6th March 2004, 9:03 PM
(This post was last modified: 6th March 2004, 9:08 PM by A Black Falcon.)
Quote:We didn't want to do it, we were pressed to do it. Hiroshima and Nagasaki would stand just the same today if they hadn't gotten bold and attacked us. The blame is theirs, one-hundred percent. Who knows how many Americans would have been killed if the war had been allowed to linger on for the sake of sparing the lives of those THAT WE WERE FIGHTING IN THE FIRST PLACE!
If you say that the blame of the Pacific War in WW2 was theirs, 100%, you do not know your history one bit. Yes, their agression was their fault. However war was not a given. We forced confrontation, you see.
Okay... it's the 1930s. Japan is at war with China in their unending struggle to gain empire that went bad when they hit the sheer size of China. They are growing bolder, and are thinking of also going southeast. They see the European conflict coming and realize that like in WW1 the Europeans will not be able to defend their colonies and they can bite off some chunks. Of course then they look at us, the US, and see a weak (in military might and will to fight) nation that is "spiritually deficient". They want to secure the Southeast Asian oil fields that they rely on for oil. Just like with Hitler taking Romania so that he can get oil his war machine requires, Japan was using Southeast Asian oil. But the US put a block in their path. Roosevelt wanted confrontation with the Axis, in a nation that was not prepared for war. He took a course that he must have known would lead to war. We cut off funds from the US, blocked their holdings in US banks, blocked trade... then working with Britain tried to block them from their oil. So either Japan backs down and reduces its militarism or they attack us. Given the culture in Japan at the time (as I have detailed), militarists controlled the government utterly at this time, and the Emperor was just another pawn of the militarist-industrialist-imperialist group that had so much power (politically, economically, etc). Well the government was elected (by 2.4% of the people), but the army, especially in China, was almost autonomous and started the China war all on its own... when militarists took power at home too as they soon did (rising patriotism in Japan swept prowar factions to power -- as I said they had indoctrinated their people well) there was no chance for that. So war was inevitable.
Now is that an indictment of Pearl Harbor? No. No one really expected a strike there... they were just expecting a move on Southeast Asia (Guam, the Phillipines, etc).
And I object strongly to your implications (that Weltall says many times) that the civilians are the same as the government... for any country. Like Germany. Yes, some people were evil there (like people who participated in anti-Jewish actions) but most? I doubt it. They just were patriotic (wanted to defend the tattered honor of their country and get revenge on the nations who had humiliated them) and (like all Westerners, as I said last time...) but somewhat racist (here is another forgotten fact -- Americans too were racist against Jews. Why do you think that we heard some word of the Holocaust for years but didn't pay any attention until we actually uncovered the camps themselves? Yeah, Americans had some lingering but real dislike for Jews...) people... following a man who clearly was extremely charismatic, Hitler. Was their cause wrong? Yes. Were some of them evil, like death squads and many of the SS? Yup. But does that indict the CIVILIANS as well as the army? No way! We did of course bomb Germany, including firebombings like in Dresden... it's a simpler way to kill civilians, from the sky, you can almost forget you are killing people... Germany and the USSR did it on the ground, in that horrific and extremely bloody war on the Eastern Front that held few prisoners and led to millions of civilian casualties.
Yes, the Germans elected Hitler. They are guilty of that. But again, he was extremely charismatic and was in the right place at the right time. Without the Great Depression none of it would have happened so I guess we can blame the European war in WW2 on ourselves because after all it was our economy that blew up and caused the whole thing (because 20's Germany invested very heavily in the US stock market to pay off the massive indemnity that the Allies had forced on it after WW1)... the point is that no one is really blameless here. In Japan militarists took power that is true but it was a reaction to not wanting to go the way of China and be subjugated... they just took 'we must be equal with the west' too far and mixed it liberally with their racism against everyone else...
Anyway, the point is that more often than not the people are pawns of the powerful, and the powerful are to blame for what occurs, not the people. Killing the people for the fault of the powerful is cruel...
Quote:Try and think of your fellow man instead of just your fellow Americans. The amount of deaths in Pearl Harbour barely scratches the surface compared to how many died as a result of the A-Bombs. Yeesh, that and all the lukemia deaths due to radiation afterwards...
Definitely. I may be American but I would never presume to say that that makes me better than anyone else... it's just luck that I (or you) are not a starving person in Africa, and while we can only do so much consideration for others does matter. Doing evil that is by your perspective good is no less evil, but it explains how you could be doing evil and why and, if you truly did not know what the right was, could explain it away... the A-Bomb was good by a 'saving American lives' perspective but the objective observer would look at it by ALL perspectives not just that one limited one.
Quote:When they attacked us, we didn't have the nuke. They were probably aware of what weapons we had (except the A-Bomb) and thought they had similar firepower to overtake us. They came bombed Pearl Harbor, so we showed our teeth. We nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then the Japanese knew very well that they were greatly outgunned and ran to us with their tail between their legs. The blame for lives lost in those two cities rested solely on the shoulders of Japans leaders. You'd rather more brave American lives would have been lost than the lives of those who attacked us in the first place? America isn't to be toyed with, and we showed them why that day.
See what "Our words are backed with NUCLEAR WEAPONS!" can do for your standing an conflict?
Even we did not know the true effects of the A-Bomb so they had no clue about that. As for the rest by the end it was mostly pride that kept them going. Pride and honor. By their code death was preferable to surrender... they knew they were doomed and victory was impossible but they were prepared to die (and with them have die millions of their citizens) because of how unthinkable surrender was. Now late in the war less extreme factions were gaining strength, but as I explained in depth before we will never truly know if they would have succeeded (and surrendered without a massive American invasion or A-Bombs) or not... it didn't go that way so we won't know. But it's sad that the world was not given the chance. I think there was one... maybe a atomic test in some uninhabited area near Japan could have sufficed to show we had a weapon of incredible power, but using it on people with them having no true idea of the apocalypse of what they faced? That is wrong.
Quote:Japan certainly found the quickest and easiest way to bring us INTO to war by suddenly bombing us just shy of a legitimate declaration of war.
Surprise attack was a frequent Japanese modus opurandi. We were expecting one. It was a surprise that it was at Pearl Harbor, that is true, but that has as much to do with a long series of intelligence and logic errors as it does to do with the daring to attack our fleet in its base...
Quote:Man, those are some fine cartoons too. It's a shame that they were pulled from the air waves by uptight liberals (cough cough). I admit, though, that they are obviously tainted, and were a form of propaganda.
It's an interesting way to see WWII American propaganda...
Quote:Well isn't that just a fucking crying shame. On behalf of the United States, I would like to apologize to the Nazi party, and especially Hitler, for that callous barbaric behavior. We were wrong to "humiliate" you, Hitler. You deserve better. I tried getting the state of Israel to join me in this apologetic motion, but they weren't inclined to feel so apologetic. Something about a holoca---holocron or something like that.
You look like you don't understand my point there. We just insult and make buffoons of the Nazis despite the horrors they brought on Europe. The Japanese? They we made subhuman in a way, made them look as stereotyped as possible with shoddy construction and building materials (because Asians can't do things as well as whites..), and make them sinister, evil, backstabbing... it's a noticable contrast if you watch or read this stuff and it's mostly due to racism.
Weltall's latest post.
Japan still was a threat? Well yes, because they'd fight to the death house by house. But they had no navy or air force. And much of the army was stuck in China. They had a lot of troops in Japan but it was more civilians than anything... but they would have fought for the Emperor had he asked it and they were expecting it. Many Japanese were expecting to die and when surrender came they were in a sense granted life... to reassess their world I guess. That mindset is of course what brought them there, and it's why you might have a point that an invasion would be catastrophic. The question really is 'how much would it take to knock the militarists out of power'. And as I've detailed, we don't know the answer to that question. So the A-Bomb was a thing you can defend in some respects, but still I think that 'bomb somewhere uninhabited (but with something there to show off its power) and wait a few weeks to see if something happens (this brings up another thing -- Nagasaki was probably unnecessary. Without it Japan was well on the road to surrender and it was just tens of thousands of needless casualties, that likely served no purpose but maybe move up the surrender a few days...)... no need to add more thousands of civilians on our concience...
As for postwar, BTW, Japan was occupied for six years. By the end it was a strong nation. We did of course keep troops there afterwards and still have 30,000 troops in Japan, but in 1952 we gave them back their soveirgnty. Of course we did force on them a very liberal constitution in the process... here I think you are wrong. I don't think we would have accepted anything less than unconditional surrender, and once that happened some kind of new government was a given. One as liberal as the Japanese constitution formed it as? Possibly not. But certainly not one like the one that was in place, where for instance civil rights can be suspended at will...
... long post. Can you tell I love history? :D