The "if you start a war you don't get a say in how it finishes" pro-nuke argument...

...is about the stupidest of all and totally missing the point of the discussion.

It's sort of like saying that 9-11 was justified because of the first gulf war.

It is mostly an occasion for moral posturings, without the slightest ground in understanding of the context of the events.

Well said, sir!

...that can possibly be made from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is that nuclear weapons have not been used since.

To me this is absolutely remarkable, given our tendency as humans to want to immediately use whatever means of destructive weaponry is at our disposal, for the least logical reasons, or, just because we can.

It's possible that the memory, the images, and the eyewitness accounts of all the horror and destruction of these bombings has contributed to, in some way, to the 64 years of non-nuclear conflicts. I know that we have come close a few times since. Most notable of those moments in history, being the Cuban Missile Crisis, and during the 80's when the cold war was peaking.

Maybe every time we've come close to sterilizing the planet with a human-made mass-extinction event, sanity has prevailed partly due to a flash of memory of the rubble and victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To me, this should be the legacy of the bombings and the ultimate memorial to those who died - and why should always mark these anniversaries, and have these discussions.

Answer: No.

So, pardon me for not losing sleep over what happened at Hiroshima & Nagasaki.

dg

In fact, Japanese political figures who raise the specter of apology for Imperial atrocities generally face a firestorm of criticism, and back down within days. Descriptions of events in China in Japanese text-books are white-wash at best. Hiroshima and Nagasaki have, in effect, become the alibi of the nation, deployed to evade acknowledging any responsibility for systematic atrocity on colossal scale, or even the reality of same....

I find it hard to recall, if possible, any American politician stating that the atrocities we committed in WWII weren't justified. Don't we use "alibis" to cover Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Tokyo, Dresden and Hamburg?

had done in China, Korea, the Philippines, etc. over the course of the war?

The war was already over. The Japanese were prostate and posed no further threat. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes perpetrated to frighten the Soviets (which they didn't) and to satisfy the blood lust of the electorate.

The war was already over.

That would certainly come as a surprise to the tens of millions of Chinese and Korean people that were still under Japanese occupation in August 1945. Japan certainly had not chance of winning, but that does not mean a war is over. Unless we were willing to let Japan keep its government and military intact and retain the conquered territory it still held, the war was not over.

The Japanese were prostate and posed no further threat.

Again, the people in China and Korea would probably have disagreed with that sentiment, but couldn't the same thing have been said about Germany the winter of '44-'45? Their offensive capability was certainly smashed, and they had been pushed out of the majority of territory they had conquered. So why didn't we negotiate an armistice with them prior to the Soviets' invasion of Berlin?

The "they do it so we do it" is just as immoral.

The "it" you're talking about makes a difference, however. While you will get no argument from me that the use of atomic weapons was horrible, take a look at what we did to Japan *after* it had surrendered. Did we systematically rape, burn, and pillage our way through Japan, killing tens of millions of its citizens? Did we export millions of its citizens to be worked to death, or raped to death, in the U.S.?

What we did was horrible, but it was done to end an exponentially more horrible war.

who by August 1945 were close to starving to death. My college algebra prof was a teenager held by the Japanese at the University of Manila. He told us they were eating rats & had come up with various ways to prepare them. He never truly recovered from the effects starvation & other deprivations caused by his internment.

dg

Sorry, you are so many ways of wrong it is not even funny.

dg

Is that, at bottom, they object to war itself, and view it as mass-murder which can never be justified. Objection to particular instances is simply a reflection of that general attitude. Actions which are condemned already within their own society and culture will seldom draw fire, rather, argumentation will be directed exclusively at actions which do not meet with wide condemnation in their own societies, because what is offensive to them is the claim that any act of war is proper and justifiable. The criticisms thus directed, flowing from an a priori conviction, are invariably a-historical, since the only concern with fact is to extract whichever ones might tend to buttress the initial conviction, and they are also in general profoundly amoral, in that they are never attempts to actually sort out the complex ethical questions involved in balancing degrees of wrong and what courses actually were available towards particular ends, and never make the slightest attempt to enquire into the state of mind of those they accuse of criminality, though of course the first element in criminal prosecution is establishing the existence of criminal intent behind an act.

The weapons employed against Hiroshima and Nagasaki have come to function as 'the alibi of the nation' in the sense that they serve as a shield against enquiry onto the behavior of Imperial Japan in the decades of exploitative expansion and war leading up to those two events, and do so by means of proclaiming, whatever we did, we suffered enough for it, look at these horrible things eventually done to us. That is a very dishonest procedure, and it is something quite different from an attempt to make a case that some act, a horror on its face, was yet necessary in the prosecution to its objective of a war necessitated by the aggression, and its atrocious character, of the power that action was directed against. The latter will succeed or fail on the strength and quality of the arguments on both sides of the question, which in turn will depend on the knowledge and depth of understanding of the persons pressing them; the former is simply attempt to avoid examination in any depth of the situation at all.

The Japanese and Germans justified their atrocities in exactly the same way, and with quite similar reasoning, that we did, and still do. The Germans justified their killing with the need to save Germany, and western civilization (at least their concept of "civilization"), from International Jewry and Bolshevism. The Japanese were to save Japan and it's "superior" culture from Western Imperialism. Both were determined to "protect their vital national interests". Sound familiar?

They killed millions of people for their own "justifiable" reasons. The west killed millions for their own "justifiable" reasons. Which was followed by a not so "cold war" which killed millions more for justifiable reasons.

You say that a priori convictions are invariably a-historical and amoral because they refuse to seek out the "complex ethical questions involved in balancing degrees of wrong..". Which is, imo, looking for justifications in what is unambiguously immoral. Thus, we have the argument of the proponents of torture, for instance, that say that it is justifiable under certain circumstances or the wife beater who can make a similar claim.

But, if you can justify the slaughter of millions by anyone as an "ethical" question with many sides, feel free to have at it. I can't.

And it clearly illustrates the a-historical quality of your position.

While it is not my intention to engage the German element at any length, it is worth pointing out one very large fact you are over-looking. The Nazi war aim was exterminationist; the purpose of victory was to commence the slaughter of peoples in the east excess to the requirements of chattel slavery to create of the German population as a whole a leisure class of masters. This was not only stated openly, but put into practice in appreciable degree in occupied areas populated by Slavic peoples. This is not a justification of military necessity, which is to maintain some ghastly act is needed for military advantage that will bring victory closer, and thus be held to have the effect in the long run of lessening the totality of suffering. While there was a good deal of exterminationist rhetoric in the United States regarding the Japanese during World War Two, and there can be no doubt racial feelings played a role in our conduct of that war, this ceased on victory, and the occupation of Japan was not marked by wholesale killings and enslavement. There is thus a significant difference in kind in the war aims, and the sort of blurring you are attempting can only be done extracting the events from history, and disregarding actual factors in the situation.

Your statement of the Japanese war aim is similarly inaccurate. Imperial Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century pursued a policy of establishing Japanese dominion over East Asia, which it considered to be inhabited by inferior native races who ought to be put under a Japanese yoke. Western Imperialists were a stumbling block to this, but were considered similarly inferior as human material, and not a threat to Japan's existence, merely an obstacle to be over-come. The level of atrocity with which this pursued is, as others have stated here, not widely appreciated to this day outside Asia, any more than is its duration. A pattern of atrocity was clearly apparent from 1932 in Manchuria, in the conquest of that region and creation of the Manchukuo regime. Actions ranging from bayonetting wounded Chinese soldiers (uniformed regulars, not guerrillas) to reprisals for guerrilla activity against villagers deemed friendly to them ranging from burying a few persons alive to herding hundreds into corrals and opening fire on the mass with machine-guns are well attested in contemporary eye-witness reports. The first large-scale use of incendiaries against an urban population domiciled in wood and paper construction occurred early in 1932 in Shanghai, with raids from Japanese carrier planes on the 'Little Chapie' district, carried out at dawn when there would be the greatest assistance from hearth fires for breakfast, and produced a rolling sheet of flames reportedly a hundred feet high sweeping through the district, incinerating thousands. This established pattern escalated over intervening years in the occupation of parts of Inner Mongolia and northern China, and simply expanded in scope and scale with the onset of full-bore war with Nationalist China from the summer of 1937. Western opposition to this, particularly that of the U.S., may well have had self-interested elements, focusing on a disinclination to allow themselves to be frozen out of the economic pickings of the China market by any single power, and certainly not by an Oriental one, but it cannot rightly be classed either as aggression against Japan, or a threat to its existence. In practical fact, it was opposition, however mild, to a policy of atrocity and conquest on the part of Japan, which was by any honest reading of the situation an imperialist aggressor of the highest water.

This is the sort of thing one expects left and progressive people to be opposed to, and to denounce in strenuous terms, and to agitate for the defeat of when it is on-going. The problem which emerges is that generally there is no way to effectively oppose and bring to an end such a course of action by a state save military force applied through the medium of war. Persons who oppose war as a general thing are thus unable ever to bring effective opposition to this sort of behavior, since they recoil from the necessary implement. Once the necessary implement is wielded, they immediately begin to focus on what the society to which they belong does, and to view it as morally equivalent to the enemy, since both are employing the detested course of war. It is a position which, as a matter of practical fact, ranges the person alongside the aggressor, and assists the aggressor in his atrocious course.

Despite the Biblical injunction, much of life consists in doing evil in the hope good may come of it, and war employed against atrocious aggression, and in self-defense, is an extreme example of this. What it tends to do is shift the suffering from one set of shoulders to another. For some years in the Orient, it was only Chinese who were being burned alive in wholesale lots by aerial bombardment; by 1944 or so, it was Japanese who suffered this instead. Ruin and death in Japan spared great numbers of Chinese, Indonesians, Burmese, and various others in Japanese power. Forcing a surrender by Japan certainly saved a good many Japanese lives, as well as the lives of Allied soldiers. There is little doubt an invasion of Japan, fought to conclusion, would have taken on an exterminationist character.

Although it seems a mickle strange position for the U.S. to be in, lecturing other countries on how they should present their own history to their citizens and the world. We do every bit as good a whitewash as the Japanese, the Chinese and the Russians (formerly the Soviets) in presenting our national history to our young uns, and explaining or apologizing for our own atrocities.

in WWII, and instead portrayed itself as the victim of Allied aggression? After all, its Germany's own history, who are we to say how they teach it?

I'm sure that the Vietnamese (for example) would like history as taught in the United States, as well as our official foreign policy, to reflect certain truths about our past behavior. The Cambodians, Iraqis, El Salvadorans, Chileans, Cubans, and a host of other countries would similarly like a more complete picture to be officially acknowledged of their countries' dealings with the United States in the last century or so.

My point is that if we're setting ourselves up as the arbiter of what other countries should do in regard to promulgating their history and teaching their citizens, we might consider washing our own hands first.

It would disturb the hell out of me if Germany started teaching its kids that it was the victim of allied aggression in WWII.


edit upon further reflection

But we're not bound to respect other countries' opinions about what our kids are taught. Seems like a classic violation of the goose and gander principle.

A person may have opinions, even strong opinions, about whether something is right or wrong without "dictating" anything.

when I was growing up, I attended the yearly WWII airshow held in a near-by town. One year, they focused on the war in the Pacific, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima. They simulated the blast & effect of the mushroom cloud as closely as they could. It was very, very sobering, watching that cloud billow upwards, & knowing what had happened. NO ONE CHEERED WHEN THIS HAPPENED. In fact, many left the show in tears.

The Japanese got all up in arms about it though, forcing the Confederate Air Force to apologize for being so "insensitive." (btw, the CAF has since changed its name; not sure what it's called now). What they left out of all their public wailing was the fact that the Japanese contingent at the air show cheered the recreation of Pearl Harbor. Those of us who were there know the truth of what happened at the Air Show that day, & it was NOT the way the Japanese depicted it.


dg

Others are aware, but decry any mention of it--context, it seems, isn't kind to their argument.

Also, a long list of other nations we started wars with.

but for some reason we don't see threads every spring that decry how unjust it was to fight Germany to the point of surrender, as opposed to negotiating an armistice with them some months earlier.

While the argument you point to *is* rather specious, I think a more appropriate statement would be "if a nation embarks on a horrifically bloody war of imperial conquest that results in the deaths of tens of millions of people, that nation should not be surprised to suffer horrific consequences if it is not victorious."

PR or not, Japan was in the same category as the Nazi and in some instances far worse.

Japan Imperial troops:
* setup forced rape camps so soldiers after a hard day of killing civilians could get some "action". As many as 200,000 women were forced into prostitution. Actually prostitution white washes the events. The women had no choice, and received no compensation. They were subject to serial rape often 3,4, 5 time a day everyday. Once "used up" they were executed.

* used slave labor under extreme conditions where most laborers died within a few months.

* conducted military weapons testing on civilians. Placing civilians strapped to boards around grenades at various angles and distances and then detonating to test lethality at various ranges.

* Cannibalism of victims even captured living POWs

* Genocide of over 18 million civilians just in China. 18 million. One more time 18 friggin million. Hitler killed 8 million Jews and is rightful considered a monster. Japan wiped out 18 million civilians (just in one country) and not a peep about it. Japan wanted the land not the people. Non Japanese was considered sub-human good for disposable labor & as sex relief but not really people. The long term goal was to populate Manchuria with Japanese citizens. Why lets worthless Chinese take up all that valuable land.

* Intentional destruction of farmland by fire on such a wide scale it resulted in a manmade famine. 2 million civilians killed. War crime trial evidence indicated this was intentional for economic reasons. Killing large numbers of civilians is costly. Starving them is cheap.

* Routine torture & execution of POW troops.
The major means of getting intelligence was to extract information by interrogating prisoners. Torture was an unavoidable necessity. Murdering and burying them follows naturally. You do it so you won't be found out. I believed and acted this way because I was convinced of what I was doing. We carried out our duty as instructed by our masters. We did it for the sake of our country. From our filial obligation to our ancestors. On the battlefield, we never really considered the Chinese humans. When you're winning, the losers look really miserable. We concluded that the Yamato (Japanese) race was superior - Uno Shintaro (Japanese intelligence officer)

If you were a Nazi POW your chance of dying in captivity was about 6%. If you were a Japanese POW it was 30%.



* Largest deployment of Chemical Weapons (against both troops & civilians) in Violation of Geneva Convention.
375 recorded instances (per Japanese incomplete records) in just one battle. The chemical weapons killed large numbers but failed to stop Chinese counter attack so the Japanese soldiers executed civilians as the left the city. Chemical weapons were also lethaly tested on POW to determine effective yields. Japanese soldiers also admitted to releasing bubonic plague in China (aka Black Death that wiped out 1/3 of mankind in Medieval ages).

* Human experimentation of living captured persons (POW & civilian). Vivisection of living people for training have been documented. Experimentation was routine to test limits of human body for damage and pain.

* Rape, pillaging, and murder as a reward.
When Japan finally occupied the city of Nanking the Japanese high command authorized a 6 week massacare which resembles more the activity of rampaging barbarians in the middle ages than any modern military. Over the 6 weeks 80,000 women were raped including children, infants and elderly. Hundreds of thousands of thousands of civilians were murdered for sport having offered no resistance. Entire families including children were forced out into the street and executed. Arson was common with entire city blocks put to the flame often with families hiding inside. Those that tried to run from the flames were gunned down in the street. All of this is well documented by Westerners who felt compelled to stay in the city and document what happened.

The slaughter of civilians is appalling. I could go on for pages telling of cases of rape and brutality almost beyond belief. Two bayoneted corpses are the only survivors of seven street cleaners who were sitting in their headquarters when Japanese soldiers came in without warning or reason and killed five of their number and wounded the two that found their way to the hospital.

Let me recount some instances occurring in the last two days. Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped. Two girls, about 16, were raped to death in one of the refugee camps.

"Two Japanese soldiers have climbed over the garden wall and are about to break into our house. When I appear they give the excuse that they saw two Chinese soldiers climb over the wall. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. In one of the houses in the narrow street behind my garden wall, a woman was raped, and then wounded in the neck with a bayonet. I managed to get an ambulance so we can take her to Kulou Hospital. (...) Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling College Girls alone. You hear nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they're shot. What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers"

Essentially Japanese high command authorized a 6 week assault and rape-athon to reward the soldiers for the hard fight of taking Nanking.

All together the Japanese Imperial war machine exterminated 30 million people. Far more than Hitler ever accomplished.

All of these actions were not random or systemic they were the actions of a people who believed that both they were genetically superior to sub-humans occupying the Asian mainland and that they have a destiny from God to be the true rulers of the Earth. A kingdom without end. The Japan of today and the Japan of 1920-1950 are two radically different nations.

Prior to the atomic bombing Japan insisted on "surrender" with 5 conditions:
* No occupation of Japan
* Keeping Emperor in power
* No disarming of military
* Keeping all non-European territory (to include Korea, Thailand, Vietnam & China).
* No war crime trials (understandable when you just committed genocide of 30 million+ people).

Some people would consider it "humane" if the US just accepted Japan "surrender" which would allow this barbaric military to remain in place and as overlords of almost 100 million people they considered "sub human" and occupying valuable land. If the war hadn't ended with a unconditional surrender how many civilians would Japan have ultimately killed. 50 million? 80 million? 100 million? Would ever race in south west asia have been wiped out to make room for an expanded Japanese empire?

to nuke us because we started the war with them!

and Japan could have surrendered long before the bomb was dropped but chose to fight on even after the first one was dropped.