Off topic but Victory Day (V-J Day) was a national holiday in the US until the 70s. In fact, its still a holiday in Rhode Island for whatever reason. Its one of two federal holidays that have been removed (the other being a holiday to celebrate the Battle of New Orleans) Now carry on about the ethics of using the atom bomb.
With all due respect, this hot garbage, on this day, makes me want to hurl. The horror of ONE and only ONE of those places is the reason why the horrors of the other three places have not been repeated, at least not on such scale...yet. Let's hope it stays that way and there continues to be a thin thread of sanity and self preservation in Evil everywhere.
We really have no frame of reference to how people felt then. I have similar stories. A great documentary is "Hell in the Pacific". It's a 4 part BBC(?) doc from 2001 and the interviews, especially with the Japanese survivors, are amazing. If you can find it, watch it. The last chapter, especially, might change some minds on how ready they were to surrender. https://www.reddit.com/comments/271aky
Consider that the firebombing wreaked more havoc and death than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The US had supreme air power. They could bomb anything and destroy anything. They didn't need nukes to annihilate anything.
And that sole condition came from nukes and a vastly demoralized populace. A firebombed public is more like prying out a cornered animal. Have you heard of Okinawa and all the other islands before it? Whether or not Japan would've "gone through it" is all guesses. What they did leading up to the war was all the leadership then had to use for their decisions. It doesn't matter if there were two camps. They did jack **** about it. It's not like they were telegraphing feelers to the US to hold back. Other than spawning movies, does Hitler's attempted assassination call into question the Allies's barbarism after the fact? Russia has a much bigger beef with Japan, and what ever camp thought they'd serve as "mediators" were deluded and possibly imaginary.
True nuclear weapons and MAD have largely been responsible for keeping the peace between world powers. Those other incidences have also had a profound effect on the post WWII World. Israel likely wouldn't exist without Auschwitz and Europeans are generally much more military averse than the US because they experienced the horrors of things like Dresden on their own soil.
Ugh - just read this - it explains it a lot better than I am: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/why_did_japan_surrender/
<iframe width="480" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9-WnLNLe3sk?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> This is a great documentary that exposes a lot of the myths people use and gives the full story on how the U.S. made the decision to drop the bombs. I thought it was really well done.
I'm curious as to what traumatic brain or other related injury you suffered that made you put Hiroshima in the same group as the others?
To add onto this thread but there has been a lot of handwringing by World leaders particularly in the West over the massive military parade that the PRC had yesterday to commemorate the 70th anniversary. http://www.cnn.com/2015/09/02/asia/china-world-war-ii-military-parade/ While yes the PRC has been asserting itself aggressively in recent years and this parade is as much a show of current power as it is about history I think many don't know the history of China in WWII and why this is such a big deal. Other than the USSR China suffered the most casualties in WWII and at one point as much as two thirds of the country was occupied with some of the most barbaric acts of a barbaric war carried out on Chinese soil. That memory is part of the reason why the Chinese at times seem so nationalistic and fanatical about territorial integrity.
I'm curious as to what traumatic brain or other related injury you suffered that made you not understand why he put Hiroshima in the same group as the others?
Apparently you're unable to grasp the point of the post. If you can't see how the deaths of a 100,000 people (the vast majority civilian) isn't a tragedy then I'm not sure you can ever understand. I honestly don't know if the A-bomb was necessary but I agree that Japan needed to be defeated. That doesn't mean that the vaporization of so many followed by agonizing death by burning and radiation poisoning is something that should be celebrated. There may be necessary wars but no good wars.
I'm not celebrating the fact that civilians got nuked, but I would never condemn the nukes the same way I would towards the massacres that happened at the other places mentioned. The fact that you can't make that distinction is sad, but it's also a reality that is becoming more and more common place as the years go by I guess.
The problem with Japan is pretty much every year if not the prime minister himself, than it's whole bunch of high ranking government, will visit the Yasukuni shrine. Yasukuni is a shrine that contains over 1000 convicted war criminals, with 14 Class A criminals added on purpose to the shrine in 1978. Yasukuni shrine also operates the Yushukan museum on the same ground as the shrine, according to the exhibits & movies in the museum Japan's invasion of China, Korea, Philippines etc was a honorable endeavor to save Asia from the evil Western imperialists, and Japan got involved in WW2 because it was forced & tricked by the US. Just a couple of month ago, almost 1/6 of Japan's parliament visited the shrine again. Than you have the numerous # of revisionist & atrocity denying politicians in Japan( eg the mayor of Nagoya that publicly told a delegation from Nanjing that the Nanjing Massacre was not real, the government appointed head of NHK aka Japan's BBC that publicly stated Japan was tricked in WW2 by the US, Japan was liberating Asia from evil western imperialist and atrocities such as the Nanjing massacre never happened)
This kind of comment makes you look bad, not him. He's the guy who is very smart, respected, and analytical - plus pretty freakin open minded. The fact he doesn't even react to your b.s. is amazing in my eyes. It's easy to insult people you don't know, rather than try to actually listen and learn.
Yeah - and you realize how much Burns played a part in it's use. If you had someone else in that role it might have been a very different outcome.
