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I grew up with a cold war era US-centric understanding of why Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to happen. I get those arguments, Later I was taught a very different,

I grew up with a cold war era US-centric understanding of why Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to happen. I get those arguments, Later I was taught a very different, also compelling, rationale for Nagazaki from a Japanese perspective. I get that argument, too. I'm USian, so of course I like any argument that puts the US on the right side of history. But as that moment gets more and more into the past, and we lose the context of culture, etc of that time, what is left is that the US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition. I've been taught the nuances. I've accepted them and perhaps even clung to them. As time passes, even USians might feel less need to keep the memory of those nuances alive. But the horror of that action doesn't go away. I grew up learning about Christopher Columbus, and Pocahontas and Thomas Jefferson, and all the narrative we learned decades ago. Especially lately there has been a lot different version of much of those stories. Some see people and actions of the past as heroic, others see them as hideous. I do not personally condemn decision makers of WWII. I am grateful for the sacrifices of past generations. But the fact remains that the US is the only country in the history of the world that has ever used a nuclear weapon in anger. That is extremely humbling.

MangoCoffee 6y ago
Imperial Japan during WWII deserved getting atomic bomb drop on them. Those nuke doesn't even come close to what they have done to the Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese and every Asian countries they have invaded. Imperial Japan should get 10 atomic bomb drop on them for Nanjing Massacre. Imperial Japan use Chinese as test subject for bio and chemical weapon. They have committed far greater crime against humanity than Nazi.
- GolDDranks 6y ago
  What if you don't believe that Hammurabi kind of thinking? (Especially when it comes to bombing civilians.) Japan had already lost the war.
  - barrenko 6y ago
    The bomb, while vicious, probably stopped the war on many more fronts than just in the Pacific.
- Razengan 6y ago
  What do China and Korea ""deserve"" for what they did to their own citizens? What does China """deserve""" for what they’re doing to Hong Kong and Uyghurs right now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests You will not run out of digging up other stuff like that.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    And that's why nuclear weapons exist - not to stop "plenty of other stuff like that", but because they're just another example of "plenty of other stuff like that." Collectively humans are belligerent, acquisitive, tribal, and stupid. We keep hoping and telling ourselves we're better than that, but so far there's disappointingly little evidence we are.
  - thefounder 6y ago
    Give me a break with HK and Uyghurs! "Nobody" really cares about them! It's all a pretext. Remember Guantanamo Bay or the recent endeavors by SA?
- quietbritishjim 6y ago
  A country, as a whole, is not an individual person and therefore can't "deserve" anything. What you're describing are acts by citizens of Imperial Japan (some decisions made high up or at the top, some made by individual units or soldiers) and killing of other people in the country. Some people who were responsible for atrocities were no doubt affected (either personally killed or people they loved were killed which of course would impact them emotionally) but for the most part you're talking about killing people who had no influence whatsoever on use of weapons in China or any other atrocity. Those people, without almost no exception whatsoever, had no say on what their citizenship was. The technical term for what you're describing is "collective punishment". Personally, I see it as a logical fallacy: failure to see that a country is not a single collective consciousness.
  - brabel 6y ago
    > The technical term for what you're describing is "collective punishment". Which is the same kind of thinking that justifies genocide and racism in general.
- thedevilslawyer 6y ago
  To actually engage with your rhethoric - a country is a conceptual entity - defined by some geo parameters. Bombs kill people. So when you say "Japan should get 10 atomic bomb drops", perhaps you can link to the 10 cities wikipedia pages whose people you're willing to wipe out?
jessaustin 6y ago
I'd suggest that using the bomb against Japan was not the real sin. The real sin, and the real idiotic blunder, was not to immediately renounce the use of nuclear weapons and institute an international order to safeguard that renunciation. From 1945 to 1949, Stalin did not have the bomb, and until the very last he had no good reason to believe he would have it anytime soon. USSR would have been very open to negotiations on that topic in 1946. The rest of the world would have fallen in line. Humanity would have been so much safer. It's possible FDR would have been wise enough to do this, and Henry Wallace probably would have been. Truman, though, was over his head. The evil bastards led him around by the nose. We've never had an actual representative government since then.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- boomboomsubban 6y ago
  I don't understand how we would stop other countries from building one by saying the US wouldn't build any more. It seems more likely that someplace like Israel would have still developed one in secret and then used it for widespread conquest.
  - jessaustin 6y ago
    That's not what I meant by a new international order. At the same time everyone was signing treaties and creating UN, it would have been real easy for nearly every shell-shocked nation to commit not to building nukes, in a way that would make violations really hurt. Like such a nation would immediately suffer 50% tariffs from every other nation. Or they would be fair game for any aggression from neighbors. It wasn't easy to build nuclear weapons in 1946. Only one nation had done it. Sure one can imagine that a nation could decide to take a flyer on nukes and thereby suffer global opprobrium, but most of the nations we'd imagine in that role didn't exist in 1946 in the way that they exist now. That included Israel, which didn't actually exist at all then.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
im_down_w_otp 6y ago
I, like you, learned all the rationalizations that got to be written in history by the victor. The point at which most of it started to unravel for me was when I learned that the United States had a whole spate of atomic bombs they were scheduling to drop if Imperial Japan didn't surrender. We think of it as two because that's all the further we got, but if things had gone a little differently it would have been six, eight, etc. A willingness to cause that kind of unprecedented basically indiscriminate devastation, well it forced me to look at the events that actually did happen through a very different lens.
- scatters 6y ago
  Unprecedented? The firebombing of Tokyo (and before that Dresden) witnessed similar levels of destruction and casualties.
- mjevans 6y ago
  These acts of destruction should be compared to the full context of the historic moment and not observed in isolation. At the time the US had been dragged in to the war by a surprise bombing that, while targeted at a military installation, was not backed by any declaration of hostilities. The ensuing battles from island to island were also brutal and from every documentary I've ever seen and every historical account I've ever read painted a very clear picture: that conventional war would not end without far higher casualties on both sides and a protracted land battle with guerilla warfare and atrocities committed by all sides. In that context an overwhelming and undeniable show of force arguably lead to less death on the obvious side, but also of those who would have been consumed on the side that surrendered as well. Consideration of the 'lessons learned' from (then, possibly either, 'the great war' or WWI) also required the consideration of recovery after the war. My supposition is that for Japan the outcome is probably within the best likely range of variations. Cultural identity intact; culture nudged towards an easy, slow, movement towards global integration, tolerance and equality; a post-war rebuilding effort to ensure that recovery would stick and general prosperity would persist. We should be so lucky to reflect upon the post-war lessons and once again apply them within as a New-New Deal. I hope that is how we apply the lessons of recovering from the world wars to recovering from the current 'war' on the pandemic (and all of the forces that cause it to be as bad as it has been; most domestic).
bart_spoon 6y ago
> US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition. One particular nuance you are passing over is that the US (and all other major combatants in the war) had already been engaged in the killing of thousands of civilians through total war and "conventional" carpet bombing. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unique in that they were leveled from a single, nuclear bomb, but they absolutely were not unique in that they were leveled. Dozens of other Japanese cities experience the same level of destruction (literally 90+% of all structures destroyed) using firebombing (as in Napalm, used intentionally as most Japanese structures at the time were wooden) as the US pushed towards the Japanese mainland. And the US wasn't alone: the bombing of entire cities was a feature of the the Western German front and the German-Russian front, by both the Allies and the Axis. So while you aren't wrong that dropping the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially the US flexing its technological muscles, I am curious as to why it is considered abhorrent to kill thousands of civilians using a single "nuclear weapon in anger", but the killing of just as many civilians using many bombs seems to be accepted as just a part of the war?
- kubanczyk 6y ago
  Yes. If anything it's a good lesson about wars: for the British to attack German cities it was a hard decision and it was to-be-or-not-to-be for their country. So at first it wasn't The Revenge. But as they were on their 250th night bombing they just did the same as on 249th, but more efficiently. They used their cached reasons or were cherry-picking new reasons as needed provided that these reasons supported what they were already doing (chiefly the revenge argument that I deem unethical - and British probably would had consider as unethical before the war). They didn't seriously reconsider if they were still in to-be-or-not-to-be mode.

MangoCoffee 6y ago

Imperial Japan during WWII deserved getting atomic bomb drop on them. Those nuke doesn't even come close to what they have done to the Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese and every Asian countries they have invaded. Imperial Japan should get 10 atomic bomb drop on them for Nanjing Massacre. Imperial Japan use Chinese as test subject for bio and chemical weapon. They have committed far greater crime against humanity than Nazi.

GolDDranks 6y ago
What if you don't believe that Hammurabi kind of thinking? (Especially when it comes to bombing civilians.) Japan had already lost the war.
- barrenko 6y ago
  The bomb, while vicious, probably stopped the war on many more fronts than just in the Pacific.
Razengan 6y ago
What do China and Korea ""deserve"" for what they did to their own citizens? What does China """deserve""" for what they’re doing to Hong Kong and Uyghurs right now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests You will not run out of digging up other stuff like that.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  And that's why nuclear weapons exist - not to stop "plenty of other stuff like that", but because they're just another example of "plenty of other stuff like that." Collectively humans are belligerent, acquisitive, tribal, and stupid. We keep hoping and telling ourselves we're better than that, but so far there's disappointingly little evidence we are.
- thefounder 6y ago
  Give me a break with HK and Uyghurs! "Nobody" really cares about them! It's all a pretext. Remember Guantanamo Bay or the recent endeavors by SA?
quietbritishjim 6y ago
A country, as a whole, is not an individual person and therefore can't "deserve" anything. What you're describing are acts by citizens of Imperial Japan (some decisions made high up or at the top, some made by individual units or soldiers) and killing of other people in the country. Some people who were responsible for atrocities were no doubt affected (either personally killed or people they loved were killed which of course would impact them emotionally) but for the most part you're talking about killing people who had no influence whatsoever on use of weapons in China or any other atrocity. Those people, without almost no exception whatsoever, had no say on what their citizenship was. The technical term for what you're describing is "collective punishment". Personally, I see it as a logical fallacy: failure to see that a country is not a single collective consciousness.
- brabel 6y ago
  > The technical term for what you're describing is "collective punishment". Which is the same kind of thinking that justifies genocide and racism in general.
thedevilslawyer 6y ago
To actually engage with your rhethoric - a country is a conceptual entity - defined by some geo parameters. Bombs kill people. So when you say "Japan should get 10 atomic bomb drops", perhaps you can link to the 10 cities wikipedia pages whose people you're willing to wipe out?

jessaustin 6y ago

I'd suggest that using the bomb against Japan was not the real sin. The real sin, and the real idiotic blunder, was not to immediately renounce the use of nuclear weapons and institute an international order to safeguard that renunciation. From 1945 to 1949, Stalin did not have the bomb, and until the very last he had no good reason to believe he would have it anytime soon. USSR would have been very open to negotiations on that topic in 1946. The rest of the world would have fallen in line. Humanity would have been so much safer. It's possible FDR would have been wise enough to do this, and Henry Wallace probably would have been. Truman, though, was over his head. The evil bastards led him around by the nose. We've never had an actual representative government since then.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
boomboomsubban 6y ago
I don't understand how we would stop other countries from building one by saying the US wouldn't build any more. It seems more likely that someplace like Israel would have still developed one in secret and then used it for widespread conquest.
- jessaustin 6y ago
  That's not what I meant by a new international order. At the same time everyone was signing treaties and creating UN, it would have been real easy for nearly every shell-shocked nation to commit not to building nukes, in a way that would make violations really hurt. Like such a nation would immediately suffer 50% tariffs from every other nation. Or they would be fair game for any aggression from neighbors. It wasn't easy to build nuclear weapons in 1946. Only one nation had done it. Sure one can imagine that a nation could decide to take a flyer on nukes and thereby suffer global opprobrium, but most of the nations we'd imagine in that role didn't exist in 1946 in the way that they exist now. That included Israel, which didn't actually exist at all then.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago

im_down_w_otp 6y ago

I, like you, learned all the rationalizations that got to be written in history by the victor. The point at which most of it started to unravel for me was when I learned that the United States had a whole spate of atomic bombs they were scheduling to drop if Imperial Japan didn't surrender. We think of it as two because that's all the further we got, but if things had gone a little differently it would have been six, eight, etc. A willingness to cause that kind of unprecedented basically indiscriminate devastation, well it forced me to look at the events that actually did happen through a very different lens.

scatters 6y ago
Unprecedented? The firebombing of Tokyo (and before that Dresden) witnessed similar levels of destruction and casualties.
mjevans 6y ago
These acts of destruction should be compared to the full context of the historic moment and not observed in isolation. At the time the US had been dragged in to the war by a surprise bombing that, while targeted at a military installation, was not backed by any declaration of hostilities. The ensuing battles from island to island were also brutal and from every documentary I've ever seen and every historical account I've ever read painted a very clear picture: that conventional war would not end without far higher casualties on both sides and a protracted land battle with guerilla warfare and atrocities committed by all sides. In that context an overwhelming and undeniable show of force arguably lead to less death on the obvious side, but also of those who would have been consumed on the side that surrendered as well. Consideration of the 'lessons learned' from (then, possibly either, 'the great war' or WWI) also required the consideration of recovery after the war. My supposition is that for Japan the outcome is probably within the best likely range of variations. Cultural identity intact; culture nudged towards an easy, slow, movement towards global integration, tolerance and equality; a post-war rebuilding effort to ensure that recovery would stick and general prosperity would persist. We should be so lucky to reflect upon the post-war lessons and once again apply them within as a New-New Deal. I hope that is how we apply the lessons of recovering from the world wars to recovering from the current 'war' on the pandemic (and all of the forces that cause it to be as bad as it has been; most domestic).

bart_spoon 6y ago

> US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition. One particular nuance you are passing over is that the US (and all other major combatants in the war) had already been engaged in the killing of thousands of civilians through total war and "conventional" carpet bombing. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unique in that they were leveled from a single, nuclear bomb, but they absolutely were not unique in that they were leveled. Dozens of other Japanese cities experience the same level of destruction (literally 90+% of all structures destroyed) using firebombing (as in Napalm, used intentionally as most Japanese structures at the time were wooden) as the US pushed towards the Japanese mainland. And the US wasn't alone: the bombing of entire cities was a feature of the the Western German front and the German-Russian front, by both the Allies and the Axis. So while you aren't wrong that dropping the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially the US flexing its technological muscles, I am curious as to why it is considered abhorrent to kill thousands of civilians using a single "nuclear weapon in anger", but the killing of just as many civilians using many bombs seems to be accepted as just a part of the war?

kubanczyk 6y ago
Yes. If anything it's a good lesson about wars: for the British to attack German cities it was a hard decision and it was to-be-or-not-to-be for their country. So at first it wasn't The Revenge. But as they were on their 250th night bombing they just did the same as on 249th, but more efficiently. They used their cached reasons or were cherry-picking new reasons as needed provided that these reasons supported what they were already doing (chiefly the revenge argument that I deem unethical - and British probably would had consider as unethical before the war). They didn't seriously reconsider if they were still in to-be-or-not-to-be mode.