directly attacking me.
No one seems to have read the Paul Fussell essay I posted. The Pacific War wasn’t static in August 1945. America was suffering 7,000 casualties per week.
Every hour the war continued meant more American killed and wounded. More suffering of American POWs in Japanese prison camps.
Anything which delayed victory (on satisfactory terms) could only be viewed as treason. The responsibility of American leadership was to American lives, not Japanese.
The better case is not against the atomic bombing, which is flimsy, but against America’s ridiculous unconditional surrender obsession.
Go back to America.
“Swedish nuclear engineer Anders Björkman, once asked to investigate ‘nuclear weapons’ for Sweden, has been showing in detail for years that nuclear weapons are impossible, fake, & have never existed (versus nuclear power, which does work). ”
Does he realize nuclear detonations were viewed by US civilians?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17apJBN8b_I
Good for pointing this out but it is not either or. Both perspectives are correct.
Women perform labor which frees men for the front and give birth to future soldiers.
Children are future soldiers.
I suppose the elderly are innocent enough.
Go back to Armenia. And take your racial cousins’ sense of chutzpah with you.
If I have learned anything from comic books it’s this; exposure to radiation can only result in a positive result such as the ability to fly or super-human strength…
Peace.
That’s my understanding as well – post A-bomb terms not much different than those Japan had sought months earlier. I suppose it could be that the American people needed the A-bombs to convince them that we weren’t being soft.
Well…
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2477708/
I decided to troll my VERY WEAK readers some more.
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/the-ethics-of-nuking-the-ussr/
Hasegawa makes a compelling argument that even in the absence of nuclear weapons Japan would have surrendered anyway due to the Soviet entry in the war which (i) did away with any hopes the Japanese leadership might have of the USSR mediating peace or of there being a fallout between the USSR and America which Japan could use to get more favorable conditions and (ii) meant that the remaining heavy industry of Japan now located in Manchuria and Korea was going to be lost.
https://apjjf.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501/article.pdf
Regarding the atom bombs themselves I find the moralizing pathetic and meaningless, the Allies had been carrying out strategic bombing with the aim of maximizing enemy civilian losses since at least 1942, whether 50,000 civilians are annihilated via conventional means or nuclear means seems to be a pointless debate. Overall, the US decision to employ the nuclear option is completely rational and justified in the context that the US had already adopted a policy of maximum civilian deaths.
Utilitarian calculus is irrelevant – God has declared their lives to be inviolable in war. They cannot be targeted or indiscriminately killed. When the Lord of the universe declares a thing to be off limits, one bows his head and complies.
Peace.
The new transhumanism…HULK SMAAAASH!!!
Peace.
What happens when your opponent disobeys God to gain a military advantage and defeats you as a result?
Are you of the same forum origin as Karlin and myself?
I think you are.
Don’t discuss the forum.
@Anatoly Karlin
Look here, mate, everything in life is about balance and marbles. Try to keep a grip on both. Swallow too many marbles and you end up writing crock. Lose your balance and you lose restraint, sanity, decency, and common sense. Lose your marbles totally and one day you could end up in all sorts of places nice and sensible people don’t go to. Spend all your marbles and you have to churn out rubbish just to make copy. Get it? You don’t have to write to make dough, there are other ways to get bread.
First rule about fight club…
Peace.
This happened, you should read about the French invasion of Algeria. Sometimes you are checkmated and have to bear with patience and look for an opportunity for victory under moral circumstance. Winning by becoming monsters (killing off women and children) is not really winning and the crimes of others do not justify one’s own; sometimes you look for the best terms you can surrender with – there is no shame in this.
If one believes in Divine justice, then one knows that oppressors will get their payback.
I can perhaps see a caveat for a situation where one is literally facing utter annihilation and this may allow one to respond in kind, however this was not the case for the US with regards to Japan. Her power was basically isolated to that island at that point, there was no way she was going to come and bulldoze the US. Some of the best victories against her were at sea.
Peace.
I did, when you had linked to it earlier. He made excellent points.
But why would nuking, say, Tokyo harbor in full view of its citizens not hasten the war as much as did nuking some provincial city? At least for the first attack? The timeline could have been the same after that by making subsequent strikes on a faster schedule (Hiroshima in a few days, Nagasaki a few days after that, at the same time as in real time) if the first nonlethal example wasn’t taken seriously. Seems like total disregard for human life, as was demonstrated over Germany when western Allies avoided industrial targets and just bombed residential areas, total terrorism.
That’s obviously true, but it applies just as much to other war crimes like the firebombing of Tokyo and the British terror bombing campaign against Germany. In all those cases the objective was to kill as many innocent civilians as possible.
As so often this was not a war between the good guys and the bad guys but a war between the bad guys and the other bad guys.
Or possibly the American firebombing raids convinced the Japanese that the Americans were psychopathic barbarians and that there was no point in surrendering since the Americans would then slaughter them all.
I have read accounts by members of the Japanese military who did feel that way at the time.
There could be something in that. There was no way you could even pretend that the West was Christian after the two world wars.
It also explains so much of the west’s self-hatred. Which unfortunately is entirely justified.
Somehow people in the West have to come to terms with the fact that the 20th century makes our claim to be civilised people seem absurd and in poor taste. Unfortunately we’ve chosen to wallow in our self-hatred instead of actually dealing with the failures of our civilisation.
The Japanese have been a lot more sensible. They’ve moved on.
The man was a raving loony. That car accident was a blessing for the world.
I remember reading Fussell’s essay in his book of essays, entitled “Thank God For The Atom Bomb”. An English professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Fussell was a lieutenant in a US infantry division in the ETO of WWII, and was wounded in action. His division was withdrawn to the US in the summer of ’45, training for the anticipated invasion of Japan. He describes how he and his comrades wept with relief when they learned of the atomic bombings.
The Americans didn’t have that many bombs at the outset.
They’d have one more in August 19, and just one more in September; with three bombs coming online every month thereafter.
I suppose this factored into calculations about whether or not to do demonstration strikes.
My first encounter with your posts here, a while ago, after reading perhaps 4 or 5 lines of your prose plus your username I had a strong hunch already that you were this guy. Then a few other posts quickly confirmed this.
It’s the combination of heavy right-wing trolling and erudition that gives it away.
Too many whites can’t accept this. They just want to double down, and blame the Jews.
When whites demonstrate the maturity to accept the civilization they created was flawed on a deep level then the first signs of recovery will emerge. There is no shame in having made a mistake.
Ironically, if you read European literature starting in the late 18th century there is a growing chorus of indigenous European gentile writers describing their disillusion and disaffection with European civilization.
By the early 20th century, figures like Bertrand Russell were openly saying things like “somehow, life in Europe is not satisfying” – this before WW1, at the height of European glory. To my surprise, I found this sentiment widespread among the most random authors when I used to read around in European writers of the era – you would suddenly come upon it in unrelated books.
WW1 itself can be viewed as a spasm of disgust with the whole giant edifice of mechanistic civilization built up.
Today, the soulless mechanistic nature of European civilization has not been left behind, but continues – which is why Europe is literally trying to kill itself through immigration and the like. They can’t stand what they are, and they can’t reform internally, so out of despair they choose extinction.
But the one sure instinct of European elites, inarticulate, dimly felt, is that the soulless mechanistic civilization must die.
Even geniuses can be too smart by half.
So according to you the US was wrong to embargo Japan over China? Why didn’t the Chinese just tell America to butt out since they secretly enjoyed Japanese military occupation and mistreatment?
There was a lot of political pressure in the US to execute Hirohito as a war criminal. It just wasn’t something that any President could sell to the American people after making so much noise about an underhanded sneak attack and the treatment of American POWs by the Japanese. Maybe after a long period of casualties involving downed planes or a failed amphibious assault it could have been but not with the US Navy and Army Air Force having complete control of the air and sea around Japan.
I believe that the decision to spare Hirohito was MacArthur’s alone to make. He was given total control of Japan during the occupation. He realized that it was the best way to avoid guerrilla style war in Japan.
While you could maintain the hereditary throne without Hirohito, it would be difficult to convince the Japanese that you were doing that while executing Hirohito.
I think the Japanese military had a pretty good estimation of how fast the US could build the bombs and thought they could wait until they had their chance to repulse an amphibious assault and get the terms they wanted.
Remember the Enola Gay was completely stripped down to carry the heavy bomb and still get away. The Japanese didn’t use what little was left of their air force to try and intercept it because if was just seen as a few lone aircraft probably doing reconnaissance. Tbe Japanese would have thrown everything they had at future attempts to use the atomic bomb.
Where does the army end and the “people” begin? Even Napoleon said – “An army marches on its stomach”
I suppose the elderly are innocent enough.
Revenge. Payback. Enforcing the consequences of behavior.
Samuel I 15:3 KJV
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.
Does anyone have any good speculations on why Japan just didn’t go after Malay and Indonesia and force the US to come to them without the provocation of Pearl?
Why don’t you name some specifics for once?
I’ve done it before – click on my handle if you’re interested. Consult any history of European literature. Look at Wikipedia.
That you challenge this shows you are astonishingly ignorant of the culture of your own civilization and probably have only a technocratic education.
The title of this book kind of grabs ya…
https://www.amazon.com/Kill-Them-All-Cathars-Albigensian/dp/0752486322
To a certain degree, there were times when even Medieval Christians went bonkers and well past what we would assume to be Christian rules of warfare (but that was usually on heathens and heretics). But I guess they could be forgiven certain episodes since specific doctrines were not fully developed; Aquinas was still soiling his diapers when the above Crusade was ongoing and Grotius was a few centuries away…
One positive development from all this is that the Europeans helped draft a great number of rules to limit warfare (being first hand witnesses to what industrial scale elimination of human beings by bombs, fire, and all other new technologies could do). These rules are pretty much the expected norm around the world and deviations from such brings out revulsion in most people – and this is a very good thing.
Peace.
Does it ever hurt to be so full of empty air?
I think the Mongol Hordes did a pretty good job of depopulating an area if they resisted the offer to join the empire and pledge fealty to the Khan. In fact, widespread elimination of the enemy population was usually a good strategy to keep him from raising another any time soon and practiced all over the world, we just don’t hear much about it.
Too long a supply line given that the US Navy was still intact. The Japanese knew they could not win a war of attrition. Their whole strategy was to draw the US Navy into a decisive battle that would cripple them and give Japan at least a couple of years to consolidate their gains. They also hoped the US civilian population would decide it wasn’t worth getting Americans killed over.
The big problem was that for all the talk of how big each sides navy was, they really weren’t that large. The Japanese would be on station far away from their home bases and the US could use Australia as a staging area. I doubt that Japan could ever pull off a successful invasion of Australia to keep American and British ships and planes from attacking them.
Why didn’t the Japanese try and invade Hawaii when they attacked Pearl? Probably because they knew they didn’t have the resources or would be too easy to detect with slow moving troop transport ships to ever be successful.
I thought we might actually be able to have an interesting conversation, but I guess not.
They did indeed. Steven Pinker mentions (in his book on historic violence):
“High-throughput massacre was also perfected by mounted hordes from the steppes, such as the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks, Magyars, Tatars, Mughals and Manchus.”
I was saying that the Mongol Hordes would have been impressed at how quickly and efficiently it could be achieved. Having the ability to eliminate near 100,000 people within a few minutes to an hour is something that may have brought a tear to eyes of the great Khan.
Peace.
An interesting conversation can only be had between two people of approximately the same level of education.
If your idea of an interesting conversation is for me to give you a course in European literature, that’s not my idea.
I don’t say any of this to insult you – many smart people today have only a technocratic education. It’s a sign of the times. Spend a few hours on the internet educating yourself on basic European literature and art from the late 18th century on, and then I’d be happy to have a conversation with you about it.
But if you’re ignorant of the most basic facts of the subject, there just isn’t any point in talking.
An excellent lecture on many of the less widely unacknowledged difficulties a US invasion of Japan would have faced:
https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/giangrec.htm
On the idea that starvation and bombing would have done them in on their own before the invasion began:
On the idea that it would have been a walkover tactically (usually coming from people who just count KIA on each side for the earlier battles, or equipment nerds who compare things like the Sherman vs the Japanese tanks, etc):
Plenty more worth reading beyond that, such as the fact that two hurricanes were due to strike sites the US would have been using for preparation had the invasions gone forward.
The USA manufactured 1.5 million Purple Hearts (note for foreigners: US military decoration for wounded personnel) in anticipation of Operation Downfall.
All Purple Hearts awarded since then are from the 1945 stockpile.
The invasion of Japan would’ve been a horrific bloodbath on the level of the Eastern Front.
The problem of food was that the US had complete control of the Japanese airspace and Japan would have had almost no capability to replenish their losses. If the US had adopted a siege strategy they would also be running daily strafing raids destroying everything that moved – including down to animal or people drawn carts and farm equipment. Napalm would also do wonders for destoying any patch of growing crops. The question is how long would it take for the population to be weakened enough that they either quit or the US leadership thinks an invasion is likely to succeed and give it a go.
You can be fed well enough to stay alive but not fit to fight.
It’s almost as if, having abandoned religion, they suddenly realised they had no reason to live.
WW1 can be seen as a desperate attempt to give meaning to life.
” … and they had legitimate fears of the spread of Communism in Asia.”
If I think you are coming to spread democracy and human rights crap in my country, I am going to invade you too. Its perfectly legal, according to your logic.
AK what was worse Mao or Japanese occupied China? If the Japanese would have stayed in Manchuria then you would of had no Communism in Asia. That may have well saved millions of lives. But then again Stalin driving the Japs out of Manchuria in 48 hours would have probably happened regardless but who knows?
Anatoly Karlin just like all of the faggoty Weebs out there likes the nuking of Japan because he believes its the reason we have Anime.
Great artistic ability: another gift of the Atom. Is there anything that unrestricted use of nuclear power cannot give us?!!!
HULK SMAAASH!!!
PEACE!
Also, wall climbing powers are awesome! Given this, anti-proliferation people (like myself) should be considered anti-superhumans.
And we haven’t even mentioned fire bombing of Tokyo – which included 100,000 dying in a single night.
Hay Chieh to be serious for a moment how many of those Mao cucks blame his atrocities on the “JAPANESE IMPERIALIST WAR”? Honestly who was worse, Mao or Japanese occupation?
The maozuo are too busy hating on nationalists, they conflate them with the Japanese.
As for Japanese occupation: immaterial since Japan didn’t really have control over their military forces; entire wars a symptom of “military careerism” of relatively low-ranking officers engaging in glory/promotion seeking endeavors. The same lack of control would also exhibit itself as atrocities which would make subsequent efforts at diplomacy impossible. Internal Japanese documents show that the government were aware that they were overstretched, with Manchuria being the greatest extent possible. But the philosophy of gekokujō made restraint impossible.
And with that military careerism and instability, it basically meant that they were agreement incapable and ultimately would get into a futile war with someone, which they did.
There are significant complexities to the power relationships then, including strange situations where German-trained Chinese battalions fought German-allied Japanese soldiers. The Nationalists were sympathetic to the Japanese at times, etc. Nothing was possible, of course, since the Japanese were not agreement capable, or even really had a very stable government.
They were both pretty terrible, just in different ways. Formosa is unique as it was a showcase colony.
Great response, I learned a lot. Thanks!
Peace.
I’m glad that most of the commenters here aren’t buying this rubbish.
As someone who has been to Hiroshima and Nagasaki (both of which, the latter especially, were not actually legitimate military targets) and seen the devastation wreaked on innocent women and children, as well as the way in which the US General HQ literally CENSORED the Japanese newspapers from reporting on radiation sickness for the 6 years of occupation, this strikes me as nothing more than a sick joke.
And of course, you are absolutely correct that in Tokyo the fire-bombings produced damage many times worse, similar to Dresden.
Would you justify the bombing of Dresden as well?
The BOTTOM LINE is THIS:
Americans have NEVER experienced anything REMOTELY close to this.
IMAGINE IF THE TABLES WERE TURNED.
Imagine if, say, Hillary Clinton were elected, and we did actually go to war with Russia, and you lived in Philadelphia, or Boston, or Charlotte, or Chicago, etc., and hundreds of thousands, including many friends and loved ones, were killed, or even worse, brutally maimed but still survived, by a missile strike from Russia.
WHAT IF MANY OF THE VICTIMS DID NOT EVEN SUPPORT THE WAR IN THE FIRST PLACE?
Those who have not experienced this DO NOT have ANY right to make moral judgments justifying the slaughter of innocents.
REMEMBER THAT THE ATOM BOMBS WERE DEVELOPED ALMOST ENTIRELY BY JEWS:
Oppenheimer led the Manhattan Project and filled it with Jews like Teller, Von Neumann, Segre, etc., and the original letter to FDR advocating the development of an atom bomb was sent by two Jews Einstein and Szilard (who ironically both later tried to prevent it from being used, but it was too late by then!)
Looking at what a sorry state the US is in now, as a virtual puppet state of Israel, can one even say that ‘winning the war’ was a good outcome?
Also, ironically, other than Israel, the other nation that pretty much ‘owns’ the US economically is Communist China, which is the very nation that the Japanese Army was fighting against the most in WWII!
So even from a pure utilitarian perspective, this is utter stupidity.
In the 1980s, I had an opportunity to spend time with the Japanese Self-Defense Forces in Okinawa on a US-Japanese military exchange. I had a number of interesting exchanges with a very articulate Japanese officer.
He said that, without question, the Japanese would have used the atomic bomb against the Americans in WWII if they had it. They would not have hesitated.
He also said that Japanese today often find it hard to understand their ancestors; that is, the culture of militarism circa WWII. Since the Japanese surrender and American occupation, Japan (like Germany) has come to realize that everything it could have hoped to achieve in WWII with “hard” power has been achieved with “soft” power — economic power and diplomacy.
A quick glance at the wealth and status of post-WWII Japan and Germany and you wonder who won the war.
Too long a supply line
Tokyo to Jarkarta – 3599
San Francisco to Jarkarta – 8673
San Francisco to Singapore – 8449
Tokyo to Singapore – 3307
You have a reading comprehension problem. You missed the part about Australia being the staging area for British and American forces (not to mention Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand). You know like Britain was for the Normandy landings.
It seems Japan did explode an atomic bomb in Korea but it was too little too late. By that time their navy and air force were almost non-existent and the bomb could never be delivered in any manner that would be useful to Japan.
Japan had its infamous unit 731 devoping chemical and biological warefare on civilians and POWs in Korea. They developed a strain of bubonic plage that they tried to get to the US on balloons riding the jet stream in ceramic jars that would break on impact and release the infected fleas in the nothern US. It failed as the low temperature killed all the fleas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
The point is, there’s no certainty of a time or date by which Japan could have been starved into submission. In a few months? A year? A year and a half? Two years? The one thing they knew for sure was that the Japanese had fought to the absolute bitter end in almost every battle in a way no other nation’s troops made a habit of doing.
An open-ended wait-and-see approach would have been unacceptable to American war planners. For one thing, bomb or no bomb, there was a fixed date for the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan. The longer the wait, the more time the Soviets would have had to extend their gains in Asia. Post-war spheres of influence were already a major concern for US policy (indeed it is commonly accepted that intimidating the Soviets was one of the motives to drop the bombs on Japan).
Remember, no one was anticipating the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek’s regime just a couple of years later. China was expected to remain an important post-war US ally. So while the US sat and waited for Japan to starve, the Soviets would not only have finished off the Japanese in Manchuria and Korea but likely extended their campaign into Japan’s remaining holdings in China proper, putting the Chinese Communists in a much stronger position (it was already plain to see that in Eastern Europe the Soviets were not relinquishing their influence over any of the territory the Red Army had taken from the Germans).
So if there were no atomic bombs, an invasion was almost certainly in the cards. And there was, as the piece I linked mentioned, a very strict timetable for when the invasion would have had to have been launched, based on seasonal weather conditions and the fact that any delay would have given the Japanese more time to prepare their defenses.
You have a reading comprehension problem.
Actually not. I am a pretty good reader and usually understand what I read.
All that war material shit didn’t grow out of the ground in Britain, nor did it in NZ or Australia, it had to be transported in from some other location, like SF.
Whereas, oil, rubber and shit actually grows out of the ground in Malay and Indonesia.
But thanks for trying to answer the question.
They were quite the thing in the late 40’s. By the 50’s everyone was very down on them. Even hard core militarists changed their rhetoric. No upside in defending the decision to use them.
It is conventional wisdom among elites that bombing Japan was unnecessary.
Only the unwashed like Paul Fussell continued to favor it.
Do you seriously not get how a staging area works. It lets you convoy in your supplies and the embark on your operation once you have sufficient supplies at your staging area. It’s qualitatively different then trying to supply you army without a staging ground. If your supplies on they way to a staging area get sunk then you delay your mission. If your supplies on their way to an advancing army get sunk well then you are screwed.
I’m familiar with the Japanese atomic bomb program … and their success in exploding a demo bomb in Korea just as the war was coming to an end. Stalin’s troops rushed into Korea shortly after. Most of the Japanese team disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. Stalin folded the Japanese team into the Soviet Union’s own atomic program.
An American war correspondent reported on the Japanese exploding a demo bomb. As I recall the story, he had actually seen the flash. The MSM dismissed this as preposterous. The report did not go further than a short in the inside pages.
One of the Japanese scientists on the Japanese program eventually ended up working on the post-WWII American atomic program. He provided the Americans with design documents and other material making it clear that the Japanese team had been ready for a demonstration. American scientists ignored the material.
The common assumption in America that it was impossible for a socially, culturally, and intellectually inferior nation like Japan to develop an atomic bomb. Therefore, reports that Japan had developed and exploded an atomic bomb had to be mistaken.
So satire week here.