Presidential vapor in Hiroshima....

[untermensche]

If you demand I prove myself innocent without a shred of guilt.

I'll do it when you deserve it.

I demand you speak out against Japanese atrocities in WWII. Be specific. Don't hold back.

I demand you speak out against the US atrocities in the Philippines that brought the US into conflict with Japan by crossing the ocean to establish a colony.

 

[Ford]

I demand you speak out against Japanese atrocities in WWII. Be specific. Don't hold back.

I demand you speak out against the US atrocities in the Philippines that brought the US into conflict with Japan by crossing the ocean to establish a colony.

Apparently the mods don't care, so I'll quote you:

Fuck off.

 

[bilby]

Dropping an atom bomb on men women and children is the biggest crime a person is capable of...excepting perhaps dropping a Hydrogen bomb on them.

This is empty rhetoric. Atom bombs don't make people any more dead than other kinds of bombs; Once you are at war, and are making 'strategic' bombing attacks that target the total destruction of enemy cities - which is the situation the US was in at the time - you are committed to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them in extremely unpleasant ways.

There is no sense in which the atomic bombing of Hiroshima caused greater suffering than did the firebombing of Tokyo; the only notable difference is the far smaller number of aircraft required for the former versus the latter.

Both lead to huge numbers of civilian deaths; Both lead to vast suffering amongst the survivors; The Tokyo raids caused considerably more death and more suffering than the Hiroshima bomb.

And that's just dropping bombs on people who are unfortunate enough to live in a war zone. The individual victims are not targets as such; Nobody is choosing who gets to die, who gets to suffer, and who gets to live - unlike during hand-to-hand massacres, such as the Rape of Nanking; or industrialized Genocides like the Nazi holocaust; or deliberate torture and killing of prisoners, as slaves of their captors, as on the Burma railroad.

Dropping an atom bomb on people is a pretty horrible thing to do; but it's not the worst thing that was done in 1945, much less the worst thing in history; and as for being the 'biggest crime', the holocaust makes the atomic bombing of Japan look like a little light shoplifting in comparison - even if we accept the presumption that bombing Hiroshima was a crime at all, which requires stretching the definition of the word 'crime' beyond its breaking point.

The indiscriminate killing of large numbers of human beings is murder. No matter what bad people have ensconced themselves amid the population of some country, the killing of innocents is NEVER ACCEPTABLE.

Clearly, many people in the 1940s, on all sides in the conflict, did not agree with you. Personally, I think that the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of German and Japanese civilians was an extremely unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of not letting the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire dominate the globe - an eventuality that would have led to the killing of far more innocents. Sometimes it is necessary to accept bad things, in order to prevent VERY bad things. World War II is an excellent example of such a time - indeed, there are vanishingly few conflicts in human history that are easier to justify than the military action of the Allies against the Axis during WWII.

This country, with the help of corporate media, Madison Avenue, and the war machine has managed to torque the collective morality of our nation so completely we can now accept this sort of thing without blinking, so long as we don't have to look at it.

Americans (outside Hawaii) may not have had to look at it; but the rest of the world did - in the 1930s, the British and French fell over backwards to avoid war with Germany - a course of action that, in hindsight, probably resulted in vastly more suffering than a more belligerent approach - for example enforcing the rearmament prohibitions of the Versailles treaty by invading the Rhineland in 1936, and throwing out the illegal German rearmament forces- would have done.

People who talk about the "necessity" of murder generally eventually commit murder.

Sometimes, it actually is necessary. Not often. But sometimes. And this was one of those times.

It is really quite the same as suicide. It takes a mind that has been over-stressed and has become inured to the meaning of the things they do. It is a kind of national depression, our country suffers from, but I will add, it has not happened without some people designing it for their own selfish gains.

Your country is pretty bad at making appropriate choices about when to go to war; You were too slow in WWI and WWII, and have been too quick ever since. You should do something about that - ideally, something more productive than ranting at people on the Internet.

That is what Hitler did. That is really about the same as Truman or General LeMay or so many of our leaders today. They have lost their humanity, and place some materialistic goal at the top of their agenda and are willing to sacrifice virtually the rest of the people for that.

The decision to kill your fellow man is something that happens always in times that are depressing. There is no exception...rob the liquor store and kill the attendant, or drop a bomb. Think on that a bit. Obama runs an assassination ring in our behalf...oh boy! Now that is depressing!

Yes, it is depressing. Why you seem to think it is also avoidable eludes me. Apart from the appeal to emotion, and your apparent (and rather bizarre) attitude that others don't care about the deaths of innocents if they recognize that such deaths are sometimes the least bad option left available, you don't seem to have much of an argument. Do you really think that the Japanese Empire would have gotten bored and gone home if the Americans had continued to ignore them after Pearl Harbour? Sometimes war is forced upon even the most peaceable peoples; and when that happens, the option with the least death and suffering in total is often the one that involves the maximum application of force as soon as it can be brought to bear. Anything less just lets the war drag on, killing innocents for months or years.

War has become steadily less common, less widespread, and less deadly in the last 70 years; In part because of the existence of a small number of heavily armed superpowers - now down to just one - and to the presence of sufficient nuclear weaponry and delivery systems as to make general war between major powers unthinkable; In part due to increasing prosperity - rich people don't go to war unless forced to do so; And in part due to increasingly close political ties between historical enemies - the EU being the obvious example of this.

While humanity has not yet managed to completely eliminate war, it seems that these techniques for reducing its incidence and severity have been hugely successful, where the blind platitudes of absolutist pacifism have completely failed. Your preferred approach is demonstrably less effective at achieving your stated goal than is the approach you rail against. A wise man would change his mind in response to such circumstances, rather then resorting to appeals to emotion and other illogical approaches, whose sole purpose seems to be to save you from admitting to yourself that your philosophy is in error.

 

[untermensche]

I demand you speak out against the US atrocities in the Philippines that brought the US into conflict with Japan by crossing the ocean to establish a colony.

Apparently the mods don't care, so I'll quote you:

Fuck off.

They shouldn't care since I don't.

You prove I was right to say it.

 

[Ford]

Apparently the mods don't care, so I'll quote you:

Fuck off.

They shouldn't care since I don't.

You prove I was right to say it.

Still waiting for you to condemn the Rape of Nanking.


I guess you thought it was a good idea.

 

[untermensche]

They shouldn't care since I don't.

You prove I was right to say it.

Still waiting for you to condemn the Rape of Nanking.


I guess you thought it was a good idea.

What have I said to make you think I approved of it?

To say nothing is not to say I approve.

To think I would approve is only some delusion of yours.

This is turning into a petty argument and is not making any points so I will try to state my thesis.

Prior to Pearl Harbor both the US and Japan were trying to expand.

The Japanese were trying to conquer China and other places and had a particularly brutal military policy.

The US had the Philippines and had a policy of expansionism from day one, and the US saw Japan growing and saw that it's position it the region was being threatened. So the US began an economic policy to try to weaken Japan. It also used Japanese brutal atrocities to justify the policy.

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor with the goal of pushing the US out of the region and becoming a major land empire.

This started all out war as the US refused to be pushed away.

 

[Ford]

Still waiting for you to condemn the Rape of Nanking.


I guess you thought it was a good idea.

What have I said to make you think I approved of it?

Say you didn't agree.








Why is that so hard?

 

[Ford]

The Japanese were trying to conquer China and other places and had a particularly brutal military policy.

Condemn that policy.



Why is that so hard?

 

[untermensche]

The Japanese were trying to conquer China and other places and had a particularly brutal military policy.

Condemn that policy.



Why is that so hard?

What difference does it make?

You have not proven the US acts in the world based on sympathy or empathy.

It is impossible to prove when one looks at the Philippines.

 

[Ford]

Condemn that policy.



Why is that so hard?

What difference does it make?

You have not proven the US acts in the world based on sympathy or empathy.

It is impossible to prove when one looks at the Philippines.

So you support massacres if they are carried out by the Japanese.

 

[whichphilosophy]

This is empty rhetoric. Atom bombs don't make people any more dead than other kinds of bombs; Once you are at war, and are making 'strategic' bombing attacks that target the total destruction of enemy cities - which is the situation the US was in at the time - you are committed to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them in extremely unpleasant ways.

There is no sense in which the atomic bombing of Hiroshima caused greater suffering than did the firebombing of Tokyo; the only notable difference is the far smaller number of aircraft required for the former versus the latter.

Both lead to huge numbers of civilian deaths; Both lead to vast suffering amongst the survivors; The Tokyo raids caused considerably more death and more suffering than the Hiroshima bomb.

And that's just dropping bombs on people who are unfortunate enough to live in a war zone. The individual victims are not targets as such; Nobody is choosing who gets to die, who gets to suffer, and who gets to live - unlike during hand-to-hand massacres, such as the Rape of Nanking; or industrialized Genocides like the Nazi holocaust; or deliberate torture and killing of prisoners, as slaves of their captors, as on the Burma railroad.

Dropping an atom bomb on people is a pretty horrible thing to do; but it's not the worst thing that was done in 1945, much less the worst thing in history; and as for being the 'biggest crime', the holocaust makes the atomic bombing of Japan look like a little light shoplifting in comparison - even if we accept the presumption that bombing Hiroshima was a crime at all, which requires stretching the definition of the word 'crime' beyond its breaking point.

The indiscriminate killing of large numbers of human beings is murder. No matter what bad people have ensconced themselves amid the population of some country, the killing of innocents is NEVER ACCEPTABLE.

Clearly, many people in the 1940s, on all sides in the conflict, did not agree with you. Personally, I think that the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of German and Japanese civilians was an extremely unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of not letting the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire dominate the globe - an eventuality that would have led to the killing of far more innocents. Sometimes it is necessary to accept bad things, in order to prevent VERY bad things. World War II is an excellent example of such a time - indeed, there are vanishingly few conflicts in human history that are easier to justify than the military action of the Allies against the Axis during WWII.

This country, with the help of corporate media, Madison Avenue, and the war machine has managed to torque the collective morality of our nation so completely we can now accept this sort of thing without blinking, so long as we don't have to look at it.

Americans (outside Hawaii) may not have had to look at it; but the rest of the world did - in the 1930s, the British and French fell over backwards to avoid war with Germany - a course of action that, in hindsight, probably resulted in vastly more suffering than a more belligerent approach - for example enforcing the rearmament prohibitions of the Versailles treaty by invading the Rhineland in 1936, and throwing out the illegal German rearmament forces- would have done.

People who talk about the "necessity" of murder generally eventually commit murder.

Sometimes, it actually is necessary. Not often. But sometimes. And this was one of those times.

It is really quite the same as suicide. It takes a mind that has been over-stressed and has become inured to the meaning of the things they do. It is a kind of national depression, our country suffers from, but I will add, it has not happened without some people designing it for their own selfish gains.

Your country is pretty bad at making appropriate choices about when to go to war; You were too slow in WWI and WWII, and have been too quick ever since. You should do something about that - ideally, something more productive than ranting at people on the Internet.

That is what Hitler did. That is really about the same as Truman or General LeMay or so many of our leaders today. They have lost their humanity, and place some materialistic goal at the top of their agenda and are willing to sacrifice virtually the rest of the people for that.

The decision to kill your fellow man is something that happens always in times that are depressing. There is no exception...rob the liquor store and kill the attendant, or drop a bomb. Think on that a bit. Obama runs an assassination ring in our behalf...oh boy! Now that is depressing!

Yes, it is depressing. Why you seem to think it is also avoidable eludes me. Apart from the appeal to emotion, and your apparent (and rather bizarre) attitude that others don't care about the deaths of innocents if they recognize that such deaths are sometimes the least bad option left available, you don't seem to have much of an argument. Do you really think that the Japanese Empire would have gotten bored and gone home if the Americans had continued to ignore them after Pearl Harbour? Sometimes war is forced upon even the most peaceable peoples; and when that happens, the option with the least death and suffering in total is often the one that involves the maximum application of force as soon as it can be brought to bear. Anything less just lets the war drag on, killing innocents for months or years.

War has become steadily less common, less widespread, and less deadly in the last 70 years; In part because of the existence of a small number of heavily armed superpowers - now down to just one - and to the presence of sufficient nuclear weaponry and delivery systems as to make general war between major powers unthinkable; In part due to increasing prosperity - rich people don't go to war unless forced to do so; And in part due to increasingly close political ties between historical enemies - the EU being the obvious example of this.

While humanity has not yet managed to completely eliminate war, it seems that these techniques for reducing its incidence and severity have been hugely successful, where the blind platitudes of absolutist pacifism have completely failed. Your preferred approach is demonstrably less effective at achieving your stated goal than is the approach you rail against. A wise man would change his mind in response to such circumstances, rather then resorting to appeals to emotion and other illogical approaches, whose sole purpose seems to be to save you from admitting to yourself that your philosophy is in error.

Nonetheless, a peace process in place (where Japan didn't have anywhere to retreat to) could have prevented the use of the A bomb.
It's not clear (last Para) that wars have been reduced in incidence. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria are a network of wars where borders are somewhat blurred in the process. Other wars have sprung up and gone since WWII. Many of these had Western powers in the background.

 

[bilby]

This is empty rhetoric. Atom bombs don't make people any more dead than other kinds of bombs; Once you are at war, and are making 'strategic' bombing attacks that target the total destruction of enemy cities - which is the situation the US was in at the time - you are committed to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them in extremely unpleasant ways.

There is no sense in which the atomic bombing of Hiroshima caused greater suffering than did the firebombing of Tokyo; the only notable difference is the far smaller number of aircraft required for the former versus the latter.

Both lead to huge numbers of civilian deaths; Both lead to vast suffering amongst the survivors; The Tokyo raids caused considerably more death and more suffering than the Hiroshima bomb.

And that's just dropping bombs on people who are unfortunate enough to live in a war zone. The individual victims are not targets as such; Nobody is choosing who gets to die, who gets to suffer, and who gets to live - unlike during hand-to-hand massacres, such as the Rape of Nanking; or industrialized Genocides like the Nazi holocaust; or deliberate torture and killing of prisoners, as slaves of their captors, as on the Burma railroad.

Dropping an atom bomb on people is a pretty horrible thing to do; but it's not the worst thing that was done in 1945, much less the worst thing in history; and as for being the 'biggest crime', the holocaust makes the atomic bombing of Japan look like a little light shoplifting in comparison - even if we accept the presumption that bombing Hiroshima was a crime at all, which requires stretching the definition of the word 'crime' beyond its breaking point.

Clearly, many people in the 1940s, on all sides in the conflict, did not agree with you. Personally, I think that the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of German and Japanese civilians was an extremely unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of not letting the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire dominate the globe - an eventuality that would have led to the killing of far more innocents. Sometimes it is necessary to accept bad things, in order to prevent VERY bad things. World War II is an excellent example of such a time - indeed, there are vanishingly few conflicts in human history that are easier to justify than the military action of the Allies against the Axis during WWII.

This country, with the help of corporate media, Madison Avenue, and the war machine has managed to torque the collective morality of our nation so completely we can now accept this sort of thing without blinking, so long as we don't have to look at it.

Americans (outside Hawaii) may not have had to look at it; but the rest of the world did - in the 1930s, the British and French fell over backwards to avoid war with Germany - a course of action that, in hindsight, probably resulted in vastly more suffering than a more belligerent approach - for example enforcing the rearmament prohibitions of the Versailles treaty by invading the Rhineland in 1936, and throwing out the illegal German rearmament forces- would have done.

People who talk about the "necessity" of murder generally eventually commit murder.

Sometimes, it actually is necessary. Not often. But sometimes. And this was one of those times.

It is really quite the same as suicide. It takes a mind that has been over-stressed and has become inured to the meaning of the things they do. It is a kind of national depression, our country suffers from, but I will add, it has not happened without some people designing it for their own selfish gains.

Your country is pretty bad at making appropriate choices about when to go to war; You were too slow in WWI and WWII, and have been too quick ever since. You should do something about that - ideally, something more productive than ranting at people on the Internet.

That is what Hitler did. That is really about the same as Truman or General LeMay or so many of our leaders today. They have lost their humanity, and place some materialistic goal at the top of their agenda and are willing to sacrifice virtually the rest of the people for that.

The decision to kill your fellow man is something that happens always in times that are depressing. There is no exception...rob the liquor store and kill the attendant, or drop a bomb. Think on that a bit. Obama runs an assassination ring in our behalf...oh boy! Now that is depressing!

Yes, it is depressing. Why you seem to think it is also avoidable eludes me. Apart from the appeal to emotion, and your apparent (and rather bizarre) attitude that others don't care about the deaths of innocents if they recognize that such deaths are sometimes the least bad option left available, you don't seem to have much of an argument. Do you really think that the Japanese Empire would have gotten bored and gone home if the Americans had continued to ignore them after Pearl Harbour? Sometimes war is forced upon even the most peaceable peoples; and when that happens, the option with the least death and suffering in total is often the one that involves the maximum application of force as soon as it can be brought to bear. Anything less just lets the war drag on, killing innocents for months or years.

War has become steadily less common, less widespread, and less deadly in the last 70 years; In part because of the existence of a small number of heavily armed superpowers - now down to just one - and to the presence of sufficient nuclear weaponry and delivery systems as to make general war between major powers unthinkable; In part due to increasing prosperity - rich people don't go to war unless forced to do so; And in part due to increasingly close political ties between historical enemies - the EU being the obvious example of this.

While humanity has not yet managed to completely eliminate war, it seems that these techniques for reducing its incidence and severity have been hugely successful, where the blind platitudes of absolutist pacifism have completely failed. Your preferred approach is demonstrably less effective at achieving your stated goal than is the approach you rail against. A wise man would change his mind in response to such circumstances, rather then resorting to appeals to emotion and other illogical approaches, whose sole purpose seems to be to save you from admitting to yourself that your philosophy is in error.

Nonetheless, a peace process in place (where Japan didn't have anywhere to retreat to) could have prevented the use of the A bomb.
It's not clear (last Para) that wars have been reduced in incidence. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria are a network of wars where borders are somewhat blurred in the process. Other wars have sprung up and gone since WWII. Many of these had Western powers in the background.

The data are clear enough: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace-after-1945/; The only category of warfare that increased after 1945 in these data is civil wars - and even they have decreased since the end of the cold war.

Absolute war deaths are down:


Deaths per 100,000 population due to war are down even more sharply (due to population growth):


Violence overall has been in decline for a long time, and that trend (which includes warfare, as well as more personal violence, such as homicide) continues. https://www.edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker

 

[whichphilosophy]

This is empty rhetoric. Atom bombs don't make people any more dead than other kinds of bombs; Once you are at war, and are making 'strategic' bombing attacks that target the total destruction of enemy cities - which is the situation the US was in at the time - you are committed to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them in extremely unpleasant ways.

There is no sense in which the atomic bombing of Hiroshima caused greater suffering than did the firebombing of Tokyo; the only notable difference is the far smaller number of aircraft required for the former versus the latter.

Both lead to huge numbers of civilian deaths; Both lead to vast suffering amongst the survivors; The Tokyo raids caused considerably more death and more suffering than the Hiroshima bomb.

And that's just dropping bombs on people who are unfortunate enough to live in a war zone. The individual victims are not targets as such; Nobody is choosing who gets to die, who gets to suffer, and who gets to live - unlike during hand-to-hand massacres, such as the Rape of Nanking; or industrialized Genocides like the Nazi holocaust; or deliberate torture and killing of prisoners, as slaves of their captors, as on the Burma railroad.

Dropping an atom bomb on people is a pretty horrible thing to do; but it's not the worst thing that was done in 1945, much less the worst thing in history; and as for being the 'biggest crime', the holocaust makes the atomic bombing of Japan look like a little light shoplifting in comparison - even if we accept the presumption that bombing Hiroshima was a crime at all, which requires stretching the definition of the word 'crime' beyond its breaking point.

Clearly, many people in the 1940s, on all sides in the conflict, did not agree with you. Personally, I think that the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of German and Japanese civilians was an extremely unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of not letting the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire dominate the globe - an eventuality that would have led to the killing of far more innocents. Sometimes it is necessary to accept bad things, in order to prevent VERY bad things. World War II is an excellent example of such a time - indeed, there are vanishingly few conflicts in human history that are easier to justify than the military action of the Allies against the Axis during WWII.

This country, with the help of corporate media, Madison Avenue, and the war machine has managed to torque the collective morality of our nation so completely we can now accept this sort of thing without blinking, so long as we don't have to look at it.

Americans (outside Hawaii) may not have had to look at it; but the rest of the world did - in the 1930s, the British and French fell over backwards to avoid war with Germany - a course of action that, in hindsight, probably resulted in vastly more suffering than a more belligerent approach - for example enforcing the rearmament prohibitions of the Versailles treaty by invading the Rhineland in 1936, and throwing out the illegal German rearmament forces- would have done.

People who talk about the "necessity" of murder generally eventually commit murder.

Sometimes, it actually is necessary. Not often. But sometimes. And this was one of those times.

It is really quite the same as suicide. It takes a mind that has been over-stressed and has become inured to the meaning of the things they do. It is a kind of national depression, our country suffers from, but I will add, it has not happened without some people designing it for their own selfish gains.

Your country is pretty bad at making appropriate choices about when to go to war; You were too slow in WWI and WWII, and have been too quick ever since. You should do something about that - ideally, something more productive than ranting at people on the Internet.

That is what Hitler did. That is really about the same as Truman or General LeMay or so many of our leaders today. They have lost their humanity, and place some materialistic goal at the top of their agenda and are willing to sacrifice virtually the rest of the people for that.

The decision to kill your fellow man is something that happens always in times that are depressing. There is no exception...rob the liquor store and kill the attendant, or drop a bomb. Think on that a bit. Obama runs an assassination ring in our behalf...oh boy! Now that is depressing!

Yes, it is depressing. Why you seem to think it is also avoidable eludes me. Apart from the appeal to emotion, and your apparent (and rather bizarre) attitude that others don't care about the deaths of innocents if they recognize that such deaths are sometimes the least bad option left available, you don't seem to have much of an argument. Do you really think that the Japanese Empire would have gotten bored and gone home if the Americans had continued to ignore them after Pearl Harbour? Sometimes war is forced upon even the most peaceable peoples; and when that happens, the option with the least death and suffering in total is often the one that involves the maximum application of force as soon as it can be brought to bear. Anything less just lets the war drag on, killing innocents for months or years.

War has become steadily less common, less widespread, and less deadly in the last 70 years; In part because of the existence of a small number of heavily armed superpowers - now down to just one - and to the presence of sufficient nuclear weaponry and delivery systems as to make general war between major powers unthinkable; In part due to increasing prosperity - rich people don't go to war unless forced to do so; And in part due to increasingly close political ties between historical enemies - the EU being the obvious example of this.

While humanity has not yet managed to completely eliminate war, it seems that these techniques for reducing its incidence and severity have been hugely successful, where the blind platitudes of absolutist pacifism have completely failed. Your preferred approach is demonstrably less effective at achieving your stated goal than is the approach you rail against. A wise man would change his mind in response to such circumstances, rather then resorting to appeals to emotion and other illogical approaches, whose sole purpose seems to be to save you from admitting to yourself that your philosophy is in error.

Nonetheless, a peace process in place (where Japan didn't have anywhere to retreat to) could have prevented the use of the A bomb.
It's not clear (last Para) that wars have been reduced in incidence. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria are a network of wars where borders are somewhat blurred in the process. Other wars have sprung up and gone since WWII. Many of these had Western powers in the background.

The data are clear enough: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace-after-1945/; The only category of warfare that increased after 1945 in these data is civil wars - and even they have decreased since the end of the cold war.

Absolute war deaths are down:
View attachment 7049

Deaths per 100,000 population due to war are down even more sharply (due to population growth):
View attachment 7050

Violence overall has been in decline for a long time, and that trend (which includes warfare, as well as more personal violence, such as homicide) continues. https://www.edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker

As I mentioned there is nothing to say the number of instances of wars are down. There are no World Wars at the moment, though some may say there is a sort of WWIII against terror groups Post WWII wars have have also run the US debt into billions if not touching a trillion dollars. Many wars have been sponsored by the US resulting still in millions of deaths.

This is one study but more are needed to compare.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has...-37-victim-nations-since-world-war-ii/5492051
20 million deaths claimed as a result of US intervention is much smaller than WWII but still a huge figure for a 'post war era'

 

[Angry Floof]

Obama to apologize to Japan for Pearl Harbor

lolz.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This is empty rhetoric. Atom bombs don't make people any more dead than other kinds of bombs; Once you are at war, and are making 'strategic' bombing attacks that target the total destruction of enemy cities - which is the situation the US was in at the time - you are committed to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them in extremely unpleasant ways.

There is no sense in which the atomic bombing of Hiroshima caused greater suffering than did the firebombing of Tokyo; the only notable difference is the far smaller number of aircraft required for the former versus the latter.

If anything I would think the atom bombs caused less suffering--fire is a bad way to die and the a-bombs were so much overkill that many died very quickly instead of slowly.

And there's one other militarily important difference: The a-bomb was dropped from very high altitude where the Japanese had no real ability to shoot planes down. The firebombing was conducted at low altitude, planes were shot down. This is what was actually important--we showed Japan we could blow them to bits while giving them no ability to hurt us as we did so. Their intended strategy of making victory too bloody went out the window.

Dropping an atom bomb on people is a pretty horrible thing to do; but it's not the worst thing that was done in 1945, much less the worst thing in history; and as for being the 'biggest crime', the holocaust makes the atomic bombing of Japan look like a little light shoplifting in comparison - even if we accept the presumption that bombing Hiroshima was a crime at all, which requires stretching the definition of the word 'crime' beyond its breaking point.

Or the biowar experiments Japan did on Chinese prisoners.

- - - Updated - - -

Still waiting for you to condemn the Rape of Nanking.


I guess you thought it was a good idea.

What have I said to make you think I approved of it?

To say nothing is not to say I approve.

To think I would approve is only some delusion of yours.

This is turning into a petty argument and is not making any points so I will try to state my thesis.

Prior to Pearl Harbor both the US and Japan were trying to expand.

The Japanese were trying to conquer China and other places and had a particularly brutal military policy.

The US had the Philippines and had a policy of expansionism from day one, and the US saw Japan growing and saw that it's position it the region was being threatened. So the US began an economic policy to try to weaken Japan. It also used Japanese brutal atrocities to justify the policy.

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor with the goal of pushing the US out of the region and becoming a major land empire.

This started all out war as the US refused to be pushed away.

Notably, you aren't condemning it even when challenged to do so.

- - - Updated - - -

What difference does it make?

You have not proven the US acts in the world based on sympathy or empathy.

It is impossible to prove when one looks at the Philippines.

So you support massacres if they are carried out by the Japanese.

I think you're going too far here. I don't think he supports them, but rather he doesn't care about them. Anything that harms US interests is at worst excusable.

 

[whichphilosophy]

If anything I would think the atom bombs caused less suffering--fire is a bad way to die and the a-bombs were so much overkill that many died very quickly instead of slowly.

And there's one other militarily important difference: The a-bomb was dropped from very high altitude where the Japanese had no real ability to shoot planes down. The firebombing was conducted at low altitude, planes were shot down. This is what was actually important--we showed Japan we could blow them to bits while giving them no ability to hurt us as we did so. Their intended strategy of making victory too bloody went out the window.

Dropping an atom bomb on people is a pretty horrible thing to do; but it's not the worst thing that was done in 1945, much less the worst thing in history; and as for being the 'biggest crime', the holocaust makes the atomic bombing of Japan look like a little light shoplifting in comparison - even if we accept the presumption that bombing Hiroshima was a crime at all, which requires stretching the definition of the word 'crime' beyond its breaking point.

Or the biowar experiments Japan did on Chinese prisoners.

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Still waiting for you to condemn the Rape of Nanking.


I guess you thought it was a good idea.

What have I said to make you think I approved of it?

To say nothing is not to say I approve.

To think I would approve is only some delusion of yours.

This is turning into a petty argument and is not making any points so I will try to state my thesis.

Prior to Pearl Harbor both the US and Japan were trying to expand.

The Japanese were trying to conquer China and other places and had a particularly brutal military policy.

The US had the Philippines and had a policy of expansionism from day one, and the US saw Japan growing and saw that it's position it the region was being threatened. So the US began an economic policy to try to weaken Japan. It also used Japanese brutal atrocities to justify the policy.

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor with the goal of pushing the US out of the region and becoming a major land empire.

This started all out war as the US refused to be pushed away.

Notably, you aren't condemning it even when challenged to do so.

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What difference does it make?

You have not proven the US acts in the world based on sympathy or empathy.

It is impossible to prove when one looks at the Philippines.

So you support massacres if they are carried out by the Japanese.

I think you're going too far here. I don't think he supports them, but rather he doesn't care about them. Anything that harms US interests is at worst excusable.

The Japanese lacked sufficient power to really defend itself against American carpet bombing. Low level bombing was used to drop incendiary devices. The Japanese didn't even bother to try and intercept one or two planes such as spy planes as it lacked the fuel. Thus plane carrying the A bomb was not even intercepted.

In the end the American never achieved their key objectives wherein most war criminals ended up exempt from prosecution and Hirohito remained in power and lived to a ripe old age.
(On his death, a cartoon showed Hirohito entering hell, whereby Hitler shouts out, "What took you so long?")
The bomb only showed that the Americans could also be barbarians like the Japanese.
Objections to the bomb came from leading US Military leaders and politicians

http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-re...-was-not-to-end-the-war-or-save-lives/5308192

 

[arkirk]

We just seem to have some of us constantly on the hunt for possible justifications for the manufacture, keeping, and even using of nuclear weapons and they seem determined to keep the world on the edge of human extinction as long as is humanly possible. There is money in this asinine notion that nuclear weapons have ever been a boon to any human beings anywhere on this earth. These are weapons that have a huge immediate human toll followed by years of various forms of cancer and poisoning. Many years ago, computer models indicated that if these weapons were used on a large scale they could create a condition known as nuclear winter.

My response to all of these people who advocate the continuance of the nuclear threat on this planet is to point out to those who still have minds capable of critical thought...THESE PEOPLE ARE SAYING: " FOLLOW ME...THIS WAY TO INCREASED CANCER, INCREASED HUMAN SUFFERING, AND POSSIBLE EXCTINCTION." Every bit of nuclear pollution released to our environment from its safe natural storage deep within the strata of the Earth's crust reduces the potential of the human species and incrementally threatens it with extinction. For people to pursue this type of power represents to me the ultimate in human vanity and narcissism. So you know who you are and what I think of you. It is a vanity of the simple minded and most socially irresponsible human beings ever to exist. I think it should be regarded as criminal.

Hitler's crimes against humanity actually pale in comparison to the potential destruction of the nuclear threat advocates. They can continue to play Russian roulette with the fortunes of the entire human race and they have to only find the occupied chamber just once for the fail to occur with unthinkable catastrophic results. The propositions these people represent need to be shown the door and their tools of international coercion need to all be dismantled. Their arguments for human destruction need to be disassembled and discredited with the same zeal as Hitler's propositions were discredited. They are of the same character.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

This is empty rhetoric. Atom bombs don't make people any more dead than other kinds of bombs; Once you are at war, and are making 'strategic' bombing attacks that target the total destruction of enemy cities - which is the situation the US was in at the time - you are committed to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them in extremely unpleasant ways.

There is no sense in which the atomic bombing of Hiroshima caused greater suffering than did the firebombing of Tokyo; the only notable difference is the far smaller number of aircraft required for the former versus the latter.

Both lead to huge numbers of civilian deaths; Both lead to vast suffering amongst the survivors; The Tokyo raids caused considerably more death and more suffering than the Hiroshima bomb.

And that's just dropping bombs on people who are unfortunate enough to live in a war zone. The individual victims are not targets as such; Nobody is choosing who gets to die, who gets to suffer, and who gets to live - unlike during hand-to-hand massacres, such as the Rape of Nanking; or industrialized Genocides like the Nazi holocaust; or deliberate torture and killing of prisoners, as slaves of their captors, as on the Burma railroad.

Dropping an atom bomb on people is a pretty horrible thing to do; but it's not the worst thing that was done in 1945, much less the worst thing in history; and as for being the 'biggest crime', the holocaust makes the atomic bombing of Japan look like a little light shoplifting in comparison - even if we accept the presumption that bombing Hiroshima was a crime at all, which requires stretching the definition of the word 'crime' beyond its breaking point.

Clearly, many people in the 1940s, on all sides in the conflict, did not agree with you. Personally, I think that the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of German and Japanese civilians was an extremely unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of not letting the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire dominate the globe - an eventuality that would have led to the killing of far more innocents. Sometimes it is necessary to accept bad things, in order to prevent VERY bad things. World War II is an excellent example of such a time - indeed, there are vanishingly few conflicts in human history that are easier to justify than the military action of the Allies against the Axis during WWII.

This country, with the help of corporate media, Madison Avenue, and the war machine has managed to torque the collective morality of our nation so completely we can now accept this sort of thing without blinking, so long as we don't have to look at it.

Americans (outside Hawaii) may not have had to look at it; but the rest of the world did - in the 1930s, the British and French fell over backwards to avoid war with Germany - a course of action that, in hindsight, probably resulted in vastly more suffering than a more belligerent approach - for example enforcing the rearmament prohibitions of the Versailles treaty by invading the Rhineland in 1936, and throwing out the illegal German rearmament forces- would have done.

People who talk about the "necessity" of murder generally eventually commit murder.

Sometimes, it actually is necessary. Not often. But sometimes. And this was one of those times.

It is really quite the same as suicide. It takes a mind that has been over-stressed and has become inured to the meaning of the things they do. It is a kind of national depression, our country suffers from, but I will add, it has not happened without some people designing it for their own selfish gains.

Your country is pretty bad at making appropriate choices about when to go to war; You were too slow in WWI and WWII, and have been too quick ever since. You should do something about that - ideally, something more productive than ranting at people on the Internet.

That is what Hitler did. That is really about the same as Truman or General LeMay or so many of our leaders today. They have lost their humanity, and place some materialistic goal at the top of their agenda and are willing to sacrifice virtually the rest of the people for that.

The decision to kill your fellow man is something that happens always in times that are depressing. There is no exception...rob the liquor store and kill the attendant, or drop a bomb. Think on that a bit. Obama runs an assassination ring in our behalf...oh boy! Now that is depressing!

Yes, it is depressing. Why you seem to think it is also avoidable eludes me. Apart from the appeal to emotion, and your apparent (and rather bizarre) attitude that others don't care about the deaths of innocents if they recognize that such deaths are sometimes the least bad option left available, you don't seem to have much of an argument. Do you really think that the Japanese Empire would have gotten bored and gone home if the Americans had continued to ignore them after Pearl Harbour? Sometimes war is forced upon even the most peaceable peoples; and when that happens, the option with the least death and suffering in total is often the one that involves the maximum application of force as soon as it can be brought to bear. Anything less just lets the war drag on, killing innocents for months or years.

War has become steadily less common, less widespread, and less deadly in the last 70 years; In part because of the existence of a small number of heavily armed superpowers - now down to just one - and to the presence of sufficient nuclear weaponry and delivery systems as to make general war between major powers unthinkable; In part due to increasing prosperity - rich people don't go to war unless forced to do so; And in part due to increasingly close political ties between historical enemies - the EU being the obvious example of this.

While humanity has not yet managed to completely eliminate war, it seems that these techniques for reducing its incidence and severity have been hugely successful, where the blind platitudes of absolutist pacifism have completely failed. Your preferred approach is demonstrably less effective at achieving your stated goal than is the approach you rail against. A wise man would change his mind in response to such circumstances, rather then resorting to appeals to emotion and other illogical approaches, whose sole purpose seems to be to save you from admitting to yourself that your philosophy is in error.

Nonetheless, a peace process in place (where Japan didn't have anywhere to retreat to) could have prevented the use of the A bomb.
It's not clear (last Para) that wars have been reduced in incidence. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria are a network of wars where borders are somewhat blurred in the process. Other wars have sprung up and gone since WWII. Many of these had Western powers in the background.

The data are clear enough: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace-after-1945/; The only category of warfare that increased after 1945 in these data is civil wars - and even they have decreased since the end of the cold war.

Absolute war deaths are down:
View attachment 7049

Deaths per 100,000 population due to war are down even more sharply (due to population growth):
View attachment 7050

Violence overall has been in decline for a long time, and that trend (which includes warfare, as well as more personal violence, such as homicide) continues. https://www.edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker

Quick question: where are all the deaths from Bush's war with Iraq?

 

[bilby]

This is empty rhetoric. Atom bombs don't make people any more dead than other kinds of bombs; Once you are at war, and are making 'strategic' bombing attacks that target the total destruction of enemy cities - which is the situation the US was in at the time - you are committed to causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them in extremely unpleasant ways.

There is no sense in which the atomic bombing of Hiroshima caused greater suffering than did the firebombing of Tokyo; the only notable difference is the far smaller number of aircraft required for the former versus the latter.

Both lead to huge numbers of civilian deaths; Both lead to vast suffering amongst the survivors; The Tokyo raids caused considerably more death and more suffering than the Hiroshima bomb.

And that's just dropping bombs on people who are unfortunate enough to live in a war zone. The individual victims are not targets as such; Nobody is choosing who gets to die, who gets to suffer, and who gets to live - unlike during hand-to-hand massacres, such as the Rape of Nanking; or industrialized Genocides like the Nazi holocaust; or deliberate torture and killing of prisoners, as slaves of their captors, as on the Burma railroad.

Dropping an atom bomb on people is a pretty horrible thing to do; but it's not the worst thing that was done in 1945, much less the worst thing in history; and as for being the 'biggest crime', the holocaust makes the atomic bombing of Japan look like a little light shoplifting in comparison - even if we accept the presumption that bombing Hiroshima was a crime at all, which requires stretching the definition of the word 'crime' beyond its breaking point.

Clearly, many people in the 1940s, on all sides in the conflict, did not agree with you. Personally, I think that the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of German and Japanese civilians was an extremely unfortunate, but unavoidable, consequence of not letting the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire dominate the globe - an eventuality that would have led to the killing of far more innocents. Sometimes it is necessary to accept bad things, in order to prevent VERY bad things. World War II is an excellent example of such a time - indeed, there are vanishingly few conflicts in human history that are easier to justify than the military action of the Allies against the Axis during WWII.

This country, with the help of corporate media, Madison Avenue, and the war machine has managed to torque the collective morality of our nation so completely we can now accept this sort of thing without blinking, so long as we don't have to look at it.

Americans (outside Hawaii) may not have had to look at it; but the rest of the world did - in the 1930s, the British and French fell over backwards to avoid war with Germany - a course of action that, in hindsight, probably resulted in vastly more suffering than a more belligerent approach - for example enforcing the rearmament prohibitions of the Versailles treaty by invading the Rhineland in 1936, and throwing out the illegal German rearmament forces- would have done.

People who talk about the "necessity" of murder generally eventually commit murder.

Sometimes, it actually is necessary. Not often. But sometimes. And this was one of those times.

It is really quite the same as suicide. It takes a mind that has been over-stressed and has become inured to the meaning of the things they do. It is a kind of national depression, our country suffers from, but I will add, it has not happened without some people designing it for their own selfish gains.

Your country is pretty bad at making appropriate choices about when to go to war; You were too slow in WWI and WWII, and have been too quick ever since. You should do something about that - ideally, something more productive than ranting at people on the Internet.

That is what Hitler did. That is really about the same as Truman or General LeMay or so many of our leaders today. They have lost their humanity, and place some materialistic goal at the top of their agenda and are willing to sacrifice virtually the rest of the people for that.

The decision to kill your fellow man is something that happens always in times that are depressing. There is no exception...rob the liquor store and kill the attendant, or drop a bomb. Think on that a bit. Obama runs an assassination ring in our behalf...oh boy! Now that is depressing!

Yes, it is depressing. Why you seem to think it is also avoidable eludes me. Apart from the appeal to emotion, and your apparent (and rather bizarre) attitude that others don't care about the deaths of innocents if they recognize that such deaths are sometimes the least bad option left available, you don't seem to have much of an argument. Do you really think that the Japanese Empire would have gotten bored and gone home if the Americans had continued to ignore them after Pearl Harbour? Sometimes war is forced upon even the most peaceable peoples; and when that happens, the option with the least death and suffering in total is often the one that involves the maximum application of force as soon as it can be brought to bear. Anything less just lets the war drag on, killing innocents for months or years.

War has become steadily less common, less widespread, and less deadly in the last 70 years; In part because of the existence of a small number of heavily armed superpowers - now down to just one - and to the presence of sufficient nuclear weaponry and delivery systems as to make general war between major powers unthinkable; In part due to increasing prosperity - rich people don't go to war unless forced to do so; And in part due to increasingly close political ties between historical enemies - the EU being the obvious example of this.

While humanity has not yet managed to completely eliminate war, it seems that these techniques for reducing its incidence and severity have been hugely successful, where the blind platitudes of absolutist pacifism have completely failed. Your preferred approach is demonstrably less effective at achieving your stated goal than is the approach you rail against. A wise man would change his mind in response to such circumstances, rather then resorting to appeals to emotion and other illogical approaches, whose sole purpose seems to be to save you from admitting to yourself that your philosophy is in error.

Nonetheless, a peace process in place (where Japan didn't have anywhere to retreat to) could have prevented the use of the A bomb.
It's not clear (last Para) that wars have been reduced in incidence. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria are a network of wars where borders are somewhat blurred in the process. Other wars have sprung up and gone since WWII. Many of these had Western powers in the background.

The data are clear enough: https://ourworldindata.org/war-and-peace-after-1945/; The only category of warfare that increased after 1945 in these data is civil wars - and even they have decreased since the end of the cold war.

Absolute war deaths are down:
View attachment 7049

Deaths per 100,000 population due to war are down even more sharply (due to population growth):
View attachment 7050

Violence overall has been in decline for a long time, and that trend (which includes warfare, as well as more personal violence, such as homicide) continues. https://www.edge.org/conversation/mc2011-history-violence-pinker

Quick question: where are all the deaths from Bush's war with Iraq?

A few tens of thousands of people killed over seven years may seem like a lot, and indeed it is, but it barely registers on the scale of these graphs; the Korean War of the late 40s and early 50s vastly outweighs the invasion of Iraq in terms of deaths. And just because it made the news, that doesn't imply that the Iraq war was actually more significant than other, less well reported, conflicts. The brown area in the top graph shows the effect of Operation Enduring Freedom (apparently American military planners have no humility nor sense of irony at all). When depicted at that scale, it was barely significant.

 

[untermensche]

I think you're going too far here. I don't think he supports them, but rather he doesn't care about them. Anything that harms US interests is at worst excusable.

Do you care about all those US atrocities in the Philippines?

Because I am the only one here that is consistent and rational.

I note both the US and Japanese atrocities and logically conclude nations do not care about atrocities.