jangbones - 2012-07-28
its not terrorism if a government does it
this is a well produced program, with some interesting facts I never heard before
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Cena_mark - 2012-07-28 It wasn't terrorism because it was a real deal war. We did it to end terror and it worked.
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Dr. Lobotomy - 2012-07-28 An intense six month firebombing campaign against 67 Japanese city didn't work even if half of Tokyo got burnt down amongst them.
The two Atomic bombs didn't work on their own.
It took the firebombs, the nukes *and* Stalin declaring war to get the nutcases in the War Council to quit. Those loons were getting schoolgirls ready to charge the amphibious landings with bamboo spears...
"Terrorism"? WTF?
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Cena_mark - 2012-07-28 The true terrorists were the military and political heads of Japan refusing surrender.
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SolRo - 2012-07-28 terrorism in the textbook definition; targeting civilians through unconventional warfare to force a desired political outcome.
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Riskbreaker - 2012-07-28 inb4 shitstorm in the comments, as with any war, it's the civilians the ones who pay the bills of goverments.
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Cena_mark - 2012-07-29 If we hijacked the Enola Gay we'd be terrorists, but Solslow is trying to be edgy here. We targeted those cities for their industrial and strategic qualities not because of their populations.
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Oscar Wildcat - 2012-07-29 I was in fact attacked at my (then) place of business by terrorists with an air force. It wasn't pretty. 1/2 trillion dollar a year military budget, and you couldn't even spare a jet or some SAM's?
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SolRo - 2012-07-29 I honestly doubt you people claiming some moral high ground watched this video, or even part of it. (not even considering how stupid and wrong your statements about impending world conquest are).
And cena, I'll pretend you aren't a troll for a second; so in your mind, a car bombing isn't terrorism as long as the bomber owns the car?
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Cena_mark  - 2012-07-29 Solro, I know what you're getting at, but you're using the loosest definition possible of terrorist. "The U.S. bombed cities... TERRORISTS! This Wes Craven makes horror films... TERRORIST!" I get it, but you're wrong and history says you're wrong. We're the U.S.A. we were just in our aggression in WW2. You get 1 star for being edgy and cool.
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HarrietTubmanPI - 2012-07-29 SolRo, I watched it. You fail to remember that the Japanese killed between 5 and 30 million people because of World War II. You fail to remember that their goal was not only to control the entire pacific, but eventually the world. You fail to remember how brutally they fought in places like Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. You fail to remember that they tortured American citizens and also killed American civilians.
You fail to also remember that because of the quick Japanese surrender, Japan transformed into the modern country that it is today.
You cannot change the past. What's done is done. I hope we never use those weapons again. However it is you who is on their high horse. You cannot compare World War II to any other war of the 20th or 21st century. It is even beyond the extent of World War I. This wasn't a war of 'containment'. This wasn't a war over oil or because of a lie about WMD. Almost all of Europe was under oppression under an evil empire against their will. All of the pacific was under control of a brutal empire, including parts of indo China. They were going to come for North America if they weren't stopped. It's almost miraculous that they never got England.
The people that fought against all of that oppression in World War II were also mostly volunteers. They weren't drafted. They were mostly under 20 years old, and as young as 17. Back then, they considered that there was something wrong with you if you didn't volunteer. There were even people who committed suicide because they couldn't make it to the army to help.
There was real heroism in that war beyond what we've seen in all other modern wars combined. We were fighting against the genocide and enslavement of a hundred million people or more.
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HarrietTubmanPI - 2012-07-29 Oh and it's always good to question war when you're learning about it. But once I went to the holocaust museum in DC and later to Arlington to walk among the dead from World War II, I never again questioned what had to be done for that war.
I'll question Vietnam. I'll definitely question Kuwait and Iraq. But, after seeing what happened in the holocaust, I'll never question the reasons and actions of World War II.
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Riskbreaker - 2012-07-29 Not just what they did to other countries of asia, what the Japanese goverment did to their own people, and what they were planning to do, was atrocious. You just can't judge an episode of history without giving it the proper context, you just can't.
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memedumpster - 2012-07-29 America didn't give a fuck about Hitler or care if he wiped out all of Europe. Americans also hated the Jews, had a eugenics program, and sought global domination. We asked Hitler to please not invade oil producing countries in order to maintain an alliance with us.
Watching Americans debate history is like watching a 99 year old woman with dimentia try and make sense of her granddaughter's wedding who didn't exist. Non-sentient spasms of words wired into childrens' emotions.
God dammit.
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HarrietTubmanPI - 2012-07-29 Memedumpster knows American history about as well as Abe Simpson.
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memedumpster - 2012-07-29 Each your fucking pudding, vote cattle.
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baleen - 2012-07-30 What? This website is so fucking broken.
Anyway, just read Racing the Enemy.
The bombing of Hiroshima was completely unnecessary in light of all the new evidence that has surfaced over the past 20 years.
http://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/kort.html
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jangbones - 2012-07-30 excellent link, thank for posting
it also serves to end the entire argument above and simultaneously render it worthless
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urbanelf - 2012-07-29
EXTRA EXTRA
JAPS GIVE UP!
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chumbucket - 2012-07-29
Peter Coyote is perfect for this.
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Sudan no1 - 2012-07-29
I'm a recovering weeaboo and I think the Nukes were preferential to a land invasion.
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Cena_mark - 2012-07-29 I think that's weeabooro's problem.
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aikimoe - 2012-07-29
These opinions are interesting.-------------
"During [Secretary of War Henry Stimson's] recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings: first, on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.'" --Gen. Dwight Eisenhower
“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages...wars cannot be won by destroying women and children." --Fleet Adm. William Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman
"It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell." --Winston Churchill
"The real purpose of building the bomb was to subdue the Soviets." -- Gen. Leslie Groves, chief of the Manhattan Project
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Cena_mark - 2012-07-29 Eskimo: Looks like they had trolls way back then.
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Caminante Nocturno - 2012-07-29
You're all a bunch of dross-spewing idiots.
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baleen - 2012-07-30 You're so bitter these days.
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Bort - 2012-07-29
So myself, I'm of the opinion that the bombs were not necessary to defeat Japan, nor were they what made Japan surrender. The atomic bombs did less damage than the firebombing campaigns in other cities, and the Japanese surrender seems to have immediately followed the involvement of the Soviet Union, not some requisite iteration of atomic bombings. As Groves said, the real effect of the atomic bombs was to send a message to the Soviet Union.
That said, there is another element to this too, that I think is lost in the post hoc justifications. I'm going to steal liberally from the following essay, which is a long read but is highly engaging (I read it every now and again like a child does with a favorite picture book):
http://leesandlin.com/articles/LosingTheWar.htm
--
So while their colleagues fell into daydreams of imminent victory, the few remaining rational men of the Axis bureaucracy grew just as convinced that surrender to the Allies on any terms was tantamount to suicide. As far as they were concerned, every additional day the war lasted -- no matter how pointless, no matter how phantasmal the hope of victory, no matter how desperate and horrible the conditions on the battlefield -- was another day of judgment successfully deferred.
This is the dreadful logic that comes to control a lot of wars. (The American Civil War is another example.) The losers prolong their agony as much as possible, because they're convinced the alternative is worse. Meanwhile the winners, who might earlier have accepted a compromise peace, become so maddened by the refusal of their enemies to stop fighting that they see no reason to settle for anything less than absolute victory. In this sense the later course of World War II was typical: it kept on escalating, no matter what the strategic situation was, and it grew progressively more violent and uncontrollable long after the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The difference was that no other war had ever had such deep reserves of violence to draw upon.
The Vikings would have understood it anyway. They didn't have a word for the prolongation of war long past any rational goal -- they just knew that's what always happened. It's the subject of their longest and greatest saga, the Brennu-njalasaga, or The Saga of Njal Burned Alive. The saga describes a trivial feud in backcountry Iceland that keeps escalating for reasons nobody can understand or resolve until it engulfs the whole of northern Europe. Provocation after fresh provocation, peace conference after failed peace conference, it has its own momentum, like a hurricane of carnage. The wise and farseeing hero Njal, who has never met the original feuders and has no idea what their quarrel was about, ultimately meets his appalling death (the Vikings thought there was nothing worse than being burned alive) as part of a chain of ever-larger catastrophes that he can tell is building but is helpless to stop -- a fate that seems in the end to be as inevitable as it is inexplicable.
For the Vikings, this was the essence of war: it's a mystery that comes out of nowhere and grows for reasons nobody can control, until it shakes the whole world apart. Njal's saga ends with a vision of war as the underlying horror of the world, always waiting underneath the frail mirage of peace. In a final dream image, spectral women are seen working an occult and horrible loom: "Men's heads were used in place of weights, and men's intestines for the weft and warp; a sword served as the beater, and the shuttle was an arrow. And these were the words the women were chanting:
Blood rains
From the cloudy web
On the broad loom
Of slaughter.
The web of man
Gray as armor
Is being woven.
This is as good a description as is available for the course of World War II from the fall of 1944 on -- after the Allies at last acknowledged that, despite the decisive battles of the previous summer, the Axis was never going to surrender. That was when the Allies changed their strategy. They set out to make an Axis surrender irrelevant.
From that winter into the next spring the civilians of Germany and Japan were helpless before a new Allied campaign of systematic aerial bombardment. The air forces and air defense systems of the Axis were in ruins by then. Allied planes flew where they pleased, day or night -- 500 at a time, then 1,000 at a time, indiscriminately dumping avalanches of bombs on every city and town in Axis territory that had a military installation or a railroad yard or a factory. By the end of the winter most of Germany's industrial base had been bombed repeatedly in saturation attacks; by the end of the following spring Allied firebombing raids had burned more than 60 percent of Japan's urban surface area to the ground.
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Scrotum H. Vainglorious - 2012-07-29
Five for the fagdance.
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Gommorrah - 2012-07-29
everyone still extant who was involved in the bombing of hiroshima should die for their crimes, and those who have passed should have the remnants of their corpses fed to feral dogs on camera. fuck you nazi cunts
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Sudan no1 - 2012-07-29 You're just mad the nazis didn't invent the nuke first.
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baleen - 2012-07-30 If only Arafat could have cleansed Israel of the Jewtards without hurting the Baathists and the Muslim Brotherhood.
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