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Are we actually arguing that conventionally firebombing entire cities with the express intent of killing hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children was anything other than a horrific crime against humanity? If you want to argue about strategic bombing and how it was impossible with the technology of the day to destroy Romanian oil fields or German military plants without inadvertently killing a ton of civilians, there's an argument to be had there. But deliberately murdering noncombatants just to terrorize the enemy population, no that's unjustifiable. I don't understand how that's a point in favor of the atomic bombs at all "but we were totally willing to murder even more people with incendiaries!" Uh, okay that was also hideous?
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Aug 7, 2015 02:26
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N00ba the Hutt posted:Even after the atomic bombings, there were enough members of the Japanese military in favor of fighting on that there was an attempted coup to prevent a surrender. None of those officers were high up, and they went ahead despite not getting support from anyone important. That coup was never going to succeed against the Emperor, and there's no evidence that without the bombings anyone of consequence would have joined them.
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Aug 7, 2015 02:31
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-Troika- posted:Here's what's indefensible revisionism: claiming that the Japanese were the victims in the entire situation in any way. Mabye they shouldn't have spent years raping and murdering their way across literally half of China, which, by the way, the Japanese government still hasn't apologized for or acknowledged to this loving day. I remember when schoolchildren in Nagasaki raped a bunch of Chinese women. Congratulations on justifying the 9/11 terrorist attacks by the way: every civilian is 100% complicit in the crimes of their government.
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Aug 7, 2015 02:33
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Typo posted:In the Japanese military when lower ranked officers carry out a coup there's usually backing from the upper levels but want clean hands. You mean that both coups failed? That doesn't seem to be a convincing point that the Japanese would have continued to fight: it sounds like the opposite.
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Aug 7, 2015 02:36
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DeusExMachinima posted:Oh yeah I'm not trying to justify poo poo like Dresden. I see that as a different situation from Hiroshima or Nagasaki, which were heavily militarized, industrial urban centers. Anyone who has a problem with nuking them but is fine with deploying WW2-era strategic bombing technology instead isn't morally superior, they're just uneducated about the state of the art at the time. Except the military industrial centers weren't the target and weren't a big concern. If they were, we would have destroyed them already. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were good targets for the atomic bombing because their relative strategic unimportance had left them mostly intact. Typo posted:But the US does have the moral obligation to end the war as fast as possible to Japanese troops can't go on raping people in China The Soviet Union's invasion of Manchuria and total defeat of the Kwantung Army had already assured that before the surrender even happened. There's no reason to think that the bombings sped up military defeat in China, you're grasping at straws.
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Aug 7, 2015 02:41
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Typo posted:Manchuria isn't the rest of China This is weak and you know it. You gonna put forward an argument that the Japanese military situation in China was anything but hopeless and capitulation in China wasn't imminent regardless of what happened at Hiroshima?
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Aug 7, 2015 03:13
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Typo posted:Dude, it's not my fault if you'd rather aggressive-post and don't want to look at a map and actually think about the length of time it would take the Soviets to gear up logistics and kick the japanese out of the rest of China even if they wanted to, nor the amount of people that would have died in the process of them doing so, nor the amount of Chinese civilians which the japanese would have killed if they held eastern China for another 3-4 month. The Japanese were already losing in mainland China as well. They were cut off from the home islands by the blockade, supply routes into China had been cleared, and they had been falling back from Chinese advances all summer. The atomic bombings weren't necessary to win the war in China, the naval victories, the advancing Chinese armies, and the Soviet entry had assured that and it's absurd to pretend otherwise. There are much better arguments for the atomic bombings than this. Given the rapidity with which the IJA collapsed in Manchuria, your theory that they'd dig in and fight to the death in Guangzhou or Shanghai or somewhere and take so many civilians with them that it outweighs hundred thousand or so innocents that were massacred at Hiroshima and Nagasaki is not very strong.
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Aug 7, 2015 03:35
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Fojar38 posted:The alternative to dropping the bombs was to starve them into submission, in which case we'd be sitting here arguing about the morality of the US starving a defeated country into submission. Blockades aren't a war crime and have plenty of precedent, so no we probably wouldn't.
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Aug 7, 2015 03:41
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Typo posted:The Japanese also have shown a tendency to fight fanatically even in hopeless situations, and particular brutality in dealing with Chinese cviilians. The opposite just happened in Manchuria. The Japanese were demoralized by this point, it's not the same as Okinawa. Also there was a bunch of weird propaganda about how the Americans were devils that would torture and rape them all to death that was contributing to the fanatical resistance in the island hopping campaign, which didn't really apply in China against soldiers that they knew were ordinary humans and not bloodlusting demonic killers. Typo posted:I mean, they'll lose, but it's gonna take months for the Soviets to gear up the logistics for another major operation, and months more to get the Japanese in China to fold. Lots of Chinese civilians, Japanese troops and Soviet/Chinese troops are gonna die in the process. "Lots", How convincing. We also killed "lots" of civilians in the bombings. This is pretty much an impossible counterfactual to argue, there's no way to know exactly how long the defeat would have taken, exactly how many soldiers and civilians would die (although killing Japanese children to save the lives of Japanese soldiers doesn't sound like a benefit to me?), which is why this particular just isn't a very good argument to justify the hundred thousand or so deaths in the bombings (and the hundreds and hundreds of thousands in the firebombings that I also oppose). I don't really get why you're stuck on this point when there are much better justifications like the prospect of an invasion of the home islands. Typo posted:And you are 75% of the way to making the "Soviet invasion of Manchuria cause Japanese surrender" argument anyway so you might as well as just make it. No the question of whether the Japanese would have surrendered the home islands without a fight regardless of the bombings is entirely different to the question of how fast their inevitable defeat in China would come. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 03:47
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Fojar38 posted:So the difference between a war crime and a non-war crime isn't the amount of suffering it causes but if it's a new tactic or not? The purpose of the blockade isn't to kill anyone, unlike nuking a city. The blockade can be ended at any time during its commission by a surrender. Are you seriously trying to argue that the Union blockade of Confederate ports or the WWI blockade of Germany is no different than nuclear war.
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Aug 7, 2015 03:51
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Typo posted:That's because Manchuria is perfect tank country since it's one big plain. One blitzkreig campaign and it's over. The rest of China isn't Yeah but you're trying to argue that the IJA would fight to the last man regardless of the odds, this isn't true for the campaigns in China. The army was in a pretty terrible state by 1945 armed with outdated equipment from the 1930s and dependent on poorly-trained young conscripts because of critical manpower shortages after almost a decade of fighting. Typo posted:The Japanese killed something like 7-8 million Chinese civilians the war. And the war caused disruptions killing another 10 million or so civilians in China. The bombings don't go back in time and resurrect those people though? That's all the people killed in 8 years of war, but even if you distributed 7-8 million military-related deaths equally by month without regard to when the heaviest fighting was that's what 70-80,000 a month? (I don't think it's valid to expect the rate of deaths from displacements to continue at that rate because Japanese control would be shrinking now, not expanding). And that's assuming that the Japanese would still be killing people at the same rate even when they'd lost half their largest army and no longer had any air power to do things like kill 10,000 civilians in the bombing campaign at Chongqing. Typo posted:It isn't if you don't think the Japanese army would have folded instantly in August 1945 in the rest of China and therefore would have folded when the overall Japanese surrender came. The Chinese had already won major victories and had plans to recapture Guangzhou and Shanghai in August. There's a reason no one ever advances the argument that the bombings were done to save Chinese lives, not only because it's not convincing, but also because that reasoning was never considered by the people doing it, not even to justify it afterwards.
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Aug 7, 2015 04:52
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Fojar38 posted:What exactly do you think the purpose of a blockade is? To deprive the enemy of the means to carry on the war. People often die in a blockade (although they don't have to, if the enemy surrenders before starvation happens), but that's not the goal. Just to be clear, is it your position that there is no moral difference between a military blockade and nuclear war on civilian targets? Genocide Tendency posted:Assigning morality to war. Like there is actually any morality in war. I am going to disagree here I think massacring prisoners at Katyn, killing millions of Poles to make way for German colonization, Soviet armies raping their way through Germnay, and Nanking were actually immoral. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 05:27 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 04:57
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Typo posted:And would have killed far more people, and the US was pretty much already doing this in 1945 The firebombing was actually immoral, if that's what you mean. Although I will agree that purposely starving civilians is wrong. For example, the Entente blockade of Germany after the armistice no longer served any military purpose and was just a horrific crime to terrorize the people into accepting whatever would be dictated to them at Versailles. Or the Germans starving the Dutch in the winter of '44 to punish them for resistance.
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Aug 7, 2015 05:03
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Chantilly Say posted:In what way is a blockade not against civilian targets? Intent, or effects? Generally the intent is to deprive the enemy of materiel with military purpose (although that does include food since soliders need to eat), and not specifically to rack up the highest civilian body count possible, unlike targeting the largest remaining cities with nuclear weapons which was explicitly done to kill as many people as possible to terrorize the enemy. Blockades with no purpose other than killing people (like the Entente's blockade of Germany into 1919 or the Dutch Hongerwinter) are indefensible imho. It's sort of like the difference between bombing a tank factory knowing that innocent people will unavoidably die, and just carpet bombing a city to put the fear of God into them.
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Aug 7, 2015 05:15
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CommieGIR posted:Japan knew the terms of their surrender: Unconditional Surrender. Unconditional is an egregious demand that was criticized at the time, even by Churchill. It's entirely different from the way wars are generally fought and concluded with a negotiated peace. Think about it: unconditional surrender. Not a single condition. The enemy makes no promises: they could line up all POW's and execute them, they could rape your women, they could make you tear down your cities brick by brick and then sell you into slavery Roman style. They don't even promise to treat you with basic humanity, it's "give us your weapons and then you'll find out what we'll do to you." If you're willing to nuke whole cities of people in the hope that it will shorten the war by a few months, surely it makes sense to try to shorten the war by agreeing to some surrender conditions like "we won't try the emperor for war crimes" and "we won't slaughter POWs" that we were willing to observe anyway.
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Aug 7, 2015 06:31
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KaptainKrunk posted:All those things you said are true in the case of unconditional surrender, but this wasn't an unconditional surrender. You don't just submit to the possibility of being starved to death or enslaved when you still have hundreds of thousands of soldiers who can die honorably. Right but what is the point of demanding an unconditional surrender if it's not an unconditional surrender. If you don't want to kill every single POW once the IJA turn themselves in, then why wouldn't you let them surrender conditionally: ie you promise not to kill them all and treat them according to the Geneva convention. It's what then, a rhetorical flourish? Nuke cities until they agree to your purple prose? I thought the point was ending the war not getting the enemy to let you say you got an unconditional surrender.
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Aug 7, 2015 06:41
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JeffersonClay posted:I studied abroad in Beijing and had a great teacher who made a big deal about V-J day. I told him that there was a significant controversy about the morality of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan in the U.S. He looked at me like I was completely nuts. The Germans were killing Poles every day of the war, that doesn't mean the bombing of Dresden was moral or that we were free to kill as many German civilians as we cared to. Japanese schoolchildren in Nagasaki were not committing any war crimes. Also I don't think anyone making the decisions actually gave a poo poo about which course of action would kill the fewest Chinese, or they might have done things like say guaranteed the emperor's position beforehand to reassure the Japanese that the surrender demand wouldn't obliterate their culture. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 06:48 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 06:46
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KaptainKrunk posted:The Japanese were seeking to end the war with whatever they could. Above all else, they sought to preserve the Emperor's (central) status in the constitutional order. When people use the term 'unconditional surrender,' they don't mean a surrender without conditions; they mean a surrender without specific political conditions e.g., a return to the status quo, preservation of a political order, no disarmament or demobilization during negotiations and so forth. No that's not what a conditional surrender is. Conditional surrenders of e.g. besieged fortresses and military units are common in history and don't have to have political conditions. JeffersonClay posted:The reason they nicknamed U.S. Grant "unconditional surrender" is not because he massacred confederates after they surrendered (unfortunately) It was because it sounded cool but actually he promised that he would treat the garrison according to the customs of war and not kill them all, so he never got one either.
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Aug 7, 2015 07:00
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Fojar38 posted:itt crocodile tears for Imperial Japan as long as it makes the US look bad I don't have any interest in making the US look bad, we can discuss the morality of wartime actions for reasons besides having an axe to grind. I'm perfectly happy to discuss why Chongqing was wrong but nobody is defending it so there's no need, but I will if you wish to take the other side!
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Aug 7, 2015 07:38
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My Imaginary GF posted:The attack on Pearl Harbor? You don't force Americans to pay higher taxes without devaluing your life to us. Now I remember why I don't have you on ignore, would emptyquote forever.
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Aug 7, 2015 07:40
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CommieGIR posted:You probably need to go tell Emporer Hirohito he was wrong. His announcement was pretty blatantly a way to excuse the complete failure of leadership, competence, and basic sense that plagued the Japanese war effort and drove their country to ruin by blaming it all on the American superweapon, I wouldn't take his press releases as unquestionable historical authority. "Hey guys, the US invaded Iraq over weapons of mass destruction, look the President gave a speech"
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Aug 7, 2015 07:46
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Chantilly Say posted:It similarly has always seemed an unnecessary and risky move. Give the opponent time to make the decision you want, and promise that there's more to come. Three days, when you're already disrupting internal communications? It seems very possible that one bomb would have been enough. There are some decisions that are uncertain enough that caution and the need for confidence dictate choices, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. 
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Aug 7, 2015 07:48
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Fojar38 posted:No, I asked for people to suggest credible alternatives to dropping the bomb and so far the only response has been "starve them." I want to know how we know that would be more humane than the bombs while also recognizing that we don't actually have any way to know. Blockades can be modified and called off. If the Japanese were convinced there's no way to save the empire and 250,000 people were going to starve to death, they could capitulate first, but you can't un-nuke a city. Fojar38 posted:The people killed by the atomic bombs were definitely victims, but not victims of the Americans; they were victims of the autocratic regime that went on a conquering spree and declared a war they couldn't win and it's always hilarious (and by hilarious I mean sad and a bit infuriating) to see people inadvertently white knighting Imperial Japan if it means making the US look worse, which I guess is just leftism.txt at this point. *Puts down teacup, adjusts monocle* "Well I say, I find your suggestion that it is inhumane to employ mustard-gas a suspiciously seditious idea! Why I cannot conceive of any possible motive beyond a hatred for good old England and a black-hearted affinity for the bloodthirsty rampaging Hun! I'll hear no more of this nonsense over convening a Convention at Geneva, that's nothing more than a foul Prussian plot to destroy the empire from within with self-doubt and -abnegation! VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 09:06 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 08:52
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Fojar38 posted:Calling off the blockade isn't going to un-starve people who died to it either though. Yeah, if the blockade reaches a point where it has no military value and is starving people just to terrorize them then that's barbaric and wrong. You can ship in basic food aid, being blockaded still sucks and they're going to get tired of it eventually. Once again, there's a moral difference between actions with a primarily military purpose with unavoidable civilian casualties and intentionally piling up as many bodies of women and children as possible as a terror attack, the latter is what ISIS does. Fojar38 posted:Funny that you mention that because the Japanese employed chemical warfare in China and the British were going to use it if Germany invaded the British Isles. I feel like we should be better than Imperial Japan though? There's a lot of heinous inhumane poo poo you can do and still be better than them. I don't think we should have raped half a city and said "well Japan raped a whole city, God liberals". Like you get that there's reasons behind discussing the morality of wartime conduct and agreeing certain atrocities are off-limits besides a secret desire to undermine the West and give the Kaiser his day in the sun, right?
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Aug 7, 2015 09:11
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"Should you nuke civilians": maximally sanctimonious hindsight, apparently E: to make this a more useful post, the point of looking at the morality of the bombings in hindsight isn't to sit and get all self-righteous and have a good cry about how bad America is, it's because we know wars will probably happen in the future and we should learn from past mistakes to make the future better than the past. Especially given the sort of conflicts in the world today, it's very relevant to ask what level of collateral damage is acceptable and find ways to win while minimizing civilian deaths. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 11:10
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LGD posted:And demonstrating completely overwhelming superiority in an attempt to force surrender isn't serving a primarily military purpose? So what wouldn't qualify as primarily a military purpose under this definition? There's at least some military value in ISIS rolling up into a village and beheading a bunch of people to terrorize the rest into helping them, nbd I guess? LGD posted:Even if you take the position that a blockade and/or Downfall would have led to fewer casualties (which is highly debatable), the bombs were manifestly not dropped because the US simply wanted to run up the K:D score on the Japanese. While it's possible that other options would have led to fewer deaths, I'm really not finding myself persuaded that a implementing a blockade, which actually turns out not to be a blockade when the extremely obvious specter of famine raises it's head Surely you recognize there's a difference between a blockade to cut off a country's military support which has the unavoidable side effect of civilian suffering, and a plan to deliberately starve civilians to death right? Kind of like the difference between bombing a tank factory knowing civilians will die, and flattening Chongqing or Dresden to terrorize people, yes? Like, I don't think the German hongerwinter on the Dutch was moral even if it did slow up the allies a bit.
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Aug 7, 2015 11:15
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Chantilly Say posted:But that question doesn't even apply because that doesn't actually work in anything but the shortest term. Okay how about what happened to Corinth. That certainly made a bunch of other cities think twice about rebellion. Display of overwhelming force, check. Discouraging others from fighting against you, check. Fine to do?
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Aug 7, 2015 11:27
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Thelonius Van Funk posted:Look it's war. Just like every American death in Iraq and Afghanistan is not only morally defensible but in fact a good thing since every dead soldier means that there is one less person fighting and the war could end sooner. The most morally correct thing would probably be bombing the Pentagon I suppose The Spanish withdrew from the Iraq War four days after the Madrid train bombings, thus they were good and right, and saved the lives of Spanish troops. Thanks Al-Qaeda!
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Aug 7, 2015 11:35
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Fojar38 posted:Still waiting to hear some alternatives to dropping the bombs that would have resulted in fewer deaths and the same capitulation by Japan. Let the Soviets invade Manchuria like we knew was going to happen anyway, so they're now surrounded by belligerent major powers with no one to turn to, then warn the Japanese about your devastating new weapon like we did, but drop it on a military target that we were planning to destroy anyway for the invasion. Give them a chance to go "oh holy poo poo we don't want that on our cities." If they refuse and you flatten Hiroshima anyway, well sucks but at least you can tell yourself you made every effort to end the war before using it on the civilian population, and more importantly you did it with about a hundred thousand fewer civilian casualties. What do you think of that idea?
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Aug 7, 2015 11:53
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sean10mm posted:The first nuke hitting them didn't produce a surrender, so why would a remote demonstration that might not even produce a convincing witness to tell the Emperor about it in the first place do so? If you do it on a military target there will be credible reports, plus they can go out and survey the damage. They'll know whatever it was was only dropped by one plane because they wouldn't have missed a full bomber raid. Even taken as given your assumption that it and the Soviet attack weren't enough (a) you can make a much stronger defense of the bombings if they got adequate warning first, and (b) you might get that surrender after nuking only one city with the second bomb and Fojar asked for a plan to get a surrender with fewer casualties. VitalSigns fucked around with this message at 13:01 on Aug 7, 2015 |
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Aug 7, 2015 12:54
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hakimashou posted:What do you mean negotiate a surrender? Surrender had to be unconditional- dictated, not negotiated. You lose a week, even one person might die during that week at Japanese hands. Then what's up with refusing to guarantee the emperor's position, that cost weeks, maybe months by contemporary accounts
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Aug 7, 2015 13:03
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sean10mm posted:It's almost like the narrative that plucky lil Japan was on the verge of surrendering any second (we promise!) was self-serving, contrived and counter-factual! Yes, according to noted traitors and Jap-lovers Douglas MacArthur, Dwight D Eisenhower, and William D Leahy
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Aug 7, 2015 13:05
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The bombs didn't even mean we got to hang Hirohito and let the Chinese poo poo on his corpse, what the hell. I am being serious, that's the only way the bombs would have been worth it.
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Aug 7, 2015 15:01
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MODS CURE JOKES posted:Did you know that the damage would have been even greater, and more wide-spread if we had to invade? Like, think about how totally leveled Hiroshima and Nagasaki were - now spread that out evenly throughout the entirety of the Japanese mainland. Imagine the plight of the poor northern Japanese civilians when they got the distinction of being occupied by the Soviets? I don't know how effective the Soviet landing force would be after swimming across the Sea of Japan, I think the Japanese could handle it
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Aug 7, 2015 16:20
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OwlFancier posted:It's a bit weird to fixate on nuclear bombings given the indescribably excruciating avalanche of unmitigated horror and atrocity that was quite a lot of the 20th century. People don't usually defend the holocaust or the Khmer Rouge though. Yeah people are going to spend more time debating controversial events than ones with a moral consensus, how weird!
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Aug 7, 2015 16:23
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A Winner is Jew posted:Killing civilians on an industrial scale with one weapon isn't any different than killing civilians on an industrial scale with hundreds or even thousands of weapons, and there wasn't a single major power in WW2 that didn't kill civilians on an industrial scale so why the gently caress are two cities being obliterated more important than all the other ones? I mean the only difference between Hiroshima and Nagasaki and every other city that was ground into dust in WW2 (Dresden, Nanking, Stalingrad, Osaka, Kassel, Darmstadt, Pforzheim, Swinoujscie, London, Berlin, Hamburg, Tokyo, ect, ect,) was that it only took one bomb a piece to do it. This boring question is asked and answered on every page: no one is arguing that the London Blitz or the Rape of Nanking was good so no one is arguing about it. People have said the firebombing of Tokyo was a war crime in this very thread though.
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Aug 7, 2015 16:42
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DeusExMachinima posted:Alright, so strategic bombing with WW2 era (in)accuracy is morally wrong. At least you're consistent. There's a big moral difference between attacking military targets even though it's impossible to prevent civilian casualties and deliberately blowing up 250,000 people to terrorize the populace. These things aren't the same, and it is possible to agree one is necessary and not the other. "Well you didn't have zero civilian casualties so you might as well nuke a 100,000 women and children!"
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Aug 7, 2015 16:45
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DeusExMachinima posted:If you really think more conventional bombs fell on industrial urban targets than civilian homes, etc etc and that's the distinction between regular bomber missions and a nuke, I don't know what to tell you. There was a reason they sent hundreds of bombers spread out over miles apart for years to have a chance at choking up Germany industry. So what? It might be necessary to kill 1,000 people to blow up a tank factory and shorten the war. That doesn't mean you can go shoot a dozen POWs in the back of the head and say "well you killed 100 times more people yesterday what's the big deal"
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Aug 7, 2015 16:50
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crabcakes66 posted:What the gently caress are you even trying to say? His argument is that bombing the German war industries killed more people than the nuclear attacks therefore you can't accept the former without accepting the latter. But this isn't true. It may be possible to justify destroying German industry despite the cost in lives, but that doesn't mean that anything you do to kill a smaller number of civilians is automatically justified. The bombing campaigns in Germany are just irrelevant to the discussion.
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Aug 7, 2015 16:58
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Miltank posted:Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both attacks on military-industrial targets. They were not chosen for the military advantage from destroying them, they were chosen because they were some of the last non-flattened cities in Japan so they would showcase the destructive power of the bomb. This is documented. Documented in this thread even.
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Aug 7, 2015 17:12
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