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What a bunch of pedantic garbage. The Japanese were willing to commit to total war to defend their right to conquer and massacre Chinese people and Pacific isla

What a bunch of pedantic garbage. The Japanese were willing to commit to total war to defend their right to conquer and massacre Chinese people and Pacific islanders and surprise-bomb the USA while they were at it. The only significant debate about the A-Bomb is whether it was more or less deadly than an invasion of mainland Japan. Any fourth grade history student would understand this. When people talk about the decline of HN, I think it's this sort of information-free, pointlessly contrary posts that they talk about.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
> What a bunch of pedantic garbage. [ ] Any fourth grade history student would understand this. [ ] When people talk about the decline of HN, I think it's this sort of information-free, pointlessly contrary posts that they talk about. If you have a valid point, why do you need to resort to incivility? > The Japanese were willing to commit to total war to defend their right to massacre Chinese people; the USA took them up on the offer. The only significant debate about the A-Bomb is whether it was more or less deadly than an invasion of mainland Japan. So you actually think that intentionally killing civilians to win a war is morally okay? I just don't hold that view.
- bernawil 13y ago
  > So you actually think that intentionally killing civilians to win a war is morally okay? I just don't hold that view. Even if the civilian deaths attributed to the A-bomb where less than that of a supposed land invasion?. WW2 saw lots of that. Think of the bombing of Dresden when the Allies whipped out the city with incendiary bombs because it was a mayor city factory (ammo, etc.).
  - samastur 13y ago
    Yes, even then. Even if you could be sure that there would be more civilian deaths (which you really can't be), there is a big ethical difference between choosing to kill someone and being forced to do it.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      No one "chose" to kill civilians at Hiroshima or Nagasaki though. The U.S. dropped leaflets all over both cities warning them of the bomb. Either way by your logic firebombing attacks such as at Dresden or Tokyo would have been just fine (oh no, my bomb had to have hit a barracks, not a hospital!) even though they can't possibly all have been right. So it's not even true to say that conventional bombing wouldn't have killed civilians; every pilot who went on a bombing mission, conventional or nuclear, knew that they were killing civilians too. And both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had actual military value, it's not as if either of them were resort villages. If the Japanese decide to put tons of civilian structure in between the military establishments then that's on them. Conventional bombing was so inaccurate that practically the only thing you'd be sure to hit while trying to bomb a military target is everything around it.... including the civilian establishments.
      - foobarbazqux 13y ago
        I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future? My point here was never that other war atrocities are somehow good. It's just my belief that intentionally killing unarmed civilians is murder, in a moral sense, irrespective of circumstance or nationality. If you must take out a military target and there are civilian casualties, then so be it, provided you did your best to minimize them. However, sprinkling some leaflets before dropping an atomic bomb is not doing your best to minimize casualties. If a display of nuclear power as a deterrent was truly required to end the war, and it may well have been, I can think of numerous less deadly steps that could have been taken first. An aggressive warning strategy that comes to mind would be bombing the remote and relatively unpopulated mountainous regions of Japan.
        mpyne 13y ago
        > I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future? As a first strike, you mean? No, we have far more effective conventional military weapons that would obviate the need for the overkill that a nuclear strike would deliver. They didn't have that in WWII though, which is the discussion everyone focuses on, and people always seem to conveniently ignore that the only thing stopping further American and Japanese bloodshed was ending the war ASAP. To the extent that the A-bombs allowed to the Emperor to save face while still surrendering, those A-bombs saved untold hundreds of thousands or even millions of further Japanese lives, not to mention the cost in American (and Soviet!) casualties.
- joyeuse6701 13y ago
  Applying morals to war is really about maintaining your sanity/humanity, nothing more. It is all together too arbitrary to define into rules based on various moral structures. Risking oneself for a dying soldier is heroic in the western view, but from a bushido perspective was insanity. So very arbitrary.
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    Sure, I agree with this. Not everyone has the same morals, and it's hard to make them into rules. War essentially occurs in the absence of rules. However, that doesn't make all wartime conduct moral. If I were fighting, I would never kill an enemy civilian with the intent to display my strength. That's just because I consider this cowardice.
madaxe 13y ago
Actually, Japan were ready to throw in the towel as a result of the tripartite pact being enacted, and Russia joining the fray. Sakhalin was the trigger, and their worst fears were confirmed when the soviets raped and pillaged their way through the island, killing some 20,000 civvies. Atrocious. They surrendered because of Stalin and his unending and brutal (and brutalised, the Red Army was not a happy place) cannon-fodder, not the bomb. Nuking two civilian populations was unnecessary, barbaric, and inexcusable, and I'm afraid to say pointless. A fourth grade history student would know exactly what you say. A heavily read historian would say something quite different - or agree. It's pretty divisive, but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender. Here's a pretty decent source on the topic - have only skimmed it, after writing this and wanting to back up my statements, but it's pretty balanced. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501 http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501
- mpyne 13y ago
  > Actually, Japan were ready to throw in the towel as a result of the tripartite pact being enacted, and Russia joining the fray. People say this a lot, but no one has clearly explained how the U.S.S.R. would have been able to stage an invasion of the Home Islands of Japan. It's not a matter of simply ferrying a bunch of people over the Trans-Siberian railroad, you also need a navy, sufficient air cover (which if I remember my geography correctly would have almost necessarily meant carrier-borne aircraft), and the logistics to back that all up. Japan knew this just as much then as we realize it now. The Soviet gains after their entry into the war were in China and Korea, not in Japan itself. Their entrance into the war was earlier than expected on the Japanese's part, but they knew the U.S.S.R. would declare war (seriously, you may consider their senior and military leadership stupid, but that stupid?). Likewise the attack on the Kwantung Army in China was surprising in that it came from every direction possible instead of the one direction they expected it from. But they knew the Soviets would attack, and in fact the attack fell while the Kwantung Army was changing positions to better guard the direction they believed the attack would actually come from. So certainly the Soviet attack came as a shock, but it was militarily no more severe than any other setback to the Allies. > but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender. Don't take this the wrong way, but what does an opinion poll have to do with whether some event actually happened in a given way or not? It either did or did not happen for the causes described. If the rest of the world has better evidence for their belief then point to the evidence, but don't point to an opinion poll as prima facie evidence of something. In the event we have evidence on the Japanese side that the atomic bomb proved a useful "excuse" to permit the Emperor to surrender. The Japanese were clearly ready to fight to the death (just witness the Battle of Okinawa), and that applied just as much against the Red Army as it did against the Americans. So simply changing the uniform of the person holding the rifle wouldn't have significantly affected the strategic calculus when the Emperor had to explain his decision to his people. On the other hand, the atomic bomb was this technological doomsday device that even the most hardened Japanese militant couldn't speak against. You couldn't fight it in the battlefield; you couldn't simply hunker down like a brave citizen and start picking up pieces after the bombs had been dropped, now there were no pieces left to pick up at all. Japan had nothing like it, and as such it gave the Emperor a clear line of reasoning for why he had to (had to) surrender for the sake of his people. It was something completely different and from out of this world, as opposed to a simple Soviet declaration of war.

foobarbazqux 13y ago

> What a bunch of pedantic garbage. [ ] Any fourth grade history student would understand this. [ ] When people talk about the decline of HN, I think it's this sort of information-free, pointlessly contrary posts that they talk about. If you have a valid point, why do you need to resort to incivility? > The Japanese were willing to commit to total war to defend their right to massacre Chinese people; the USA took them up on the offer. The only significant debate about the A-Bomb is whether it was more or less deadly than an invasion of mainland Japan. So you actually think that intentionally killing civilians to win a war is morally okay? I just don't hold that view.

bernawil 13y ago
> So you actually think that intentionally killing civilians to win a war is morally okay? I just don't hold that view. Even if the civilian deaths attributed to the A-bomb where less than that of a supposed land invasion?. WW2 saw lots of that. Think of the bombing of Dresden when the Allies whipped out the city with incendiary bombs because it was a mayor city factory (ammo, etc.).
- samastur 13y ago
  Yes, even then. Even if you could be sure that there would be more civilian deaths (which you really can't be), there is a big ethical difference between choosing to kill someone and being forced to do it.
  - mpyne 13y ago
    No one "chose" to kill civilians at Hiroshima or Nagasaki though. The U.S. dropped leaflets all over both cities warning them of the bomb. Either way by your logic firebombing attacks such as at Dresden or Tokyo would have been just fine (oh no, my bomb had to have hit a barracks, not a hospital!) even though they can't possibly all have been right. So it's not even true to say that conventional bombing wouldn't have killed civilians; every pilot who went on a bombing mission, conventional or nuclear, knew that they were killing civilians too. And both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had actual military value, it's not as if either of them were resort villages. If the Japanese decide to put tons of civilian structure in between the military establishments then that's on them. Conventional bombing was so inaccurate that practically the only thing you'd be sure to hit while trying to bomb a military target is everything around it.... including the civilian establishments.
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future? My point here was never that other war atrocities are somehow good. It's just my belief that intentionally killing unarmed civilians is murder, in a moral sense, irrespective of circumstance or nationality. If you must take out a military target and there are civilian casualties, then so be it, provided you did your best to minimize them. However, sprinkling some leaflets before dropping an atomic bomb is not doing your best to minimize casualties. If a display of nuclear power as a deterrent was truly required to end the war, and it may well have been, I can think of numerous less deadly steps that could have been taken first. An aggressive warning strategy that comes to mind would be bombing the remote and relatively unpopulated mountainous regions of Japan.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        > I'm actually kind of curious, are you okay with nuking cities in the future? As a first strike, you mean? No, we have far more effective conventional military weapons that would obviate the need for the overkill that a nuclear strike would deliver. They didn't have that in WWII though, which is the discussion everyone focuses on, and people always seem to conveniently ignore that the only thing stopping further American and Japanese bloodshed was ending the war ASAP. To the extent that the A-bombs allowed to the Emperor to save face while still surrendering, those A-bombs saved untold hundreds of thousands or even millions of further Japanese lives, not to mention the cost in American (and Soviet!) casualties.
joyeuse6701 13y ago
Applying morals to war is really about maintaining your sanity/humanity, nothing more. It is all together too arbitrary to define into rules based on various moral structures. Risking oneself for a dying soldier is heroic in the western view, but from a bushido perspective was insanity. So very arbitrary.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  Sure, I agree with this. Not everyone has the same morals, and it's hard to make them into rules. War essentially occurs in the absence of rules. However, that doesn't make all wartime conduct moral. If I were fighting, I would never kill an enemy civilian with the intent to display my strength. That's just because I consider this cowardice.

madaxe 13y ago

Actually, Japan were ready to throw in the towel as a result of the tripartite pact being enacted, and Russia joining the fray. Sakhalin was the trigger, and their worst fears were confirmed when the soviets raped and pillaged their way through the island, killing some 20,000 civvies. Atrocious. They surrendered because of Stalin and his unending and brutal (and brutalised, the Red Army was not a happy place) cannon-fodder, not the bomb. Nuking two civilian populations was unnecessary, barbaric, and inexcusable, and I'm afraid to say pointless. A fourth grade history student would know exactly what you say. A heavily read historian would say something quite different - or agree. It's pretty divisive, but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender. Here's a pretty decent source on the topic - have only skimmed it, after writing this and wanting to back up my statements, but it's pretty balanced. http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501 http://www.japanfocus.org/-Tsuyoshi-Hasegawa/2501

mpyne 13y ago
> Actually, Japan were ready to throw in the towel as a result of the tripartite pact being enacted, and Russia joining the fray. People say this a lot, but no one has clearly explained how the U.S.S.R. would have been able to stage an invasion of the Home Islands of Japan. It's not a matter of simply ferrying a bunch of people over the Trans-Siberian railroad, you also need a navy, sufficient air cover (which if I remember my geography correctly would have almost necessarily meant carrier-borne aircraft), and the logistics to back that all up. Japan knew this just as much then as we realize it now. The Soviet gains after their entry into the war were in China and Korea, not in Japan itself. Their entrance into the war was earlier than expected on the Japanese's part, but they knew the U.S.S.R. would declare war (seriously, you may consider their senior and military leadership stupid, but that stupid?). Likewise the attack on the Kwantung Army in China was surprising in that it came from every direction possible instead of the one direction they expected it from. But they knew the Soviets would attack, and in fact the attack fell while the Kwantung Army was changing positions to better guard the direction they believed the attack would actually come from. So certainly the Soviet attack came as a shock, but it was militarily no more severe than any other setback to the Allies. > but outside of the US the majority agree that the USSR caused the surrender. Don't take this the wrong way, but what does an opinion poll have to do with whether some event actually happened in a given way or not? It either did or did not happen for the causes described. If the rest of the world has better evidence for their belief then point to the evidence, but don't point to an opinion poll as prima facie evidence of something. In the event we have evidence on the Japanese side that the atomic bomb proved a useful "excuse" to permit the Emperor to surrender. The Japanese were clearly ready to fight to the death (just witness the Battle of Okinawa), and that applied just as much against the Red Army as it did against the Americans. So simply changing the uniform of the person holding the rifle wouldn't have significantly affected the strategic calculus when the Emperor had to explain his decision to his people. On the other hand, the atomic bomb was this technological doomsday device that even the most hardened Japanese militant couldn't speak against. You couldn't fight it in the battlefield; you couldn't simply hunker down like a brave citizen and start picking up pieces after the bombs had been dropped, now there were no pieces left to pick up at all. Japan had nothing like it, and as such it gave the Emperor a clear line of reasoning for why he had to (had to) surrender for the sake of his people. It was something completely different and from out of this world, as opposed to a simple Soviet declaration of war.