We will not forget the casualties, pain, and suffering that the Japanese imperialist regime imposed on the Chinese people. Any attempt to deny or cover-up this tragedy will be met with strongest condemnation.
Should ask them if they should reconsider the mass enslavement of Koreans to work the mines, the fields, and sex slave brothels because Korea got uppity.
Those types would unequivocally say "yes" because they're edgy teens, racists, or the big ole intersection of those two on the venn diagram.
I know, it's still a huge issue in Korea that still poisons relations between them and Japan to this day.
Of course it's interesting how this atrocity is still kept alive in the collective cultural minds of the south yet when it came to the military dictatorship of South Korea "telling their women to volunteer their bodies" to the yankee occupiers in their bases after the korean war as a patriotic duty, the entire story is buried and survivors kept silent in the media at large.
Fucking disgusting that denialism is still prevalent in Japan. At least Germany managed to rid itself of holocaust apologia.
Except for horseshoe theory, which was and still is nazi apologia through and through, and originally even shifted blame for the holocaust on the USSR. Germany does a lot to distance itself from our nazi past, but when you look closely, many of the narratives built around that serve to exculpate a large number of our populace, further an agenda of social conservatism and economic liberalism, improve our image on the international stage, or all of the above. The honest confrontation with fascism and how to prevent its return has almost never come from any German government, but from society at large, and there mostly from deliberately leftist milieus. Because when you're honest about these things, you have to admit the material conditions of late Weimar era Germany, and the superstructural legacy of Prussian conservatism, and the admission that a failing capitalist system willingly enabled a fascist takeover because their values aligned with the hyperconformist, national revanchist militarism of our ruling class would run directly against the agenda of our conservative mainstream.
Yep. Reading blackshirts and reds by parenti really points out how the west, including west Germany, literally rehabilitated literal nazi party members back into society and spun up the myth of the "clean" wehrmacht to sooth the collective conscious of the reactionary west German society.
ofc, when we're getting back to the original topic, Japan's stance on this is a lot more problematic than Germany's. Something like the worship at Yasukuni shrine would be unthinkable for a German politician, just as parts of the Japanese history curriculum absolutely wouldn't fly in a German textbook, and both definitely contributes to Germany's relations with its former enemies being a lot better than Japan's, even when it largely pertains to soft power factors instead of hard, material concessions.
I only wanted to clarify that we should take Germany's official form of WW2 remembrance culture with a grain of salt, and that the idea of an American-led denazification attempt is entirely bogus.
This is one of the most horrifying parts of WW2. You really don't hear much about the Japanese crimes anymore. They were astoundingly brutal and basically got away with it in order to contain the communists. Most people remember the Soviets had the most deaths in WW2, but China had the second most deaths because the Japanese were so brutal.
They would literally use them for Target practice, and I've also heard they let some recruits commit their first kill with a prisoner. And this isn't all. They would even use them for medical experiments.
People who complain about the use of the nukes, this is what it stopped.
Edit: Hoes mad.
Fuck you there's no moral, ethical, logical, or reasonable justification for America nuking civilian populations.
Civilians, politicians, business leaders, vital industry and the Japanese military all existed in the City of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This argument doesn't work.
An invasion of Japan was never actually on the table. The surrender of Japan prevented Soviet troops from moving into (and most likely annexing) Nanjing, not US troops landing in Japan. The USSR getting Nanjing and the Kuriles back was part of the agreement at Yalta - it was what Roosevelt promised Stalin in return for his agreement to declare war on Japan 2-3 months after Germany's surrender. Stalin later renewed his agreement to attack the Japanese in negotiations with Truman at the Potsdam conference, mere days before the first nuke fell. BTW, at that point, Japan was firmly convinced that the USSR would not only remain neutral, but side with Japan and negotiate a favorable peace deal for them. They were entirely delusional about Stalin's stance, they got told so repeatedly by their ambassador in Moscow, and the allies could freely listen in on any of that because they had cracked Japanese encryption. It was abundantly clear that the USSR declaring war on Japan would have been a complete game changer far surpassing the military impact of the bombings. Meanwhile, the allies had formed a full naval blockade of the Japanese islands, completely controlled the Japanese airspace and had reduced the imperial navy to being almost entirely nonexistent due to lack of fuel. Japan didn't have a chance at that point at all. They were completely fucked and the US knew this.
The entire ground invasion narrative was made up retroactively to justify the bombings, for which Japan had been selected as a target as early as 1943. The US wanted to show off its new superweapon, they decided from the very start of the Manhattan project that they wanted to do that on the Japanese, not the Germans, due to a mix of racism and revanchism for Pearl Harbor, they also saw this as part of a containment strategy against Stalin and they specifically sought out largely unbombed, densely built population centers instead of military installations to make sure that the bombs would demonstrate their full destructive potential by flattening as many buildings as possible.
The idea that Truman's government, which was racist as fuck against East Asians, would have done any of that to help Chinese and Korean peasants, when they routinely painted Japanese as bucktoothed goblins, is honestly kinda ridiculous.
I'm not saying that to write off the reasoning that the bombings may have actually saved lives in Manchuria and other occupied areas as an entirely unintended side effect. That's a different conversation, and a more difficult one than this one. But the potential land invasion is 100% US propaganda and shouldn't even be part of such discussions here. Americans tell this narrative to their school kids for a reason, and it's definitely not compassion with Chinese people.
I'm not arguing that the Japanese weren't fucked, but if mainland Japan had been blockaded, what do you think would have happened? Would they have gone "Well guess we lost lads, lets pack it up" or would they do what they were already doing and impose even harsher rationing on their civilians to feed their military to the bitter end? Given than one nuke wasn't enough to convince them to surrender, and Japanese veterans were found throughout the Pacific still continuing the fight as late as the 1970s, it's not hard to see what the answer is.
I'm not saying the US are good, or that the nukes were a good thing. I'm saying that the lives lost from the nukes, in my understanding, pale in comparison to the probable loss of life if the nukes hadn't been used.
Get fucked you cunt there's no moral, ethical, logical, or reasonable justification for America nuking civilian populations.
The choice was between nuking them or wait another few months of waiting the struggling japanese surrender unconditionally. Shaun just made a video documentary about it this week.
wait another few months of waiting the struggling japanese surrender unconditionally
Even after the first nuke, the Japanese military command nearly coup'd the Emperor because he was considering surrender. There is no way that they would have surrendered after "a few more months".
Also I'm sure the people being butchered across Manchuria would really appreciate your lets-not-do-anything-mean-during-a-war tactic. "Sorry guys, I know they're literally raping women by the thousands and killing children, but these nukes are awfully loud"
Oh you're right, i firgot te japanese still had continental control.
Still completely unnecessary. "Military command" was not united against surrendering. Many were actively trying to surrender, conditionally or not. The nukes could also been dropped in unpopulated areas, or coastal sea. The soviets were at most two months away from liberating manchuria and korea, who were already materially cut off from japan.
The soviets were at most two months away from liberating manchuria and korea, who were already materially cut off from japan.
How many civilians in Manchuria would you consider is acceptable to be murdered/raped/tortured before you thought dropping the nukes was acceptable? Also materially cut off doesn't matter when they controlled so much of Manchuria that they could have kept themselves reasonably supplied just from those regions.
Many were actively trying to surrender, conditionally or not
I've not seen anything about Japan wanting to surrender unconditionally until after the second nuke. AFAIK they wanted to keep their overseas territories which would have meant a continued genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_during_the_occupation_of_Japan#Rapes_by_U.S._forces
Wow you really showed me, here I was completely arguing in favour of rape and you just blew my argument apart. Good job.
Thank you, I'm glad you were able to learn and grow from this interaction
Nope, nukes were still the best of a bunch of bad choices.
[citation needed]
Years of fallout induced birth defects and rapes by occupying yankees was not the 'best of a bunch of bad choices.'
Yeah, allowing the continued rape of Manchuria and then starving the civilian population of Japan, and then probably a land invasion with brutal urban warfare and anti-guerilla operations (because America always handles guerilla insurrections really well) would have been a much better option.
Japanese leadership was on the verge of surrendering to the soviets, which would've ended the war in manchuria without the annihilation of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
imo the JCP being in power would be infinitely preferable to the US rape occupation which continues to this day
I implore you to begin reading history from non-western/non-liberal sources
Japanese leadership was on the verge of surrendering to the soviets
No they weren't. Maybe in Manchuria but certainly not mainland Japan, the Soviets didn't have the naval capability to launch an invasion of mainland Japan.
For what? Soviet Naval capacity? Well there's Project Hula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Hula where the US had to provide naval vessels to the Soviets. Not to mention that even after that there was no guarantee that the Soviets would have been able to protect a naval invasion.
For the Japanese not wanting to surrender, they were refusing to surrender after the second nuke and threatened to overthrow the Emperor if he tried to surrender. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
The war crime understander has logged on. You see in order to stop a war crime we just need to commit another war crime! Brilliant I agree, I think you should join the army IRL you'll fit right in.
Lmao at the fragility of Western leftists. A Chinese person asking questions on Nanjing memorial day has to have his post deleted.
I guess any amount of Chinese people dying is preferable to white leftists having to answer uncomfortable questions.
Just baby brained lol.
Why not glass entire sections of the planet? Why not just send us into nuclear apocalypse?
Because at the time there were no other nukes. I don't support nuking anywhere now, but at the time, in that exact circumstance, I believe it was the best option.
Less suffering that allowing the occupation of Manchuria to continue
Less suffering than an invasion of Japan
Less suffering than blockading and starving them out
A brutal and horrible thing, but ultimately necessary.
Ah yes, choosing the option that I think is less harmful to the most people is psychotic.
That's the only response I give to atomic bomb stans. Maybe if you suck America's cock hard enough you can become American one day. Then you'll have a reason to defend their war crimes.
I don't recall saying I was.
Whereas you initiated this conversation with open support for American war crimes.
The American "war crime" stopped the far worse actual Japanese war crimes, if you're against the nukes then you're in favour of the Japanese rape of Manchuria.
Please highlight the portion of this text which you believe serves as proof.
All of it, and the fact that it stopped once the Japanese surrendered because of the nukes.
Irrelevant. You're conflating the surrender with the bombings. If there was the possibility of surrender in any other context, then this argument dissolves. Your task, then, is to prove that a less brutal Japanese surrender could not possibly have been reached by other means. Go.
Well given that after the first nuke they still wanted to keep fighting and refused to surrender I'd say that proves it.
This article gives a decent discussion of why the US really dropped the bomb. https://www.liberationnews.org/u-s-dropped-nuclear-bombs-hiroshima-nagasaki/
It was ultimately to scare off the USSR and, maybe to some extent, to get revenge for Pearl Harbor. If you think those reasons justify the mass killing of around 200,000 people then idk what to say. It seems clear, and widely accepted among historians who are outside of the neoliberal/conservative circle, that the USA did not need to drop the bomb
Japan had been trying to surrender the entire time. What America was demanding was unconditional surrender, which included the right to execute the emperor. America could have secured the Japanese surrender with a fucking letter. They used the bombs to secure more favorable terms.
I get the visceral reaction to the Japanese atrocities and wanting some kind of punishment, but the bombs and the firebombing campaign weren’t it man. Some factory worker or some housewife in Hiroshima didn’t deserve it any more than their counterpart in Nanking. We should’ve let the USSR invade in the north while we blockaded the south and then hosed the entire imperial government along with the fucking emperor. We didn’t do enough to kill fascism in Japan, we just waged a genocidal campaign against the people because Curtis LeMay was a psycho.
If you think that a civilian in Hiroshima suffered equally as a civilian in Nanking then you're insane and even worse, a centrist.
It's not about punishment, it's about the reality of it. The US maybe should have allowed for an invasion of Northern Japan, although that would likely have been horriffic and brutal street fighting and anti-insurgency warfare, also starving out the south would have led to mass starvation and death of the civilian population as the military wouldn't have surrendered.
I too like to make a huge deal over 2/8s of Japan's total civilian deaths ( a total which is the same or lower than Korean deaths they caused in the war), because condemning America is far more important to me than acknowledging 14+ million people the Japanese Empire killed between 1936 & 1945. Surely the US was trying to genocide the Japanese by clinging to that oh-so-unreasonable "unconditional surrender".
And the USSR would've made the Japanese surrender themselves! The US invasion plan was a hoax, but the Soviet plan was ready and infallible!
Why do I deserve to die in nuclear fire? I've never supported a fascist regime materially or otherwise
Not really, pretty close and you could make a solid argument that imperialism is fascism I'd agree. But I also don't support the US government so...
As a Chinese national it's really hard to feel bad for what the Americans did to the Japanese because of how they benefited off of the fruits of our slavery. You can't even make the excuse that they didn't no better because they turned around and voted that class A war criminal Kishi back in.
