Killing civilians through food shortages induced by blockade, invasion, and air and artillery strikes are not "mistakes".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".If someone kills 10 people by mistake vs killing 1 on purpose, which action is less moral to you?
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
Well thats putting it lightly.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.
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.
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.
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 offices 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 Hasegawas Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Hasegawas research into Soviet and Japanese archives, they wrote, is replete with massive new and important wisps of evidence about the causes of Japans 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.
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.
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?
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?