https://mobile.twitter.com/Slucchiurbanite/status/1644541100022177793
:wojak-nooo: not every wehrmacht soldier was a nazi!
:so-true: every japanese civilian was a fascist
:liberalism: But also mass murdering war criminals and complete monsters like Unit 731 are just precious smol beans who should be forgiven, and the USSR was doing a heckin evil fake show trial when it charged the ones it caught and that's why the US had to criminalize the distribution of the court proceedings.
Gotta love that the position that every civilian caught up in US bombing campaigns was guilty and deserved death can coexist in the same heads that also believe the actual, literal monsters carrying out atrocities stopped being a problem or deserving punishment the instant the war was over.
Fuck, now I'm realizing there's a thread there about people fundamentally accepting war as a legitimate thing, that in war there's a collective guilt in the enemy that extends to civilians but still a fundamental legitimacy to soldiers and state actions, especially when it's expedient to simply absorb the defeated state and faction into part of the imperial machine. The crimes of Imperial Japan couldn't be prosecuted because its Co-Prosperity Sphere effectively became a part of the US imperial machine, just as Nazi Germany became part of the US imperial machine in Europe with the FRG, just with a few token measures to distance the FRG and its Nazi-party-alumni leadership from the Nazis themselves.
I don't think there's an antidote to it: it's cynical and shaped by commentary by accepted propaganda mouthpieces. I'm not even entirely sure how applicable it is to modern conflicts: it applies to things like WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam wars, where even regarding the designated "enemy" there's a more tacit acceptance of formal state forces than insurgent groups, like the VC gets demonized by Americans while nobody talks about the formal North Vietnamese army, but in more modern conflicts it seems like this idea has shifted to "enemy bad and illegitimate, whoever we like good and legitimate" in a way that doesn't distinguish between state and non-state actors, which makes me think this is more shaped by formal propaganda than some innate "formally accepted violence man violence good, non-formally accepted violence man violence bad" phenomenon.
Like you can't really inoculate a population, and especially cynical jingoists, against the stance of the formally accepted propaganda mouthpieces.
One could probably tie this to how the FRG/modern Germany and Occupied Korea each consider/considered their counterpart to be fundamentally an illegitimate insurgency against their authority, or how the really terminal liberals try to insist on describing Taiwan as the legitimate Chinese government even in contravention of the US's own position, and how the entire liberal idea of a legitimate state is at once paramount in their geopolitical worldview and at the same entirely cynical and shaped by what they're told to believe, but I'm already too drunk to articulate what I'm trying to say here so I'm not sure I can follow this thread of thought to fruition.
Thank you for the thoughtful answer! It’s depressing but it’s correct.
came here to post this. glad to see someone already hit the nail on the head. also i was gonna type way more, you boiled it down so perfectly.
Justifying nuclear mass slaughter with "well actually that city full of civilians were all totally fascists" is like a right wing parody of what they think a leftist would say
An easy way to shut up any CHUD that says something like "They are all authoritarians so they must die" is to simply respond with "you sound like antifa".
Liberals do that all the time. I've had more than one suggest to me that civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan were justified because "they're homophobic" (all of them, apparently -- and there's no way we ourselves murdered any gay people in those countries, obviously). Especially rich was the one who said that to me and had a bunch of virulently homophobic shit in their immediate post history.
hwite people are the master race because they're enlightened progressives. Everyone else is a backwards savage
libs unironically believe this
I remember liberals being okay with Obama classifying dead drone strike civilians as enemy combatants afterward so this tracks for them.
Yeah, and immediately after they did that, they wanted to start nuking the communists. The only thing that stopped them was the USSR acquiring its own atomic weapons.
no one thinks the soviets copied it whole cloth.
the difference between the Soviets having the bomb when Korea kicked off (a gap of 1 year) or not is extremely important. a single month US-based spies could've shaved off is worth praise. the US government was sharply divded on whether to use the bombs when they knew the Soviets could respond, a less credible and developed Soviet atomic program might've swayed them the other way. :nuke: i personally like atomic risk assessments being based on estimates myself
Yep, plutonium and uranium fission bombs. Fusion weapons like Castle Bravo make Little Boy and Fat Man look puny by comparison.
If anyone here feels like terrifying yourself a bit do a Google search for nukemap, find your hometown, and then check out the range of fatman/little boy and then check out the range for something more modern. It's like the difference between millions and billions. You understand abstractly that they're more devastating but....seeing it visualized is genuinely jaw dropping.
Oh. Oh.
I’ll be honest I thought Fat man and little boy were bigger than that. They only destroy like, the area of my college campus.
Casta brava destroys not only my entire city but the next city over as well.
Tsar bomba destroys nearly from coast to coast of Florida.
I bet this guy will definitely have a take about the Romanovs or the French Monarchs that is consistent with this one.
anti fascism is when you bomb korean slave laborers and japanese civilians. and the more war crimes you do the more antifascism it is
Nuking Japan is "good" but executing the top 50k Nazi officers is "too far"
Even if this were true, the Red Army wasn't still killing civilians decades later with radiation poisoning
Also, its fucking two cities vs an entire country, he doesnt even say Berlin, this moron said all of Germany.
Literally by any realistic method you'll probably end up killing more people doing a campaign through half a country vs two single strikes on a pair of cities.
Keep in mind that the bombs in Japan were 100% unnecessary. Japan was actively trying to surrender when they ordered the nukes.
The Germans quitting before The Bomb was ready was all that saved a million Berliners from dying on a single day.
Ehh, there is the fact that we fundamentally approved of Germany for being a white Christian nation and all that
They were literally actively TRYING to surrender, America just wanted to be the official sole 'victor' and exclude the USSR. That is literally the only reason the bomb was dropped. Twice.
They were literally actively TRYING to surrender
For real? I've not actually heard this before
Yep. I recommend skullman's video on it if you want a full explanation. But TL;DR both the USSR and America were fully aware of Japan's repeated attempts to start surrender negotiations. The USSR instead entered the war against Japan so it could benefit from the victory, the USA didn't like that so they dropped nukes in order to be the 'reaaaal' winner, which had practically zero effect on the leadership's stance.
They were actively in negotiations to surrender when the bombs were dropped.
I wonder if these guys would’ve supported the holocaust survivors who wanted to exterminate the entire German race via poisoned water supply
:us-foreign-policy: when it comes to "authoritarianism," followed by some skull measuring about how Warsaw Pact nations are in the not okay zone.
"Hey check out this one accomplishment to counterweigh 300 years of mass murder and poverty"
- Twitter user who thinks he's the shitYes the insane segregationist capitalists who dropped the bomb did it because they wanted to destroy fascism, that's also why they executed all the Japanese fascists and their emperor.....oh wait
Also famous strongholds of Japanese fascism check notes "Hiroshima and Nagasaki", you know, those places where the Imperial family and their military elite live
