I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call it genocide (in my mind you need a sustained effort over a longer time frame than that) but it certainly was one of the greatest terror attacks ever committed, a completely senseless slaughter of an incredible number of innocent civilians
Your mind has it wrong, at least according to international law. The Srebrenica genocide was just 20 days long, but it still counts due to intent and methodology. I don't think the nuclear bombings were genocidal, because there wasn't specific intent by American leadership to literally eliminate every single Japanese from the areas they were bombing. The intent in this case is debatable but I think most rational people know that it was a senseless killing to facilitate a show of force against the Soviet Union.
Well, I don't think you've actually contradicted anything I said. The dropping of the nuclear bombs consisted of two specific events a couple days apart, what I would refer to as two specific terrorist attacks. Anything that takes place over 20 days is already a sustained effort over a longer period than the US nuclear bombings of Japan. But more important than the time frame is the idea of a sustained effort at all. Maybe a sustained effort over 3 days could count as a genocide too, but I think dropping 2 bombs on 2 cities in a country with... well, a lot more than 2 cities can hardly be considered a serious effort at genocide.
And anyway as you say we know the intent: terrorism, not genocide.
Again, you're just implying that time frame has any bearing on genocide. When this isn't true, not by any definition of genocide. Sabra and Shatila was a genocidal massacre that took place over just 48 hours. Does it stop being genocidal because of how little time it took? What if they did it faster? Would they get away with it then? I don't see any meaning in assigning time limits to genocide.
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to call it genocide (in my mind you need a sustained effort over a longer time frame than that)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what this means, but it reads to me like you're saying that for it to count as genocide that it needs to span over a certain time frame, am I misconstruing this? Are you of the mind that it should count as 2 separate genocides if the nuclear bombs dropped more than a few days apart from each other? This is a very strange point.
Frankly comrade I have no idea what you're talking about or how you could possibly have derived what is in this comment from any of my comments, so I'm simply going to disengage.
because there wasn’t specific intent by American leadership to literally eliminate every single Japanese from the areas they were bombing.
I'm pretty sure after nuclear tests they knew people would literally evaporate so dropping that bomb was with intent to eliminate every single Japanese there. And same with the firebombings btw, the devastating effect on the population living in entire cities built mostly out of wood and paper was known.
Imperial Japan certainly didn't have any compunction about regularly terror bombing Chinese and other Asian cities full of civilians during the war, so when Japanese war apologists start crying about how terrible it was that they got bombed it's very much a case of me playing the world's tiniest violin.
No, it's not good that Japanese civilians died in the bombing campaigns against Japan in 1945 but bombing and bombardment of cities in WWII was accepted as a legitimate tactic by both the Axis and the Allies. We can certainly look back on it and say how horrible it was, but at the end of the day we are applying modern morality and rules of war to a past conflict.
Personally, I see the focus on the atomic bombings (as opposed to the two night firebombing raids on Tokyo that killed more people than both atomic bombs combined) to be a sort of post-war Clean Wehrmacht style revisionism carried out by the Americans and Japanese when the Yanks realized they very much did want to remilitarize Japan to oppose the USSR and PRC. By making Japan out to be the victim of some unique horror of war, there is an implied equivalence that cancels out all the horrors of war Japan inflicted on everyone else.
No, it's not good that Japanese civilians died in the bombing campaigns against Japan in 1945 but bombing and bombardment of cities in WWII was accepted as a legitimate tactic by both the Axis and the Allies. We can certainly look back on it and say how horrible it was, but at the end of the day we are applying modern morality and rules of war to a past conflict.
Sure, terrorist style bombing of cities to force capitulation was seen as a valid method of waging warfare, but terrorist style bombing of the cities of an already beaten enemy for no purpose other than destruction of innocent people was kind of unprecedented even then. Generally you stop dropping bombs when the enemy is beaten, rather than dropping all your fancy new, more destructive than ever before kind of bomb as a victory lap
The enemy is beaten when it surrenders. The Japanese did not surrender until after the bombs were dropped. Even then, the Imperial military staged a coup against their own God-Emperor to stop him from broadcasting his surrender speech. They stormed the Imperial Palace and ransacked the place - the recording was smuggled out in a pile of laundry. We are taking about a country run by people with that level of deathwish, you cannot just assume that they were beaten.
Setting all of that aside, there were still hundreds of thousands of Imperial Japanese soldiers in China and Korea at the time of surrender. Those soldiers were oppressing, murdering, raping and stealing up until the very end. Just because the Japanese military ceased to be a threat to the US Fleet does not mean that they ceased to be a threat to millions of people.
There are soldiers in China that we need to stop, obviously the solution is to vaporize a bunch of innocent civilians in Japan, great idea.
The solution is to continue to fight against the aggressor occupier fascist state using all means available until they surrender. A naval invasion of Japan was projected to cause up to 500,000 casualties. A naval blockade until starvation might have caused millions of civilian deaths if you take Leningrad as an example of how a starvation blockade would go.
It is tragic and horrific when a civilian is killed in war, but civilian deaths in war are unavoidable. The guilty party are the Japanese militarists who were refusing to surrender and holding out for some deathride bloodbath (of their own civilians).
I really think you ought to watch that video before continuing to support the US in its completely unnecessary and indefensible slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
As a Chinese person who's lived in Japan for many years and read about the topic pretty extensively in three languages, I don't think that I need my opinions to be validated by an Englishman.
I am Chinese. Both my grandfathers fought in the War to Resist Japanese Aggression and one went on to fight Americans in the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea. Both are now interred in a cemetery for Martyrs of the Revolution.
But sure, I have American brain worms despite not being an American and never living there. I obviously wouldn't have any reason other than American nationalism to take a dim view of Imperial Japan, right?
And I'm an Algerian, but I don't support Nazi Germany invading Fr*nce, because just like with the U.S. and Japan they didn't do it for us colonized people, in fact they killed us too. The nuking wasn't to make Japan surrender, but just to flex the U.S. power on the soviets and who ever else challenges it, your grandfathers benefited nothing from the U.S. nuking Imperial Japan. The U.S. didn't nuke Japan for your grandfathers.
Continue to lecture someone from another country about how they should feel about their own country and history is the real American brain worms my friend.
I don't pretend to know the complexities of the French occupation and the Algerian struggle for independence, that's why I'm not going to tell you how you should feel or think about it.
We let's have a look at the relevant part of Hirohito's surrender speech to see whether or not the bombs had any impact on his decision to surrender:
Show
Clear as fucking day right from the man himself.
Even if I do have American brain worms (maybe granddad pick some up from a dead yank in Korea), what you're espousing is just Japanese right wing brain worms. Don't take it from me, take it from a Japanese media scholar:
First of all, the narrative of August journalism can be classified into three categories.
The first is the "narrative of suffering" intended to pass down wartime experiences as "victims" of the atomic bombings, air raids, evacuations, repatriations and other grueling ordeals, and the "sacrifices" soldiers had to make, represented by kamikaze attacks and suicidal battles.
...
In such a context, Japan's invasion, atrocities, colonial rule and other forms of "aggression" are completely receded into the background. Instead, its self-image as victims of militarism is brought to the fore.
This view on war and history was formed due to peculiarities of how post-war Japan was handled during the Cold War.
Japan could return to the international community without facing squarely its war responsibility and pursue its economic growth after the emperor was exonerated at the behest of the United States and Western powers waived their right to claim compensation.
It's so frustrating that even Japanese people can acknowledge that this is their version of the Clean Wehrmacht myth specifically designed by Americans to rehabilitate them in a Cold War confrontation with the USSR but you try to tell this to a leftist and it's like talking to a fucking brick wall.
The firebombing of Tokyo, and the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were totally genocide events. The Japanese military had already been in total disarray since the Nazis and fascists fell and the war was already understood as lost and Japanese military were drafting a surrender. But the US saw that the USSR had taken advantage of the fact that the British and French were cooked, Germany, and Italy defeated and Spain still recovering from the civil war, meaning basically anyone that could stop them in Europe had been neutralized. So Moscow, despite being EXHAUSTED by one of the most brutal wars in world history, kept pressing on and liberating Eastern Europe.
The US had the nuke though by then, but it was completed far too late to really be used in battle. The US Army and Navy were constantly pressing the President to authorize their use, but Truman refused on the grounds that they’ll look cruel. However when Truman was informed on what the USSR was doing, he had the political urgency to finish the theater of war with Japan ASAP, he couldn’t target military facilities… not enough shock value… it would have to deliberately target civilians. The US only possessed those two bombs but had all the material and know-how to make 2 to 4 bombs a week if needed, however the Japanese didn’t know how many the US had or not. So the US committed a Japanese genocide by annihilating the three most populated cities in the nation, with the intent to be seen as so brutal that they surrender immediately so the US can concentrate on holding down Europe. Especially since many of the American military top brass were convinced that the US and USSR were going to go to war in Europe because the US just wasn’t going to allow the Soviets to take over Britain and France especially but Empires throughout history that the US desperately wanted to command under the new “Pax Americana”…
The firebombing of Tokyo, and the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were totally genocide events.
About as many German civilians died in the storming of Berlin as Japanese civilians from the bombing of Hiroshima. Is the Battle of Berlin also a "genocide" event?
The Japanese military had already been in total disarray since the Nazis and fascists fell and the war was already understood as lost and Japanese military were drafting a surrender.
Where are these drafts now? Surely there would be copies if they were ever sent out. What terms were being proposed? Were the drafts ever approved or even seen by the Emperor and his war council? Someone with a title starting the write a piece of paper is meaningless.
As for all the American historiography of their motivations, I find it extremely convenient that most of them were published or came to light around the time of the Korean War when America was trying to justify the rearmament of Japan. If the Americans are willing to pave over all Wehrmacht atrocities to justify the Bundeswher, I have no doubt that they would be willing to play the heel for Japanese rearmament.
The real proof that can't be fakef that the Americans knew that Japan was not down and out was that planning and logistics for Operation Downfall, the nnvasion of Japan, continued apace right up until the Japanese formal surrender. This included well documented actions like transferring landing ships to the USSR as well as corroborating statements in 1945 given to the Chinese, Soviet, and British governments.
While I do not dispute that American use and targeting of the abombs had political motivations, that does not automatically make inverse true where there was no military reason for their use.
Adopting a far right Nipponkaigi-style victimization narrative to own the US.
I'm not sure I'd go so far as to call it genocide (in my mind you need a sustained effort over a longer time frame than that) but it certainly was one of the greatest terror attacks ever committed, a completely senseless slaughter of an incredible number of innocent civilians
Your mind has it wrong, at least according to international law. The Srebrenica genocide was just 20 days long, but it still counts due to intent and methodology. I don't think the nuclear bombings were genocidal, because there wasn't specific intent by American leadership to literally eliminate every single Japanese from the areas they were bombing. The intent in this case is debatable but I think most rational people know that it was a senseless killing to facilitate a show of force against the Soviet Union.
Well, I don't think you've actually contradicted anything I said. The dropping of the nuclear bombs consisted of two specific events a couple days apart, what I would refer to as two specific terrorist attacks. Anything that takes place over 20 days is already a sustained effort over a longer period than the US nuclear bombings of Japan. But more important than the time frame is the idea of a sustained effort at all. Maybe a sustained effort over 3 days could count as a genocide too, but I think dropping 2 bombs on 2 cities in a country with... well, a lot more than 2 cities can hardly be considered a serious effort at genocide.
And anyway as you say we know the intent: terrorism, not genocide.
Again, you're just implying that time frame has any bearing on genocide. When this isn't true, not by any definition of genocide. Sabra and Shatila was a genocidal massacre that took place over just 48 hours. Does it stop being genocidal because of how little time it took? What if they did it faster? Would they get away with it then? I don't see any meaning in assigning time limits to genocide.
No, I'm not actually. My comment was about how it does not.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what this means, but it reads to me like you're saying that for it to count as genocide that it needs to span over a certain time frame, am I misconstruing this? Are you of the mind that it should count as 2 separate genocides if the nuclear bombs dropped more than a few days apart from each other? This is a very strange point.
Frankly comrade I have no idea what you're talking about or how you could possibly have derived what is in this comment from any of my comments, so I'm simply going to disengage.
Same, maybe my English isn't good enough, or maybe we're on completely different planes. No worries comrade, disengaged.
I'm pretty sure after nuclear tests they knew people would literally evaporate so dropping that bomb was with intent to eliminate every single Japanese there. And same with the firebombings btw, the devastating effect on the population living in entire cities built mostly out of wood and paper was known.
Imperial Japan certainly didn't have any compunction about regularly terror bombing Chinese and other Asian cities full of civilians during the war, so when Japanese war apologists start crying about how terrible it was that they got bombed it's very much a case of me playing the world's tiniest violin.
No, it's not good that Japanese civilians died in the bombing campaigns against Japan in 1945 but bombing and bombardment of cities in WWII was accepted as a legitimate tactic by both the Axis and the Allies. We can certainly look back on it and say how horrible it was, but at the end of the day we are applying modern morality and rules of war to a past conflict.
Personally, I see the focus on the atomic bombings (as opposed to the two night firebombing raids on Tokyo that killed more people than both atomic bombs combined) to be a sort of post-war Clean Wehrmacht style revisionism carried out by the Americans and Japanese when the Yanks realized they very much did want to remilitarize Japan to oppose the USSR and PRC. By making Japan out to be the victim of some unique horror of war, there is an implied equivalence that cancels out all the horrors of war Japan inflicted on everyone else.
Sure, terrorist style bombing of cities to force capitulation was seen as a valid method of waging warfare, but terrorist style bombing of the cities of an already beaten enemy for no purpose other than destruction of innocent people was kind of unprecedented even then. Generally you stop dropping bombs when the enemy is beaten, rather than dropping all your fancy new, more destructive than ever before kind of bomb as a victory lap
The enemy is beaten when it surrenders. The Japanese did not surrender until after the bombs were dropped. Even then, the Imperial military staged a coup against their own God-Emperor to stop him from broadcasting his surrender speech. They stormed the Imperial Palace and ransacked the place - the recording was smuggled out in a pile of laundry. We are taking about a country run by people with that level of deathwish, you cannot just assume that they were beaten.
Setting all of that aside, there were still hundreds of thousands of Imperial Japanese soldiers in China and Korea at the time of surrender. Those soldiers were oppressing, murdering, raping and stealing up until the very end. Just because the Japanese military ceased to be a threat to the US Fleet does not mean that they ceased to be a threat to millions of people.
There are soldiers in China that we need to stop, obviously the solution is to vaporize a bunch of innocent civilians in Japan, great idea.
There's a video about this topic I think you would benefit from watching.
youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go
The solution is to continue to fight against the aggressor occupier fascist state using all means available until they surrender. A naval invasion of Japan was projected to cause up to 500,000 casualties. A naval blockade until starvation might have caused millions of civilian deaths if you take Leningrad as an example of how a starvation blockade would go.
It is tragic and horrific when a civilian is killed in war, but civilian deaths in war are unavoidable. The guilty party are the Japanese militarists who were refusing to surrender and holding out for some deathride bloodbath (of their own civilians).
I really think you ought to watch that video before continuing to support the US in its completely unnecessary and indefensible slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
As a Chinese person who's lived in Japan for many years and read about the topic pretty extensively in three languages, I don't think that I need my opinions to be validated by an Englishman.
American brainworms
I am Chinese. Both my grandfathers fought in the War to Resist Japanese Aggression and one went on to fight Americans in the War to Resist American Aggression and Aid Korea. Both are now interred in a cemetery for Martyrs of the Revolution.
But sure, I have American brain worms despite not being an American and never living there. I obviously wouldn't have any reason other than American nationalism to take a dim view of Imperial Japan, right?
And I'm an Algerian, but I don't support Nazi Germany invading Fr*nce, because just like with the U.S. and Japan they didn't do it for us colonized people, in fact they killed us too. The nuking wasn't to make Japan surrender, but just to flex the U.S. power on the soviets and who ever else challenges it, your grandfathers benefited nothing from the U.S. nuking Imperial Japan. The U.S. didn't nuke Japan for your grandfathers.
Continue to lecture someone from another country about how they should feel about their own country and history is the real American brain worms my friend.
I don't pretend to know the complexities of the French occupation and the Algerian struggle for independence, that's why I'm not going to tell you how you should feel or think about it.
The American brain worm is believing that America nuking two Japanese cities was somehow the reason Imperial Japan "Surrendered"
We let's have a look at the relevant part of Hirohito's surrender speech to see whether or not the bombs had any impact on his decision to surrender:
Clear as fucking day right from the man himself.
Even if I do have American brain worms (maybe granddad pick some up from a dead yank in Korea), what you're espousing is just Japanese right wing brain worms. Don't take it from me, take it from a Japanese media scholar:
It's so frustrating that even Japanese people can acknowledge that this is their version of the Clean Wehrmacht myth specifically designed by Americans to rehabilitate them in a Cold War confrontation with the USSR but you try to tell this to a leftist and it's like talking to a fucking brick wall.
The firebombing of Tokyo, and the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were totally genocide events. The Japanese military had already been in total disarray since the Nazis and fascists fell and the war was already understood as lost and Japanese military were drafting a surrender. But the US saw that the USSR had taken advantage of the fact that the British and French were cooked, Germany, and Italy defeated and Spain still recovering from the civil war, meaning basically anyone that could stop them in Europe had been neutralized. So Moscow, despite being EXHAUSTED by one of the most brutal wars in world history, kept pressing on and liberating Eastern Europe.
The US had the nuke though by then, but it was completed far too late to really be used in battle. The US Army and Navy were constantly pressing the President to authorize their use, but Truman refused on the grounds that they’ll look cruel. However when Truman was informed on what the USSR was doing, he had the political urgency to finish the theater of war with Japan ASAP, he couldn’t target military facilities… not enough shock value… it would have to deliberately target civilians. The US only possessed those two bombs but had all the material and know-how to make 2 to 4 bombs a week if needed, however the Japanese didn’t know how many the US had or not. So the US committed a Japanese genocide by annihilating the three most populated cities in the nation, with the intent to be seen as so brutal that they surrender immediately so the US can concentrate on holding down Europe. Especially since many of the American military top brass were convinced that the US and USSR were going to go to war in Europe because the US just wasn’t going to allow the Soviets to take over Britain and France especially but Empires throughout history that the US desperately wanted to command under the new “Pax Americana”…
About as many German civilians died in the storming of Berlin as Japanese civilians from the bombing of Hiroshima. Is the Battle of Berlin also a "genocide" event?
Where are these drafts now? Surely there would be copies if they were ever sent out. What terms were being proposed? Were the drafts ever approved or even seen by the Emperor and his war council? Someone with a title starting the write a piece of paper is meaningless.
As for all the American historiography of their motivations, I find it extremely convenient that most of them were published or came to light around the time of the Korean War when America was trying to justify the rearmament of Japan. If the Americans are willing to pave over all Wehrmacht atrocities to justify the Bundeswher, I have no doubt that they would be willing to play the heel for Japanese rearmament.
The real proof that can't be fakef that the Americans knew that Japan was not down and out was that planning and logistics for Operation Downfall, the nnvasion of Japan, continued apace right up until the Japanese formal surrender. This included well documented actions like transferring landing ships to the USSR as well as corroborating statements in 1945 given to the Chinese, Soviet, and British governments.
While I do not dispute that American use and targeting of the abombs had political motivations, that does not automatically make inverse true where there was no military reason for their use.