As a history major, whos studied inside and outside college classrooms in great depth the history of the world and the wars and the causes and the effects I can say you're right on about the hypocrisy of war. Any sane person will never justify killing another human being. War simplifies that statement by using fear to create an enemy that is not a human being. Brainwashing and bootcamps remove the will of a man to be willful and beat into his mind that killing is the way. Having considered both sides of the hiroshima statement I will say this. Not dropping the bombs would have resulted in at least a million more causalities. Just as dropping it effected hundreds of thousands of people and you could even argue billions by the knowledge of the effect it had. In all honesty, dropping the bomb is one of the reasons no country has dropped one since, not on another country. The devastation and aftermath is not one country's problem alone, but a problem for the world and not just mankind. One cannot justify killing, because it's not justifiable, even if emotion if the driving force. I'd like to end my statement with what I consider to be the best speech I've heard to date by Robert Kennedy. It's called Mindless Menace. Here's the video. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_Vll-t0H6A]Robert F. Kennedy speech ~ Mindless Menace of Violence - YouTube[/ame]
Yes, because in 1945 Japan was a peace loving nation that never hurt anyone. Occupation of China? What's that? All of their men fighting to the death, and putting our marines in some of the deadliest battles in the war, and there is no reason to expect different from the fucking main land. And Oh yeah, the Japanese had already tested one nuke by the time we attacked. AND BESIDES THE FUCKING POINT, Fire bombing in tokyo and other major city killed over five to ten times as many people as the atom bombs did. Stop pulling straws.
The occupation of China was decided by the Japanese GOVERNMENT, the actions of a government should not be punished by killing CIVILIANS. The people of a country are not the same entity as the government, they're just forced to go along with whatever they're told. Plus your logic is kinda flawed, "Japan killed lots of people in China, so it's ok for us to kill lots of Japanese" Where's the humanity in that?
Not only their men, but their women and children as well. You also cannot forget their occupation of Korea, the way the japanese went into each school in Korea and chose the prettiest girls to be sex slaves in Japan, while promising their families more bags of rice, as well as stripping all koreans of their heritage, their birth names and giving them all japanese names in place of their original names. The girls who werent chosen to be sex slaves were givin sticks in place of a bayonet and practiced 6+ hours a day stabbing at targets to prepare to be the first on the line when the americans attacked. The japanese used propaganda to tell their people that we would be merciless and rape and kill them all if every man, woman, and child didn't grab a stick and attack and they planned to use those unarmed civilians as the first waves, because they knew that the U.S. as a culture valued the lives of children, whereas japan saw our value as a weakness to exploit. The koreans and japanese were shocked when our soldiers finally rolled into town and not only didn't kill them, but gave the children chocolate and toys. The japanese also told korean boys that if they joined the military they'd give them more rice (since the whole of korea was slowly starving to death) and then after joining, the japanese turned them into kamikaze pilots. The book "when my name was Keoko" discusses japans atrocities in great detail. Also, the book hiroshima discusses the point of view of people who were actually bombed. One man was bombed at both hiroshima and nakasaki after fleeing hiroshima and lived to tell about both bombings. The other documentary, the rape of nanking is so explicit, I caution most people to be prepared when watching it. I turned it off after the part where a boy watched the japanese bayonet his mother while she was breast feeding. She picked up her baby and kept trying to breast feed as blood gushed from her lungs because she didn't want the baby to get trampled by the people running over dead bodies to get away from the invading japanese who were slaughtering civilians. Japan denied this happened at all until recently, despite mountains of video and picture evidence documenting it all. They raped every woman and child they came across and then left them nude for anyone to see them. This was extremely dishonorable and japan did it on purpose to inflict emotional damage to the families of the victims. Anyone who's taken a cultural history class or the history of china/korea/japan knows the above. No doubt the U.S. is good at killing. How do you think we became the top military power in the world? Worse yet, after world war 2 we pardoned some of the worst nazi leaders such as Josef Mengele, who was known as the angel of death for his human experiments. Some of the worst experiments ever done and makes the movie saw look like sesame street. He got off because his research was valuable to us and we wanted to know what happens if you put a human at a high altitude without protection or microwave someone alive or how long it takes for fleas to kill a child, he was the guy who did this shit and we let him go because his research was beneficial. No doubt human beings of all cultures are hypocrites, its human nature, just as justifying horrible acts is also human nature. I find a lot of fault in the ops post, because I've actually studied this stuff and not taken it from one source. The germans thought they had the bomb, in fact, we bugged the hotel they were being forced to stay in thinking they might give up some secrets which they never did. It wasn't until einstein had found fault in their formula that they could be heard gasping through the little mics in their rooms as news of the bomb being dropped reached them. They had added about 1000 times more uranium to their bomb than was necessary. We were actually racing russia to get german technology after the war because the treaty between russia and the u.s. and britian was no longer necessary, the war was over. This race, eventually led to many more conflicts such as the cold war, part of the korean war since north korea was backed by russia and china and supplied a govt foundation (yes, the koreans studied the govts of the world before they chose the one that enabled the leader of the country to have the most control and decided on Russia's form of govt.) our introduction of osama bin laden as we provided his side with weapons while russia supplied his enemies with weapons and bombs training. These "secret wars" where we were basically the shadow govt behind the war have happened countless time in U.S. history.
War has always and I mean always been aimed at civilians. Study any war in history and that is evident. Even during the crusades, the christians had the backing of the church that all their mortal sins during war would be forgiven. With that knowledge, they raped and murdered every person who didn't convert in the name of god they came across. It's basic human war, no logic required.
Oh jesus christ, another one of these simplistic, narrow minded threads about how the US shouldn't have dropped the bombs. There's thousands of different aspects to this engagement, and I am tired of hearing the same rehashed "what about the civilians!1!!1" rhetoric. Let me break it down to you simpletons- less people (soldiers AND civilians) died by dropping the bomb than by not dropping the bomb. This is only 1 aspect of among thousands of ethical, logistical, strategic, and moral aspects that had been tediously and meticulously lamented over by allied High command for YEARS Dropping the bombs ended the biggest conflict mankind has ever faced. The war had raged on for over half a decade and killed over 50 million people, the war needed to end.
Oh Jesus Christ, you didn't read the article. Let me break it down for you; "As for the utilitarian calculus of "saving American lies," historian Ralph Raico explains: "[T]he rationale for the atomic bombings has come to rest on a single colossal fabrication, which has gained surprising currency: that they were necessary in order to save a half-million or more American lives. These, supposedly, are the lives that would have been lost in the planned invasion of Kyushu in December, then in the all-out invasion of Honshu the next year, if that was needed. But the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese home islands was forty-six thousand American lives lost."" "A 1946 U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey determined the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nukings were not decisive in ending the war. Most of the political and military brass agreed. "The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing," said Dwight Eisenhower in a 1963 interview with Newsweek." Hiroshima: Quotes <--survey
America knew the war was coming to and end, and that other countries (specifically Russia) needed to know that "We have a bigger stick than you".
it shows that we don't fuck around. yes, cavillians were lost. but this war was huge. and many of my main points have already been covered. who's dropped a nuke on foreign territory since then? no one. testing is different, and north korea is just a hell hole. cavillians or soldiers, it doesn't matter. they're still humans, and dropping those bombs saved millions of lives, i guarantee it.
So would you justify the attack on 9/11 because we too are a war mongering empire? That's not beside the point at all, did you read the article? "For more evidence suggesting that the Truman administration was out to draw Japanese blood for its own sake, or as a show of force for reasons of Realpolitik, consider the United States's one-thousand-plane bombing of Tokyo on August 14, the largest bombing raid of the Pacific war, after Hirohito agreed to surrender and the Japanese state made it clear it wanted peace." You guys didn't read the article either. So you also support the tactics of terrorism? Or are American civilians worth more than Japanese ones?
japan was testing nukes, right? they were in the process of nuking us. if we wouldn't have beat them to it, they would have attempted to do that over here. just two nukes placed in a certain spot could easily kill 10 million+ people. new york had a population of about 7.5 million in 1945. 3,620,962 people lived in chicago at the time when the bombs were dropped. taking into account of the many residential and outskirts of these large cities, at least, at least 15 million lives would be lost. approximately 246,000 lives were lost in that japan bombings. so you tell me. would you rather have japan bombed and lose 246,000 lives, or bomb chocago and new york and lose at least 15 million? i vote for japan. not being mean to the japanese, they're very nice people. but we chose the smarter way out. even though i think the use of nukes is unnecessary, it stopped the war. thank you, have a nice day.
well to be honest i dont think the Japanese had the same range with their nuclear bombers as we did. We have/had the best navy in the world, tripple the amount of carriers . Moving a carrier into striking range on the east or west coast of United States would have been very very hard. Especially after pearl harbor....Since for the most part, the action took in Asia/europe /africa, we were able to get our carriers much closer to Japan then they would have ever been able to get to our shores. ww2 was the last war that United States of America wanted to win.
No offence, but all of that was ignorant and pretty ridiculous. Vote for no one to be bombed. It's an option; your false duality is sickening. Thank YOU, have a nice day.