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‘US government documents admit that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington's Cold War on the Soviet Union. Ben Norton reviews the historical record.’

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[-] Aru@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 year ago

The level of propaganda to not only justify turning innocent civilians into dust and basically fuck the land for the next life, but to also convince your population that it was necessary is something else

[-] WaterBowlSlime@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Honestly it doesn't take any convincing to make Americans support atrocities. The US can just do them and Americans will invent justifications all on their own.

[-] Aru@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago

I think it's because of patriotism "oh the US did this atrocity? Well I am usonian and I did nothing wrong, therefore the atrocity was ok".

[-] Beat_da_Rich@lemmygrad.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There's a heavy dose of shame and denialism too. To be told your whole life that you are the good guys and that your country gets into every war for noble reasons, you have to really reconcile atrocities in a way that doesn't conflict with that myth. To do so otherwise is admit your entire upbringing is a lie, your leaders are malicious psychopaths, and that you've been complicit in voting for them your whole life. That can really really break people. It's a greatly traumatic thing and is on par with losing your religion or estranging yourself from family.

I'd say for the majority of American liberals, they understandably have a difficult time facing the truth. Because the truth is fucking dark.

[-] OrnluWolfjarl@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Every aspect of culture and education in the US is dedicated to drilling into the minds of people that the US are the most good, the most just, the most honest, that their systems of governance are based on these values, and the majority of people work hard towards maintaining that.

So when a USonian is faced with this narrative being broken, they fall back into cognitive dissonance. It's only recently we've seen a reversal of this to a significant scale, but ask anyone and they'll likely tell you that they still believe these things were true a couple decades ago and it's only now that the US has become bad.

Whatever the US has accused communists of doing to their people, the US has already perfected it.

[-] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Japan's Holocaust was as bad as the Nazi's. They were killing, raping, mutilating, and enslaving millions of Chinese, Burmese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other peoples on a daily basis. Every extra day the Japanese empire was in power was another day of hell for millions of innocent people. Japan's rulers know the War was lost after Germany fell. They were happy to keep the killing going.

[-] bennieandthez@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago

Behold the MOAB! (mother of all bad takes)

[-] juchebot88@lemmygrad.ml -1 points 1 year ago

Yep, I'd expect to see something like this pretty much anywhere on the US internet today, since August 9th is the one day of the year when Japan goes from Wholesome Anime Country to Evil Genocidal Asiatic Barbarian Land in the minds of most Americans. I would not have expected to see it on GenZedong.

[-] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago

Your description of the conditions is correct but your conclusion is a non-sequitur. It does not follow logically that the only or best option to stop those atrocities was to mass murder civilians. Despite what the propaganda about the bombings that has since been inculcated into the western public claims, they were not in fact necessary for compelling Japan's surrender. There were already internal disputes about this in the Japanese leadership for some time, but after their decisive defeat in Manchuria at the hands of the Red Army the decision to surrender as soon as possible became pretty much unanimous. Every day that went by was another day that the Soviets took more territory and came closer and closer - through the Kurils - to the Japanese home islands. The Japanese imperialists knew just as well as the Nazis that they stood a much better chance of avoiding punishment for their crimes (and some of them even being allowed to retain some power in the post war state) if they surrendered to the US rather than the USSR. Moreover we now know that the US leaders knew this. Their primary motivations were to have a live weapons test and to intimidate the Soviet Union.

[-] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

You say there were 'options,' yet somehow managed to avoid actually naming them.

What would you tell the Koreans/Chinese/Burmese whose families died while the negotiations stretched out?

[-] DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago

And what of the Japanese civilians? Are their lives automatically forfeit because they had the gall to be born in the bad guy country?

Do not justify atrocities with other atrocities. And do not ignore the bulk of another person's argument to pretend they had no argument. You just look like an idiot when you do that.

[-] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

What of the Japanese civilians?

You haven't given me one word about why their lives were more valuable than the enslaved peoples.

[-] DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml 1 points 1 year ago

You're being deliberately obtuse, take your concern trolling elsewhere.

[-] CascadeOfLight@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago

Well this is some inverted reasoning. The bombs didn't end the war quicker and the US military didn't think that they would. It was pointless cruelty to civilians that saved no one, for the sake of intimidating the USSR.

And if we follow this logic, then every (white) inhabitant of the US deserves to have every single atom of their bodies blasted out into interstellar space at the speed of light for their country's past and present crimes.

[-] AmarkuntheGatherer@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago

Not much since there'd be quite few of them. Japan would be on the retreat at that point and would have very limited capacity to carry out further atrocities.

What would you tell people that lost their families in the Korean war to support the atomic bombs, since Japan surrendering to the US instead of the USSR all but guaranteed that war?

[-] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago

"A limited capacity." Or, they might have decided that if they were going to lose, they would take as many people as they could with them.

Read up on biological warfare Unit 731 and tell me that there was no chance they'd have killed as many people as they could.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

[-] culpritus@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#Surrender_and_immunity

Destruction of evidence

As the Second World War started to come to an end, all prisoners within the compound were killed to conceal evidence, and there were no documented survivors.[102] With the coming of the Red Army in August 1945, the unit had to abandon their work in haste.

Curious.

American grant of immunity

Interesting.

Among the individuals in Japan after its 1945 surrender was Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, who arrived in Yokohama via the American ship Sturgess in September 1945. Sanders was a highly regarded microbiologist and a member of America's military center for biological weapons. Sanders' duty was to investigate Japanese biological warfare activity. At the time of his arrival in Japan, he had no knowledge of what Unit 731 was.[69] Until Sanders finally threatened the Japanese with bringing the Soviets into the picture, little information about biological warfare was being shared with the Americans. The Japanese wanted to avoid prosecution under the Soviet legal system, so, the morning after he made his threat, Sanders received a manuscript describing Japan's involvement in biological warfare.[104] Sanders took this information to General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers and responsible for rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupations. MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese informants:[105] he secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731, including their leader, in exchange for providing America solely, with their research on biological warfare and data from human experimentation.[6] American occupation authorities monitored the activities of former unit members, including reading and censoring their mail.[106] The Americans believed that the research data was valuable and did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons.[107]

The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with "poisonous serums" on Chinese civilians. This took place in August 1946 and was instigated by David Sutton, assistant to the Chinese prosecutor. The Japanese defense counsel argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. The subject was not pursued further by Sutton, who was probably unaware of Unit 731's activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental. Later in 1981, one of the last surviving members of the Tokyo Tribunal, Judge Röling, had expressed bitterness in not being made aware of the suppression of evidence of Unit 731 and wrote, "It is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind was kept secret from the court by the U.S. government."[108]

Critics argue that racism led to the double standard in the American postwar responses to the experiments conducted on different nationalities.[109] Whereas the perpetrators of Unit 731 were exempt from prosecution, the U.S. held a tribunal in Yokohama in 1948 that indicted nine Japanese physician professors and medical students for conducting vivisection upon captured American pilots; two professors were sentenced to death and others to 15–20 years' imprisonment.[109]

It just keeps going.

Separate Soviet trials

Although publicly silent on the issue at the Tokyo Trials, the Soviet Union pursued the case and prosecuted 12 top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731 and its affiliated biological-war prisons Unit 1644 in Nanjing and Unit 100 in Changchun in the Khabarovsk war crimes trials. Among those accused of war crimes, including germ warfare, was General Otozō Yamada, commander-in-chief of the million-man Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria.

Official silence during the American occupation of Japan

As above, during the United States occupation of Japan, the members of Unit 731 and the members of other experimental units were allowed to go free. On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington in order to inform it that "additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii, can probably be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as 'war crimes' evidence".[6]

According to an investigation by the The Guardian, after the end of the war, under the pretense of vaccine development, former members of Unit 731 conducted human experiments on Japanese prisoners, babies and mental patients, with secret funding from the American Government.[114] One graduate of Unit 1644, Masami Kitaoka, continued to perform experiments on unwilling Japanese subjects from 1947 to 1956. He performed his experiments while he was working for Japan's National Institute of Health Sciences. He infected prisoners with rickettsia and infected mentally-ill patients with typhus.[115] As the chief of the unit, Shiro Ishii was granted immunity from prosecution for war crimes by the American occupation authorities, because he had provided human experimentation research materials to them. From 1948 to 1958, less than five percent of the documents were transferred onto microfilm and stored in the US National Archives before they were shipped back to Japan.[116]

Ultimately, inadequate scientific and engineering foundations limited the effectiveness of the Japanese program.[122][123] Harris speculates that US scientists generally wanted to acquire it due to the concept of forbidden fruit, believing that lawful and ethical prohibitions could affect the outcomes of their research.[124]

So glad US nuked civilians so they could have sole occupation of Japan.

jesus-christ

[-] ksynwa@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Even after accepting your premise there is a huge amount of middle ground between doing nothing and nuking civilian centres.

[-] Dagwood222@lemm.ee -1 points 1 year ago

Like what, exactly?

Remember two things. First were the Asian peoples who were being slaughtered by the Empire. Why should they go on suffering one extra day? The other is that Truman had an obligation to protect American lives; that was his sworn duty. Why should he allow any US service men to die to protect the lives fo Japaense?

[-] BelieveRevolt@hexbear.net 0 points 1 year ago

I guess that justifies the murder of civilians for you?

By that logic, 9/11 was justified big-cool

[-] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Please explain, in detail, why the lives of the Japanese civilians in Hiroshima were more important then the lives of the Korean/Burmese/Chinese people being killed every day?

[-] aaaaaaadjsf@hexbear.net 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Please explain, in detail, why the lives of American civilians in the twin towers were more important than the lives of middle eastern people being killed every day?

Do you see how horrific and crazy this sounds? Using your logic, you can justify killing civilans of most countries, hell using your logic France deserves to get nuked out of existence because of what they are currently doing to West Africa.

Thankfully we shouldn't use this logic.

[-] WaterBowlSlime@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago

I don't think you understand what the word "civilian" means

[-] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago

The Japanese Empire was killing a lot of civilians. Chinese civilians, Burmese civilians, Vietnamese civilians. Explain to me why their lives shouldn't be considered important?

[-] GrainEater@lemmygrad.ml 0 points 1 year ago

as mentioned in the video, Japan was already willing to surrender because of the USSR

[-] Dagwood222@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

If they were so willing, why didn't they just do it?

this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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