On this day 78 years ago, the so-called "stronghold of democracy and freedom" used a nuclear bomb against the peaceful residents of Hiroshima.
The explosion and its aftermath claimed tens of thousands of lives, leaving even more permanently disabled and disfigured.
This was far from the only, but undoubtedly the most horrific crime committed by the USA, with absolutely no necessity.
Horrific.
Sounds like you donât subscribe to the argument that the bombs ultimately saved many lives by ending the war more quickly. I think itâs hard to separate those ideas.
âCrime.â
What bullshit.
Go dig up what the Japanese did throughout that war and say âcrimeâ again.
STFU.
The citizens of Hiroshima didnât deserve that. War at this scale is a tragedy of modern civilization.
The government only job is to protect their citizen! Japan shouldâve never attack first! Thatâs my opinion. I love Japan and everyone in this world đ
The vast majority of the people murdered in the bombing were innocent. It was the city with the largest Christian population, and one of the major anti-war cities in Japan.
They're not responsible for the crimes of others just because they lived under the same government, have similar genetics, or any other such nonsense.
Cool.
Now do the rape of Nanking or look at hundreds of other actual crimes committed by the Japanese.
Itâs easy to rewrite history 80 years later but to suggest the bombing was a crime or unnecessary is wrong.
So if your neighbor was a jerk, I can slap you. When you get mad at me, I say, âBut your neighbor was a jerk so what I did wasnât wrong.â <- totally sound logicâŚ
It was a world war.
Your analogy is retarded.
STFU until you can come up with a coherent argument.
Stop looking for excuses for genocide
Bombing a few cities isnât âgenocide.â
Though, the Japanese did engage in their own âholocausts.â
Bombing a massive amount of innocent people because the rulers over them did bad things is pure evil. Go to bed and stop arguing such a preposterous thesis. Youâre now muted.
Wahhhh âyouâre saying things that are accurate and that I donât like to hear so Iâm muting you.â
No body cares.
It is not that simple. You can make a strong case that if the US had not murdered 100k civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese would not have surrendered, which would have necessitated a ground war in Japan for the Allies to win the war, that would have no doubt resulted in the death of millions of Japanese citizens.
They had ALREADY surrendered before the bombing.
And no, even if you could prove that, it still wouldn't justify it
The Japanese surrendered on August 15, 1945, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and August 9, and no doubt they would not have surrendered on August 15, if not for the threat of more atomic bombs being dropped on their populations.
A more humane way to end the war IMO was to drop an atomic bomb on a military position or naval port which would have little civilian casualties, and then tell the Japanese that Tokyo would be destroyed next if they did not surrender that perhaps would have ended the war.
But it is very easy in 2023 to talk about what leaders in 1945 should have done. In August 1945 countries had just had more than a half decade of destroying each others cities and civilian populations already, and Truman was not going to risk the deaths of 100s of thousands of his troops to invade Japan. The Emperor would likely fought to the last man if not for the atomic bomb, based on historians judgement of the man.
Twats today love to rewrite history.
Fuck em
Hindsight is 2020. This isn't rewriting history but learning from it so we don't commit the same crimes and avoid the evils of the past.
We needed to respond, but we also needed to have avoided evil acts, and attacking innocents is one of the worst crimes. If we instead attacked a military compound, the blood of the innocents would be on the hands of the Japanese military because they put them in harm's way.
Itâs rewriting history.
Whatâs done is done.
Is it helpful to study history? Certainly.
But to go back and say âshould never have done this.â Without the context of the day is revisionist nonsense.
"Study history, but don't ever pass judgement over a moral decision!"
We study history so we can make observations and learn from it, especially moral lessons.
Rewriting history would be denying facts. That's literally the opposite of what I'm doing.
This is one of the cases where being an expert actually matters.
Have you studied WWII extensively? Do you have all of the context?
Are you 100% positive the Japanese would have surrendered if we had used the bomb elsewhere?
100%. Not 98 or 99 but 100%.
citation needed
No creation needed. The plain fact is that two cities with all their innocents were attacked. Evil is not resolved by more evil. A military base or the emperor's palace should have been the target, not innocents. Even the emperor's palace would be really iffy.
The issue is not whether we needed to respond militarily (whether surrender was given) but the manner and method of our response. That doesn't need a citation.
I believe it IS that simple nostr:npub1ul45aruuhu09e5nts8mn49wsvhu58q8qmpvyyvpa0qhuvljehnys4uyt0r . I have a worldview/religion that says that murdering people is always wrong.
Making theoretical death calculations is not my job. Iâm not God.
Example, I could theorize that a daycare down the road is housing a future mass murderer. A few parents are super jacked up and are training their kids to kill.
I cannot go kill all those children because I calculate that it will likely save more lives in the long run. I donât know the future and I have no green light to kill.
Honest question: where is your moral principle that gives you the right to kill innocent people? Do you subscribe to a religion that says this is okay?
Your arguments are nonsense.
So if you had the chance to murder Adolph Hitler in 1939 knowing his plans for the destruction of Europe/Russia and mass murder of the Jews, and you knew the likelihood of him being able to do it, you wouldnât murder Hitler because you donât know the future for sure and your worldview/religion that says murdering people is âalwaysâ wrong?
This hypothetical is ridiculous because humans canât know the future, like who Hitler would become. Thatâs one of the main points why murdering people for better future outcomes is evil. If someone killed your child because they thought he would turn out bad, I have a feeling you wouldnât shrug it off. Furthermore, the US didnât just bomb Hitler, they bombed a bunch of innocent people along with some âbad guysâ.
Why is this hard for you? Are you on team USA no matter what? Are you afraid of meeting your maker and therefore willing to murder to stay alive longer? Iâm seriously asking.
Your hypotheticals so far have been literally retarded.
Thereâs no point in having a discussion with sub 80iq such as yourself.
You canât see how absurd your points are.
For example, in this hypothetical you contradict yourself.
So dumb.
Like the Nazis did to the Brits?
It's easy to criticize these actions when us civilians have been isolated from the effects of war for so long.
Yes, Nukes are pure evil and should never be used in war again. But they also served as an effective deterrent against civilian attacks, creating the relatively peaceful world we take for granted today.
History should be remembered to learn from our past mistakes, not assign blame through the lens of today.
No necessity huh? You sure have a weird understanding of WW2...
Well that take is lacking some nuance, Luke. I believe Hiroshima was used for military purposes. And at least ending the war early saved the lives of US servicemen, and also, I would argue in a way helped the Japanese, as it meant the Russians didn't get a chance to invade Hokkaido. Japan could have ended up partitioned like Germany. It also gave the Japanese authorities a face saving way to surrender, and enabled the US to keep the country largely intact, and soon able to ramp up to peacetime rebuilding. Obviously it would have been better if there had been no war and no need for anything so horrific. But it's not fair to point out the Hiroshima bomb as somehow exceptionally brutal in a period of time where plenty of brutal acts were committed by all sides.
Good outcomes cannot justify evil actions
Amazing how we have to live on the same planet as people that don't understand this
Maybe, but your argument was "absolutely not necessity" which I think is untrue. Now if your argument should be interpreted as "violence is never necessary", Tolstoy-like pacifism, rather than "necessary" in any utilitarian sense of the word, then I respect your (I would argue) correct interpretation of the Gospel, and I see where you're coming from. I just think many people will misunderstand your original note without that context.
Mind you, the original tweet wasn't mine.
But it wasn't necessary in the sense that the Japanese had already surrendered.
Speculative "what if"s aren't relevant in this
How would you convince someone that the Japanese had surrendered before the bombs?
Was pearl harbor necessary https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/pearl-harbor
I think perhaps the Japanese had show willingness to a conditional surrender, but that the US would only accept unconditional. I believe that the US is the most uncompromising and dominant empire we've seen since Rome, and Hiroshima strikes me as a Carthage or sacking of Jerusalem like moment in establishing hiarchey as a global hegemon in a history defining way. In that sense it was necessary (from the point of view of a US imperialist) It was needed to break the spirit of the Japanese and subdue the entire region (even world) to US power. But in terms of being necessary in the strict sense of simply ending the war, you are probably correct in that it wasn't needed. Not sure if the "pax Americana" would have lasted without the psychological edge it gave the US for decades after, although the value of the so-called "pax Americana" is itself something that can be debated, I am aware.
Evil doesn't justify evil...
Dominating the world isn't an excuse
True, it's very easy to look at what they did and cast condemnations. I've thought about this quite a lot, and when I was younger I couldn't even fathom attempting to justify it. I always wondered why they didn't just drop it off the coast or something to showcase what they could do.
Think about this though... it took *two* direct atomic bombings to get the emperor to surrender.
Not one. Two.
That means they saw the absolute devastation and annihilation of the first bomb, and said "nah, we're not phased, we're staying the course". There is no reasoning with that level of devotion.
What would be the next step then? An invasion, more war, more "conventional" bombings and dead civilians. WWII already killed tens of milllions, and it could have easily been much higher.
Not saying if I were in control I would have done the same thing with certainty, but I at least understand the reasoning now.
The US military ought to have chosen non-innocent targets, such as a Japanese military base. At that point it would be on the Japanese for the innocent lives lost (civilians shouldn't be mingled in an encampment). Instead, we chose two cities where innocents made their lives. "Getting the message across" might have taken three, or four, but that is better than committing an evil of our own. The proper response to evil is never more evil.
China should nuke Taipei to save lives that can be lost in the future
What a decontextualized, reductionist narrative.
A country at war is not âpeacefulâ.
Certainly, if that was the whole story, yes. We can say that the Japanese state and military were far from peaceful while still condemning making an entire city including women and children a target. It's not a white washing of the Japanese but enough self-awareness to know when we've committed evil regardless of the instigation.
Hiroshima was largely anti-war
Most definitely. Japan needed to get a return for their deeds at Pearl Harbor, but innocent lives must never become the targets of retaliatiory violence.
If any use of such a bomb could be considered just, it would require extreme precision and a very hard and certainly non-innocent target, which a city with residents is most certainly not.
This event was taught in public school. By association Iâm starting to doubt it happened.
