Tankiedesantski [he/him]

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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: September 21st, 2020

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  • the U.S. nuking Japan brought no good

    No, look at the passage I cited from the Emperor’s surrender address. Tell me exactly what it says.

    sure the Clean Wehrmacht exist, but there was still a theater of Nazis getting punished, meanwhile the U.S. granted Unit 731 immunity and Hiro Hito died in 1989.

    There was the theatre of the Tokyo War Crimes trials too. Are you seriously this ignorant about the topic and trying to lecture me? The German denazification process was scarcely better than the Japanese process. Von Braun et al was their Unit 731. A bunch of high ranking Nazis got to die of old age too. America can eat shit for letting both the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese off the hook with a slap but Germany didn’t get nuked and it was rehabilitated just like Japan. It’s almost as if the US was going to rehabilitate both fascist powers anyway, nukes or not.





  • We let’s have a look at the relevant part of Hirohito’s surrender speech to see whether or not the bombs had any impact on his decision to surrender:

    Clear as fucking day right from the man himself.

    Even if I do have American brain worms (maybe granddad pick some up from a dead yank in Korea), what you’re espousing is just Japanese right wing brain worms. Don’t take it from me, take it from a Japanese media scholar:

    First of all, the narrative of August journalism can be classified into three categories.

    The first is the “narrative of suffering” intended to pass down wartime experiences as “victims” of the atomic bombings, air raids, evacuations, repatriations and other grueling ordeals, and the “sacrifices” soldiers had to make, represented by kamikaze attacks and suicidal battles.

    In such a context, Japan’s invasion, atrocities, colonial rule and other forms of “aggression” are completely receded into the background. Instead, its self-image as victims of militarism is brought to the fore.

    This view on war and history was formed due to peculiarities of how post-war Japan was handled during the Cold War.

    Japan could return to the international community without facing squarely its war responsibility and pursue its economic growth after the emperor was exonerated at the behest of the United States and Western powers waived their right to claim compensation.

    It’s so frustrating that even Japanese people can acknowledge that this is their version of the Clean Wehrmacht myth specifically designed by Americans to rehabilitate them in a Cold War confrontation with the USSR but you try to tell this to a leftist and it’s like talking to a fucking brick wall.


  • This is applying post facto knowledge to a decision when assessing it ethically. Even if the Japanese had planned to surrender following the Soviet invasion (there is no evidence that any such decision was made before the atomic bombings) such decision was not communicated to any of the Allied powers. Even if an intention to surrender had been teased at, a surrender is not a surrender until the surrendering side accepte terms and lays down arms.

    Even if we accept for sake of argument that the US decision makers thought the bombs had zero military value and were purely for show, how do you think it would have gone down if the US had went to Stalin with this information? Stalin, the man who had been pushing for intensified Allied air raids against Germany and a second front since 1941, would have just been like “oh don’t worry about using your new city destroying wonder weapon, I’ll just let Soviet soldiers continue to fight and die in a war you could probably end easily”?

    It always comes down to this. Chinese lives don’t matter, Korean lives don’t matter, Soviet lives don’t matter. As long as the precious Fascist civilians get to starve to death instead of being bombed, or conscripted into a kamikaze mission, or shot for dissenting instead, it’s aaaaaalllll worth it!



  • The firebombing of Tokyo, and the nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were totally genocide events.

    About as many German civilians died in the storming of Berlin as Japanese civilians from the bombing of Hiroshima. Is the Battle of Berlin also a “genocide” event?

    The Japanese military had already been in total disarray since the Nazis and fascists fell and the war was already understood as lost and Japanese military were drafting a surrender.

    Where are these drafts now? Surely there would be copies if they were ever sent out. What terms were being proposed? Were the drafts ever approved or even seen by the Emperor and his war council? Someone with a title starting the write a piece of paper is meaningless.

    As for all the American historiography of their motivations, I find it extremely convenient that most of them were published or came to light around the time of the Korean War when America was trying to justify the rearmament of Japan. If the Americans are willing to pave over all Wehrmacht atrocities to justify the Bundeswher, I have no doubt that they would be willing to play the heel for Japanese rearmament.

    The real proof that can’t be fakef that the Americans knew that Japan was not down and out was that planning and logistics for Operation Downfall, the nnvasion of Japan, continued apace right up until the Japanese formal surrender. This included well documented actions like transferring landing ships to the USSR as well as corroborating statements in 1945 given to the Chinese, Soviet, and British governments.

    While I do not dispute that American use and targeting of the abombs had political motivations, that does not automatically make inverse true where there was no military reason for their use.







  • Imperial Japan certainly didn’t have any compunction about regularly terror bombing Chinese and other Asian cities full of civilians during the war, so when Japanese war apologists start crying about how terrible it was that they got bombed it’s very much a case of me playing the world’s tiniest violin.

    No, it’s not good that Japanese civilians died in the bombing campaigns against Japan in 1945 but bombing and bombardment of cities in WWII was accepted as a legitimate tactic by both the Axis and the Allies. We can certainly look back on it and say how horrible it was, but at the end of the day we are applying modern morality and rules of war to a past conflict.

    Personally, I see the focus on the atomic bombings (as opposed to the two night firebombing raids on Tokyo that killed more people than both atomic bombs combined) to be a sort of post-war Clean Wehrmacht style revisionism carried out by the Americans and Japanese when the Yanks realized they very much did want to remilitarize Japan to oppose the USSR and PRC. By making Japan out to be the victim of some unique horror of war, there is an implied equivalence that cancels out all the horrors of war Japan inflicted on everyone else.