On this historic day (exactly 75 years to the day since the August 9 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki) we should take a moment to understand more about our shared history.
> But he was also behind the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans because, as Mr Stimson put it, "their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese".
The internment of Japanese-Americans is a blight on United States history [1], as is the gold rush era Chinese Exclusion Act [2] ("the first law implemented to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating" to the United States), as was the 1950s "Red Scare" [3] (where accusations of being Communist spies were made without evidence.)
As the United States enters into a (likely multi-decade long) second Cold War and potential painful economic decoupling, it's worth knowing this history so that the real problems the United States has identified with the Chinese Communist Party can be addressed in accordance to the values the United States exposes.
Especially with the presumption of innocence (innocent until proven guilty) when it comes to individual people's lives, and the principle that everybody is created equal.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's recent "Distrust and Verify" [4] reformulation (of a famous Russian proverb) should definitely be applied widely to counter the Chinese Communist Party threat, but great care must be taken to ensure America's core values are always respected. Cold Wars are very dangerous and vastly increase the risk of nuclear escalation, so it's vital we all understand what's at stake.
I didn't mean to hijack the discussion. I agree that Imperial Japan, Maoist China and Soviet Russia killed tens of millions of people, and Europe/United States had similar number of deaths in World War 1 and 2. I know there is terrible atrocities taking place right now all over the world. From the ethno-religious concentration camps, to human trafficking and slavery, forced prison labor etc.
My comment was in context of the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and nuclear war, and how, as the United States enters into what many are calling Cold War 2, we should learn the lessons from the first Cold War and the realities of nuclear war.
These major anniversaries provide a lot of news stories for all of humanity to take a moment to pause and reflect on.
Seems to me that in order to take away any truly valuable lessons from some historical event, you have to understand the context in which it occurred.
Generally speaking, humans are very bad at actually understanding how they themselves would actually feel, react, or behave in a similar situation. It's kind of like people who talk all the time about entrepreneurship or starting their own company but then never actually quit their jobs because the reality of handing in your resignation and going off on your own is quite different than the intellectualization of it.
The general context of this particular anniversary is the "short twentieth century", from 28 July 1914 to 26 December 1991.
In particular, the significance of the first date helps explain why it would be the US making a first strike, and the significance of the second date why it they held it necessary to make a countervalue strike.
(Afterwards, 31 March 1991-12 November 2001 —from which we have many refugees— would start the twenty-first century of "nationalistic" fake news.)
I am afraid that what happens in the upcoming election will be a referendum on what kind of country the US will become, and what kind of reaction it will have to the urgent existential problems the world faces today. If the current administration persists, I do not see any genuine way that the country could tackle these problems. Just look at the completely botched non-response to the current pandemic at the Federal level; not to mention the constant racism in calling the coronavirus "Kung Flu". All the political appointees lie constantly and seem to be terrible at their jobs. I do not personally believe that the country can handle the upcoming crises in a reasonable manner if that happens.
On the other hand, even with a change in the Presidency, it is almost guaranteed that the GOP will do everything in its power to obstruct the new Administration, if it holds any power at all.
I am not sure what will happen. I share your hope but not your optimism.
It's off-topic, but (as a non-American) I personally believe Trump will win re-election. Steve Bannon (the architect of Trump's 2016 election win) has said Trump will win re-election if the Chinese Communist Party is the central issue of the election (which it increasingly is).
Come November they'll likely be multiple vaccine candidates in late-stage trials, and the compelling argument can be made saying the botched crisis is almost over and Trump will soon be returning the economy to four more years of ~3% growth. After the vaccine is widely deployed, whoever is President will see a year of 6+% growth (after 2020's 10+% contraction)
The CCP isn't a tremendously controversial issue in the US (the consensus against it is strong and bipartisan), so it's hard to see how it could become the central issue of the election.
The issue is Biden appears much weaker than Trump on China. He has the baggage of being an Obama administration official (overseeing the South China Sea militarization and the US-China Cyber Agreement).
Some core Trump advisors like Peter Navarro (author of "Death by China" and the associated documentary) believe in economic decoupling far more deeply Biden advisors.
I agree some Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer are hawks on China, but a Biden administration would be far less hawkish on the CCP issue than Trump.
I can see Trump using the 'nuclear option' and cutting off Hong Kong's ability to conduct transactions in US dollars (fatally killing the Hong Kong economy and deeply damaging China's, and far less so America's). I can't see Biden doing that.
Again, I'm not saying you're wrong, it's just hard to imagine such nitty-gritty details of the US-China relationship being the central issue of this election.
I believe geopolitics were a significant part of the last POTUS election. The parties are split based on their constituents relative anxiety over Russia. Also, Hillary's "no fly zone" over Russia's naval base in Syria seemed an important issue too.
Easy. After carefully creating the enemy in the past four years (the relationship with China was then much better and people weren't using "CCP" as a stand-in for "China"), Trump will just need to stress that he's the only one who can protect Americans from the threat- those democrats weaklings were selling the country to the CCP and will continue to do so.
Useful vaccines this year is wishful thinking, but when other nations have "rebounds" it will make USA's abject failure look less bad, so it is possible Trump could "win". This is especially possible if they don't get Biden's dementia drugs tuned correctly for one or more debates. In that case the CCParty's "wait and see" strategy will have failed, so heads will roll.
From what I've read it's very likely they'll be rolling out vaccines with ~50% effectiveness this year (and deploying it in high volumes in 2021). The vaccine doesn't have to be perfect. As long as it's proven safe, confers some level of protection and is deployed in badly affected areas (including nursing homes) it will help drop the death numbers and we'll reach herd immunity faster.
Operation Warp Speed has meant a huge amount tax payer money is being thrown at this.
Everything I've heard/read on the vaccine topic has pegged my personal wishful thinking meter. We don't currently have a vaccine for any virus similar to SARS-CoV-2. The nearest thing is the annual flu vaccine, and while they are sometimes as much as 60% effective they're normally more like 40% effective. (Some people say that SARS-CoV-2 won't mutate as much as influenza, but the only reason to believe it won't mutate enough to matter [given that the D614 -> G614 spike protein mutation basically took over the world in a couple of months, and that's something we already know about] is more wishful thinking.) A vaccine anywhere near as ineffective as the flu vaccine needs to see universal treatment to even move the needle on "herd immunity". In the current climate in USA (and maybe some other nations, I don't know?) there's no way we'll get even 70% treatment.
Also, it's August already. Although some other nations have fast reliable testing for anyone who needs it, USA CDC is still struggling to field a convenient test. How are these people going to crank out hundreds of millions of vaccine doses by November? That isn't totally Trump's fault, but he has certainly been among the public figures giving us the vaccine song-and-dance. He may need to somehow trick Biden into saying something like "I believe in the new vaccine that the wonderful scientists have given us" right before everyone realizes what a fairy tale it has been. We'll still see high-six-figures of Americans dead by election time. Any political machine that actually wanted to win could make a powerful argument out of all those dead people...
we currently have dozens of vacine candidates for SARS-CoV-2 not just "something similar".
The reason to believe it won't mutate much is exactly in the difference of SARS-CoV-2 from influenza: coronaviruses mutate at much slover rate.
I can add some wishful thinking parts though: coronaviruses usually mutate to get less severe, and the threshold for the herd immunity may be way lower than the 60% or 70% (cross-imunity, non-hemogenity, etc.).
Not sure what it the point in comparing it to the influenza, because a) that's a very different virus b) there are several different strains of the flu floating around so is is a guessing game.
There are less than 100 days to the election and they are only running the first human trials.
Imho there is no way a vaccine makes it to public in time for Trump.
The vaccine doesn't need to roll out and the crisis to be over for Trump to win re-election.
Just having the headlines full of promising results from the early trials, the starting of mass manufacturing and a clear timetable when the vaccine will begin its deployment may be provide enough "light at the end of the tunnel".
Biden is also turning 78 years old soon. I wouldn't count Trump out for an electoral college victory.
I'm not sure you understand how bad the coronavirus situation is here. People's kids aren't going to be able to go to school in person this fall. Short of the outbreak of WW3 I can't imagine the pandemic not being the top issue.
Ask Sweden. Relatively few teachers have caught COVID there. Taxi drivers have a five times higher risk than teachers. Also, it depends on the age of the pupils.
The problem here is that 'conservatives' in the US have been conditioned to blame all of societies ills on 'progressives'. It's a culture war. To pivot, you need to convince that China is the greatest threat and that the 'progressives' are in bed with them. With 11 weeks to go and no groundwork having been done already, it's unlikely this strategy will stick at all.
Yeah, the Japanese interment sucks, but I wonder what would have happened if there was no internment. Could US wartime industry on the West coast have operated successfully under constant sabotage? Would it be better for America to lose the war to Japan (or at least reach a deal and let Japan keep all of the Pacific islands and Chinese land holdings) if it meant that the internment didn't happen?
It's impossible to figure out what percentage of Japanese people in the US would have sided with Japan over America. But it might be telling that during the Niihau incident, literally every Japanese person the pilot ran across decided to help him, in contrast to helping the native Hawaiians they had been living with for decades. I wonder at what point the internment becomes acceptable. If 99% of the Japanese people in America would have supported Japan in the war, would the internment have been okay?
There isn't a shortage of bytes for storing HN comments - you can go ahead and quote the full phrase of "literally every Japanese person the pilot ran across".
Would you have supported the internment if 110,000 of those 120,000 people supported Japan in their war against the USA?
Those 3 people establish a lower bound for the amount of people of Japanese descent who would have aided Japan, given the chance. I've heard people argue that no American of Japanese descent would have aided Japan which just clearly isn't true.
You write like there are dangers that the US might forget or lose their values, like innocent until proven guilty or that everybody is created equal.
The US has never lived up to those. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (I hope no one forgot about that one) or all the tragic events that ignited the BLM movement are just current examples.
I don't disagree that the values of the United States have always been an aspiration rather than actual reality.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that "All men are created equal" in 1776 as part of the United States' founding principles, but it took until 1865 for slavery to even be abolished in the United States. He even owned slaves himself and famously bore 6 children with his slave, Sally Hemings. As recently as 155 years ago in the United States, you could own people as property, and 70 years ago black people couldn't drink out of the same drinking fountain as white people.
The US has always been a work in progress, and it's better to have some kind of aspirational set of values (like presumption of innocence and equality) that we should try and make sure our societies are living up to.
Of course you should have aspirations! But many people seems to think that the US is this shining light of enlightenment and democracy in the world that, just a little bit, at a few occasions, forgotten they way.
But that is just not true. From slavery, Jim Crow, internment camps, McCarthy, Vietnam, killing of “enemy combatants”, etc. You have never been even close to the way.
Who has absolutely no significant power, or privileges. I take the Swedish Royal family over the Murdochs, Busches, Trumps or Clintons any day. I hope you aren’t so naive that you think that the US are free from privileges by birth.
The thing about the US is, it usually takes a generation or two to make it to the top (Kennedy, Trump) but some ambitious upstarts can do it without generational wealth (Clinton, Obama). Then, the kids (mostly) and grandkids (definitely) fade into obscurity. When was the last time you saw an old-world royal lineage fade into obscurity? (France, 1789?) So some great-great-great(^n) descendent of some conquerer of yesteryear has a guaranteed place at the table in directing the modern European nation because why, exactly?
They don't have any place at the table directing modern European nations. Their roles are purely ceremonial. They are like Christmas trees. They are tradition and some people think they are nice and cozy. Personally I feel that they are somewhat absurd anachronisms, but there are so much more important matters to be concerned about.
In contrast, most European countries have higher social mobility than the US [0]. And considering the influence of money in US politics, that matters more.
There are countries freer in practice if not in stated principals.
But there are definitely a load of countries which make America look great, and if that's not a sign of how much progress humanity has still to make I don't know what is.
Many non-Americans are kept in the dark regarding America's involvement with modern day genocide - for example, its support of 20 million people being starved to death RIGHT NOW in Yemen.
So, its not necessarily the case that just because everyone believes something, it is true...
No, I'm just pointing out that there is a real difference between places where there is a free press and places where there is not and the state is empowered to clamp down on ideas it doesn't like.
That sounds the same to me. Of course there are worse places than the US. You aren’t Saudi Arabia, Russia or China, Belarus or even Turkey. But you aren’t even in the top ten in regards to freedom, democracy, equality, social mobility, health, etc. I’d much rather live in any of the Nordic countries, Germany, the Netherlands, France, ...
The fact that you can talk about Julian Assange openly is the point.
It doesn't matter what he did was lawful or not, or whether the law itself is right or wrong. In the end, he decided to hole himself up in a foreign embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on some sex charges.
No, he didn't. That is entirely and absolutely FALSE, and you are feeding this false narrative by parroting this nonsense.
He offered to go back to Sweden to face the charges on the proviso that he would not be expedited from Sweden to the USA. This was not guaranteed.
Julian Assange is a political prisoner. All of the bogus sex crime charges against him have been dropped, and were never intended to be anything but a lever to get him to go back to Sweden so he could be extrajudicially rendered back to the USA - since Sweden and the USA have a track record of such criminal behaviour, Julian rightfully required a guarantee that the Swedish government could not provide.
And as a result Julian Assange is currently being psychologically tortured in Belmarsh - and has yet to face any of the charges against him. Nobody should think that Assanges' case upholds the highest values of Western legal justice, because it does not.
What is being done to Julian is tantamount to the same sort of treatment one would expect to happen to dissidents in dictatorships. Stop spreading the nonsense, and learn the facts about his case - it is chilling to the core.
> I don't disagree that the values of the United States have always been an aspiration rather than actual reality.
The US is a constitutional democracy that was created in a world of kingdoms. It has the oldest constitution, a code of laws that grants its citizens rights which the government is prohibited from violating. And while the UK may be considered as an (perhaps only) older running democracy, it had a king, where the US replaced this role with the invention of a popularly-elected president. Sure it's not so special anymore, since everyone has democracy and presidents these days. But it most certainly was not always the case, especially back when the US was stumbling at times living up to its ideals. I am old enough to remember a world where the most common form of govt was still a dictatorship, not democracy, and there were despicable authoritarian regimes on almost every continent. US history is certainly not all positive, but the positives are there. A constitution and popular elections are not ideals, they are results. People who have positive opinions of this country throughout history were not as blind and irrational as these dismissive posts think.
The fact that there have been unfortunate exceptions is proof that they are actually followed. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp notably was done in secrecy so as to prevent the general populace from objecting. What's needed to fix that case is more transparency and I don't take that as an example of values being forgotten.
> all the tragic events that ignited the BLM movement are just current examples.
A tiny minority of people caused the incidents that ignited the BLM movement. They're not widely held opinions, but happen to be rife in the police force. It's a bad culture in the police that needs to be cleaned out, not that it's in the US culture itself.
The Guantánamo Bay camp has been known for three administrations and it still remains.
The violence against black people has been going on since the beginning with impunity. And people continue to elect the people that pay and control the police force.
As someone coming from a region that suffered lots of US interference: The US is the world’s last hope to have full peace, open trade and modern value/societies.
Woman did not have rights in most of the world because they wanted to. But because the US pressured them to.
>Woman did not have rights in most of the world because they wanted to. But because the US pressured them to.
The US has never had a female leader and has never really been the vanguard of women's rights -- interesting that you should choose to ascribe all such success to the US. Womens suffrage was established in nearly 100 countries before the US.
I’m honestly perplexed that anyone can think that. The US has supported many more oppressive regimes than any liberation movements, and often toppled left leaning democracies to install their own capitalist puppets.
There's a big difference between widespread disregard for fundamental human rights and the government trying to offshore it and keep it on the down low.
Equating the two like so many people love doing is necessary step if you want to transition from the latter to the former.
I grew up with a cold war era US-centric understanding of why Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to happen. I get those arguments, Later I was taught a very different, also compelling, rationale for Nagazaki from a Japanese perspective. I get that argument, too.
I'm USian, so of course I like any argument that puts the US on the right side of history. But as that moment gets more and more into the past, and we lose the context of culture, etc of that time, what is left is that the US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition.
I've been taught the nuances. I've accepted them and perhaps even clung to them. As time passes, even USians might feel less need to keep the memory of those nuances alive. But the horror of that action doesn't go away.
I grew up learning about Christopher Columbus, and Pocahontas and Thomas Jefferson, and all the narrative we learned decades ago. Especially lately there has been a lot different version of much of those stories. Some see people and actions of the past as heroic, others see them as hideous.
I do not personally condemn decision makers of WWII. I am grateful for the sacrifices of past generations. But the fact remains that the US is the only country in the history of the world that has ever used a nuclear weapon in anger. That is extremely humbling.
Imperial Japan during WWII deserved getting atomic bomb drop on them. Those nuke doesn't even come close to what they have done to the Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese and every Asian countries they have invaded. Imperial Japan should get 10 atomic bomb drop on them for Nanjing Massacre.
Imperial Japan use Chinese as test subject for bio and chemical weapon. They have committed far greater crime against humanity than Nazi.
And that's why nuclear weapons exist - not to stop "plenty of other stuff like that", but because they're just another example of "plenty of other stuff like that."
Collectively humans are belligerent, acquisitive, tribal, and stupid. We keep hoping and telling ourselves we're better than that, but so far there's disappointingly little evidence we are.
A country, as a whole, is not an individual person and therefore can't "deserve" anything. What you're describing are acts by citizens of Imperial Japan (some decisions made high up or at the top, some made by individual units or soldiers) and killing of other people in the country. Some people who were responsible for atrocities were no doubt affected (either personally killed or people they loved were killed which of course would impact them emotionally) but for the most part you're talking about killing people who had no influence whatsoever on use of weapons in China or any other atrocity. Those people, without almost no exception whatsoever, had no say on what their citizenship was.
The technical term for what you're describing is "collective punishment". Personally, I see it as a logical fallacy: failure to see that a country is not a single collective consciousness.
To actually engage with your rhethoric - a country is a conceptual entity - defined by some geo parameters.
Bombs kill people. So when you say "Japan should get 10 atomic bomb drops", perhaps you can link to the 10 cities wikipedia pages whose people you're willing to wipe out?
I'd suggest that using the bomb against Japan was not the real sin. The real sin, and the real idiotic blunder, was not to immediately renounce the use of nuclear weapons and institute an international order to safeguard that renunciation. From 1945 to 1949, Stalin did not have the bomb, and until the very last he had no good reason to believe he would have it anytime soon. USSR would have been very open to negotiations on that topic in 1946. The rest of the world would have fallen in line. Humanity would have been so much safer. It's possible FDR would have been wise enough to do this, and Henry Wallace probably would have been. Truman, though, was over his head. The evil bastards led him around by the nose. We've never had an actual representative government since then.
I don't understand how we would stop other countries from building one by saying the US wouldn't build any more. It seems more likely that someplace like Israel would have still developed one in secret and then used it for widespread conquest.
That's not what I meant by a new international order. At the same time everyone was signing treaties and creating UN, it would have been real easy for nearly every shell-shocked nation to commit not to building nukes, in a way that would make violations really hurt. Like such a nation would immediately suffer 50% tariffs from every other nation. Or they would be fair game for any aggression from neighbors. It wasn't easy to build nuclear weapons in 1946. Only one nation had done it. Sure one can imagine that a nation could decide to take a flyer on nukes and thereby suffer global opprobrium, but most of the nations we'd imagine in that role didn't exist in 1946 in the way that they exist now. That included Israel, which didn't actually exist at all then.
They don't need a bomb in 1946 though, presumably nuclear power will eventually spread and suddenly it's 1963 and Israel is performing an underground test.
And? Would the Israel of that world have escaped somehow all the consequences that would have been in place for decades? Having escaped those consequences, would they then have subjected the globe to a rampage of nuclear holocaust? This is a sort of magical thinking: sure it's good to have less nukes, but only up to a point. After that, less nukes actually means more nukes! Good grief.
Nuclear power absent the support of militarists in control of public money would be, absent. Only by the most skewed of accounting methods does it even begin to pay for itself. The war pigs have a different lie for every different constituency, and "nukes are green" has somehow been swallowed by a small number of very vocal (on HN anyway) internet environmentalists.
>Would the Israel of that world have escaped somehow all the consequences that would have been in place for decades
They would essentially be UN consequences, they don't have a great track record of enforcing things like that.
>Having escaped those consequences, would they then have subjected the globe to a rampage of nuclear holocaust
Looking only at nukes, dropping one more on a populated area is worse than reality so far. And it's impossible to guess what kind of warfare a world without MAD would gave faced.
>Nuclear power absent the support of militarists in control of public money would be, absent. Only by the most skewed of accounting methods does it even begin to pay for itself.
Nuclear power obtained without the focus placed on weapons would be a completely different economy. Not only are design choices often made allowing more bombs to be created, the control of information and resources drives the price up.
Definitely, nuclear power has been developed with bomb production in mind. Now, that's what we have. Lots of bombs and a nuclear power industry that costs more than renewables and endangers the public. I'm not happy about either aspect of our situation. No more of that please.
Being cynical, I suspect the reason "demonstration" of the bomb had not seriously been discussed as an option is because in a way Hiroshima and Nagasaki were demonstrations, if one considers the target audience to have been Stalin instead of Hirohito.
I kind of wonder about the timeline in which Kennedy and Khrushchev hadn't been cancelled by their respective hardliners. Would we have wound up with a world of laws, in which the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved?
Would the US and the USSR have converged on market economies with strong safety nets? Would we all now be celebrating Hearth's Warming Eve with pantomimes?
Demonstrating to the soviets was a fringe benefit at best.
If you read the accounts from any person at the time. Regardless of the theater or the nationality the overwhelming consensus was that the priority was to get the war over with ASAP so that everyone could go home. Anything else was just a side benefit.
Humanity might have been safer without nukes. I think it's more accurate to say that humanities safety would have been less variable without nukes. No chance of nuclear war, but almost a certainty of WW3, and WW4, and...
It's not quite as much of an unalloyed good as you're suggesting.
I, like you, learned all the rationalizations that got to be written in history by the victor.
The point at which most of it started to unravel for me was when I learned that the United States had a whole spate of atomic bombs they were scheduling to drop if Imperial Japan didn't surrender. We think of it as two because that's all the further we got, but if things had gone a little differently it would have been six, eight, etc.
A willingness to cause that kind of unprecedented basically indiscriminate devastation, well it forced me to look at the events that actually did happen through a very different lens.
These acts of destruction should be compared to the full context of the historic moment and not observed in isolation. At the time the US had been dragged in to the war by a surprise bombing that, while targeted at a military installation, was not backed by any declaration of hostilities. The ensuing battles from island to island were also brutal and from every documentary I've ever seen and every historical account I've ever read painted a very clear picture: that conventional war would not end without far higher casualties on both sides and a protracted land battle with guerilla warfare and atrocities committed by all sides.
In that context an overwhelming and undeniable show of force arguably lead to less death on the obvious side, but also of those who would have been consumed on the side that surrendered as well. Consideration of the 'lessons learned' from (then, possibly either, 'the great war' or WWI) also required the consideration of recovery after the war.
My supposition is that for Japan the outcome is probably within the best likely range of variations. Cultural identity intact; culture nudged towards an easy, slow, movement towards global integration, tolerance and equality; a post-war rebuilding effort to ensure that recovery would stick and general prosperity would persist.
We should be so lucky to reflect upon the post-war lessons and once again apply them within as a New-New Deal. I hope that is how we apply the lessons of recovering from the world wars to recovering from the current 'war' on the pandemic (and all of the forces that cause it to be as bad as it has been; most domestic).
What? Pearl Harbor? Morally, the entire bombing campaign against Japanese cities, including both conventional and nuclear bombing, was justified by deliberate extermination of Chinese civilian population (estimated 2.7 million civilian deaths in North China for years 1940-1942).
> In a study published in 1996, historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta claims that the Three Alls Policy, sanctioned by Emperor Hirohito himself, was both directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians.
(That "justification" doesn't look valid in my eyes, don't take me wrong. Eye for an eye, civilian for a civilian?...)
Alas, it certainly looks like US had already decided that they indiscriminately target Japanese civilians long before they had nuclear weapons. The single most devastating conventional raid on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 claimed 90-100 thousand deaths (it's slightly more than Hiroshima).
I agree with you. I do wish historical context was not so easily lost from the public consciousness, but I don't have a solution for it.
I can't find it now, but there was an audible audiobook that I used to have back in the dvd-audio days that showed just how much effort the Japanese government took to even be able to accept surrender when their militaries were extremely hawkish even to the end. It briefly touched on US discussions as well but was primarily focused on the Japanese government.
The Emperor of Japan himself had to do a certain amount of conspiring in order to be able to both surrender and not lose face. Even though he was in theory the supreme ruler, apparently if not done correctly there was risk of that military officers would go rogue.
That's a pretty absurd take. I mean, of course the bombing wouldn't have stopped if there was no surrender...considering that was the whole point of using nuclear bombs in the first place. I can't understand how 2 nuclear bombs can be considered to be worse than the millions of deaths a land invasion of Japan would have led to. I absolutely understand why the Americans weren't willing to risk a conventional land war in Japan, considering the insanely bitter Japanese resistance in Okinawa.
Everything indicated that Japan and it's civilian population was willing to fight off an invasion at all costs, through the bitter end. The Americans witnessed that absolute suicidal fanaticism in every single battle they've had with the Japanese whether they were military or civilians. What's actually "rationalization" is to pretend the Americans didn't try everything to convince the Japanese to capitulate or to push for the disproven theory that Japan was about to surrender anyways. I get that it's hard for some to acknowledge that the US has ever done anything good, but there are already tons of valid reasons to dislike America. This absolutely isn't one of them.
Btw in ww2, history seems to have been written mostly by the losers who pushed for the omnipresent "underdog" narratives that are usually nothing more than outright historical revisionism . The Japanese white washing of their ww2 history or the german generals post war memoirs that started numerous myths about the Werhmacht are proof of that. Ironically, one of those narratives is the tired maxim that history is supposedly written by the winners, which is a pretty convenient way for the losers to make their revisionism more compelling.
> I can't understand how 2 nuclear bombs can be considered to be worse than the millions of deaths a land invasion of Japan would have led to.
You should definitely try to understand that. Perhaps if the bombs had been targeted at LA or NY by Germans (who would certainly be as correct as you are that doing that would've saved millions of lives in a potential invasion of the USA by Germany once it was done in Europe) it would be easier for you to understand that the potential for a future, prolongued military battle in no way can be used as a justification for immediately killing hundreds of thousands of civillians.
I'm not european or american so no, I don't have a preference for who gets nuked. Yet, there is a huge difference between Japan and Germany. The german army was acting like a "regular army", that surrendered when it was hopeless and did not have a religious desire to fight until the very end even if suicide is necessary. Germany civilians were also not prone to join the army in that bitter resistance until the end and weren't trained to fight with bamboo spears if necessary. Also, the conquest of germany wasn't planned to cause 1m american casualties and 5-10m japanese civilian and military casualties and didn't require a contested landing that would have dwarfed the one on DDay.
Again, it's pure non sense to advocate that those numbers would have been better than 2 nuclear bombs because... at least it was conventional? And why can't an assessment of the potential casualties be used as a justification? Because that just sounds like grandstanding that completely ignore the reality of the war in the pacific.
Not only that, but Germany was still planned to be a target if it hadn't surrendered by the time the bombs were ready. So yes, it could have happened, but only the japanese were willing go fight until the very end. They had to be shown that they would not die in a honorable resistance against the us forces, but instead will simply get nuked with no chance of fighting or retaliating.
Nope. The German command didn't act normally in this respect. They were in hopeless situation since June 1944 (Operation Bagration) and continued to kill and die for nonsensical reasons. They only surrendered after Hitler killed himself.
Sure, the high command was delusional or had nothing to lose, but for the most part german units surrendered in massive numbers throughout 1945 especially to the western allies. Same for germany cities, where civilians usually put up 0 resistance and were revelieved to see the war end. There is no comparison possible imo, just look at the number of japanese war prisoners vs those from germany
> the potential for a future, prolongued military battle
It wasn't "potential", it was already happening. People fixate on the atom bombs but completely ignore the carpet bombing campaigns that had been going on long before. Dozens of Japanese cities were flattened to the same extent of destruction as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The only difference is that with those two cities, it was accomplished with a single plane, dropping a single atomic bomb, whereas with other Japanese cities, it was accomplished with hundreds of planes dropping thousands of napalm filled warheads.
>. I can't understand how 2 nuclear bombs can be considered to be worse than the millions of deaths a land invasion of Japan would have led to.
>What's actually "rationalization" is to pretend the Americans didn't try everything to convince the Japanese to capitulate or to push for the disproven theory that Japan was about to surrender anyways
Those weren't the only two options. Many scientists working on the Manhattan Project submitted the Szilárd petition, urging the US to inform Japan of the terms of surrender before dropping an atomic bomb on them. The petition was ignored. They didn't even try something as basic as that.
Further, the bombs destructive power could have been demonstrated without dropping one on two cities. A non-inhabited area very possibly could have worked, but a military only target was also a possibility.
This isn't an example of the losers rewriting history, it's straightforward logic. The only situation I would consider launching a nuke today is retaliatory, and I don't see how being the sole owners of a nuclear bomb makes any other situation ethical.
I'm sorry, I'm not following. The declaration of Cairo clearly stated that the US will accept unconditional surrender. There was no need to inform Japan of that by that point, they were fully aware that the US would have accepted an unconditional surrender. There were no terms to inform the Japanese of. Keep in mind they were dropping leaflets warning the target cities' population of imminent doom for days before the bombings.
And why not? If you had a weapon you knew could end the war and lead to much, much less casualties on your side why not use it? What leader would prefer the death of hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers (and millions of civilian casualties) in a total war because nuclear somehow makes it less ethical?
>The declaration of Cairo clearly stated that the US will accept unconditional surrender. There was no need to inform Japan of that by that point, they were fully aware that the US would have accepted an unconditional surrender
Those aren't terms. On a simple, likely over discused level, the Japanese leaders were against the removal of the Emperor. If the US had provided terms accepting a figurehead role for him they may have been willing to discuss peace.
>Keep in mind they were dropping leaflets warning the target cities' population of imminent doom for days before the bombings.
Though leaflets were dropped in Japan, they did not list Hiroshima as a target and they were not dropped in Hiroshima.
> If you had a weapon you knew could end the war and lead to much, much less casualties on your side why not use it? leader would prefer the death of hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers (and millions of civilian casualties) in a total war because nuclear somehow makes it less ethical?
Again, those weren't the only options available. It's entirely possible their weapon could have ended the war without using it on cities.
The terms were unconditional surrender & Japan wanted far more than just keeping the emperor prior to the bombings. In any case, Japan did surrender unconditionally. They tried to add a clause protecting the emperor, vut the americans were clear that unconditional meant unconditional and japan ended up agreeing with that. So It wasn't part of a separate peace offer, it was just fully unconditional surrender. The US only ended up letting the emperor stay to keep stability and ease occupation, but were not obliged to do so
The United States could have detailed the Potsdam Declaration's demands and turned them into terms of surrender fitting the Szilárd petition. Japan may have surrendered if they did, they at least had doubts that maintaining territory was still possible.
We'll never know, as instead they demanded unconditional surrender and used atomic bombs to force acceptance.
Either way, the US was never in a scenario where their only option was nuke cities or a full scale invasion.
Yes, and they both would nuke each other to oblivion if that happens. Thankfully, the US provably won't try to attack China in a genocidial attempt to conquer half of asia for itself.
>A willingness to cause that kind of unprecedented basically indiscriminate devastation, well it forced me to look at the events that actually did happen through a very different lens.
I think you need to spend some quality time going over pictures and statistics from cities like Volgograd and Berlin. The destruction was by no means unprecedented and the death toll among the locals was on the same order as what you'd expect from fighting over the city. The low cost to the attackers was what was unprecedented.
> US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition.
One particular nuance you are passing over is that the US (and all other major combatants in the war) had already been engaged in the killing of thousands of civilians through total war and "conventional" carpet bombing. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unique in that they were leveled from a single, nuclear bomb, but they absolutely were not unique in that they were leveled. Dozens of other Japanese cities experience the same level of destruction (literally 90+% of all structures destroyed) using firebombing (as in Napalm, used intentionally as most Japanese structures at the time were wooden) as the US pushed towards the Japanese mainland. And the US wasn't alone: the bombing of entire cities was a feature of the the Western German front and the German-Russian front, by both the Allies and the Axis.
So while you aren't wrong that dropping the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially the US flexing its technological muscles, I am curious as to why it is considered abhorrent to kill thousands of civilians using a single "nuclear weapon in anger", but the killing of just as many civilians using many bombs seems to be accepted as just a part of the war?
Yes. If anything it's a good lesson about wars: for the British to attack German cities it was a hard decision and it was to-be-or-not-to-be for their country. So at first it wasn't The Revenge.
But as they were on their 250th night bombing they just did the same as on 249th, but more efficiently. They used their cached reasons or were cherry-picking new reasons as needed provided that these reasons supported what they were already doing (chiefly the revenge argument that I deem unethical - and British probably would had consider as unethical before the war). They didn't seriously reconsider if they were still in to-be-or-not-to-be mode.
One less known fact is that one of the advisors to US army back in WWII is Dr Liang Sicheng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liang_Sicheng. He is the father of modern Chinese architecture. He recommended that the Americans military authorities spare the ancient Japanese cities of Kyoto and Nara.
He married with another legend Lin Huiyin, whose niece Maya Lin later designed Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Lin
The fact this claim has been at the top of this Hacker News thread for hours piqued my interest. So I did some research.
I read the New York Times "Overlooked" obituary for Dr Liang Sicheng but found no reference to this event. [1]. The closest thing I could find was [2] which writes the following (and links to a currently-unavailable article hosted on the government of China mouthpiece China Daily):
> During World War II, as Japan occupied Beijing and most of coastal China, Liang Sicheng was working in Sichuan. According to Luo Zhewen, a former student who frequently assisted Liang Sicheng in his research, Liang heard that the Allied forces were planning on bombing Japan and Japanese-controlled areas in China. Liang began drawing up a map of the major Chinese cities occupied by Japan as well as Japan’s former capitals, Nara and Kyoto to help American military planners avoid destroying important historic sites and buildings. Liang then traveled to Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Republic of China, and passed the maps to the US Army liaison stationed there.
The NYT article suggests Dr. Liang Sicheng was later in life sent to re-education as a counterrevolutionary of Maoist China, but that he has had his reputation revived by the CCP which turn him into a folk hero. I don't doubt that he passed on maps and messages to the US Army in the hope of sparing culturally important sites from bombing, but without further evidence the claim that he was an advisor to the US military that convinced them to spare Kyoto and Nara appears overblown.
I am happy to be convinced if independent historians believe Liang Sicheng had a part to play in the decision, but right now this claim feels like highly-upvoted CCP propaganda.
> I am happy to be convinced if independent historians believe Liang Sicheng had a part to play in the decision, but right now this claim feels like highly-upvoted CCP propaganda.
You have to be very naive to think that there are corners on the internet with more than a thousand users that do not have the presence of every superpower. What do you think they’re spending their resources on?
I'm not saying the users upvoting are shills, just that the claim appears amplified and disseminated through through CCP's official propaganda outlet (China Daily is "owned by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China")
I see how hard we are still trying to rationalize such a despicable act as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"We choose not to destroy cultural value" seems a compassion argument until one realizes that the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed. To try to justify the attack, to talk about the process, the decisions, removes a very important part of the discussion. And that is the consequences on the civil population.
I accept that talking about strategies and politics make sense. But, to remove any human consideration from the discussion only makes us one step closer to repeat the horrific acts of the past.
As we have seen so recently, facts do not change people's minds, but feelings do. To talk about the effects on the population, to talk about the suffering will help people to change their minds about using atomic bombs.
> the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed.
That's false. More Tokyo residents died from incendiary bombing. The alternative to the two nuclear bombs was to use 10,000 bombers with napalm to literally incinerate every village and town in Japan.
Because of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles in WW1 due to no occupation of Germany, in WW2 the only acceptable outcome was occupation and unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan. (An exception was made for Japan to keep the Emperor.)
The Japanese military were end-of-the-world type leaders, same as in Germany, so no negotiated surrender was possible.
And calling the USA murderers after Japan declared war on them is absurd. The Japanese population got off easy compared to their butchery in China, which they still deny (because they have to - there was no honor in their conduct and no excuse.)
Speculation. Hiroshima was choosen to demonstrate the max destructive power. If tokyo would have been a better candidate, they probably would have gone with it.
And Tokyo is not a city, but a region. It has naturally more population because of it's far bigger area. Whether population at the time was also denser than in hiroshima back then, do you have data for this?
Anyway, the point is that it doesn't matter which tool you use. The death toll depends more on the effort and will you put in, than on the bomb you use.
Well, no. Tokyo was already attacked before, and had significant destruction received already. And some cities of tokyo even were on the initial list of targets with strategic value for the atomic bomb. If anything they did not choose it because is was not important enough.
In the end they decided the target mainly by effective damage (physical as also psychological), which ruled out already attacked areas and left only a handful cities. Of those hiroshima was the best, because of size and the surrounding mountains, which made the best setup for effective demonstrating the power of the atomic bomb.
The USA, the only country to ever use a nuclear bomb, has a population that has disturbingly not reckoned with this history.
From a recent study into USA attitudes to the usage of nuclear weapons in warfare:
> Sagan noted, “The most shocking finding of our study is that 60 percent of Americans would approve of killing 2 million Iranian civilians to prevent an invasion of Iran that might kill 20,000 U. S. soldiers. ”
I think it's pretty hard to overstate how concerning that study result is. The nuclear bombing of Japan killed 120,000 people. Here, 60% say they'd approve of killing 2,000,000 _civilians_ to save 20,000 U.S combatants.
I'd hazard a guess that more Americans are proud of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than are ashamed of it. To not reckon with the horror and the pain of those bombing is to be open to doing the same and worse in the future.
With Fascism whipping up in the USA, that survey result becomes even more ominous.
> until one realizes that the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed.
Says who? The firebombing of Tokyo killed just as many civilians as the atom bomb over Hiroshima did (100k+), and is still considered the single most destructive air raid in human history[0]. And that was just Tokyo. Dozens of similar air raids were conducted throughout Japan, to say nothing of the European/Russian fronts.
It is not those defending the atom bombs that are removing "any human consideration from the discussion". It is people like yourself who, presumably because you don't know the relevant history, are removing the human consideration by ignoring the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were already being slaughtered. But for some reason killing someone with a napalm filled "conventional" bomb is more acceptable than killing them with an atomic bomb.
Even overflowing with tourists Kyoto is a magical place. I'm not religious at all but standing in those beautiful temples and shrines I can't help but be moved by them. Destroying them would have been a tragic mistake.
Japanese did their fair share of disgusting things during WWII and occupation of China, Korea, but the article sounds like and old joke about a mugger who says he saved a girl today. He didn't mug her, so that counts as a save.
An interesting fact that you may not know about is that Von Neumann was involved in the decision :
"Von Neumann, four other scientists, and various military personnel were included in the target selection committee that was responsible for choosing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the first targets of the atomic bomb. Von Neumann oversaw computations related to the expected size of the bomb blasts, estimated death tolls, and the distance above the ground at which the bombs should be detonated for optimum shock wave propagation and thus maximum effect. The cultural capital Kyoto, which had been spared the bombing inflicted upon militarily significant cities, was von Neumann's first choice,[131] a selection seconded by Manhattan Project leader General Leslie Groves. However, this target was dismissed by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.[132]"
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] threadhttp://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/08/08/kyoto-misconceptio...
> But he was also behind the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans because, as Mr Stimson put it, "their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese".
The internment of Japanese-Americans is a blight on United States history [1], as is the gold rush era Chinese Exclusion Act [2] ("the first law implemented to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating" to the United States), as was the 1950s "Red Scare" [3] (where accusations of being Communist spies were made without evidence.)
As the United States enters into a (likely multi-decade long) second Cold War and potential painful economic decoupling, it's worth knowing this history so that the real problems the United States has identified with the Chinese Communist Party can be addressed in accordance to the values the United States exposes.
Especially with the presumption of innocence (innocent until proven guilty) when it comes to individual people's lives, and the principle that everybody is created equal.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's recent "Distrust and Verify" [4] reformulation (of a famous Russian proverb) should definitely be applied widely to counter the Chinese Communist Party threat, but great care must be taken to ensure America's core values are always respected. Cold Wars are very dangerous and vastly increase the risk of nuclear escalation, so it's vital we all understand what's at stake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_long_march_through_the_ins...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps
My comment was in context of the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and nuclear war, and how, as the United States enters into what many are calling Cold War 2, we should learn the lessons from the first Cold War and the realities of nuclear war.
These major anniversaries provide a lot of news stories for all of humanity to take a moment to pause and reflect on.
Generally speaking, humans are very bad at actually understanding how they themselves would actually feel, react, or behave in a similar situation. It's kind of like people who talk all the time about entrepreneurship or starting their own company but then never actually quit their jobs because the reality of handing in your resignation and going off on your own is quite different than the intellectualization of it.
In particular, the significance of the first date helps explain why it would be the US making a first strike, and the significance of the second date why it they held it necessary to make a countervalue strike.
(Afterwards, 31 March 1991-12 November 2001 —from which we have many refugees— would start the twenty-first century of "nationalistic" fake news.)
On the other hand, even with a change in the Presidency, it is almost guaranteed that the GOP will do everything in its power to obstruct the new Administration, if it holds any power at all.
I am not sure what will happen. I share your hope but not your optimism.
Come November they'll likely be multiple vaccine candidates in late-stage trials, and the compelling argument can be made saying the botched crisis is almost over and Trump will soon be returning the economy to four more years of ~3% growth. After the vaccine is widely deployed, whoever is President will see a year of 6+% growth (after 2020's 10+% contraction)
Some core Trump advisors like Peter Navarro (author of "Death by China" and the associated documentary) believe in economic decoupling far more deeply Biden advisors.
I agree some Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer are hawks on China, but a Biden administration would be far less hawkish on the CCP issue than Trump.
I can see Trump using the 'nuclear option' and cutting off Hong Kong's ability to conduct transactions in US dollars (fatally killing the Hong Kong economy and deeply damaging China's, and far less so America's). I can't see Biden doing that.
Job done.
Operation Warp Speed has meant a huge amount tax payer money is being thrown at this.
Also, it's August already. Although some other nations have fast reliable testing for anyone who needs it, USA CDC is still struggling to field a convenient test. How are these people going to crank out hundreds of millions of vaccine doses by November? That isn't totally Trump's fault, but he has certainly been among the public figures giving us the vaccine song-and-dance. He may need to somehow trick Biden into saying something like "I believe in the new vaccine that the wonderful scientists have given us" right before everyone realizes what a fairy tale it has been. We'll still see high-six-figures of Americans dead by election time. Any political machine that actually wanted to win could make a powerful argument out of all those dead people...
The reason to believe it won't mutate much is exactly in the difference of SARS-CoV-2 from influenza: coronaviruses mutate at much slover rate.
I can add some wishful thinking parts though: coronaviruses usually mutate to get less severe, and the threshold for the herd immunity may be way lower than the 60% or 70% (cross-imunity, non-hemogenity, etc.).
Not sure what it the point in comparing it to the influenza, because a) that's a very different virus b) there are several different strains of the flu floating around so is is a guessing game.
Just having the headlines full of promising results from the early trials, the starting of mass manufacturing and a clear timetable when the vaccine will begin its deployment may be provide enough "light at the end of the tunnel".
Biden is also turning 78 years old soon. I wouldn't count Trump out for an electoral college victory.
https://medium.com/wintoncentre/what-have-been-the-fatal-ris...
Ask Israel how opening schools worked for them.
It's impossible to figure out what percentage of Japanese people in the US would have sided with Japan over America. But it might be telling that during the Niihau incident, literally every Japanese person the pilot ran across decided to help him, in contrast to helping the native Hawaiians they had been living with for decades. I wonder at what point the internment becomes acceptable. If 99% of the Japanese people in America would have supported Japan in the war, would the internment have been okay?
In this case, "literally every" means exactly three people, two of whom were first-generation immigrants without citizen.
I do hope you understand how that's not a sufficient basis to make conclusions about 120,000 people.
Would you have supported the internment if 110,000 of those 120,000 people supported Japan in their war against the USA?
Pearl Harbor was surveilled by a Japanese officer attached to the Japanese Embassy from restaurants above the base.
The endgame for both Germany and Japan was to invade the USA.
Having studied WW2 at length, I don't see an alternative to the Japanese internment at the time.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_American_Bund
The US has never lived up to those. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (I hope no one forgot about that one) or all the tragic events that ignited the BLM movement are just current examples.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that "All men are created equal" in 1776 as part of the United States' founding principles, but it took until 1865 for slavery to even be abolished in the United States. He even owned slaves himself and famously bore 6 children with his slave, Sally Hemings. As recently as 155 years ago in the United States, you could own people as property, and 70 years ago black people couldn't drink out of the same drinking fountain as white people.
The US has always been a work in progress, and it's better to have some kind of aspirational set of values (like presumption of innocence and equality) that we should try and make sure our societies are living up to.
But that is just not true. From slavery, Jim Crow, internment camps, McCarthy, Vietnam, killing of “enemy combatants”, etc. You have never been even close to the way.
[0]England, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, others?
In contrast, most European countries have higher social mobility than the US [0]. And considering the influence of money in US politics, that matters more.
[0] http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/socia...
But there are definitely a load of countries which make America look great, and if that's not a sign of how much progress humanity has still to make I don't know what is.
So, its not necessarily the case that just because everyone believes something, it is true...
In a country on the opposite side of the spectrum, doing that lands you in secret jail.
It doesn't matter what he did was lawful or not, or whether the law itself is right or wrong. In the end, he decided to hole himself up in a foreign embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on some sex charges.
He offered to go back to Sweden to face the charges on the proviso that he would not be expedited from Sweden to the USA. This was not guaranteed.
Julian Assange is a political prisoner. All of the bogus sex crime charges against him have been dropped, and were never intended to be anything but a lever to get him to go back to Sweden so he could be extrajudicially rendered back to the USA - since Sweden and the USA have a track record of such criminal behaviour, Julian rightfully required a guarantee that the Swedish government could not provide.
And as a result Julian Assange is currently being psychologically tortured in Belmarsh - and has yet to face any of the charges against him. Nobody should think that Assanges' case upholds the highest values of Western legal justice, because it does not.
What is being done to Julian is tantamount to the same sort of treatment one would expect to happen to dissidents in dictatorships. Stop spreading the nonsense, and learn the facts about his case - it is chilling to the core.
The US is a constitutional democracy that was created in a world of kingdoms. It has the oldest constitution, a code of laws that grants its citizens rights which the government is prohibited from violating. And while the UK may be considered as an (perhaps only) older running democracy, it had a king, where the US replaced this role with the invention of a popularly-elected president. Sure it's not so special anymore, since everyone has democracy and presidents these days. But it most certainly was not always the case, especially back when the US was stumbling at times living up to its ideals. I am old enough to remember a world where the most common form of govt was still a dictatorship, not democracy, and there were despicable authoritarian regimes on almost every continent. US history is certainly not all positive, but the positives are there. A constitution and popular elections are not ideals, they are results. People who have positive opinions of this country throughout history were not as blind and irrational as these dismissive posts think.
> all the tragic events that ignited the BLM movement are just current examples.
A tiny minority of people caused the incidents that ignited the BLM movement. They're not widely held opinions, but happen to be rife in the police force. It's a bad culture in the police that needs to be cleaned out, not that it's in the US culture itself.
The violence against black people has been going on since the beginning with impunity. And people continue to elect the people that pay and control the police force.
Woman did not have rights in most of the world because they wanted to. But because the US pressured them to.
The US has never had a female leader and has never really been the vanguard of women's rights -- interesting that you should choose to ascribe all such success to the US. Womens suffrage was established in nearly 100 countries before the US.
Equating the two like so many people love doing is necessary step if you want to transition from the latter to the former.
I'm USian, so of course I like any argument that puts the US on the right side of history. But as that moment gets more and more into the past, and we lose the context of culture, etc of that time, what is left is that the US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition.
I've been taught the nuances. I've accepted them and perhaps even clung to them. As time passes, even USians might feel less need to keep the memory of those nuances alive. But the horror of that action doesn't go away.
I grew up learning about Christopher Columbus, and Pocahontas and Thomas Jefferson, and all the narrative we learned decades ago. Especially lately there has been a lot different version of much of those stories. Some see people and actions of the past as heroic, others see them as hideous.
I do not personally condemn decision makers of WWII. I am grateful for the sacrifices of past generations. But the fact remains that the US is the only country in the history of the world that has ever used a nuclear weapon in anger. That is extremely humbling.
Imperial Japan use Chinese as test subject for bio and chemical weapon. They have committed far greater crime against humanity than Nazi.
What does China """deserve""" for what they’re doing to Hong Kong and Uyghurs right now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodo_League_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests
You will not run out of digging up other stuff like that.
Collectively humans are belligerent, acquisitive, tribal, and stupid. We keep hoping and telling ourselves we're better than that, but so far there's disappointingly little evidence we are.
The technical term for what you're describing is "collective punishment". Personally, I see it as a logical fallacy: failure to see that a country is not a single collective consciousness.
Which is the same kind of thinking that justifies genocide and racism in general.
Bombs kill people. So when you say "Japan should get 10 atomic bomb drops", perhaps you can link to the 10 cities wikipedia pages whose people you're willing to wipe out?
Nuclear power absent the support of militarists in control of public money would be, absent. Only by the most skewed of accounting methods does it even begin to pay for itself. The war pigs have a different lie for every different constituency, and "nukes are green" has somehow been swallowed by a small number of very vocal (on HN anyway) internet environmentalists.
They would essentially be UN consequences, they don't have a great track record of enforcing things like that.
>Having escaped those consequences, would they then have subjected the globe to a rampage of nuclear holocaust
Looking only at nukes, dropping one more on a populated area is worse than reality so far. And it's impossible to guess what kind of warfare a world without MAD would gave faced.
>Nuclear power absent the support of militarists in control of public money would be, absent. Only by the most skewed of accounting methods does it even begin to pay for itself.
Nuclear power obtained without the focus placed on weapons would be a completely different economy. Not only are design choices often made allowing more bombs to be created, the control of information and resources drives the price up.
I kind of wonder about the timeline in which Kennedy and Khrushchev hadn't been cancelled by their respective hardliners. Would we have wound up with a world of laws, in which the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved? Would the US and the USSR have converged on market economies with strong safety nets? Would we all now be celebrating Hearth's Warming Eve with pantomimes?
If you read the accounts from any person at the time. Regardless of the theater or the nationality the overwhelming consensus was that the priority was to get the war over with ASAP so that everyone could go home. Anything else was just a side benefit.
It's not quite as much of an unalloyed good as you're suggesting.
The point at which most of it started to unravel for me was when I learned that the United States had a whole spate of atomic bombs they were scheduling to drop if Imperial Japan didn't surrender. We think of it as two because that's all the further we got, but if things had gone a little differently it would have been six, eight, etc.
A willingness to cause that kind of unprecedented basically indiscriminate devastation, well it forced me to look at the events that actually did happen through a very different lens.
In that context an overwhelming and undeniable show of force arguably lead to less death on the obvious side, but also of those who would have been consumed on the side that surrendered as well. Consideration of the 'lessons learned' from (then, possibly either, 'the great war' or WWI) also required the consideration of recovery after the war.
My supposition is that for Japan the outcome is probably within the best likely range of variations. Cultural identity intact; culture nudged towards an easy, slow, movement towards global integration, tolerance and equality; a post-war rebuilding effort to ensure that recovery would stick and general prosperity would persist.
We should be so lucky to reflect upon the post-war lessons and once again apply them within as a New-New Deal. I hope that is how we apply the lessons of recovering from the world wars to recovering from the current 'war' on the pandemic (and all of the forces that cause it to be as bad as it has been; most domestic).
> In a study published in 1996, historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta claims that the Three Alls Policy, sanctioned by Emperor Hirohito himself, was both directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians.
Sankō Sakusen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy
(That "justification" doesn't look valid in my eyes, don't take me wrong. Eye for an eye, civilian for a civilian?...)
Alas, it certainly looks like US had already decided that they indiscriminately target Japanese civilians long before they had nuclear weapons. The single most devastating conventional raid on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 claimed 90-100 thousand deaths (it's slightly more than Hiroshima).
I can't find it now, but there was an audible audiobook that I used to have back in the dvd-audio days that showed just how much effort the Japanese government took to even be able to accept surrender when their militaries were extremely hawkish even to the end. It briefly touched on US discussions as well but was primarily focused on the Japanese government.
The Emperor of Japan himself had to do a certain amount of conspiring in order to be able to both surrender and not lose face. Even though he was in theory the supreme ruler, apparently if not done correctly there was risk of that military officers would go rogue.
Everything indicated that Japan and it's civilian population was willing to fight off an invasion at all costs, through the bitter end. The Americans witnessed that absolute suicidal fanaticism in every single battle they've had with the Japanese whether they were military or civilians. What's actually "rationalization" is to pretend the Americans didn't try everything to convince the Japanese to capitulate or to push for the disproven theory that Japan was about to surrender anyways. I get that it's hard for some to acknowledge that the US has ever done anything good, but there are already tons of valid reasons to dislike America. This absolutely isn't one of them.
Btw in ww2, history seems to have been written mostly by the losers who pushed for the omnipresent "underdog" narratives that are usually nothing more than outright historical revisionism . The Japanese white washing of their ww2 history or the german generals post war memoirs that started numerous myths about the Werhmacht are proof of that. Ironically, one of those narratives is the tired maxim that history is supposedly written by the winners, which is a pretty convenient way for the losers to make their revisionism more compelling.
You should definitely try to understand that. Perhaps if the bombs had been targeted at LA or NY by Germans (who would certainly be as correct as you are that doing that would've saved millions of lives in a potential invasion of the USA by Germany once it was done in Europe) it would be easier for you to understand that the potential for a future, prolongued military battle in no way can be used as a justification for immediately killing hundreds of thousands of civillians.
Again, it's pure non sense to advocate that those numbers would have been better than 2 nuclear bombs because... at least it was conventional? And why can't an assessment of the potential casualties be used as a justification? Because that just sounds like grandstanding that completely ignore the reality of the war in the pacific.
Not only that, but Germany was still planned to be a target if it hadn't surrendered by the time the bombs were ready. So yes, it could have happened, but only the japanese were willing go fight until the very end. They had to be shown that they would not die in a honorable resistance against the us forces, but instead will simply get nuked with no chance of fighting or retaliating.
It wasn't "potential", it was already happening. People fixate on the atom bombs but completely ignore the carpet bombing campaigns that had been going on long before. Dozens of Japanese cities were flattened to the same extent of destruction as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The only difference is that with those two cities, it was accomplished with a single plane, dropping a single atomic bomb, whereas with other Japanese cities, it was accomplished with hundreds of planes dropping thousands of napalm filled warheads.
>What's actually "rationalization" is to pretend the Americans didn't try everything to convince the Japanese to capitulate or to push for the disproven theory that Japan was about to surrender anyways
Those weren't the only two options. Many scientists working on the Manhattan Project submitted the Szilárd petition, urging the US to inform Japan of the terms of surrender before dropping an atomic bomb on them. The petition was ignored. They didn't even try something as basic as that.
Further, the bombs destructive power could have been demonstrated without dropping one on two cities. A non-inhabited area very possibly could have worked, but a military only target was also a possibility.
This isn't an example of the losers rewriting history, it's straightforward logic. The only situation I would consider launching a nuke today is retaliatory, and I don't see how being the sole owners of a nuclear bomb makes any other situation ethical.
And why not? If you had a weapon you knew could end the war and lead to much, much less casualties on your side why not use it? What leader would prefer the death of hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers (and millions of civilian casualties) in a total war because nuclear somehow makes it less ethical?
Those aren't terms. On a simple, likely over discused level, the Japanese leaders were against the removal of the Emperor. If the US had provided terms accepting a figurehead role for him they may have been willing to discuss peace.
>Keep in mind they were dropping leaflets warning the target cities' population of imminent doom for days before the bombings.
Though leaflets were dropped in Japan, they did not list Hiroshima as a target and they were not dropped in Hiroshima.
> If you had a weapon you knew could end the war and lead to much, much less casualties on your side why not use it? leader would prefer the death of hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers (and millions of civilian casualties) in a total war because nuclear somehow makes it less ethical?
Again, those weren't the only options available. It's entirely possible their weapon could have ended the war without using it on cities.
We'll never know, as instead they demanded unconditional surrender and used atomic bombs to force acceptance.
Either way, the US was never in a scenario where their only option was nuke cities or a full scale invasion.
I think you need to spend some quality time going over pictures and statistics from cities like Volgograd and Berlin. The destruction was by no means unprecedented and the death toll among the locals was on the same order as what you'd expect from fighting over the city. The low cost to the attackers was what was unprecedented.
One particular nuance you are passing over is that the US (and all other major combatants in the war) had already been engaged in the killing of thousands of civilians through total war and "conventional" carpet bombing. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unique in that they were leveled from a single, nuclear bomb, but they absolutely were not unique in that they were leveled. Dozens of other Japanese cities experience the same level of destruction (literally 90+% of all structures destroyed) using firebombing (as in Napalm, used intentionally as most Japanese structures at the time were wooden) as the US pushed towards the Japanese mainland. And the US wasn't alone: the bombing of entire cities was a feature of the the Western German front and the German-Russian front, by both the Allies and the Axis.
So while you aren't wrong that dropping the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially the US flexing its technological muscles, I am curious as to why it is considered abhorrent to kill thousands of civilians using a single "nuclear weapon in anger", but the killing of just as many civilians using many bombs seems to be accepted as just a part of the war?
But as they were on their 250th night bombing they just did the same as on 249th, but more efficiently. They used their cached reasons or were cherry-picking new reasons as needed provided that these reasons supported what they were already doing (chiefly the revenge argument that I deem unethical - and British probably would had consider as unethical before the war). They didn't seriously reconsider if they were still in to-be-or-not-to-be mode.
He married with another legend Lin Huiyin, whose niece Maya Lin later designed Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Lin
I read the New York Times "Overlooked" obituary for Dr Liang Sicheng but found no reference to this event. [1]. The closest thing I could find was [2] which writes the following (and links to a currently-unavailable article hosted on the government of China mouthpiece China Daily):
> During World War II, as Japan occupied Beijing and most of coastal China, Liang Sicheng was working in Sichuan. According to Luo Zhewen, a former student who frequently assisted Liang Sicheng in his research, Liang heard that the Allied forces were planning on bombing Japan and Japanese-controlled areas in China. Liang began drawing up a map of the major Chinese cities occupied by Japan as well as Japan’s former capitals, Nara and Kyoto to help American military planners avoid destroying important historic sites and buildings. Liang then traveled to Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Republic of China, and passed the maps to the US Army liaison stationed there.
The NYT article suggests Dr. Liang Sicheng was later in life sent to re-education as a counterrevolutionary of Maoist China, but that he has had his reputation revived by the CCP which turn him into a folk hero. I don't doubt that he passed on maps and messages to the US Army in the hope of sparing culturally important sites from bombing, but without further evidence the claim that he was an advisor to the US military that convinced them to spare Kyoto and Nara appears overblown.
I am happy to be convinced if independent historians believe Liang Sicheng had a part to play in the decision, but right now this claim feels like highly-upvoted CCP propaganda.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/obituaries/overlooked-lin...
[2] https://radiichina.com/did-chinese-architect-liang-sicheng-s...
Even for HN this is ridiculously paranoid.
Ah okay, sorry, I thought that's what you meant.
"We choose not to destroy cultural value" seems a compassion argument until one realizes that the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed. To try to justify the attack, to talk about the process, the decisions, removes a very important part of the discussion. And that is the consequences on the civil population.
I accept that talking about strategies and politics make sense. But, to remove any human consideration from the discussion only makes us one step closer to repeat the horrific acts of the past.
As we have seen so recently, facts do not change people's minds, but feelings do. To talk about the effects on the population, to talk about the suffering will help people to change their minds about using atomic bombs.
That's false. More Tokyo residents died from incendiary bombing. The alternative to the two nuclear bombs was to use 10,000 bombers with napalm to literally incinerate every village and town in Japan.
Because of the failure of the Treaty of Versailles in WW1 due to no occupation of Germany, in WW2 the only acceptable outcome was occupation and unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan. (An exception was made for Japan to keep the Emperor.)
The Japanese military were end-of-the-world type leaders, same as in Germany, so no negotiated surrender was possible.
And calling the USA murderers after Japan declared war on them is absurd. The Japanese population got off easy compared to their butchery in China, which they still deny (because they have to - there was no honor in their conduct and no excuse.)
The conventional bombings on Tokyo killed more people than any atomic bomb.
Tokyo had at the time a population of 1.1 million and 90,000 to 100,000 dead on the bombing of March 10th 1945.
Hiroshima had at the time a population of 255,000 and 66,000 dead caused by the atomic bomb.
You are right. It would have been way worse if the USA has attacked a more populated area. The situations is no less horrific because it.
And Tokyo is not a city, but a region. It has naturally more population because of it's far bigger area. Whether population at the time was also denser than in hiroshima back then, do you have data for this?
Anyway, the point is that it doesn't matter which tool you use. The death toll depends more on the effort and will you put in, than on the bomb you use.
Tokyo was not chosen because it's too important to nuke. Demonstrate isn't the only criteria.
In the end they decided the target mainly by effective damage (physical as also psychological), which ruled out already attacked areas and left only a handful cities. Of those hiroshima was the best, because of size and the surrounding mountains, which made the best setup for effective demonstrating the power of the atomic bomb.
From a recent study into USA attitudes to the usage of nuclear weapons in warfare:
> Sagan noted, “The most shocking finding of our study is that 60 percent of Americans would approve of killing 2 million Iranian civilians to prevent an invasion of Iran that might kill 20,000 U. S. soldiers. ”
I think it's pretty hard to overstate how concerning that study result is. The nuclear bombing of Japan killed 120,000 people. Here, 60% say they'd approve of killing 2,000,000 _civilians_ to save 20,000 U.S combatants.
I'd hazard a guess that more Americans are proud of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than are ashamed of it. To not reckon with the horror and the pain of those bombing is to be open to doing the same and worse in the future.
With Fascism whipping up in the USA, that survey result becomes even more ominous.
1. https://news.stanford.edu/2017/08/08/americans-weigh-nuclear...
Says who? The firebombing of Tokyo killed just as many civilians as the atom bomb over Hiroshima did (100k+), and is still considered the single most destructive air raid in human history[0]. And that was just Tokyo. Dozens of similar air raids were conducted throughout Japan, to say nothing of the European/Russian fronts.
It is not those defending the atom bombs that are removing "any human consideration from the discussion". It is people like yourself who, presumably because you don't know the relevant history, are removing the human consideration by ignoring the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were already being slaughtered. But for some reason killing someone with a napalm filled "conventional" bomb is more acceptable than killing them with an atomic bomb.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
"Von Neumann, four other scientists, and various military personnel were included in the target selection committee that was responsible for choosing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the first targets of the atomic bomb. Von Neumann oversaw computations related to the expected size of the bomb blasts, estimated death tolls, and the distance above the ground at which the bombs should be detonated for optimum shock wave propagation and thus maximum effect. The cultural capital Kyoto, which had been spared the bombing inflicted upon militarily significant cities, was von Neumann's first choice,[131] a selection seconded by Manhattan Project leader General Leslie Groves. However, this target was dismissed by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.[132]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann