Sorry. I forgot that as a Ch*k it is my place to bite my tongue and just accept my people being butchered and raped on a daily basis while the Japanese fascists debate surrender at a leisurely pace. I shouldnt hope for Japanese morale to be destroyed in a way irrefutable to all but the most insane Japanese militarists (the ones who tried to coup their own God-Emperor to prevent surrender) because that would be downright uppity of me.
Just come right out and say it. Chinese lives don't matter. Maybe after that you can go lecture the Palestinians about how firing rockets at Tel Aviv is bad and wrong because precious Israeli civilians might get hurt.
the U.S. nuking Japan brought no good
No, look at the passage I cited from the Emperor's surrender address. Tell me exactly what it says.
sure the Clean Wehrmacht exist, but there was still a theater of Nazis getting punished, meanwhile the U.S. granted Unit 731 immunity and Hiro Hito died in 1989.
There was the theatre of the Tokyo War Crimes trials too. Are you seriously this ignorant about the topic and trying to lecture me? The German denazification process was scarcely better than the Japanese process. Von Braun et al was their Unit 731. A bunch of high ranking Nazis got to die of old age too. America can eat shit for letting both the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese off the hook with a slap but Germany didn't get nuked and it was rehabilitated just like Japan. It's almost as if the US was going to rehabilitate both fascist powers anyway, nukes or not.
I don't understand this analysis. Surely it would be easier for the Americans to control and damage the Chinese economy if Xi Jinping and Chinese business leaders were typing out emails and memos on backdoored Microsoft software or iPhones. Forcing Huawei to develop their own tech via hostility means that the Chinese market is lost forever and now the American security apparatus has to deal with an opaque ecosystem they can't backdoor.
I've heard people say that the October Hamas attacks on Israel were so surprising because they were planned entirely via Chinese tech and therefore was not picked up by Zionist elint. I don't necessarily think that's true or even the only reason, but it's not an implausible example of how forcing China to make its own systems is a huge own goal.
All this hostility has just made China more and more self sufficient. I just don't see how that gives the US more leverage than a China which is completely dependent on Western tech.
Western leftists criticizing Deng for his shitty chess moves when it turns out he was playing Go the whole time.
Under Millei, all Argentinians will be merged into a gestalt consciousness who will be a billionaire.
We let's have a look at the relevant part of Hirohito's surrender speech to see whether or not the bombs had any impact on his decision to surrender:
Clear as fucking day right from the man himself.
Even if I do have American brain worms (maybe granddad pick some up from a dead yank in Korea), what you're espousing is just Japanese right wing brain worms. Don't take it from me, take it from a Japanese media scholar:
First of all, the narrative of August journalism can be classified into three categories.
The first is the "narrative of suffering" intended to pass down wartime experiences as "victims" of the atomic bombings, air raids, evacuations, repatriations and other grueling ordeals, and the "sacrifices" soldiers had to make, represented by kamikaze attacks and suicidal battles.
...
In such a context, Japan's invasion, atrocities, colonial rule and other forms of "aggression" are completely receded into the background. Instead, its self-image as victims of militarism is brought to the fore.
This view on war and history was formed due to peculiarities of how post-war Japan was handled during the Cold War.
Japan could return to the international community without facing squarely its war responsibility and pursue its economic growth after the emperor was exonerated at the behest of the United States and Western powers waived their right to claim compensation.
It's so frustrating that even Japanese people can acknowledge that this is their version of the Clean Wehrmacht myth specifically designed by Americans to rehabilitate them in a Cold War confrontation with the USSR but you try to tell this to a leftist and it's like talking to a fucking brick wall.
This is applying post facto knowledge to a decision when assessing it ethically. Even if the Japanese had planned to surrender following the Soviet invasion (there is no evidence that any such decision was made before the atomic bombings) such decision was not communicated to any of the Allied powers. Even if an intention to surrender had been teased at, a surrender is not a surrender until the surrendering side accepte terms and lays down arms.
Even if we accept for sake of argument that the US decision makers thought the bombs had zero military value and were purely for show, how do you think it would have gone down if the US had went to Stalin with this information? Stalin, the man who had been pushing for intensified Allied air raids against Germany and a second front since 1941, would have just been like "oh don't worry about using your new city destroying wonder weapon, I'll just let Soviet soldiers continue to fight and die in a war you could probably end easily"?
It always comes down to this. Chinese lives don't matter, Korean lives don't matter, Soviet lives don't matter. As long as the precious Fascist civilians get to starve to death instead of being bombed, or conscripted into a kamikaze mission, or shot for dissenting instead, it's aaaaaalllll worth it!
Continue to lecture someone from another country about how they should feel about their own country and history is the real American brain worms my friend.
I don't pretend to know the complexities of the French occupation and the Algerian struggle for independence, that's why I'm not going to tell you how you should feel or think about it.
The firebombing of Tokyo, and the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were totally genocide events.
About as many German civilians died in the storming of Berlin as Japanese civilians from the bombing of Hiroshima. Is the Battle of Berlin also a "genocide" event?
The Japanese military had already been in total disarray since the Nazis and fascists fell and the war was already understood as lost and Japanese military were drafting a surrender.
Where are these drafts now? Surely there would be copies if they were ever sent out. What terms were being proposed? Were the drafts ever approved or even seen by the Emperor and his war council? Someone with a title starting the write a piece of paper is meaningless.
As for all the American historiography of their motivations, I find it extremely convenient that most of them were published or came to light around the time of the Korean War when America was trying to justify the rearmament of Japan. If the Americans are willing to pave over all Wehrmacht atrocities to justify the Bundeswher, I have no doubt that they would be willing to play the heel for Japanese rearmament.
The real proof that can't be fakef that the Americans knew that Japan was not down and out was that planning and logistics for Operation Downfall, the nnvasion of Japan, continued apace right up until the Japanese formal surrender. This included well documented actions like transferring landing ships to the USSR as well as corroborating statements in 1945 given to the Chinese, Soviet, and British governments.
While I do not dispute that American use and targeting of the abombs had political motivations, that does not automatically make inverse true where there was no military reason for their use.
I am not watching a 2 hour long video. If you would like to summarize his most salient points then I am happy to respond to those points. If me not watching this video is a deal breaker for you then we do not have to continue this conversation.
Your position is identical to the modern, western narrative which was cooked up as a retroactive justification for an obviously unjustifiable act.
I would be interested in these western sources which use the saving of Chinese and Korean lives as an explicit justification for the atomic bombings.
Also, your position is also the position of the Nanjing-denying Japanese far right so... Idk where that leaves us if we apply your reasoning.
As a Chinese person who's lived in Japan for many years and read about the topic pretty extensively in three languages, I don't think that I need my opinions to be validated by an Englishman.
There are soldiers in China that we need to stop, obviously the solution is to vaporize a bunch of innocent civilians in Japan, great idea.
The solution is to continue to fight against the aggressor occupier fascist state using all means available until they surrender. A naval invasion of Japan was projected to cause up to 500,000 casualties. A naval blockade until starvation might have caused millions of civilian deaths if you take Leningrad as an example of how a starvation blockade would go.
It is tragic and horrific when a civilian is killed in war, but civilian deaths in war are unavoidable. The guilty party are the Japanese militarists who were refusing to surrender and holding out for some deathride bloodbath (of their own civilians).
The enemy is beaten when it surrenders. The Japanese did not surrender until after the bombs were dropped. Even then, the Imperial military staged a coup against their own God-Emperor to stop him from broadcasting his surrender speech. They stormed the Imperial Palace and ransacked the place - the recording was smuggled out in a pile of laundry. We are taking about a country run by people with that level of deathwish, you cannot just assume that they were beaten.
Setting all of that aside, there were still hundreds of thousands of Imperial Japanese soldiers in China and Korea at the time of surrender. Those soldiers were oppressing, murdering, raping and stealing up until the very end. Just because the Japanese military ceased to be a threat to the US Fleet does not mean that they ceased to be a threat to millions of people.
I am Chinese. Both my grandfathers fought in the War to Resist Japanese Aggression and one went on to fight Americans in the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea. Both are now interred in a cemetery for Martyrs of the Revolution.
But sure, I have American brain worms despite not being an American and never living there. I obviously wouldn't have any reason other than American nationalism to take a dim view of Imperial Japan, right?
Imperial Japan certainly didn't have any compunction about regularly terror bombing Chinese and other Asian cities full of civilians during the war, so when Japanese war apologists start crying about how terrible it was that they got bombed it's very much a case of me playing the world's tiniest violin.
No, it's not good that Japanese civilians died in the bombing campaigns against Japan in 1945 but bombing and bombardment of cities in WWII was accepted as a legitimate tactic by both the Axis and the Allies. We can certainly look back on it and say how horrible it was, but at the end of the day we are applying modern morality and rules of war to a past conflict.
Personally, I see the focus on the atomic bombings (as opposed to the two night firebombing raids on Tokyo that killed more people than both atomic bombs combined) to be a sort of post-war Clean Wehrmacht style revisionism carried out by the Americans and Japanese when the Yanks realized they very much did want to remilitarize Japan to oppose the USSR and PRC. By making Japan out to be the victim of some unique horror of war, there is an implied equivalence that cancels out all the horrors of war Japan inflicted on everyone else.
American foreign policy is essentially just age of sail imperialism but with "democratic" subbing in for "Christian".
"They're not Christian so we can kill them and take their stuff" has become "They're not democratic so we can kill them and take their stuff."
Also works on the next level because even if someone outside the European ingroup becomes democratic or Christian, that democracy or Christianity just becomes a lever of control for extractive economics.
an extended war for six months
An extended love making session of two minutes.
US House panel plans Taiwan war game with Wall Street Executives
That's it. That's the actual headline. Nothing I say can make it more absurd than it actually is.
The war-game participants include representatives from investment banks, in addition to current and former executives from pharmaceutical companies and retired four-star US military officers. The committee declined to name the financial executives who will participate.