No, my point is that we didn't bomb in order to force negotiations. We did it in order to avoid them.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith…maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble…Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much…Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender…because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace…one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
The Putin Interview
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Last: 6 mo ago by Mothra
Mothra said:The thing you keep overlooking in your many moral equivalency arguments is the difference between our war with Japan and Russia's attack on Ukraine is the moral justness of same. Japan was a brutal, imperialistic regime, not only responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, but also for the greatest attack on American soil since the War of 1812. While we can debate the morals of dropping the bomb, there is no comparison between the justifications for going to war with Japan, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.KaiBear said:Much of the world does NOT agree dropping nukes on Japan was necessary or ethically correct.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith%85maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble%85Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much%85Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender%85because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace%85one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Much of the world does NOT believe US air strikes, invasions . drone strikes and regime changes makes us any different or better than Putin.
I am curious - given your repeated moral equivalency arguments - do you think that we should refrain from commenting on the justness of all future wars since we may have been responsible for bad conduct in our nation's past? Certainly sounds that way.
Same old good guys vs. bad guys argument, still failing to distinguish JAB/JIB questions.Mothra said:The thing you keep overlooking in your many moral equivalency arguments is the difference between our war with Japan and Russia's attack on Ukraine is the moral justness of same. Japan was a brutal, imperialistic regime, not only responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, but also for the greatest attack on American soil since the War of 1812. While we can debate the morals of dropping the bomb, there is no comparison between the justifications for going to war with Japan, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.KaiBear said:Much of the world does NOT agree dropping nukes on Japan was necessary or ethically correct.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith…maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble…Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much…Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender…because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace…one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Much of the world does NOT believe US air strikes, invasions . drone strikes and regime changes makes us any different or better than Putin.
I am curious - given your repeated moral equivalency arguments - do you think that we should refrain from commenting on the justness of all future wars since we may have been responsible for bad conduct in our nation's past? Certainly sounds that way.
There was no value in negotiations in that circumstance.Sam Lowry said:No, my point is that we didn't bomb in order to force negotiations. We did it in order to avoid them.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith…maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble…Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much…Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender…because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace…one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
That which does not kill me, will try again and get nastier
Wrong again.Mothra said:Or is it your position, like Sam, that our refusal to supply the Japanese imperialists with resources to fuel their war machine and bloody march across Asia and the Pacific warranted the Pearl Harbor attack?KaiBear said:Mothra said:The thing you keep overlooking in your many moral equivalency arguments is the difference between our war with Japan and Russia's attack on Ukraine is the moral justness of same. Japan was a brutal, imperialistic regime, not only responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, but also for the greatest attack on American soil since the War of 1812. While we can debate the morals of dropping the bomb, there is no comparison between the justifications for going to war with Japan, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.KaiBear said:Much of the world does NOT agree dropping nukes on Japan was necessary or ethically correct.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith%85maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble%85Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much%85Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender%85because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace%85one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Much of the world does NOT believe US air strikes, invasions . drone strikes and regime changes makes us any different or better than Putin.
I am curious - given your repeated moral equivalency arguments - do you think that we should refrain from commenting on the justness of all future wars since we may have been responsible for bad conduct in our nation's past? Certainly sounds that way.
The US felt ' justified ' fighting Japan ( indirectly for Japan's for invasion of China and Manchuria ) because of the Pearl Harbor attack. Although factions in the Far East thought the US was simply protecting European colonialism.
The attack on Pearl Harbor ( and my Dad was there in the USS Selfridge ) was brought on by the US stopping all oil exports to Japan. Without US oil Japan either had to allow their military to grind to an immediate halt in China or find another source of oil. The only other readily available source were on Dutch island colonies in the Far East. To prevent the US fleet from defending the Dutch....Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. A huge tactical and political mistake on the part of the Japanese.
Russia feels ' justified ' in invading Ukraine to prevent the eventual placement of NATO nuclear missils immediately adjacent to their border, thereby making a 1st strike virtually unstoppable. Even with 200,000 Russian troops along the Ukrainian border the Biden administration STILL called for Ukraine to join NATO.
Possibly the dumbest--deadliest US foreign policy blunder since the Korean War.
You and much of the West believe Russia's invasion to be morally inexcusable and brutal in the extreme. Even with hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties most of the Russian people still support the war and Putin's reasons to invade.That should give anyone pause on just how threatened Russia felt regarding the pre war situation.
Actually it is highly relevant to the proper authority criterion.Quote:
As for Russia, whether it "feels" justified to Russians is completely irrelevant. The Just War Theory has objective criteria, and clearly the Russian attack on Ukraine does not meet these well-settled criteria.
There is if you value saving human lives, as we're always claiming we do.Oldbear83 said:There was no value in negotiations in that circumstance.Sam Lowry said:No, my point is that we didn't bomb in order to force negotiations. We did it in order to avoid them.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith…maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble…Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much…Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender…because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace…one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Sam: There is if you value saving human lives, as we're always claiming we do.Quote:
Oldbear83 said:
There was no value in negotiations in that circumstance.
And what if 'negotiations' only cause more bloodshed, as most of the men who were directly involved said?
That which does not kill me, will try again and get nastier
Same old mischaracterizations, obfuscation, and failure to answer the questions posed.Sam Lowry said:Same old good guys vs. bad guys argument, still failing to distinguish JAB/JIB questions.Mothra said:The thing you keep overlooking in your many moral equivalency arguments is the difference between our war with Japan and Russia's attack on Ukraine is the moral justness of same. Japan was a brutal, imperialistic regime, not only responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, but also for the greatest attack on American soil since the War of 1812. While we can debate the morals of dropping the bomb, there is no comparison between the justifications for going to war with Japan, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.KaiBear said:Much of the world does NOT agree dropping nukes on Japan was necessary or ethically correct.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith…maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble…Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much…Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender…because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace…one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Much of the world does NOT believe US air strikes, invasions . drone strikes and regime changes makes us any different or better than Putin.
I am curious - given your repeated moral equivalency arguments - do you think that we should refrain from commenting on the justness of all future wars since we may have been responsible for bad conduct in our nation's past? Certainly sounds that way.
Get back to me when you grow a pair.
It is not at all relevant to the Just War theory criteria.Sam Lowry said:Wrong again.Mothra said:Or is it your position, like Sam, that our refusal to supply the Japanese imperialists with resources to fuel their war machine and bloody march across Asia and the Pacific warranted the Pearl Harbor attack?KaiBear said:Mothra said:The thing you keep overlooking in your many moral equivalency arguments is the difference between our war with Japan and Russia's attack on Ukraine is the moral justness of same. Japan was a brutal, imperialistic regime, not only responsible for the deaths of millions of innocent Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, but also for the greatest attack on American soil since the War of 1812. While we can debate the morals of dropping the bomb, there is no comparison between the justifications for going to war with Japan, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.KaiBear said:Much of the world does NOT agree dropping nukes on Japan was necessary or ethically correct.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith%85maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble%85Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much%85Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender%85because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace%85one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Much of the world does NOT believe US air strikes, invasions . drone strikes and regime changes makes us any different or better than Putin.
I am curious - given your repeated moral equivalency arguments - do you think that we should refrain from commenting on the justness of all future wars since we may have been responsible for bad conduct in our nation's past? Certainly sounds that way.
The US felt ' justified ' fighting Japan ( indirectly for Japan's for invasion of China and Manchuria ) because of the Pearl Harbor attack. Although factions in the Far East thought the US was simply protecting European colonialism.
The attack on Pearl Harbor ( and my Dad was there in the USS Selfridge ) was brought on by the US stopping all oil exports to Japan. Without US oil Japan either had to allow their military to grind to an immediate halt in China or find another source of oil. The only other readily available source were on Dutch island colonies in the Far East. To prevent the US fleet from defending the Dutch....Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor. A huge tactical and political mistake on the part of the Japanese.
Russia feels ' justified ' in invading Ukraine to prevent the eventual placement of NATO nuclear missils immediately adjacent to their border, thereby making a 1st strike virtually unstoppable. Even with 200,000 Russian troops along the Ukrainian border the Biden administration STILL called for Ukraine to join NATO.
Possibly the dumbest--deadliest US foreign policy blunder since the Korean War.
You and much of the West believe Russia's invasion to be morally inexcusable and brutal in the extreme. Even with hundreds of thousands of Russian casualties most of the Russian people still support the war and Putin's reasons to invade.That should give anyone pause on just how threatened Russia felt regarding the pre war situation.Actually it is highly relevant to the proper authority criterion.Quote:
As for Russia, whether it "feels" justified to Russians is completely irrelevant. The Just War Theory has objective criteria, and clearly the Russian attack on Ukraine does not meet these well-settled criteria.
It wouldn't be likely to cause more bloodshed. It might have postponed it, but the nuclear option would still have been there. We never made a serious effort, partly because we wanted to demonstrate our power to the Russians. If you're talking about what Japan might have done years down the road, there are always consequences planned or unplanned (communist rule in China, Vietnam War, etc.). Suffice it to say Hirohito wasn't so uniquely evil as to make negotiation an obvious error.Oldbear83 said:Sam: There is if you value saving human lives, as we're always claiming we do.Quote:
Oldbear83 said:
There was no value in negotiations in that circumstance.
And what if 'negotiations' only cause more bloodshed, as most of the men who were directly involved said?
"It wouldn't be likely to cause more bloodshed."
The people in position to know, say you are wrong.
The people in position to know, say you are wrong.
That which does not kill me, will try again and get nastier
They said a lot of things, including that we committed war crimes. You'd have to elaborate before I can really respond further.Oldbear83 said:
"It wouldn't be likely to cause more bloodshed."
The people in position to know, say you are wrong.
You really should read what the Generals/Admirals of that time said, instead of depending on revisionist crap.Sam Lowry said:They said a lot of things, including that we committed war crimes. You'd have to elaborate before I can really respond further.Oldbear83 said:
"It wouldn't be likely to cause more bloodshed."
The people in position to know, say you are wrong.
That which does not kill me, will try again and get nastier
Well, you used the magic word, so I guess you win!Oldbear83 said:revisionistSam Lowry said:They said a lot of things, including that we committed war crimes. You'd have to elaborate before I can really respond further.Oldbear83 said:
"It wouldn't be likely to cause more bloodshed."
The people in position to know, say you are wrong.
I like the part where he is fiddling with the box w/ the giant red button on it......
nervously.
- KKM
even dropped it on the floor a couple of times.
I think I heard an 'ach du lieber'.
Forgot he was fluent in German.
BID.
nervously.
- KKM
even dropped it on the floor a couple of times.
I think I heard an 'ach du lieber'.
Forgot he was fluent in German.
BID.
pro ecclesia, pro javelina
Actually, we won when we decided not to 'negotiate' with the guys who thought the genocide in China and the Bataan Death March represented good policy.Sam Lowry said:Well, you used the magic word, so I guess you win!Oldbear83 said:revisionistSam Lowry said:They said a lot of things, including that we committed war crimes. You'd have to elaborate before I can really respond further.Oldbear83 said:
"It wouldn't be likely to cause more bloodshed."
The people in position to know, say you are wrong.
That which does not kill me, will try again and get nastier
Warring nations rarely see eye to eye. Negotiating means dealing with people you may not like.Oldbear83 said:Actually, we won when we decided not to 'negotiate' with the guys who thought the genocide in China and the Bataan Death March represented good policy.Sam Lowry said:Well, you used the magic word, so I guess you win!Oldbear83 said:revisionistSam Lowry said:They said a lot of things, including that we committed war crimes. You'd have to elaborate before I can really respond further.Oldbear83 said:
"It wouldn't be likely to cause more bloodshed."
The people in position to know, say you are wrong.
Sam: "Negotiating means dealing with people you may not like."
That's what you do in peacetime. When someone attacks you and you go to war, negotiating ends until someone surrenders. A negotiated surrender in WW2 was never a sane outcome for the Allies to accept.
That's what you do in peacetime. When someone attacks you and you go to war, negotiating ends until someone surrenders. A negotiated surrender in WW2 was never a sane outcome for the Allies to accept.
That which does not kill me, will try again and get nastier
That's not necessarily true at all. Many wars have ended with a negotiated peace.Oldbear83 said:
Sam: "Negotiating means dealing with people you may not like."
That's what you do in peacetime. When someone attacks you and you go to war, negotiating ends until someone surrenders. A negotiated surrender in WW2 was never a sane outcome for the Allies to accept.
Soldiers who die have families just like civilians, and the impact of their sacrifice has an equal if not greater cascade effect. And where you concede the debate is that the blood of the civilians is on the enemy's hands and not their regime that put them in the situation.Sam Lowry said:You don't know how my family might have been affected if our soldiers had been ordered to invade. It's a given that lives are at stake in any war. The question is how many civilians can you justify sacrificing to save those whose business is to fight. If your only answer is "what about grandpa," you've conceded the debate.ATL Bear said:Your blind spot is your disdain for America. I frankly could care less about the saving of Japanese lives. It was a strategy that saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and by circumstance ended up saving millions of Japanese as well. I'm curious how you bend your disregard for American soldiers lives into your moral origami.Sam Lowry said:You're talking about saving Japanese lives. It's quite a stretch to claim that was part of any war strategy. Sounds a lot more like a moral justification to me.ATL Bear said:You are asking about morality and justice. I'm dealing in justification and strategy. You're looking for retrospective guilt within the prism of modernity. I'm dealing with the realities of the war and era. If you want to noodle over the moral decision of killing 500,000 Japanese in order to save 500,000 American soldiers I can assure you of where I land. The fantasy you're entertaining is that neither was required, which is a pure revisionist hypothetical. So no, I have no interest in entertaining the latter.Sam Lowry said:I'm not asking about the justice of the war, I'm asking about the justice of dropping nuclear bombs on half-trained civilians who would have been little more than speed bumps in the path of an invading army. It sounded like you had an opinion a while ago, or have you just lost interest?ATL Bear said:Your "Just War" conversation is with someone else. The only moral conversation we've had is your attempt at moral equivalency for the bombing of Tokyo and/or Hiroshima and the rape and slaughter of captured civilians and POWs. Trying to equate morality with a battle objective is an exercise in futility. You follow rules and conventions that are in place to the best of your ability and the rest is the hell of war.Sam Lowry said:Correct me if I'm wrong, but you and others seem to be arguing that we were morally justified in nuking Japan. So it kind of does matter what you think. If you're saying anything goes and morality doesn't matter, let's be clear about that.ATL Bear said:Your boy Putin has them pointed at us right now, and vice versa. It has nothing to do with what you or I want or think, It has to do with the nature of enemies and war.Sam Lowry said:If you really believe we're all legitimate targets for a nuclear attack, you're way more anti-American than I'll ever be.ATL Bear said:Yes, it does make us all legitimate targets of an invader. Which is why if the roles were reversed the Japanese would have done similar or likely worse. Maybe you think something different, but that's the reality of war.Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
You and OldBear are wrong to suggest that moral questions weren't raised at the time. If there's any revisionism going on here, it's that.
The Japanese didn't need negotiations to surrender, and the war was going to be executed according to the best outcome for America. We'd just finished a brutal battle in Okinawa and were preparing to invade the islands of Japan proper.Sam Lowry said:No, my point is that we didn't bomb in order to force negotiations. We did it in order to avoid them.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith…maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble…Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much…Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender…because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace…one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
After one or both sides realize the cost of continuing is too great.Sam Lowry said:That's not necessarily true at all. Many wars have ended with a negotiated peace.Oldbear83 said:
Sam: "Negotiating means dealing with people you may not like."
That's what you do in peacetime. When someone attacks you and you go to war, negotiating ends until someone surrenders. A negotiated surrender in WW2 was never a sane outcome for the Allies to accept.
In other words we're not responsible for anything because we're the good guys. That isn't how it works, especially not if you're interested in criticizing anyone else for war crimes. Like it or not, civilians are supposed to be protected.ATL Bear said:Soldiers who die have families just like civilians, and the impact of their sacrifice has an equal if not greater cascade effect. And where you concede the debate is that the blood of the civilians is on the enemy's hands and not their regime that put them in the situation.Sam Lowry said:You don't know how my family might have been affected if our soldiers had been ordered to invade. It's a given that lives are at stake in any war. The question is how many civilians can you justify sacrificing to save those whose business is to fight. If your only answer is "what about grandpa," you've conceded the debate.ATL Bear said:Your blind spot is your disdain for America. I frankly could care less about the saving of Japanese lives. It was a strategy that saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and by circumstance ended up saving millions of Japanese as well. I'm curious how you bend your disregard for American soldiers lives into your moral origami.Sam Lowry said:You're talking about saving Japanese lives. It's quite a stretch to claim that was part of any war strategy. Sounds a lot more like a moral justification to me.ATL Bear said:You are asking about morality and justice. I'm dealing in justification and strategy. You're looking for retrospective guilt within the prism of modernity. I'm dealing with the realities of the war and era. If you want to noodle over the moral decision of killing 500,000 Japanese in order to save 500,000 American soldiers I can assure you of where I land. The fantasy you're entertaining is that neither was required, which is a pure revisionist hypothetical. So no, I have no interest in entertaining the latter.Sam Lowry said:I'm not asking about the justice of the war, I'm asking about the justice of dropping nuclear bombs on half-trained civilians who would have been little more than speed bumps in the path of an invading army. It sounded like you had an opinion a while ago, or have you just lost interest?ATL Bear said:Your "Just War" conversation is with someone else. The only moral conversation we've had is your attempt at moral equivalency for the bombing of Tokyo and/or Hiroshima and the rape and slaughter of captured civilians and POWs. Trying to equate morality with a battle objective is an exercise in futility. You follow rules and conventions that are in place to the best of your ability and the rest is the hell of war.Sam Lowry said:Correct me if I'm wrong, but you and others seem to be arguing that we were morally justified in nuking Japan. So it kind of does matter what you think. If you're saying anything goes and morality doesn't matter, let's be clear about that.ATL Bear said:Your boy Putin has them pointed at us right now, and vice versa. It has nothing to do with what you or I want or think, It has to do with the nature of enemies and war.Sam Lowry said:If you really believe we're all legitimate targets for a nuclear attack, you're way more anti-American than I'll ever be.ATL Bear said:Yes, it does make us all legitimate targets of an invader. Which is why if the roles were reversed the Japanese would have done similar or likely worse. Maybe you think something different, but that's the reality of war.Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
You and OldBear are wrong to suggest that moral questions weren't raised at the time. If there's any revisionism going on here, it's that.
We didn't need negotiations in order to surrender, either. Anyone can surrender unconditionally at any time. That doesn't make it a reasonable expectation.ATL Bear said:The Japanese didn't need negotiations to surrender, and the war was going to be executed according to the best outcome for America. We'd just finished a brutal battle in Okinawa and were preparing to invade the islands of Japan proper.Sam Lowry said:No, my point is that we didn't bomb in order to force negotiations. We did it in order to avoid them.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith…maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble…Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much…Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender…because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace…one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
As opposed to "it goes on until someone surrenders."ATL Bear said:After one or both sides realize the cost of continuing is too great.Sam Lowry said:That's not necessarily true at all. Many wars have ended with a negotiated peace.Oldbear83 said:
Sam: "Negotiating means dealing with people you may not like."
That's what you do in peacetime. When someone attacks you and you go to war, negotiating ends until someone surrenders. A negotiated surrender in WW2 was never a sane outcome for the Allies to accept.
<chuckle> Only Sam would treat Unconditional Surrender by the US as effectively equal in concept to Unconditional Surrender by Japan.Sam Lowry said:We didn't need negotiations in order to surrender, either. Anyone can surrender unconditionally at any time. That doesn't make it a reasonable expectation.ATL Bear said:The Japanese didn't need negotiations to surrender, and the war was going to be executed according to the best outcome for America. We'd just finished a brutal battle in Okinawa and were preparing to invade the islands of Japan proper.Sam Lowry said:No, my point is that we didn't bomb in order to force negotiations. We did it in order to avoid them.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith…maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble…Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much…Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender…because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace…one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
That which does not kill me, will try again and get nastier
The point is, saying they don't need negotiations doesn't add much to the analysis since it's technically always true. It's just another way of saying we don't want to negotiate.Oldbear83 said:<chuckle> Only Sam would treat Unconditional Surrender by the US as effectively equal in concept to Unconditional Surrender by Japan.Sam Lowry said:We didn't need negotiations in order to surrender, either. Anyone can surrender unconditionally at any time. That doesn't make it a reasonable expectation.ATL Bear said:The Japanese didn't need negotiations to surrender, and the war was going to be executed according to the best outcome for America. We'd just finished a brutal battle in Okinawa and were preparing to invade the islands of Japan proper.Sam Lowry said:No, my point is that we didn't bomb in order to force negotiations. We did it in order to avoid them.ATL Bear said:So your point is that our fire power brought an abrupt end to a brutal war with a brutal enemy under the terms we wanted, while avoiding a massive loss of American lives in a land invasion? Ok. And that's a bad thing because?? How many more nukes and firebombs do you think would have occurred had they refused, as was nearly the case?Sam Lowry said:Which demonstrates my point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki helped us avoid negotiation and obtain an unconditional surrender.ATL Bear said:The Potsdam Declaration was presented and rejected before any nuclear bombs were dropped. It took a matter of days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the terms to be accepted.Sam Lowry said:Exactly the point. We can debate whether the Japanese were ready to negotiate, though I think it's pretty clear they were. It's quite clear that we weren't, and that in itself vitiates any argument that we used nukes as a last resort.Redbrickbear said:Maybe they were willing to negotiate in good faith…maybe they were not.ATL Bear said:They wanted to keep all the lands they conquered and were willing to risk an invasion of Japan to keep as much as they could. There was no good faith negotiations occurring despite the recognition they were in trouble…Redbrickbear said:ATL Bear said:Except the Soviets had no interest and were not going to be a mediator. Your link above even says as much…Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
That is exactly what Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. They forced him to the table. Otherwise, this war would have gone on indefinitely, as the Japanese spurned every attempt by the Americans to end the war. And we tried. Repeatedly.
The Japanese were already trying to use the Soviets as a mediator in a negotiated end to the war.
I think what you mean is that the atomic bombs made Japan submit to an unconditional surrender.
Vs the conditional surrender they wanted to negotiate
What the bombs did do (along with the Soviet invasion of Manchuria) was convince the Emperor that they had to unconditionally surrender…because the cabinet was still very much divided on the issue.
[Anami still wanted to fight on despite thinking the US might have had 100 atomic bombs and might use them on Tokyo.
It is true that Suzuki said at the cabinet meeting on the afternoon of August 13 that the atomic bombs nullified the traditional form of homeland defense. But it appears that the military treated the Nagasaki bomb as a part of the ordinary incendiary air raids. Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy. Anami's revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side. The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: "There is no record in other materials that treated the effect (of the Nagasaki bomb) seriously."]
[Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo's account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war.]
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i
Certainly,
At the time they were wanting the Soviets to be their mediator old Joe Stalin was planning to eventually invade Japan and get back Sakhalin island and other lands the Czar had lost to Japan in 1905
But the fact is the Japanese leadership knew since the fall of Saipan that they could not win the war and were looking for a negotiated peace…one that would let them keep the Emperor and at least some of their pre-1939 lands
The point is that the USA leadership made a decision that they would settle for nothing less than unconditional surrender.
Come on, Sam. We all know that America is ALWAYS the bad guy in your book. Your prefer to side with despots and dictators. It's guys like Putin that fight Just Wars, not Americans.Sam Lowry said:In other words we're not responsible for anything because we're the good guys. That isn't how it works, especially not if you're interested in criticizing anyone else for war crimes. Like it or not, civilians are supposed to be protected.ATL Bear said:Soldiers who die have families just like civilians, and the impact of their sacrifice has an equal if not greater cascade effect. And where you concede the debate is that the blood of the civilians is on the enemy's hands and not their regime that put them in the situation.Sam Lowry said:You don't know how my family might have been affected if our soldiers had been ordered to invade. It's a given that lives are at stake in any war. The question is how many civilians can you justify sacrificing to save those whose business is to fight. If your only answer is "what about grandpa," you've conceded the debate.ATL Bear said:Your blind spot is your disdain for America. I frankly could care less about the saving of Japanese lives. It was a strategy that saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and by circumstance ended up saving millions of Japanese as well. I'm curious how you bend your disregard for American soldiers lives into your moral origami.Sam Lowry said:You're talking about saving Japanese lives. It's quite a stretch to claim that was part of any war strategy. Sounds a lot more like a moral justification to me.ATL Bear said:You are asking about morality and justice. I'm dealing in justification and strategy. You're looking for retrospective guilt within the prism of modernity. I'm dealing with the realities of the war and era. If you want to noodle over the moral decision of killing 500,000 Japanese in order to save 500,000 American soldiers I can assure you of where I land. The fantasy you're entertaining is that neither was required, which is a pure revisionist hypothetical. So no, I have no interest in entertaining the latter.Sam Lowry said:I'm not asking about the justice of the war, I'm asking about the justice of dropping nuclear bombs on half-trained civilians who would have been little more than speed bumps in the path of an invading army. It sounded like you had an opinion a while ago, or have you just lost interest?ATL Bear said:Your "Just War" conversation is with someone else. The only moral conversation we've had is your attempt at moral equivalency for the bombing of Tokyo and/or Hiroshima and the rape and slaughter of captured civilians and POWs. Trying to equate morality with a battle objective is an exercise in futility. You follow rules and conventions that are in place to the best of your ability and the rest is the hell of war.Sam Lowry said:Correct me if I'm wrong, but you and others seem to be arguing that we were morally justified in nuking Japan. So it kind of does matter what you think. If you're saying anything goes and morality doesn't matter, let's be clear about that.ATL Bear said:Your boy Putin has them pointed at us right now, and vice versa. It has nothing to do with what you or I want or think, It has to do with the nature of enemies and war.Sam Lowry said:If you really believe we're all legitimate targets for a nuclear attack, you're way more anti-American than I'll ever be.ATL Bear said:Yes, it does make us all legitimate targets of an invader. Which is why if the roles were reversed the Japanese would have done similar or likely worse. Maybe you think something different, but that's the reality of war.Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
You and OldBear are wrong to suggest that moral questions weren't raised at the time. If there's any revisionism going on here, it's that.
Mothra said:Come on, Sam. We all know that America is ALWAYS the bad guy in your book. Your prefer to side with despots and dictators. It's guys like Putin that fight Just Wars, not Americans.Sam Lowry said:In other words we're not responsible for anything because we're the good guys. That isn't how it works, especially not if you're interested in criticizing anyone else for war crimes. Like it or not, civilians are supposed to be protected.ATL Bear said:Soldiers who die have families just like civilians, and the impact of their sacrifice has an equal if not greater cascade effect. And where you concede the debate is that the blood of the civilians is on the enemy's hands and not their regime that put them in the situation.Sam Lowry said:You don't know how my family might have been affected if our soldiers had been ordered to invade. It's a given that lives are at stake in any war. The question is how many civilians can you justify sacrificing to save those whose business is to fight. If your only answer is "what about grandpa," you've conceded the debate.ATL Bear said:Your blind spot is your disdain for America. I frankly could care less about the saving of Japanese lives. It was a strategy that saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and by circumstance ended up saving millions of Japanese as well. I'm curious how you bend your disregard for American soldiers lives into your moral origami.Sam Lowry said:You're talking about saving Japanese lives. It's quite a stretch to claim that was part of any war strategy. Sounds a lot more like a moral justification to me.ATL Bear said:You are asking about morality and justice. I'm dealing in justification and strategy. You're looking for retrospective guilt within the prism of modernity. I'm dealing with the realities of the war and era. If you want to noodle over the moral decision of killing 500,000 Japanese in order to save 500,000 American soldiers I can assure you of where I land. The fantasy you're entertaining is that neither was required, which is a pure revisionist hypothetical. So no, I have no interest in entertaining the latter.Sam Lowry said:I'm not asking about the justice of the war, I'm asking about the justice of dropping nuclear bombs on half-trained civilians who would have been little more than speed bumps in the path of an invading army. It sounded like you had an opinion a while ago, or have you just lost interest?ATL Bear said:Your "Just War" conversation is with someone else. The only moral conversation we've had is your attempt at moral equivalency for the bombing of Tokyo and/or Hiroshima and the rape and slaughter of captured civilians and POWs. Trying to equate morality with a battle objective is an exercise in futility. You follow rules and conventions that are in place to the best of your ability and the rest is the hell of war.Sam Lowry said:Correct me if I'm wrong, but you and others seem to be arguing that we were morally justified in nuking Japan. So it kind of does matter what you think. If you're saying anything goes and morality doesn't matter, let's be clear about that.ATL Bear said:Your boy Putin has them pointed at us right now, and vice versa. It has nothing to do with what you or I want or think, It has to do with the nature of enemies and war.Sam Lowry said:If you really believe we're all legitimate targets for a nuclear attack, you're way more anti-American than I'll ever be.ATL Bear said:Yes, it does make us all legitimate targets of an invader. Which is why if the roles were reversed the Japanese would have done similar or likely worse. Maybe you think something different, but that's the reality of war.Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
You and OldBear are wrong to suggest that moral questions weren't raised at the time. If there's any revisionism going on here, it's that.
DC is not America...the Federal government in fact is only one part of the United States.
And the people in DC have made some really really dumb calls since the 1960s...not just on foreign policy but on economic/industrial policy and even on cultural matters.
They have certainly not earned the trust of the American people.
Who said otherwise? And why is your post directed at me?Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Come on, Sam. We all know that America is ALWAYS the bad guy in your book. Your prefer to side with despots and dictators. It's guys like Putin that fight Just Wars, not Americans.Sam Lowry said:In other words we're not responsible for anything because we're the good guys. That isn't how it works, especially not if you're interested in criticizing anyone else for war crimes. Like it or not, civilians are supposed to be protected.ATL Bear said:Soldiers who die have families just like civilians, and the impact of their sacrifice has an equal if not greater cascade effect. And where you concede the debate is that the blood of the civilians is on the enemy's hands and not their regime that put them in the situation.Sam Lowry said:You don't know how my family might have been affected if our soldiers had been ordered to invade. It's a given that lives are at stake in any war. The question is how many civilians can you justify sacrificing to save those whose business is to fight. If your only answer is "what about grandpa," you've conceded the debate.ATL Bear said:Your blind spot is your disdain for America. I frankly could care less about the saving of Japanese lives. It was a strategy that saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and by circumstance ended up saving millions of Japanese as well. I'm curious how you bend your disregard for American soldiers lives into your moral origami.Sam Lowry said:You're talking about saving Japanese lives. It's quite a stretch to claim that was part of any war strategy. Sounds a lot more like a moral justification to me.ATL Bear said:You are asking about morality and justice. I'm dealing in justification and strategy. You're looking for retrospective guilt within the prism of modernity. I'm dealing with the realities of the war and era. If you want to noodle over the moral decision of killing 500,000 Japanese in order to save 500,000 American soldiers I can assure you of where I land. The fantasy you're entertaining is that neither was required, which is a pure revisionist hypothetical. So no, I have no interest in entertaining the latter.Sam Lowry said:I'm not asking about the justice of the war, I'm asking about the justice of dropping nuclear bombs on half-trained civilians who would have been little more than speed bumps in the path of an invading army. It sounded like you had an opinion a while ago, or have you just lost interest?ATL Bear said:Your "Just War" conversation is with someone else. The only moral conversation we've had is your attempt at moral equivalency for the bombing of Tokyo and/or Hiroshima and the rape and slaughter of captured civilians and POWs. Trying to equate morality with a battle objective is an exercise in futility. You follow rules and conventions that are in place to the best of your ability and the rest is the hell of war.Sam Lowry said:Correct me if I'm wrong, but you and others seem to be arguing that we were morally justified in nuking Japan. So it kind of does matter what you think. If you're saying anything goes and morality doesn't matter, let's be clear about that.ATL Bear said:Your boy Putin has them pointed at us right now, and vice versa. It has nothing to do with what you or I want or think, It has to do with the nature of enemies and war.Sam Lowry said:If you really believe we're all legitimate targets for a nuclear attack, you're way more anti-American than I'll ever be.ATL Bear said:Yes, it does make us all legitimate targets of an invader. Which is why if the roles were reversed the Japanese would have done similar or likely worse. Maybe you think something different, but that's the reality of war.Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
You and OldBear are wrong to suggest that moral questions weren't raised at the time. If there's any revisionism going on here, it's that.
DC is not America...the Federal government in fact is only one part of the United States.
And the people in DC have made some really really dumb calls since the 1960s...not just on foreign policy but on economic/industrial policy and even on cultural matters.
They have certainly not earned the trust of the American people.
You have some of the most inane, off-topic posts on Baylor fans.
And I noticed, you still haven't gotten around to identifying the posters who said the Biden admin had nothing to do with Russia's attack on Ukraine.
Mothra said:Who said otherwise? And why is your post directed at me?Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Come on, Sam. We all know that America is ALWAYS the bad guy in your book. Your prefer to side with despots and dictators. It's guys like Putin that fight Just Wars, not Americans.Sam Lowry said:In other words we're not responsible for anything because we're the good guys. That isn't how it works, especially not if you're interested in criticizing anyone else for war crimes. Like it or not, civilians are supposed to be protected.ATL Bear said:Soldiers who die have families just like civilians, and the impact of their sacrifice has an equal if not greater cascade effect. And where you concede the debate is that the blood of the civilians is on the enemy's hands and not their regime that put them in the situation.Sam Lowry said:You don't know how my family might have been affected if our soldiers had been ordered to invade. It's a given that lives are at stake in any war. The question is how many civilians can you justify sacrificing to save those whose business is to fight. If your only answer is "what about grandpa," you've conceded the debate.ATL Bear said:Your blind spot is your disdain for America. I frankly could care less about the saving of Japanese lives. It was a strategy that saved hundreds of thousands of American lives, and by circumstance ended up saving millions of Japanese as well. I'm curious how you bend your disregard for American soldiers lives into your moral origami.Sam Lowry said:You're talking about saving Japanese lives. It's quite a stretch to claim that was part of any war strategy. Sounds a lot more like a moral justification to me.ATL Bear said:You are asking about morality and justice. I'm dealing in justification and strategy. You're looking for retrospective guilt within the prism of modernity. I'm dealing with the realities of the war and era. If you want to noodle over the moral decision of killing 500,000 Japanese in order to save 500,000 American soldiers I can assure you of where I land. The fantasy you're entertaining is that neither was required, which is a pure revisionist hypothetical. So no, I have no interest in entertaining the latter.Sam Lowry said:I'm not asking about the justice of the war, I'm asking about the justice of dropping nuclear bombs on half-trained civilians who would have been little more than speed bumps in the path of an invading army. It sounded like you had an opinion a while ago, or have you just lost interest?ATL Bear said:Your "Just War" conversation is with someone else. The only moral conversation we've had is your attempt at moral equivalency for the bombing of Tokyo and/or Hiroshima and the rape and slaughter of captured civilians and POWs. Trying to equate morality with a battle objective is an exercise in futility. You follow rules and conventions that are in place to the best of your ability and the rest is the hell of war.Sam Lowry said:Correct me if I'm wrong, but you and others seem to be arguing that we were morally justified in nuking Japan. So it kind of does matter what you think. If you're saying anything goes and morality doesn't matter, let's be clear about that.ATL Bear said:Your boy Putin has them pointed at us right now, and vice versa. It has nothing to do with what you or I want or think, It has to do with the nature of enemies and war.Sam Lowry said:If you really believe we're all legitimate targets for a nuclear attack, you're way more anti-American than I'll ever be.ATL Bear said:Yes, it does make us all legitimate targets of an invader. Which is why if the roles were reversed the Japanese would have done similar or likely worse. Maybe you think something different, but that's the reality of war.Sam Lowry said:Your logic, not mine. All you're really saying is that Japan had a citizen militia. Horror of horrors, so did we. It brings to mind the quote about Japan invading America and finding a rifle behind every blade of grass. Apocryphal or not, there's a lot of truth to the observation. Plenty of Americans would fight to defend their homeland in the event of an invasion, and rightly so. Do you really think that makes us legitimate targets for a weapon of mass destruction? Take a step back and consider how warped that is.ATL Bear said:Only in Sam's warped logic does it get framed that way.Sam Lowry said:So we used a nuclear bomb against women and children wielding bamboo spears...and we were doing them a favor.ATL Bear said:That's an extremely warped perspective and ignorant of the factual history. Negotiating for peace? Even after Nagasaki and the planned surrender, there was an attempt by some Senior Japanese officers to stop it in a coup. I'm sorry the people had to suffer under the extreme militaristic and fanatical leadership of Imperial Japan, who literally had a belief in invincibility. But what you call terror and intimidation tactics saved millions of lives. Every citizen of Japan was prepped as a warrior, including women and children, so every target was a military one.Sam Lowry said:
We were preparing for an invasion because we were determined not to negotiate the peace. So if we "saved" the Japanese from anything, it was only from ourselves.
And fire-bombing is not a battle tactic any more than mass rape or any of the other atrocities committed by Japan. It's a terrorist tactic designed to demoralize and intimidate a population.
Only in America, folks.
All of the propaganda about Japanese fighting to the death overlooks one point. They were ordered, or at least believed it was their patriotic duty, to do so. When the emperor surrendered, so did they. Sure, there were a few holdouts and dead-enders hiding out in caves, isolated from news reports, living on bugs and rainwater, sharpening sticks and piling up pebbles sort of like Whiterock plotting the "liberation" of Crimea.
Everyone else acknowledged reality and got on with their lives. Our beef wasn't with them. It was with the emperor. We wanted him gone and didn't care how many people, including women and children, we had to kill to make that happen.
You and OldBear are wrong to suggest that moral questions weren't raised at the time. If there's any revisionism going on here, it's that.
DC is not America...the Federal government in fact is only one part of the United States.
And the people in DC have made some really really dumb calls since the 1960s...not just on foreign policy but on economic/industrial policy and even on cultural matters.
They have certainly not earned the trust of the American people.
You have some of the most inane, off-topic posts on Baylor fans.
And I noticed, you still haven't gotten around to identifying the posters who said the Biden admin had nothing to do with Russia's attack on Ukraine.
I'm not sure what you are talking about.
When did I say that the Biden administration had anything/or nothing to do with Russia's attack on Ukraine?
See above. As I said in response, I went back and reviewed about ten pages of posts, and didn't find a single post supporting your position. I also asked you to specifically identify the posters in question, but you failed to do so.Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Redbrickbear said:KaiBear said:
Yes, anyone with a different viewpoint is morally bankrupt.
Bottom line
The US helped bring on this Ukrainian nightmare by repeatedly attempting to pull Ukraine out of the Russian orbit .
A place Ukraine had occupied unwillingly for centuries.
Now hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are DEAD and millions more are refugees in neighboring countries .
You are wasting your time on here arguing that point.
The other guys on this forum will argue that Nuland and the DC set never spent billions on pulling Ukraine out of the Russian orbit.
Then they will turn around with a straight face and tell you it was a wonderful thing that we did that.
Make no mistake about it….they are happy with every DC policy in Eastern Europe since Obama took power.
And while they lack the courage to come out and say it directly they would also like to see a regime change war/campaign inside Russia to install a more compliant regime there.
Repaying the Iraq disaster but this time on a much much larger scale.
Neo-cons and liberal interventionists never learn
Just curious, what posters are you referencing specifically, because I haven't seen anyone who agrees with your statements above, at least on the last several pages of this thread.
With all due respect, you seem to have erected a massive strawman. Recognizing that the US has much blame for the Ukrainian conflict and recognizing Russia has much blame for the Ukrainian conflict are certainly not neocon and interventionist positions.
You can back and look but several posters will deny the U.S. had any role in sparking off this conflict.
Like I said, you seem to have erected a massive straw man.
I have no clue what your latest inane and irrelevant post in response to mine has to do with anything I've posited. I've never disputed that the US has a bad track record of unnecessarily intervening in the world's conflicts. But unlike Sam, I don't believe 1812 was the last Just War we've been involved in, and for a schmuck who has vociferously supported the side of Putin, I find it especially ironic.
Mothra said:See above. As I said in response, I went back and reviewed about ten pages of posts….Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Redbrickbear said:KaiBear said:
Yes, anyone with a different viewpoint is morally bankrupt.
Bottom line
The US helped bring on this Ukrainian nightmare by repeatedly attempting to pull Ukraine out of the Russian orbit .
A place Ukraine had occupied unwillingly for centuries.
Now hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are DEAD and millions more are refugees in neighboring countries .
You are wasting your time on here arguing that point.
The other guys on this forum will argue that Nuland and the DC set never spent billions on pulling Ukraine out of the Russian orbit.
Then they will turn around with a straight face and tell you it was a wonderful thing that we did that.
Make no mistake about it….they are happy with every DC policy in Eastern Europe since Obama took power.
And while they lack the courage to come out and say it directly they would also like to see a regime change war/campaign inside Russia to install a more compliant regime there.
Repaying the Iraq disaster but this time on a much much larger scale.
Neo-cons and liberal interventionists never learn
Just curious, what posters are you referencing specifically, because I haven't seen anyone who agrees with your statements above, at least on the last several pages of this thread.
With all due respect, you seem to have erected a massive strawman. Recognizing that the US has much blame for the Ukrainian conflict and recognizing Russia has much blame for the Ukrainian conflict are certainly not neocon and interventionist positions.
You can back and look but several posters will deny the U.S. had any role in sparking off this conflict.
1. There has been a broad policy consensus from Bush to Obama to Biden that expansion of NATO into the East and color revolutions were a good policy.
I never specifically blamed Biden.
Neo-cons in the GOP and liberal interventionists in the Democratic Party have a lot in common on foreign policy.
2. To the extent that some posters on here don't think the U.S. government launches or supports color revolutions in other parts of the world…well I'm not going to call specific posters out
1) I don't disagree with any of this. Again, what the hell does this have to do with anything I've posted???Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:See above. As I said in response, I went back and reviewed about ten pages of posts….Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Redbrickbear said:KaiBear said:
Yes, anyone with a different viewpoint is morally bankrupt.
Bottom line
The US helped bring on this Ukrainian nightmare by repeatedly attempting to pull Ukraine out of the Russian orbit .
A place Ukraine had occupied unwillingly for centuries.
Now hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are DEAD and millions more are refugees in neighboring countries .
You are wasting your time on here arguing that point.
The other guys on this forum will argue that Nuland and the DC set never spent billions on pulling Ukraine out of the Russian orbit.
Then they will turn around with a straight face and tell you it was a wonderful thing that we did that.
Make no mistake about it….they are happy with every DC policy in Eastern Europe since Obama took power.
And while they lack the courage to come out and say it directly they would also like to see a regime change war/campaign inside Russia to install a more compliant regime there.
Repaying the Iraq disaster but this time on a much much larger scale.
Neo-cons and liberal interventionists never learn
Just curious, what posters are you referencing specifically, because I haven't seen anyone who agrees with your statements above, at least on the last several pages of this thread.
With all due respect, you seem to have erected a massive strawman. Recognizing that the US has much blame for the Ukrainian conflict and recognizing Russia has much blame for the Ukrainian conflict are certainly not neocon and interventionist positions.
You can back and look but several posters will deny the U.S. had any role in sparking off this conflict.
1. There has been a broad policy consensus from Bush to Obama to Biden that expansion of NATO into the East and color revolutions were a good policy.
I never specifically blamed Biden.
Neo-cons in the GOP and liberal interventionists in the Democratic Party have a lot in common on foreign policy.
2. To the extent that some posters on here don't think the U.S. government launches or supports color revolutions in other parts of the world…well I'm not going to call specific posters out
2) I think we both know you overstated your position. Nobody on this thread has said anything close to what you've alleged. The fact you can't name them says all one needs to know. Best to just own the mistake and move on.
Mothra said:Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:See above. As I said in response, I went back and reviewed about ten pages of posts….Redbrickbear said:Mothra said:Redbrickbear said:KaiBear said:
Yes, anyone with a different viewpoint is morally bankrupt.
Bottom line
The US helped bring on this Ukrainian nightmare by repeatedly attempting to pull Ukraine out of the Russian orbit .
A place Ukraine had occupied unwillingly for centuries.
Now hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are DEAD and millions more are refugees in neighboring countries .
You are wasting your time on here arguing that point.
The other guys on this forum will argue that Nuland and the DC set never spent billions on pulling Ukraine out of the Russian orbit.
Then they will turn around with a straight face and tell you it was a wonderful thing that we did that.
Make no mistake about it….they are happy with every DC policy in Eastern Europe since Obama took power.
And while they lack the courage to come out and say it directly they would also like to see a regime change war/campaign inside Russia to install a more compliant regime there.
Repaying the Iraq disaster but this time on a much much larger scale.
Neo-cons and liberal interventionists never learn
Just curious, what posters are you referencing specifically, because I haven't seen anyone who agrees with your statements above, at least on the last several pages of this thread.
With all due respect, you seem to have erected a massive strawman. Recognizing that the US has much blame for the Ukrainian conflict and recognizing Russia has much blame for the Ukrainian conflict are certainly not neocon and interventionist positions.
You can back and look but several posters will deny the U.S. had any role in sparking off this conflict.
1. There has been a broad policy consensus from Bush to Obama to Biden that expansion of NATO into the East and color revolutions were a good policy.
I never specifically blamed Biden.
Neo-cons in the GOP and liberal interventionists in the Democratic Party have a lot in common on foreign policy.
2. To the extent that some posters on here don't think the U.S. government launches or supports color revolutions in other parts of the world…well I'm not going to call specific posters out
Nobody on this thread has said anything close to what you've alleged. The fact you can't name them says all one needs to know.
I'm not sure why you want me call out posters on here…I would be happy to message you at least 3 posters usernames on here who have denied that the Maidan uprising was a coup, that the USA had anything to do with it, and that the expansion of NATO had absolutely nothing to do with this conflict or was it see by Moscow as an unacceptable provocation into their sphere of influence.