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.
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.
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 shitThe Japanese were not fascists
oh yeah the hypermilitarist genocidal racists backed by a bunch of monopolies in a suit pretending to be an economy that took over a british-modelled liberal monarchy are sooooooo different from fascists 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄
Fascism is an actual ideology. Its Karl Marx was a man named Giovanni Gentile, and he wrote an entire philosophy on it. The Japanese didn't really have any ideology other than "Let the Emperor live 10,000 years!" Most of the European imperialists didn't have huge militaries, nor did the military control society. I guess you could call the Japanese imperialist, but you don't have to be militarist to be imperialist. I realize that to some, the Venn diagrams of these three appear very nearly a circle, but there is much more to it than that.
:data-laughing: only the italians were fascists! the other ones were fascist revisionists!
:funny-clown-hammer:
Yes, on one level, I realize that today, fascist is just an insult. But believe it or not, it is an actual school of thought, an entire philosophy. You can still read the books, if you care to seek them out. But the insult is widespread and unavoidable. For example, here is one group of antifa calling another group of antifa fascist. Unless you're going to do the chud thing of "antifa are the real fascists!"
It's not new, either. 1937: Communist Party of Spain (PCE) calls the POUM fascists. They don't have any evidence, they just know that the POUM are fascists.
Also I wouldn’t call the organization that defeated Japan “liberals”. They were far from that.
Famed liberal icon, uhhhhhhh, Douglas Macarthur.
To the Japanese, machines of war--from the heavy machine guns to the tank--are only incidentals in warfare. We Americans realize that the infantry must perform the tasks of actually taking over the ground and holding it, but we use every available machine of war to prevent unnecessary losses. In contrast, the Japanese do not conceive of substituting the shock action of war machines for the shock action of infantry, and they merely strengthen the shock action of troops by the assistance of the machines. The Japanese Army is an army of men, supported by machines of war; ours is an army using machines of war. This is a fine distinction and perhaps not readily understood, but every statement of Japanese military policy bears this out.
A Japanese who has not tasted defeat will attack with a dash and a magnificent disregard for himself. When he has been set back on his heels, just once, he loses that zip and comes back without confidence and impelled by a morbid feeling toward death that might be worded as "Come on, let's get it over with."
He has found himself up against things he can't understand: For example, the way we use artillery (the Chinese never used it against him like that, and he doesn't know what to do about it); the fact that we prefer to sit back and stop him with well aimed rifle and machine-gun fire, and not fight it out with the bayonet; the fact that when we meet him with a bayonet we don't break and run; and, above all, the fact that his basic idea--that skill, bravery, and cold steel alone will win the war--is wrong.
-- "Japanese Warfare as Seen by U.S. Observers" from Intelligence Bulletin, May 1943
Dimitrov identified Imperial Japan as explicitly fascist several times in his writings on the United Front. I consider Dimitrov to be the authority on identifying fascism in the prewar period, and later attempts to restrict its definition to be revisionist. A good example of this "restrictionist" tendency is Jason Stanley's 2020 book "How Fascism Works".
They learned nothing from Mussolini, and about the only contact they had with the Italians was hosting a few submarines in Indonesia. Then when the Italians switched sides in '43, they took the subs for their own and bundled the sailors off into the legendarily brutal Japanese POW camp system.
Well, since he is specifically pointing to the dropping of the A-bomb, I would assume he means Truman and his advisors specifically.
Sure, MacArthur would never have dropped The Bomb had the decision been left up to him.
Fun fact: the atom bomb was top secret, right? Nobody knew about it, including the Americans, until it dropped. The US military went calmly about planning Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese homeland, like the Bomb wasn't even there. The Japanese had figured out where it was going to land, and planned a defense. And their defense was a good one. It would have been a bloodbath on both sides. Not only squadrons of kamikaze pilots and sailors with one way tickets to the shrine of heroes at Yasukuni; but the women and children clutching pitiful staves and bamboo spears.
Wasn't MacArthur the one that came up with the idea of dropping "30 to 50" nukes to win the Korean war?
