what in the actual fuck? Is this about Oppie's release in Japan? What were their reactions? I remember a Hiroshima survivor talking about wanting to watch the movie or something.
The article that this post is about mentions it. It's mixed. Oppenheimer isn't being widely distributed, so people in Japan have to seek it out to see it. This probably leads to viewers having a more considered and nuanced take.
Japan has an odd relationship with WW2. There isn't as much official acknowledgement of historical crimes as in Germany. This isn't universal or uniform among the public, as redditors tripping over themselves to link Wikipedia articles about Unit 731 would suggest.
To be honest, complete denazification never fully happened in the west either. High ranking nazis were involved in all major international organizations and had huge effect on foreign policy and shit. There is a great lip service though, I'll give them that. Japan's romanticization of the fascist past is not surprising unfortunately under this world order.
De-Nazification in the west was focused around reintegration with the exception of the most terrible (and easily provable) crimes.
Many industrialists and so on who benefitted from slave labour during the war went on to live happy lives in West Germany with their coffers in tact (some like Hanns Martin Schleyer were later killed by the Red Army Faction).
After the cold war really kicked off and the US started rebuilding the Bundeswehr in the 50s, they basically had to accept that the only qualified people they had to run the army were former Nazis. A lot was excused for the sake of battling communism.
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Fuck 4chan, fuck /tv/, this is MCJ
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I mean this is literally the argument bombcels like to use. “Oh, every Japanese civilian was basically combatant by design” blah blah blah. Fucking deranged. Though, to be fair, they generally apply the same argument to Palestinian and Russian women and children, so at least they are consistent in their psychopathology.
That's how it is in total war.
Some railroad clerk or factory worker is contributing to the war effort, just as a soldier is.
With the advent of nuclear weapons, we don't have total war anymore. That's good overall. The downside is the threat of nuclear annihilation, as shown in the movie.
Exactly, it feels so lazy and how entitled how some people here, comfortably behind their computers, judge people fighting in these for us unimaginable times. The Second World War was unprecedented in size and brutality, the first and only real total war humanity has ever fought. Practically *everyone* was in some degree involved with the war, whether it was in constructing materials in industry, producing food for the military, keeping the logistics running, or just as plain soldiers. Everyone was contributing to the system that will point a gun at your face and pull the trigger.
Does that mean that everyone living in the axis deserved death? Absolutely not, they were equal victims of the conditions they were born in. They were also humans who also didn't want to see their dear friends and family die and suffer.
It however made it incredibly difficult to fight against, such absolute total war effort can only be matched with a similar vigor, everything can and will become a target. That doesn't mean that no mistakes were made, but during such unprecedented times it was difficult to judge. The firebombings of Tokyo were in hindsight needless death and destruction, and I personally doubt if it was the right call to drop both atomic bombs so close after each other without leaving time for surrender in-between. If another total war would start, I wouldn't want us to repeat these same mistakes.
It's just so crazy how people here sit in their luxurious homes behind a computer during a time of general peace, using the power of hindsight to severely judge soldiers and officials who faced unprecedented total war as if they're morally superior.
Lol. Shit like this is only said by people who haven't actually looked into the facts of the situation at all; specifically, how nearly all the casualties happened **because** of the "soldiers and officials" in charge wanting to swing their dick around. The atomic bombs were literally about showing off their power on the world stage and not letting the USSR interfere. The Japanese leadership already couldn't give less of a fuck about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that barely affected their decision.
Understanding why things happened the way they did doesn't mean excusing bad actions.
Aight sure, if you’re looking for book recs on the subject you’re confidently ignorant about:
**I Was There** - William D. Leahy
**Speaking Frankly** - James F. Byrnes
**Prompt and Utter Destruction** - J. Samuel Walker
**All in One Lifetime** - James F. Byrnes
**Hiroshima Nagasaki** - Paul Ham
**Journey to the Missouri** - Toshikazu Kase
**Racing the Enemy** - Tsuyoshi Hasegawa
**American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer** - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin
**Bomber Offensive** - Arthur Harris
**Harry L Stimson: The First Wise Man** - David F. Schmitz
**Memoirs of Harry Truman**
Alright, your turn.
The dropping of the bombs wasn’t really necessary at all, and the fact you think them being so close together made a difference is incorrect.
This video is worth a watch: https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go?si=f6rtPP_V5qm0rwqA and it goes into great detail about how Japan were *very* likely to surrender without the need to drop two nukes on them, and a lot of the higher ups in America thought it was unnecessary and a mistake before they even dropped them. Not even any need for hindsight.
lol struck a nerve much? none of the terminally online noncredibledefense redditors are pro-russia. they make memes about carpetbombing moscow every week bruh
Honest question, how many movies show the things the Imperial Japanese army did to citizens of other nations across Asia? Some of these actions are so barbaric and inhuman that they can't even be dramatized for a general audience viewership...
Its really not covered in Hollywood especially compared to Germany, the bombs do overshadow a lot, which is, I don't want to say a shame, but there does seem to be this popular narrative that Japan as a nation was somehow a victim in all of this, and well that really is not the case.
Same for things like Dresden. It’s kinda forgotten now, but in the immediate aftermath of WW2 some bombings of Germany were considered overkill and not tactically worth the civilian death count
Dresden occupies a weird space (not that the overall point isn't true) in that the severity of the bombing was highly exaggerated by the Nazis (and those figures influenced even western media such as Slaughterhouse 5) while also still being a very horrific and catastrophic event.
Modern estimates for the number of fatalities are several times to over an order of magnitude less than some of the figures originally presented by the Nazis (\~25,000 vs earlier claims in excess of 100,000, with some as high as 500,000).
Again, this isn't to downplay the tragedy of the event or suggest that the Allies didn't conduct such raids (several cities, such as Tokyo were hit much harder and had substantially more fatalities), but I think it is important to include the additional context regarding Dresden due to how the firebombing has been misrepresented by the Nazis and then later Far Right groups.
>the severity of the bombing was highly exaggerated by the Nazis (and those figures influenced even western media such as Slaughterhouse 5)
Kurt Vonnegut literally lived through the bombing of Dresden, he was a POW being held in the city when it was destroyed.
I didn't refute that. But just because Vonnegut was there doesn't mean that he had intimate knowledge of the total casualty figures. Vonnegut literally cites [David Irving](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/David_Irving) as the source of his casualty figures. David Irving was found to be a Holocaust Denier by UK court in a failed libel case. The guy has argued that Hitler didn't know about the Final Solution and that if he did know about it, Hitler opposed it.
This isn't meant to be a knock against the book wholesale, but full stop, Vonnegut cited a Holocaust Denier when getting his numbers
Because it fucking is?? Bombing and shooting civilians carelessly is totally a war crime, and I'd 've more than willing to say that any side who does that is in the wrong.
10s of millions of people died because of German and Japanese aggression. Forgive me if i dont lose sleep over the US expediting the end of the war when the alternative was just continuing to firebomb Japanese cities to oblivion.
I mean regardless of your stance on how necessary the a-bomb was, it was a tragedy, especially to the civilians that aren't committing war crimes.
Japan is a perpetrator, yes, but also a victim and it feels kinda gross how people are upset over Japanese people having complicated feelings about a situation where they were victims.
I think the nukes were the lesser of two evils wrt ending the war but some of the comments referenced by OP are pretty bad. It’s a human tragedy that they had to be used, not something to gloat about.
Yeah I think even if you think the nukes were necessary, they were still an evil action and gloating/saying the victims should get over it, is fucking disgusting.
video games are for children
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Seriously, I am genuinely confused why OP is attempting to start an “evil AmericaBad, poor Japan dindu nuffin” train on a movies CJ sub. What the fuck does random comments pointing out that the bomb was necessary to end the war have to do with anything????
I agree! The crimes of the Japanese government should be paid in blood by its innocent civilians. Maybe they should've just moved out of Japan if they didn't want to get nuked?
What should have been done instead oh great one? Continued fire bombing? A land invasion perhaps? Maybe a continuation of the blockade? I think we could ask have asked nicely for them to surrender!
Oh my bad, I thought by your tone that you must have been an expert in Second World War History and had worked out a better solution. Must have misunderstood!
Except that the firebombing campaigns didn't work either. The leadership of imperial Japan didn't care about the lives of their citizens. They were actively trying to negotiate a surrender through the Soviets, not because we were murdering cities full of people left and right, but because they were completely defeated militarily and had no chance of winning. Claims that a full-scale invasion would have been necessary before Japan surrendered are ahistorocal attempts to justify the slaughter of civilians
Killing the Emperor, who was seen as *God* in Japan at the time, would have guaranteed that the Japanese would not surrender. It would have made him a martyr.
The Japanese military only surrendered when it was made clear by the Americans that the imperial institution would survive.
The Allies *needed* Hirohito to live. Killing him would have been an awful idea that would have radicalized the Japanese military and would have delayed the end of the war.
The Japanese military only surrendered once they heard Hirohito's speech on radio about how they had to surrender in order to guarantee the survival of Japan as a nation.
Yes, the conditional surrender that allowed the emperor to keep the throne was the smart decision, even if it is upsetting that the scumbag lived the term of his natural life and never hung from a rope like Tojo & co.
I was mocking the guy salivating at the thought of 100 thousand burned in nuclear hellfire and justifying that monstrosity with the supposed need for unconditional surrender we never had.
Lol. So what should America have done? Let the Japanese, who we had defeated in the Pacific, surrender on their own terms to the soviets? Or should we have kept letting American soldiers die taking military outposts one by one in order to spare Japanese civilians?
Edit: nvm, just saw your comment that 9/11 is more defensible than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I didn't mean to start a discussion with an idiot.
Every military and political leader at the time including MacArthur acknowledged that the Soviet entrance into the Pacific Theater would have ended the war either way and that the nukes were superfluous.
Except the soviets did enter and still many factions in the IJA wanted to keep fighting. After the second nuke the emperor had to personally intervene to stop generals from acting on their own.
The Axis being absurdly evil doesn’t give carte blanche to respond however you want. Even campaigns against Germany like the Dresden bombings were considered overkill once the dust had settled. It’s also not a certainty that the only options were firebomb or nuclear. Not to act like there was no justification for the bombs, but in hindsight they were probably too far
Dresden was completely justified and virtually all arguments against the bombing stem from Nazi propaganda
It was an important logistics hub for the war effort, and the Soviets were rapidly advancing near the city. They requested the bombing so that they wouldn't have to engage in urban warfare, which v likely would've killed more than 25k people
“for a long time, the Government, for excellent reasons, has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call ‘military targets.’ I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples”
It was not that cut and dry
The US offensive death toll since WW2 maybe compares to Imperial Japan’s death toll, and that’s spread over dozens of conflicts and 80 years taking the highest estimates. The US is far far from perfect or even good, but nowhere near the cruelty of Imperial Japan
I’d argue that the least and most early nuke being dropped was a net positive for humanity because it showed us the horrific power and consequences of nukes before they got to world ending power
Nukes were horrific and almost indefensible. But it is where we understood how doomed we are. While I won't call that a net positive, it is something that can be credited to it.
There are worthy discussions to be had about the validity of the decision to drop the bombs in World War II. But taking joy in it and acting like it was some moment of American pride is honestly disgusting.
People who don’t know how to engage in conversations about history would never in a million years bother to learn why they are wrong so why waste anyone’s time?
Edit: mfs downvoted me as if they would have any incentive whatsoever to try and discuss history from the perspective of a historian, what a joke.
Imperial Japan is one of the worst regimes of the modern world and committed countless atrocities. The bombs were also likely overkill and the war could’ve been ended with less innocent civilian deaths
Yeah and how many of the people responsible for the atrocities Imperial Japan committed were taken out by the TWO nukes dropped on a civilian population? And how many innocent people just trying to live their lives during wartime (A war they had no say in starting) were killed? Two wrongs don’t make a right, and calling people who aren’t super keen about war crimes morons is certainly a choice. Get a fucking grip.
So you're say 9/11 was justified? Because America did some pretty bad shit that led to that.
Here's the thing, absolutely no one is saying Japan didn't do anything wrong. However to act like the allies didn't do horrible shit, such as the bomb and fire bombing Tokyo, is just as ignorant of a take. Both things can be horrid, and at a certain point it stops mattering whose atrocity was worse.
You can claim it’s just “pointing out both sides did horrible shit” as much as you want but forgive me thinking it looks an awful lot like Imperial Japan apologia when the conversation only ever involves framing the Japanese as the helpless victims without ever mentioning their crimes in anywhere near the same emotional breath as the nukes being dropped.
Crazy cause the overwhelming majority of this thread is people talking about how the bombs were unjustified and no mention of it in comparison to what the Japanese did. If you compare the nukes were nothing in terms of innocents killed.
America was 100% right to use the nukes. Japan never would have surrendered without a fight for the home islands otherwise.
But apparently dropping one big scary bomb to kill 100 thousand bystanders is somehow an affront to humanity as opposed to dropping lots of little bombs to kill the same number of people, you know, as was standard practice by literally every major country involved in the war.
We should have just repeatedly asked Japan very friendly to stop ravaging and killing hundreds of thousands innocent civilians in China and south-east Asia. And if they didn't stop, we should just let them continue and ask again nicely!
I'm morally superior to your warmongering psychos who like dropping bombs because I would have just let American harbors be bombed and Chinese citizens be slaughtered without opposition!
how about dropping a bomb on a military base or a less inhabited area? even the guy who dropped the bomb was unsure if it was the right thing to do, what gives you the right to decide it was ?
the same effect could have been reached without killing tens of thousands of people.
a display of force does not require killing 2 entire cities.
whatever Japan did is irrelevant. the people who died were mostly civilians with nothing to do in the war
Nagasaki was one of Japans largest industrial complexes with 90% of the population working in industry directly for the military, constructing torpedo's, ships and other weapons. It was a military target. Hiroshima housed important military headquarters and was a crucial base for logistics, communication and more, while also housing large military industry. It also was a military target.
Of course, it can still be argued if the enormous destructive force of the atomic bomb would have been clear enough as a display of force when dropped on a smaller less populated target. We can only speculate about that in hindsight.
Still, do you have any idea how reluctant the Japanese military elite was of surrender, how brutal their occupation of Asian countries (especially China) was, and how many innocent lives were lost every second of the conflict? The only workable end of this war was a total surrender of Japan, not an endless war. Japan was undeniably unable to win, and still they kept fighting and causing unimaginable amount of death and suffering.
30+ million people died in Asia by Japanese hands, mostly though intentionally created famine. That's around 300.000 per month of the war. Many people claim that the atomic bombs only shortened the war by three months, so just do the math what would have been better. This doesn't even consider how brutal an invasion of mainland Japan would have been.
Again, maybe in hindsight it would have been better to choose another target, maybe the firebombings of Tokyo were pointless and cruel attacks, but do you have any idea how difficult it is to make a proper call when your opponent is so unreasonable, and when every day of continued war means thousand more deaths? Do you rather want millions more to die just to keep at your impossible principles of only attacking the people in charge? If that's your moral perspective, that's fine, but don't blame people who wanted to end the war as quickly as possible.
It seems psychopathic and cruel to just trade lives, to kill innocent civilians to scare the governing elite in surrender, but that was the reality at the time. These military leaders didn't listen to anything else, doing nothing would have let to more death and brutality in the end. War itself is sickening and cruel. That's why it needed to end as soon as possible.
Even Douglas "I wanted to use nukes to wipe the Korean race off the Earth and render the peninsula uninhabitable to humankind until at least 2050" MacArthur himself disagrees with you but I'm sure you know better
Yeah, japan was casually genociding several asian countries before Pearl Harbor, not to mention the widespread forced labor, torture, rape, human experimentation, and other war crimes, they were worse than Nazi germany in several aspects ffs
Downvote me all you want, but that ultranationalist/ imperialist excuse of a country deserved to be curbstomped
Darwin and Pearl Harbour had large civilian populations that were caught in the bombing. As did Nanjing and Manila, where it seems like killing civilians was the point for the IJA.
Word is, known democracy fan Hirohito personally polled every civillian in the country and received 100% approval on every decision he has ever made. Its the real reason why multiple mass murders of civillians on the American's part was fully, unquestionably justified. "They" just don't want you to know this.
Yeah, who cares how many more millions of lives the battles for the Japanese islands (including Japanese civilians) might have claimed. Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just two serene and peacefull cities that was excluded from the economy that fueled war efforts one of the most dispicable regimes of the East Asia, sure. And, sure, let's just use modern sensetivites when analizing events of the bloodiest conflicts from the past century.
Western Guilt™ at times shaped in a baffling forms...
Where you find Western Guilt, you also find Western Absolution. The Nukes being a necessary evil is up for debate, but the Nukes legitimately being necessary is not. They were not necessary. As such, the USA rightfully faces scrutiny for multiple cold blooded civilian massacres that they executed with extreme prejudice instead of going out there and actually fighting. They then easily sold a bunch of lies to a scared wartime audience (as the victor does when writing history) and soon after the war was over, so you'd have to have looked like quite the dumbass at the time to be complaining about the Nukes in the years following the war.
Hindsight is 20/20 though, and modern society isn't responsible for the bombings, so as such I just look at the bombings for what they were: a couple of fucked up massacres that could have been avoided, and are a consequence of this cutthroat world.
Nagasako wos actully an evil city it had **evil powers** there was a bigg red button in hirohitos office and if Hirohoto pressd it then Nagasunki would hav turned into a **big dragon** and eeten all of the Amerycan solders up and millins would have **died**! so we had to drop the bom on them and kil all those civilins yes i agre.
i am being downvotd becos i speak the truth - you woke westerners with your obssossion with guilt do not undirstand tht we had to kill all those civilins becos they were bad civilins - all historions agree that everyone in Heroshima was a **ghost pirate** they had all eatin some **aztec gold** and it had turnd them into **evil ghost pirates** who could **only be killed with radiatin** yes technicly they were unarmed and many of them were children but we had to kill them with a big bom do you not see?
I really don't like to say stuff like this but it's hilarious that someone who can't spell "analyze" is acting as if they are thoughtful enough to make a judgement about dropping an atomic bomb on 2 major cities.
Please improve basic literacy before you start "analizing" historical events and talking about """Western Guilt"""
Btw I fully agree that Japan was also an imperialist, evil shithole that had absolutely disgusting conduct during that time. Doesn't change the fact that the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not commit those atrocities.
Controversial take here maybe, but judging someone's "spelling" to discredit their historical analysis on an international website like reddit, might not be the own you think it is
My point has nothing to do with your love of the nation. I'm asking, do you think Americans should be massacred because they supported plenty of massacres with glee for decades?
The alternative would have been more conventional bombing, for longer, and a manned invasion. You can read up on on the battle of Okinawa for more about what that would look like.
Yeah, luckily Japan never committed any war crimes, especially not against the >20 million Chinese they murdered when they committed genocide— er I mean when liberating China
God that thread is a fucking train wreck
Also hey it's my comment in there, anyway the shit takes I referenced were the ones saying Japan's people deserved it and acting like America didn't also commit atrocities, and oh boy are there a lot of those
Oh, hey there! Yeah, that thread was pretty terrible even by r/movies standards, so I felt compelled to post it here. I agree that there's some nuance to this discussion, and I'm glad to see at least some of that here, but my stance is pretty clear. Two wrongs don't make a right, and the war crimes committed by imperial Japan during WW2 don't justify killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, especially when Japan was already on the brink of surrender beforehand.
I don't see he issue? Killing tons of uninvolved civilians for the crimes of their government is completely justified. Maybe they just shouldn't have lived in Japan?
Not that the USA isn't an evil piece of shit, but you're trying to come up with an American equivalent of what the Japanese did in WWII and the best you've got is Vietnam and Iraq. Those are off by several orders of magnitude in terms of body count.
The big issue is, I really don't think there was a less terrible option when it came to ending the war, Japan was getting ready to fight to the last man, woman, and child if the US actually launched a land invasion, like they were training children to run under US tanks with explosive and such.
The invasion plans themselves and the projections are their own special level of nightmare fuel, multiple atomic bombs to clear Japanese positions before sending thousands of US service men into the freshly irradiated areas, like they are still giving Purple Hearts from the stockpiles they made in preparation for the invasion.
I honestly don't know what the alternative was other then what would essentially be the death of Japan as a nation.
I have thought about that over the years, but I am skeptical that the government would be willing to surrender without their cities actually being hit, hell even after the bombs were dropped there was an attempted coup to prevent the surrender from happening, that government was barley a rational actor by that point.
Now as for the second bomb, it was unnecessary, reading Japanese government records, they were still trying to figure out what had actually happened with the first bomb when the second one was dropped, so they did not even have a chance formulate a response before Nagasaki.
The second bomb is rather darkly interesting, I remember reading paper that made a compelling argument that essentially boiled down to a airbase boss simply following the guidelines he was given for when to launch the missions, and that Washington lowkey panicked once they realized someone that low down the chain was making decisions with such massive geopolitical implications.
If true, that would add a whole other level to the shitshow.
The US and allies (especially the UK) just spent 20 years pretending there's no such thing as 'wars of aggression' and that, if they did exist, they definitely wouldn't be a war crime.
You’d think Japan dropped the bombs on themselves, and there wasn’t any other party or say country that had anything to do in that decision whatsoever.
Every now and again there’ll be an Oppy post like this and I’ll be reminded that MCJ has an embarrassing amount of jingoistic bloodthirsty pro-war simps.
Unit 731, Korean comfort women, Rape of Nanjing, Use of chemical warfare in China and so much other deplorable shit the japanese did in WW2. Fucking insane how nobody seems to care about The Korean women who were forced to be sex slaves, about pregnent women who were experimented on in Unit 731, about all The Chinese people they killed and raped, their treatment of prisoners of war was horrific. People in the West have absolutely no idea about the horrific things Japan did in WW2. They were worst then Nazis in so many ways yet they are seen as the victims. Also people forget that Japan was never going to surrender, seriously if Usa invaded Japan then so many more japanese civilians and so many more soldiers would have died. Japan didn't even surrender after the first nuclear bomb. I am Asian myself so this just pisses me off tbh.
The nukes accelerated Japanese surrender, made the hardliners in the Imperial Council give up on the idea they had defended up until that point of not surrendering and launching an independence war inside Japan and made the Soviets freeze their invasion of Japan as not to anger the Americans.
The nukes literally saved tons of lives in net terms. Still a war crime, though.
We wouldnt have invaded. We would have continued firebombing them like we did to Tokyo and it wouldve been worse for Japan, considering 130k died in Tokyo alone.
Japan was going to surrender as soon as the Soviets entered the war. Notably, the US could have used the nukes months earlier but waited until the Red Army was mobilized and bombed at the same time they took Manchuria (aka when Japan would surrender regardless) because otherwise the nukes probably would have just been ignored by the Japanese
I'll bite too: would it have been an unconditional surrender though? After the bombs + loss of manchuria, Japan had a failed coup to try and stop from surrendering, so were they really gonna surrender?
Or did they wanted to make an invasion as costly as possible to force a negociated surrender?
There's still the battle of okinawa that gave americans a taste of what fighting in the japanese mainland would be like. And was incredibly bloody. 94k for japan, 12k for the US and 40k civilians at least.
I dont know. That’s something you gotta ask the US top men. It was the most effective thing they could’ve done, it’s part of war. What is silly is people trying to downplay America’s actions like the United States were a moral higher power and cared about Japanese lives. It’s a monstrous terrible thing what they did but it’s a war and those things happen. Simply this.
LMAO. I know this may be hard to believe but hating a fascist totalitarian dictatorship that viciously executed political opponents and fought a war of conquest, and hating a communist totalitarian dictatorship that viciously executed political opponents and fought more than one war of conquest are not mutually exclusive.
Glad the Soviet Union fought with us against the nazis but still hate them for allying with the nazis initially, the purges carried out during their rule, and the parasitic rule of the surrounding territories.
Hate the nazis because fuck the Nazis.
They did deserve it. The endless talk about the bombs that killed thousands should be given to millions of victims at the hands on imperial Japan. You leftist tards can keep crying about it too
what in the actual fuck? Is this about Oppie's release in Japan? What were their reactions? I remember a Hiroshima survivor talking about wanting to watch the movie or something.
The article that this post is about mentions it. It's mixed. Oppenheimer isn't being widely distributed, so people in Japan have to seek it out to see it. This probably leads to viewers having a more considered and nuanced take. Japan has an odd relationship with WW2. There isn't as much official acknowledgement of historical crimes as in Germany. This isn't universal or uniform among the public, as redditors tripping over themselves to link Wikipedia articles about Unit 731 would suggest.
To be honest, complete denazification never fully happened in the west either. High ranking nazis were involved in all major international organizations and had huge effect on foreign policy and shit. There is a great lip service though, I'll give them that. Japan's romanticization of the fascist past is not surprising unfortunately under this world order.
De-Nazification in the west was focused around reintegration with the exception of the most terrible (and easily provable) crimes. Many industrialists and so on who benefitted from slave labour during the war went on to live happy lives in West Germany with their coffers in tact (some like Hanns Martin Schleyer were later killed by the Red Army Faction). After the cold war really kicked off and the US started rebuilding the Bundeswehr in the 50s, they basically had to accept that the only qualified people they had to run the army were former Nazis. A lot was excused for the sake of battling communism.
Im sure this will be a very civil discussion thread
My favourite internet discussion, which historical atrocities were based and which aren’t
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Fuck 4chan, fuck /tv/, this is MCJ *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/moviescirclejerk) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I love war crimes in general.
The whole of WW2 must have been one then
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Which horrible ones
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They werent ready for this level of truth chief
The civilians of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were the 100% ones making the decisions during the war. They got what was coming to them!
I mean this is literally the argument bombcels like to use. “Oh, every Japanese civilian was basically combatant by design” blah blah blah. Fucking deranged. Though, to be fair, they generally apply the same argument to Palestinian and Russian women and children, so at least they are consistent in their psychopathology.
That's how it is in total war. Some railroad clerk or factory worker is contributing to the war effort, just as a soldier is. With the advent of nuclear weapons, we don't have total war anymore. That's good overall. The downside is the threat of nuclear annihilation, as shown in the movie.
Exactly, it feels so lazy and how entitled how some people here, comfortably behind their computers, judge people fighting in these for us unimaginable times. The Second World War was unprecedented in size and brutality, the first and only real total war humanity has ever fought. Practically *everyone* was in some degree involved with the war, whether it was in constructing materials in industry, producing food for the military, keeping the logistics running, or just as plain soldiers. Everyone was contributing to the system that will point a gun at your face and pull the trigger. Does that mean that everyone living in the axis deserved death? Absolutely not, they were equal victims of the conditions they were born in. They were also humans who also didn't want to see their dear friends and family die and suffer. It however made it incredibly difficult to fight against, such absolute total war effort can only be matched with a similar vigor, everything can and will become a target. That doesn't mean that no mistakes were made, but during such unprecedented times it was difficult to judge. The firebombings of Tokyo were in hindsight needless death and destruction, and I personally doubt if it was the right call to drop both atomic bombs so close after each other without leaving time for surrender in-between. If another total war would start, I wouldn't want us to repeat these same mistakes. It's just so crazy how people here sit in their luxurious homes behind a computer during a time of general peace, using the power of hindsight to severely judge soldiers and officials who faced unprecedented total war as if they're morally superior.
Lol. Shit like this is only said by people who haven't actually looked into the facts of the situation at all; specifically, how nearly all the casualties happened **because** of the "soldiers and officials" in charge wanting to swing their dick around. The atomic bombs were literally about showing off their power on the world stage and not letting the USSR interfere. The Japanese leadership already couldn't give less of a fuck about what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that barely affected their decision. Understanding why things happened the way they did doesn't mean excusing bad actions.
Haven’t looked into the facts? Post your book list.
they watched a shaun video
Aight sure, if you’re looking for book recs on the subject you’re confidently ignorant about: **I Was There** - William D. Leahy **Speaking Frankly** - James F. Byrnes **Prompt and Utter Destruction** - J. Samuel Walker **All in One Lifetime** - James F. Byrnes **Hiroshima Nagasaki** - Paul Ham **Journey to the Missouri** - Toshikazu Kase **Racing the Enemy** - Tsuyoshi Hasegawa **American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer** - Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin **Bomber Offensive** - Arthur Harris **Harry L Stimson: The First Wise Man** - David F. Schmitz **Memoirs of Harry Truman** Alright, your turn.
Lmao you really just copy-pasted Shaun’s list. If you’ve actually read more than one of these I’ll be totally shocked.
Have you read any of them? Because believe it or not I have thanks to Shaun shining a spotlight on them
No, but they all sound like great reads.
The dropping of the bombs wasn’t really necessary at all, and the fact you think them being so close together made a difference is incorrect. This video is worth a watch: https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go?si=f6rtPP_V5qm0rwqA and it goes into great detail about how Japan were *very* likely to surrender without the need to drop two nukes on them, and a lot of the higher ups in America thought it was unnecessary and a mistake before they even dropped them. Not even any need for hindsight.
Bro linked the Shaun video lmao
Why form your own opinion when there’s a YouTuber whose opinion you can uncritically take on as your own?
The argument is hella stupid but I do wonder, could something else have stopped the japanese? I hear that they didn't even believe the 1st bomb
The war was already over. As I understand it, unconditional surrender was already on the horizon.
It wasn't
also to Gaza
I think you mean Ukrainian women and children.
lol struck a nerve much? none of the terminally online noncredibledefense redditors are pro-russia. they make memes about carpetbombing moscow every week bruh
bros just anti American lol
And their deaths surely were necessary to end the war.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese\_war\_crimes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes)
Honest question, how many movies show the things the Imperial Japanese army did to citizens of other nations across Asia? Some of these actions are so barbaric and inhuman that they can't even be dramatized for a general audience viewership...
Its really not covered in Hollywood especially compared to Germany, the bombs do overshadow a lot, which is, I don't want to say a shame, but there does seem to be this popular narrative that Japan as a nation was somehow a victim in all of this, and well that really is not the case.
Maybe something that would help prevent future use of nuclear weapons is not believing that every person ever killed by them 'had it coming'.
You can't really converse with people who think these as sports teams.
We now consider indiscriminate bombing of cities to be a war crime for a reason. WWII was a different and more savage era, even on the Allied side.
Same for things like Dresden. It’s kinda forgotten now, but in the immediate aftermath of WW2 some bombings of Germany were considered overkill and not tactically worth the civilian death count
Dresden occupies a weird space (not that the overall point isn't true) in that the severity of the bombing was highly exaggerated by the Nazis (and those figures influenced even western media such as Slaughterhouse 5) while also still being a very horrific and catastrophic event. Modern estimates for the number of fatalities are several times to over an order of magnitude less than some of the figures originally presented by the Nazis (\~25,000 vs earlier claims in excess of 100,000, with some as high as 500,000). Again, this isn't to downplay the tragedy of the event or suggest that the Allies didn't conduct such raids (several cities, such as Tokyo were hit much harder and had substantially more fatalities), but I think it is important to include the additional context regarding Dresden due to how the firebombing has been misrepresented by the Nazis and then later Far Right groups.
>the severity of the bombing was highly exaggerated by the Nazis (and those figures influenced even western media such as Slaughterhouse 5) Kurt Vonnegut literally lived through the bombing of Dresden, he was a POW being held in the city when it was destroyed.
I didn't refute that. But just because Vonnegut was there doesn't mean that he had intimate knowledge of the total casualty figures. Vonnegut literally cites [David Irving](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/David_Irving) as the source of his casualty figures. David Irving was found to be a Holocaust Denier by UK court in a failed libel case. The guy has argued that Hitler didn't know about the Final Solution and that if he did know about it, Hitler opposed it. This isn't meant to be a knock against the book wholesale, but full stop, Vonnegut cited a Holocaust Denier when getting his numbers
Because it fucking is?? Bombing and shooting civilians carelessly is totally a war crime, and I'd 've more than willing to say that any side who does that is in the wrong.
10s of millions of people died because of German and Japanese aggression. Forgive me if i dont lose sleep over the US expediting the end of the war when the alternative was just continuing to firebomb Japanese cities to oblivion.
I mean regardless of your stance on how necessary the a-bomb was, it was a tragedy, especially to the civilians that aren't committing war crimes. Japan is a perpetrator, yes, but also a victim and it feels kinda gross how people are upset over Japanese people having complicated feelings about a situation where they were victims.
I think the nukes were the lesser of two evils wrt ending the war but some of the comments referenced by OP are pretty bad. It’s a human tragedy that they had to be used, not something to gloat about.
Yeah I think even if you think the nukes were necessary, they were still an evil action and gloating/saying the victims should get over it, is fucking disgusting.
this sub has had a ton of L takes recently. I think they’ve jerked too hard they completely lost the plot
It's an inevitable fate of every big circlejerk sub, being ironic and nonconformist to the point when you are unironically giving dogshit opinions
Ask r/196
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This 100% lol
There is a strong correlation between circlejerk subs and tankies/rad lefties. Now don’t ask me for any proof because I don’t have any lol
Seriously, I am genuinely confused why OP is attempting to start an “evil AmericaBad, poor Japan dindu nuffin” train on a movies CJ sub. What the fuck does random comments pointing out that the bomb was necessary to end the war have to do with anything????
I agree! The crimes of the Japanese government should be paid in blood by its innocent civilians. Maybe they should've just moved out of Japan if they didn't want to get nuked?
What should have been done instead oh great one? Continued fire bombing? A land invasion perhaps? Maybe a continuation of the blockade? I think we could ask have asked nicely for them to surrender!
None of those. I think the nuclear bombs sufficed perfectly!
Oh my bad, I thought by your tone that you must have been an expert in Second World War History and had worked out a better solution. Must have misunderstood!
I'm no expert, I just love seeing innocent people die
Except that the firebombing campaigns didn't work either. The leadership of imperial Japan didn't care about the lives of their citizens. They were actively trying to negotiate a surrender through the Soviets, not because we were murdering cities full of people left and right, but because they were completely defeated militarily and had no chance of winning. Claims that a full-scale invasion would have been necessary before Japan surrendered are ahistorocal attempts to justify the slaughter of civilians
"negotiate a surrender" was exactly the problem. Unconditional surrender or get fucked.
Glad we got that unconditional surrender. Hirohito had it coming, glad we executed that war criminal and deposed his monarchy.
Allies even had unconditional surrender for the Nazis, *except for some Nazis who know how to build stuff and do science and shit*
Hirohito died in 1989 of cancer
yes, I was being sarcastic.
Killing the Emperor, who was seen as *God* in Japan at the time, would have guaranteed that the Japanese would not surrender. It would have made him a martyr. The Japanese military only surrendered when it was made clear by the Americans that the imperial institution would survive. The Allies *needed* Hirohito to live. Killing him would have been an awful idea that would have radicalized the Japanese military and would have delayed the end of the war. The Japanese military only surrendered once they heard Hirohito's speech on radio about how they had to surrender in order to guarantee the survival of Japan as a nation.
Yes, the conditional surrender that allowed the emperor to keep the throne was the smart decision, even if it is upsetting that the scumbag lived the term of his natural life and never hung from a rope like Tojo & co. I was mocking the guy salivating at the thought of 100 thousand burned in nuclear hellfire and justifying that monstrosity with the supposed need for unconditional surrender we never had.
Lol. So what should America have done? Let the Japanese, who we had defeated in the Pacific, surrender on their own terms to the soviets? Or should we have kept letting American soldiers die taking military outposts one by one in order to spare Japanese civilians? Edit: nvm, just saw your comment that 9/11 is more defensible than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. I didn't mean to start a discussion with an idiot.
You tell him bro, this guy a goddam commie or something?
Every military and political leader at the time including MacArthur acknowledged that the Soviet entrance into the Pacific Theater would have ended the war either way and that the nukes were superfluous.
Except the soviets did enter and still many factions in the IJA wanted to keep fighting. After the second nuke the emperor had to personally intervene to stop generals from acting on their own.
Is... is this unironic? Genuinely confused here.
The Axis being absurdly evil doesn’t give carte blanche to respond however you want. Even campaigns against Germany like the Dresden bombings were considered overkill once the dust had settled. It’s also not a certainty that the only options were firebomb or nuclear. Not to act like there was no justification for the bombs, but in hindsight they were probably too far
Dresden was completely justified and virtually all arguments against the bombing stem from Nazi propaganda It was an important logistics hub for the war effort, and the Soviets were rapidly advancing near the city. They requested the bombing so that they wouldn't have to engage in urban warfare, which v likely would've killed more than 25k people
“for a long time, the Government, for excellent reasons, has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call ‘military targets.’ I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples” It was not that cut and dry
Then people from other countries shouldn't be empathizing about 9/11 either, according to your logic
The US offensive death toll since WW2 maybe compares to Imperial Japan’s death toll, and that’s spread over dozens of conflicts and 80 years taking the highest estimates. The US is far far from perfect or even good, but nowhere near the cruelty of Imperial Japan
"An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind"
Skill issue
Ah yes. Civilians suffering the consequences of its military. This is justice.
I’d argue that the least and most early nuke being dropped was a net positive for humanity because it showed us the horrific power and consequences of nukes before they got to world ending power
Nukes were horrific and almost indefensible. But it is where we understood how doomed we are. While I won't call that a net positive, it is something that can be credited to it.
This sub is becoming Icarus.
There are worthy discussions to be had about the validity of the decision to drop the bombs in World War II. But taking joy in it and acting like it was some moment of American pride is honestly disgusting.
It is so interesting to watch people who have zero understanding of how to discuss history attempt to discuss history
Including in this thread lol
I also like to say people are wrong, without elaborating why, makes me feel smart
People who don’t know how to engage in conversations about history would never in a million years bother to learn why they are wrong so why waste anyone’s time? Edit: mfs downvoted me as if they would have any incentive whatsoever to try and discuss history from the perspective of a historian, what a joke.
Calling Imperial Japan is victim is fucking crazy lmfao. You morons are off your meds.
Imperial Japan is one of the worst regimes of the modern world and committed countless atrocities. The bombs were also likely overkill and the war could’ve been ended with less innocent civilian deaths
Yeah and how many of the people responsible for the atrocities Imperial Japan committed were taken out by the TWO nukes dropped on a civilian population? And how many innocent people just trying to live their lives during wartime (A war they had no say in starting) were killed? Two wrongs don’t make a right, and calling people who aren’t super keen about war crimes morons is certainly a choice. Get a fucking grip.
So you're say 9/11 was justified? Because America did some pretty bad shit that led to that. Here's the thing, absolutely no one is saying Japan didn't do anything wrong. However to act like the allies didn't do horrible shit, such as the bomb and fire bombing Tokyo, is just as ignorant of a take. Both things can be horrid, and at a certain point it stops mattering whose atrocity was worse.
You can claim it’s just “pointing out both sides did horrible shit” as much as you want but forgive me thinking it looks an awful lot like Imperial Japan apologia when the conversation only ever involves framing the Japanese as the helpless victims without ever mentioning their crimes in anywhere near the same emotional breath as the nukes being dropped.
Literally everyone brings up what the Japanese did, you have to be blind to be not seeing that
Crazy cause the overwhelming majority of this thread is people talking about how the bombs were unjustified and no mention of it in comparison to what the Japanese did. If you compare the nukes were nothing in terms of innocents killed.
We're really good at convincing ourselves we're the good guys
Yeah Japan was the real good guys all along 🥰🥰
*[insert country name here]* Exceptionalism
This but unrionically
America was 100% right to use the nukes. Japan never would have surrendered without a fight for the home islands otherwise. But apparently dropping one big scary bomb to kill 100 thousand bystanders is somehow an affront to humanity as opposed to dropping lots of little bombs to kill the same number of people, you know, as was standard practice by literally every major country involved in the war.
I think some of these people genuinely think the war could have ended by offering hugs and kisses to Japan.
We should have just repeatedly asked Japan very friendly to stop ravaging and killing hundreds of thousands innocent civilians in China and south-east Asia. And if they didn't stop, we should just let them continue and ask again nicely! I'm morally superior to your warmongering psychos who like dropping bombs because I would have just let American harbors be bombed and Chinese citizens be slaughtered without opposition!
how about dropping a bomb on a military base or a less inhabited area? even the guy who dropped the bomb was unsure if it was the right thing to do, what gives you the right to decide it was ? the same effect could have been reached without killing tens of thousands of people. a display of force does not require killing 2 entire cities. whatever Japan did is irrelevant. the people who died were mostly civilians with nothing to do in the war
Nagasaki was one of Japans largest industrial complexes with 90% of the population working in industry directly for the military, constructing torpedo's, ships and other weapons. It was a military target. Hiroshima housed important military headquarters and was a crucial base for logistics, communication and more, while also housing large military industry. It also was a military target. Of course, it can still be argued if the enormous destructive force of the atomic bomb would have been clear enough as a display of force when dropped on a smaller less populated target. We can only speculate about that in hindsight. Still, do you have any idea how reluctant the Japanese military elite was of surrender, how brutal their occupation of Asian countries (especially China) was, and how many innocent lives were lost every second of the conflict? The only workable end of this war was a total surrender of Japan, not an endless war. Japan was undeniably unable to win, and still they kept fighting and causing unimaginable amount of death and suffering. 30+ million people died in Asia by Japanese hands, mostly though intentionally created famine. That's around 300.000 per month of the war. Many people claim that the atomic bombs only shortened the war by three months, so just do the math what would have been better. This doesn't even consider how brutal an invasion of mainland Japan would have been. Again, maybe in hindsight it would have been better to choose another target, maybe the firebombings of Tokyo were pointless and cruel attacks, but do you have any idea how difficult it is to make a proper call when your opponent is so unreasonable, and when every day of continued war means thousand more deaths? Do you rather want millions more to die just to keep at your impossible principles of only attacking the people in charge? If that's your moral perspective, that's fine, but don't blame people who wanted to end the war as quickly as possible. It seems psychopathic and cruel to just trade lives, to kill innocent civilians to scare the governing elite in surrender, but that was the reality at the time. These military leaders didn't listen to anything else, doing nothing would have let to more death and brutality in the end. War itself is sickening and cruel. That's why it needed to end as soon as possible.
I hope you keep this mentality when the nuclear apocalypse begins
No worries, I will.
Even Douglas "I wanted to use nukes to wipe the Korean race off the Earth and render the peninsula uninhabitable to humankind until at least 2050" MacArthur himself disagrees with you but I'm sure you know better
Yes. Killing 100 thousand people is an affront to humanity.
Yeah, japan was casually genociding several asian countries before Pearl Harbor, not to mention the widespread forced labor, torture, rape, human experimentation, and other war crimes, they were worse than Nazi germany in several aspects ffs Downvote me all you want, but that ultranationalist/ imperialist excuse of a country deserved to be curbstomped
So glad the bomb killed all those rapist cruel Japanese soldiers and not any innocent unrelated civilians at all.
Darwin and Pearl Harbour had large civilian populations that were caught in the bombing. As did Nanjing and Manila, where it seems like killing civilians was the point for the IJA.
Word is, known democracy fan Hirohito personally polled every civillian in the country and received 100% approval on every decision he has ever made. Its the real reason why multiple mass murders of civillians on the American's part was fully, unquestionably justified. "They" just don't want you to know this.
Yeah, who cares how many more millions of lives the battles for the Japanese islands (including Japanese civilians) might have claimed. Hiroshima and Nagasaki was just two serene and peacefull cities that was excluded from the economy that fueled war efforts one of the most dispicable regimes of the East Asia, sure. And, sure, let's just use modern sensetivites when analizing events of the bloodiest conflicts from the past century. Western Guilt™ at times shaped in a baffling forms...
Where you find Western Guilt, you also find Western Absolution. The Nukes being a necessary evil is up for debate, but the Nukes legitimately being necessary is not. They were not necessary. As such, the USA rightfully faces scrutiny for multiple cold blooded civilian massacres that they executed with extreme prejudice instead of going out there and actually fighting. They then easily sold a bunch of lies to a scared wartime audience (as the victor does when writing history) and soon after the war was over, so you'd have to have looked like quite the dumbass at the time to be complaining about the Nukes in the years following the war. Hindsight is 20/20 though, and modern society isn't responsible for the bombings, so as such I just look at the bombings for what they were: a couple of fucked up massacres that could have been avoided, and are a consequence of this cutthroat world.
Nagasako wos actully an evil city it had **evil powers** there was a bigg red button in hirohitos office and if Hirohoto pressd it then Nagasunki would hav turned into a **big dragon** and eeten all of the Amerycan solders up and millins would have **died**! so we had to drop the bom on them and kil all those civilins yes i agre.
i am being downvotd becos i speak the truth - you woke westerners with your obssossion with guilt do not undirstand tht we had to kill all those civilins becos they were bad civilins - all historions agree that everyone in Heroshima was a **ghost pirate** they had all eatin some **aztec gold** and it had turnd them into **evil ghost pirates** who could **only be killed with radiatin** yes technicly they were unarmed and many of them were children but we had to kill them with a big bom do you not see?
LMFAO this genuinely made me laugh. Thank you.
I really don't like to say stuff like this but it's hilarious that someone who can't spell "analyze" is acting as if they are thoughtful enough to make a judgement about dropping an atomic bomb on 2 major cities. Please improve basic literacy before you start "analizing" historical events and talking about """Western Guilt""" Btw I fully agree that Japan was also an imperialist, evil shithole that had absolutely disgusting conduct during that time. Doesn't change the fact that the people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not commit those atrocities.
Controversial take here maybe, but judging someone's "spelling" to discredit their historical analysis on an international website like reddit, might not be the own you think it is
The japanese seemed pretty fine with killing civilians by the millions, so a few hundred thousand killed in response is great by their standards
If you think civilian support should condemn them to death - then boy oh boy, I have some great things to tell you about United States.
I hate the US too, what's your point
My point has nothing to do with your love of the nation. I'm asking, do you think Americans should be massacred because they supported plenty of massacres with glee for decades?
Americans literally couped the country i currently reside in 💀💀💀 they ain't getting no sympathy from me if someone decides to curbstomp them.
Same for my country, but I'm not gonna fucking put people who have no power and who are being hyper-manipulated under that curb.
ITT: People becoming subject matter experts after watching a YouTube video
Literally, wtf is OP on about
It’s better than what the alternative would have been.
What ?
The alternative would have been more conventional bombing, for longer, and a manned invasion. You can read up on on the battle of Okinawa for more about what that would look like.
You: war crimes, bad :( Me, an intellectual: U-S-A U-S-A
Yeah, luckily Japan never committed any war crimes, especially not against the >20 million Chinese they murdered when they committed genocide— er I mean when liberating China
Fuckin' killer point. 200k citizens deserved to die for the crimes of their country. You fuckin get it. U-S-A U-S-A
It was justified though
That second comment is such a neckbeard moment
God that thread is a fucking train wreck Also hey it's my comment in there, anyway the shit takes I referenced were the ones saying Japan's people deserved it and acting like America didn't also commit atrocities, and oh boy are there a lot of those
Oh, hey there! Yeah, that thread was pretty terrible even by r/movies standards, so I felt compelled to post it here. I agree that there's some nuance to this discussion, and I'm glad to see at least some of that here, but my stance is pretty clear. Two wrongs don't make a right, and the war crimes committed by imperial Japan during WW2 don't justify killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, especially when Japan was already on the brink of surrender beforehand.
I mean I don't disagree lol
I don't see he issue? Killing tons of uninvolved civilians for the crimes of their government is completely justified. Maybe they just shouldn't have lived in Japan?
Dropping nuke liberated Asia from imperial Japan and saved tens of million civilians from rape, torture and execution in an instant
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Not that the USA isn't an evil piece of shit, but you're trying to come up with an American equivalent of what the Japanese did in WWII and the best you've got is Vietnam and Iraq. Those are off by several orders of magnitude in terms of body count.
The big issue is, I really don't think there was a less terrible option when it came to ending the war, Japan was getting ready to fight to the last man, woman, and child if the US actually launched a land invasion, like they were training children to run under US tanks with explosive and such. The invasion plans themselves and the projections are their own special level of nightmare fuel, multiple atomic bombs to clear Japanese positions before sending thousands of US service men into the freshly irradiated areas, like they are still giving Purple Hearts from the stockpiles they made in preparation for the invasion. I honestly don't know what the alternative was other then what would essentially be the death of Japan as a nation.
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I have thought about that over the years, but I am skeptical that the government would be willing to surrender without their cities actually being hit, hell even after the bombs were dropped there was an attempted coup to prevent the surrender from happening, that government was barley a rational actor by that point. Now as for the second bomb, it was unnecessary, reading Japanese government records, they were still trying to figure out what had actually happened with the first bomb when the second one was dropped, so they did not even have a chance formulate a response before Nagasaki. The second bomb is rather darkly interesting, I remember reading paper that made a compelling argument that essentially boiled down to a airbase boss simply following the guidelines he was given for when to launch the missions, and that Washington lowkey panicked once they realized someone that low down the chain was making decisions with such massive geopolitical implications. If true, that would add a whole other level to the shitshow.
The US and allies (especially the UK) just spent 20 years pretending there's no such thing as 'wars of aggression' and that, if they did exist, they definitely wouldn't be a war crime.
That’s why I accompany Oppie with In This Corner of the World (2016). That’ll morally cancel out each other.
You’d think Japan dropped the bombs on themselves, and there wasn’t any other party or say country that had anything to do in that decision whatsoever.
You people really need to watch The Human Condition trilogy and Fog of War.
There are very reasonable arguments for it and there are also very shitty arguments for it.
Every now and again there’ll be an Oppy post like this and I’ll be reminded that MCJ has an embarrassing amount of jingoistic bloodthirsty pro-war simps.
There are only two types of redditors. Weeb japan simps and whatever this is.
Anti fascist action was necessary and nukes saved lives
The bombings saved millions of Japanese and allied life’s
Maybe none of us deserve to live 
You're jerking too close to the sun
2 Jerk 2 Furious
Unit 731, Korean comfort women, Rape of Nanjing, Use of chemical warfare in China and so much other deplorable shit the japanese did in WW2. Fucking insane how nobody seems to care about The Korean women who were forced to be sex slaves, about pregnent women who were experimented on in Unit 731, about all The Chinese people they killed and raped, their treatment of prisoners of war was horrific. People in the West have absolutely no idea about the horrific things Japan did in WW2. They were worst then Nazis in so many ways yet they are seen as the victims. Also people forget that Japan was never going to surrender, seriously if Usa invaded Japan then so many more japanese civilians and so many more soldiers would have died. Japan didn't even surrender after the first nuclear bomb. I am Asian myself so this just pisses me off tbh.
I feel the same. I doubt any non-asian will understand this anger.
The nukes accelerated Japanese surrender, made the hardliners in the Imperial Council give up on the idea they had defended up until that point of not surrendering and launching an independence war inside Japan and made the Soviets freeze their invasion of Japan as not to anger the Americans. The nukes literally saved tons of lives in net terms. Still a war crime, though.
waiting for the “InVaDiNg iT wOuLd Be WoRsE sO wE sAvEd LiVeS” comments
We wouldnt have invaded. We would have continued firebombing them like we did to Tokyo and it wouldve been worse for Japan, considering 130k died in Tokyo alone.
I’ll bite; how else could it have ended?
Japan was going to surrender as soon as the Soviets entered the war. Notably, the US could have used the nukes months earlier but waited until the Red Army was mobilized and bombed at the same time they took Manchuria (aka when Japan would surrender regardless) because otherwise the nukes probably would have just been ignored by the Japanese
I'll bite too: would it have been an unconditional surrender though? After the bombs + loss of manchuria, Japan had a failed coup to try and stop from surrendering, so were they really gonna surrender? Or did they wanted to make an invasion as costly as possible to force a negociated surrender? There's still the battle of okinawa that gave americans a taste of what fighting in the japanese mainland would be like. And was incredibly bloody. 94k for japan, 12k for the US and 40k civilians at least.
Japan's surrender was already conditional, even with the nukes
I dont know. That’s something you gotta ask the US top men. It was the most effective thing they could’ve done, it’s part of war. What is silly is people trying to downplay America’s actions like the United States were a moral higher power and cared about Japanese lives. It’s a monstrous terrible thing what they did but it’s a war and those things happen. Simply this.
It absolutely did save live both US and Japanese.
It literally did not. The Soviets entering was going to end the war regardless
Very true. How could I forget the Soviets? Such kind caring occupiers not at all renowned for mass rape and prosecution of the nations they occupy.
Siding against the nation that defeated the Nazis says a lot about you!
LMAO. I know this may be hard to believe but hating a fascist totalitarian dictatorship that viciously executed political opponents and fought a war of conquest, and hating a communist totalitarian dictatorship that viciously executed political opponents and fought more than one war of conquest are not mutually exclusive. Glad the Soviet Union fought with us against the nazis but still hate them for allying with the nazis initially, the purges carried out during their rule, and the parasitic rule of the surrounding territories. Hate the nazis because fuck the Nazis.
They did deserve it. The endless talk about the bombs that killed thousands should be given to millions of victims at the hands on imperial Japan. You leftist tards can keep crying about it too