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[Kin5290]

If someone kills 10 people by mistake vs killing 1 on purpose, which action is less moral to you?

Killing civilians through food shortages induced by blockade, invasion, and air and artillery strikes are not "mistakes".

 

[petran79]

Could have just stopped there. Fuck off with the rest of the bullshit. Imperial Japan is remembered in Asia as fucking assholes and savages. You come around here and sprout that shit to anyone who lived through the war here and you're likely to either get very angry stares or just straight up beaten up. No one gives a fuck what some British hostage said, I'm telling you what Asians in Asia think of Japan's occupation. It was not pretty.

Sorry, I was at a seminar about the Holocaust in Israel and the Jewish researchers who have lost relatives did not beat me up when we were discussing various aspects of the Holocaust and Antisemitimism.

I discuss only in that way. Leave the rest for other topics

 

[LizardKing]

There were an estimated 45 MILLION civilian deaths during WW2. 250k casualties (dead and injured) from the nukes on Japan. Not that soldiers aren't "innocent". There's nothing less valuable about someones life if they strap on a uniform and fight for their country. War is terrible any way you slice it and whether someone dies from a nuke, gas, gunpowder, blade or starvation, the result is the same.

It's estimated that 333k people died from US firebombing on Japan. Up to a million in air raids. Germany half a million civilians from allied raids. And that's just dropping bombs from the air, before we even begin to discuss the results of a land invasion like what would have happened in Japan. That is fucking war it is terrible. People who parrot that the US did something egregiously unnecessary by dropping the bombs don't have a clue what they are talking about. Estimates of a US invasion of Japan were expecting many multiples of deaths compared to what we got. Millions more civilians (and soldiers who's lives matter too let's not forget) dead. Many many more would have died and those 2 bombs ended it because it could show unprecedented force in an instant.

 

[Oberon]

Sorry, I was at a seminar about the Holocaust in Israel and the Jewish researchers who have lost relatives did not beat me up when we were discussing various aspects of the Holocaust and Antisemitimism.

I discuss only in that way. Leave the rest for other topics

What does that have to do with the japanese during Ww2?

 

[reckless]

Which was a famine. Yes, it was exacerbated by Soviet policies, but the main cause was still a natural event. You don't see Churchill blamed for the Bengal famine and you don't see the Americans blamed for killing off the Native Americans with smallpox.

Well thats putting it lightly.

 

[ChainedMaster]

Wrong. There were several people who had input in the decision to surrender and they had different conditions that they wanted: to keep all of Japan's conquered possessions, to prevent any Allied soldiers from landing on the Japanese Home Islands, to keep the emperor as the head of state, and so on.

They eventually accepted unconditional surrender, and it meant that MacArthur had the authority to remove Hirohito and charge him with war crimes. That didn't end up happening, but the Americans ended up rewriting the Japanese constitution and removed the emperor from any role in the government. Even today, the Japanese Imperial family has no political power of any kind, and the emperor is a purely ceremonial position.

Do you have a source for that? The sources I've read claim otherwise.

https://mises.org/library/hiroshima-myth

The stark fact is that the Japanese leaders, both military and civilian, including the Emperor, were willing to surrender in May of 1945 if the Emperor could remain in place and not be subjected to a war crimes trial after the war.

 

[ChainedMaster]

Double post

 

[Piecake]

Do you have a source for that? The sources I've read claim otherwise.

https://mises.org/library/hiroshima-myth

A staple of Hiroshima Revisionism has been the contention that the government of Japan was prepared to surrender during the summer of 1945, with the sole proviso that its sacred emperor be retained. President Harry S. Truman and those around him knew this through intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, the story goes, but refused to extend such an assurance because they wanted the war to continue until atomic bombs became available. The real purpose of using the bombs was not to defeat an already-defeated Japan, but to give the United States a club to use against the Soviet Union. Thus Truman purposely slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese, not to mention untold thousands of other Asians and Allied servicemen who would perish as the war needlessly ground on, primarily to gain diplomatic advantage.

One might think that compelling substantiation would be necessary to support such a monstrous charge, but the revisionists have been unable to provide a single example from Japanese sources. What they have done instead amounts to a variation on the old shell game. They state in their own prose that the Japanese were trying to surrender without citing any evidence and, to show that Truman was aware of their efforts, cite his diary entry of July 18 referring to a “telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” There it is! The smoking gun! But it is nothing of the sort. The message Truman cited did not refer to anything even remotely resembling surrender. It referred instead to the Japanese foreign office’s attempt (under the suspicious eyes of the military) to persuade the Soviet Union to broker a negotiated peace that would have permitted the Japanese to retain their prewar empire and their imperial system (not just the emperor) intact. No American president could have accepted such a settlement, as it would have meant abandoning the United States’ most basic war aims.

In particular, Sherwin and Bird berated me for failing to refer to Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. “Hasegawa’s research into Soviet and Japanese archives,” they wrote, “is replete with massive new and important ‘wisps’ of evidence about the causes of Japan’s surrender. It seems telling to us that his work is ignored.” What Sherwin and Bird apparently did not know, or hoped their readers did not know, was that although Hasegawa agreed with revisionists on a number of issues he explicitly rejected the early surrender thesis. Indeed, Hasegawa in no uncertain terms wrote that “Without the twin shocks of the atomic bombs and the Soviet entry into the war, the Japanese never would have surrendered in August.” So much for the “massive new and important ‘wisps’ of evidence.”

Undeterred by this fiasco and still unable to produce even a single document from Japanese sources, Bird has continued to peddle the fiction that “peace” meant the same thing as “surrender.”

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/52502

 

[ThoseDeafMutes]

Which was a famine. Yes, it was exacerbated by Soviet policies, but the main cause was still a natural event. You don't see Churchill blamed for the Bengal famine and you don't see the Americans blamed for killing off the Native Americans with smallpox.

Here's someone doing just that, on NeoGAF, less than a month ago.

 

[aliengmr]

The Firebombing of Tokyo still is one of the worst war crimes ever commited, yet few in the United States are aware that the attack even took place.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/03/tokyo-firebombing-world-war-ii/

Few know about it? Seems every time this topic is brought up people always bring up the US's war crimes against poor fucking Japan.

What people never seem to be aware of is just how fucking savage the Japanese were. But not only were they savage, they were fucking relentless in that savagery. I'm sorry, but at the time the gloves were off, millions were dying and Germany and Japan were the direct cause of the suffering.

The damage inflicted on Japan, was on the leadership of Japan. They started the war, they savagely executed that war, they chose to continue the war until the very end, and their people paid the price.

That wasn't a war crime, it was the result of a massive, costly, global war in which over 50 million people died. Let's not forget it took the destruction of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the threat total fucking annihilation, before they would surrender.

If you were one of the people in the path of the Japanese army would you still call it a war crime? Or would you hope to whatever higher power you believe in that it might bring an end to the war?

 

[MysticX]

Few know about it? Seems every time this topic is brought up people always bring up the US's war crimes against poor fucking Japan.

What people never seem to be aware of is just how fucking savage the Japanese were. But not only were they savage, they were fucking relentless in that savagery. I'm sorry, but at the time the gloves were off, millions were dying and Germany and Japan were the direct cause of the suffering.

The damage inflicted on Japan, was on the leadership of Japan. They started the war, they savagely executed that war, they chose to continue the war until the very end, and their people paid the price.

That wasn't a war crime, it was the result of a massive, costly, global war in which over 50 million people died. Let's not forget it took the destruction of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the threat total fucking annihilation, before they would surrender.

If you were one of the people in the path of the Japanese army would you still call it a war crime? Or would you hope to whatever higher power you believe in that it might bring an end to the war?

let alone the fact that allegedly the japanese killed more people than the naziz did.

 

[Hermii]

Few know about it? Seems every time this topic is brought up people always bring up the US's war crimes against poor fucking Japan.

What people never seem to be aware of is just how fucking savage the Japanese were. But not only were they savage, they were fucking relentless in that savagery. I'm sorry, but at the time the gloves were off, millions were dying and Germany and Japan were the direct cause of the suffering.

The damage inflicted on Japan, was on the leadership of Japan. They started the war, they savagely executed that war, they chose to continue the war until the very end, and their people paid the price.

That wasn't a war crime, it was the result of a massive, costly, global war in which over 50 million people died. Let's not forget it took the destruction of Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the threat total fucking annihilation, before they would surrender.

If you were one of the people in the path of the Japanese army would you still call it a war crime? Or would you hope to whatever higher power you believe in that it might bring an end to the war?

It happened for very understandable, logical reasons but I don't know how you can say that literally burning cities of the map is not a war crime.

Imagine if ground troops were used to accomplish the same thing as the fire raids. If troops went in with orders to massacre everyone, burn down their houses, shoot them in the head to make sure they are all dead. Wouldn't you call that a warcrime?

 

[Drek]

It happened for very understandable, logical reasons but I don't know how you can say that literally burning cities of the map is not a war crime.

Imagine if ground troops were used to accomplish the same thing as the fire raids. If troops went in with orders to massacre everyone, burn down their houses, shoot them in the head to make sure they are all dead. Wouldn't you call that a warcrime?

1. Your correlation with troops on the ground doesn't work because in order for troops on the ground to kill 100,000 people as you're describing they would have already achieve military victory and would be killing a defenseless population. That is specifically outlawed from the Hague.

2. Tokyo was not a defenseless city and had capable anti-aircraft artillery, as such bombing it wasn't attacking an unprotected party.

There had been attempts to amend the Hague with more pertinent limitations on war for aircraft, but even had it been in place there is no suggestion it would have forbidden the bombing of a major enemy port equipped with anti-air weaponry.

We need to be careful drawing a line between something that is awful and something that is an actual war crime because it's an important distinction. War is awful from the start. Industrialized war even more so. But a war crime is inflicting needless suffering and against a defenseless population. Fire bombing Tokyo had strategic merit but even beyond that was acceptable under the universally applied tactic of terror bombing as a vehicle for regime change (same reason Dresden was bombed, why the Nazi's bombed the shit out of London, and why the Japanese bombed Chongqing, the last of which FYI didn't have legitimate defenses and also resulted in a citywide conflagration). Tokyo had legitimate anti-air protection as well.

There was no preying upon a defenseless entity, just a terrifyingly effective bombing campaign that should make everyone seriously consider the real destructive power of industrialized war. I would argue that is a far more dangerous thing. Dismissing it as a war crime presumes there was malice by the perpetrators. The destruction of Tokyo wasn't done out of malice, it was done as a mechanical part of the war effort, but with such effect as to be horrifying.

I personally view the use of aerial bombardment in World War II to be comparable to shelling and mounted machine guns from World War I. They were used exactly as designed, as every party building them intended them to be used, but when applied to a real world scenario even though everyone knew what it added up to on paper they weren't ready for what that reality looked like.

Next is ICBMs and long range drones. We've never seen what those can do outside of narrowly focused attacks and when we do we'll see entire metropolitan cities turned into craters over a single day with effectively zero warning and therefore nearly zero survivors. That will ultimately lead to open thermonuclear war and the end of everything.