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When Japan's emperor recently announced his future resignation, he didn't say "I resign", he talked about his age and deteriorating health. In all likelihood st

by pluma 8y ago

When Japan's emperor recently announced his future resignation, he didn't say "I resign", he talked about his age and deteriorating health. In all likelihood straight out saying "we surrender" would have been inconceivable, especially if the surrender is supposed to be unconditional, potentially with a Nuremberg treatment of the god-emperor. You can blame the culture for not using communication efficiently, but saying a "null" answer to the demands of surrender was sufficient reason to one-up the violence by becoming the first and only country to use nuclear weapons and the first and only country to use nuclear weapons specifically against civilians, is absurd. (To be clear: what I'm saying is that even with a gun to his head, the emperor probably wouldn't have simply said "okay, we surrender", at least no publicly)

krapp 8y ago
>(To be clear: what I'm saying is that even with a gun to his head, the emperor probably wouldn't have simply said "okay, we surrender", at least no publicly) But that's what actually happened. The military was afraid the emperor would surrender and launched a coup on the palace, and the record containing the announcement of Japan's surrender had to be snuck out in a pile of laundry. And to be fair, Japan's current emperor can't legally resign or even ask to resign because of restrictions on imperial political influence imposed by postwar law, since abdication would require changing the constitution.
Amezarak 8y ago
> You can blame the culture for not using communication efficiently, but saying a "null" answer to the demands of surrender was sufficient reason to one-up the violence by becoming the first and only country to use nuclear weapons and the first and only country to use nuclear weapons specifically against civilians, is absurd. I have trouble understanding why killing a few hundred thousand civilians in a nuclear attack is in some way qualitatively different in a moral sense from killing a few hundred thousand civilians in firebombings. The only difference was tactical: now we can and will kill you with even less effort and risk. The US had bombed out most Japanese cities and countless civilians had died in the bombings. The firebombing of Tokyo alone killed as many as many as 200k, easily the same scale as the nuclear bombings. I think the intense focus on the nuclear bombings is misleading. There was no "one-upping" or escalation. The same level of violence was perpetrated by a new method.
- mc32 8y ago
  I think that comes ftom people who want to examine war from a moral/amoral and aggressiveness PoV who minimize the threat as we saw it from the SU gaining a foothold in East Asia as well as a desire to not protract a war on Japanese soil where the local pop was more or less trained as militias. It’s a bit of wishful thinking, good intent, but still wishful.
  - pluma 8y ago
    Your POV only works if you assume that Soviet Union invading Japan is an undesirable outcome for the Allies. Japan had good reasons to want to avoid a Soviet occupation because they had only just recovered territory they had previously lost to Russia. Was it in the US's best interests to escalate the use of force? Sure. But I'm not American and this isn't the 1940s so I see no reason to judge the decision on those terms.
    - mc32 8y ago
      With China in Civil war, it was paramount to bring over the Japanese to the new western alliance and keep it out of the forming soviet bloc.
      - pluma 8y ago
        Paramount to achieving what exactly? And in whose best interest? This sounds a lot like post-hoc rationalization. Are you trying to argue that a Japanese SSR would have tipped the scales so significantly the Soviets could have succeeded (and then done what exactly? start a nuclear war?)? Or that Japan itself would have been worse off (if so, why do you care if you're not Japanese?)? You'd think legitimizing such an unprecedented, traumatizing, unspeakable act like using nuclear weapons would require something more plausible than "well, we really didn't want them to be annexed by the Soviets".
- knorker 8y ago
  > I have trouble understanding why killing a few hundred thousand civilians in a nuclear attack is in some way qualitatively different in a moral sense from killing a few hundred thousand civilians in firebombings. There was an evacuation of civilians, during the Vietnam war I believe[1], where the evacuees had to walk a narrow bridge to a boat. One man panicked and started pushing his way through, pushing people into the water. A military official walked up to the man and shot him in the head. There were no more paniced pushes by anyone, and everyone was saved. This doesn't mean that an innocent person panicking is worthy of the death penalty. Would there even have been a mass panic? We'll never know. Would arresting the man have been enough to prevent it? We'll never know. > The only difference was tactical: now we can and will kill you with even less effort and risk. The US had bombed out most Japanese cities and countless civilians had died in the bombings. The firebombing of Tokyo alone killed as many as many as 200k, easily the same scale as the nuclear bombings. Exactly. And this is the difference morally as well. The firebombing of Tokyo did not cause surrender. It wasn't until two bombs showed just how effortlessly the US could from now on wage the war that reality could immediately not be denied. Yes, the main reason for the US to use the bombs instead of many planes with firebombing were to reduce their own military casualties and to show the Soviets what the new world order will be. But in another analogy: A criminal may fight one police officer, but it takes a special kind of criminal to choose to fight an armed SWAT team with only fists. If I wanted to make excuses for the US I could add that in a total war there are no civilians. Japan's cultural expectation here was that every man, woman, and child would die before surrendering. A wake-up call can effectively shorten the war for both sides. Firebombings were evidently not enough of one. Dan Carlin's currently talking about the Japanese side of WWII. I highly recommend his work. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supernova-in-the-east-i/ https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supern... [1] this isn't about the morality of the war in Vietnam.

by pluma 8y ago

krapp 8y ago

>(To be clear: what I'm saying is that even with a gun to his head, the emperor probably wouldn't have simply said "okay, we surrender", at least no publicly) But that's what actually happened. The military was afraid the emperor would surrender and launched a coup on the palace, and the record containing the announcement of Japan's surrender had to be snuck out in a pile of laundry. And to be fair, Japan's current emperor can't legally resign or even ask to resign because of restrictions on imperial political influence imposed by postwar law, since abdication would require changing the constitution.

Amezarak 8y ago

> You can blame the culture for not using communication efficiently, but saying a "null" answer to the demands of surrender was sufficient reason to one-up the violence by becoming the first and only country to use nuclear weapons and the first and only country to use nuclear weapons specifically against civilians, is absurd. I have trouble understanding why killing a few hundred thousand civilians in a nuclear attack is in some way qualitatively different in a moral sense from killing a few hundred thousand civilians in firebombings. The only difference was tactical: now we can and will kill you with even less effort and risk. The US had bombed out most Japanese cities and countless civilians had died in the bombings. The firebombing of Tokyo alone killed as many as many as 200k, easily the same scale as the nuclear bombings. I think the intense focus on the nuclear bombings is misleading. There was no "one-upping" or escalation. The same level of violence was perpetrated by a new method.

mc32 8y ago
I think that comes ftom people who want to examine war from a moral/amoral and aggressiveness PoV who minimize the threat as we saw it from the SU gaining a foothold in East Asia as well as a desire to not protract a war on Japanese soil where the local pop was more or less trained as militias. It’s a bit of wishful thinking, good intent, but still wishful.
- pluma 8y ago
  Your POV only works if you assume that Soviet Union invading Japan is an undesirable outcome for the Allies. Japan had good reasons to want to avoid a Soviet occupation because they had only just recovered territory they had previously lost to Russia. Was it in the US's best interests to escalate the use of force? Sure. But I'm not American and this isn't the 1940s so I see no reason to judge the decision on those terms.
  - mc32 8y ago
    With China in Civil war, it was paramount to bring over the Japanese to the new western alliance and keep it out of the forming soviet bloc.
    - pluma 8y ago
      Paramount to achieving what exactly? And in whose best interest? This sounds a lot like post-hoc rationalization. Are you trying to argue that a Japanese SSR would have tipped the scales so significantly the Soviets could have succeeded (and then done what exactly? start a nuclear war?)? Or that Japan itself would have been worse off (if so, why do you care if you're not Japanese?)? You'd think legitimizing such an unprecedented, traumatizing, unspeakable act like using nuclear weapons would require something more plausible than "well, we really didn't want them to be annexed by the Soviets".
knorker 8y ago
> I have trouble understanding why killing a few hundred thousand civilians in a nuclear attack is in some way qualitatively different in a moral sense from killing a few hundred thousand civilians in firebombings. There was an evacuation of civilians, during the Vietnam war I believe[1], where the evacuees had to walk a narrow bridge to a boat. One man panicked and started pushing his way through, pushing people into the water. A military official walked up to the man and shot him in the head. There were no more paniced pushes by anyone, and everyone was saved. This doesn't mean that an innocent person panicking is worthy of the death penalty. Would there even have been a mass panic? We'll never know. Would arresting the man have been enough to prevent it? We'll never know. > The only difference was tactical: now we can and will kill you with even less effort and risk. The US had bombed out most Japanese cities and countless civilians had died in the bombings. The firebombing of Tokyo alone killed as many as many as 200k, easily the same scale as the nuclear bombings. Exactly. And this is the difference morally as well. The firebombing of Tokyo did not cause surrender. It wasn't until two bombs showed just how effortlessly the US could from now on wage the war that reality could immediately not be denied. Yes, the main reason for the US to use the bombs instead of many planes with firebombing were to reduce their own military casualties and to show the Soviets what the new world order will be. But in another analogy: A criminal may fight one police officer, but it takes a special kind of criminal to choose to fight an armed SWAT team with only fists. If I wanted to make excuses for the US I could add that in a total war there are no civilians. Japan's cultural expectation here was that every man, woman, and child would die before surrendering. A wake-up call can effectively shorten the war for both sides. Firebombings were evidently not enough of one. Dan Carlin's currently talking about the Japanese side of WWII. I highly recommend his work. https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supernova-in-the-east-i/ https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-62-supern... [1] this isn't about the morality of the war in Vietnam.