Don2 (Don1 Revised)
Contributor
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.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.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.Sometimes, it actually is necessary. Not often. But sometimes. And this was one of those times.People who talk about the "necessity" of murder generally eventually commit murder.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.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.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:
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Deaths per 100,000 population due to war are down even more sharply (due to population growth):
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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.
But a million people died, no?
