World Peace Day.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Well, it was my birthday yesterday, but I had to work. Shame.
Today, though, is the anniversary of the words first nuclear bomb being dropped.

And a lot of Lefties make a big point of the fact that America is the only power that has ever used nukes in anger. And how much better the world would be if we never used them again.

But before we go saying how evil it was to drop them bombs on those two cities - first Hiroshima, then Nagasaki on August the 9th, lets remember that the Japanese government started thier involvement in the war. Ok, they may not have been a democracy like Hitler's Germany was, and the people may not have actually voted in their government, but had they actually sank the carriers at Pearl Harbour and won the war they got involved in, the Japanese nation as a whole would have been well pleased, I'm sure.

As it was, the USA bit back - and as far as I'm concerned, the civilian population had it coming to them. Now, maybe that sounds a bit harsh, but lets remember that even now, a democratic Japanese nation still has not faced up to what it did, as a nation back then.

The German population, even those who were not adults themselves, have expressed their sorrow and shame over the Nazis and what they did. Germany today is not a place where they will tolerate people waving swastikas, unlike England where it is viewed with distaste, but is still just about legal.

The Democratic Japanese government of today, however, has still not fully taken responsibilitiy for its country's shameful past. And I wish that others on the left would remember this when they go on about America, or the British Empire.

The Japanese are just as racist as any redneck in the Deep South. There is a word in japanese for a foreigner who can speak Japanese, and it isn't complementary.

"Whites are racist , and only whites can be racist", so runs the mantra.
Hogwash.

Oh, yeah , I know the 'power + predjudice = racism' trick. And the fact is that any time anyone gets the chance to take advantage of anyone else, human nature being what it is, then bad things are gonna happen. The rich will exploit the poor, the Hutus will try to exterminate the Tutsis, and the Japanese will go on a rampage of rape and murder like they did in Naking.
It ain't just Whitey who is to blame for the ills of this world, I reckon.

Even in England, it is not unknown for a British bobby to hit a man who is walking by with his hands in his pockets. You could ask Ian Tomlinson that, but sadly, he is dead. And more people like him, innocent people who were just walking past the wrong place at the wrong time are going to get killed unless we come down and come down hard on those responsible.

The funny thing is, that even though both Hiroshima and Dresden were bombed, and many , many people died as a result, it was people like hirohito and werner von Braun who got off. they got clean way. Americans needed a puppet government in Japan and they also needed someone to build their rockets for them. So, men with blood on their hands got taken up and cleaned down.
And that is the way of the world.

Yes, we should be cynical about BP, about the influence of Uncle Sam - and about our government wherever we live. But let's not imagine that the Americans and the Capitalists are the source of all our problems.

Lets remember that some African peoples, and the Arabs, did pretty well out of the slave trade too - and some are still doing it and keeping slavery going. Let's remember that Joe Stalin might have been 'on our side' in the war against Hitler, but there is still the matter of the millions of his own people that he had killed. he didn't deserve to be lionised by the british left the way he was by so many who should have known better.

It's too late I know , for a birthday wish now - but next year, I'm gonna wish that we 'get real' about racism and hatred and exploitation in our world.
Racism isn't just down to white people. police brutality doesn't just happen in Soviet Russia or Alabama - it's going to happen anywhere that decent people see it going on , and yet ignore, or worse still, actually excuse it.

On Hiroshima day, let us remember those who died, but remember also what they allowed others to do in their name.Let us consider what we also condone and excuseand ask 'is that really fair and just?'

Comments

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

Wait, I'm sorry. I couldn't get past:

"a democracy like Hitler's Germany was"

*blinks*

You're putting forth that Hitler's Germany was *democratic*?
Uh, I don't think it's a democracy when you KILL the opposition party.

[thies.livejournal.com]

it is democracy when you get elected democratically, getting rid of the opposition came after that

That's what he did.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

His opposition was comunists.
But I can give you that he missed Watergate, that's right.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

Basically the Japanese deserved to get nuked because, sixty-five years later, they haven't taken responsibility for their various atrocities committed at the time. Also, they're racist. So yeah, apparently we should nuke racists.

[eracerhead.livejournal.com]

Everyone does this unjust thing, and so that is the rationale for not being introspective, not considering our personal role in the situation and not changing our attitudes and behavior.

It's a shame so many people are starving. Oh well I can't feed them all, so pass the pie.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

On the contrary - the Japanese commanders , the Military government were unwilling to consider the consequences of their actions.

As a result, they faced a humiliating defeat and surrender.
Hiroshima? They had it coming.

before we get too smug about winning the war, we should maybe consider what we are storing up for ourselves with our attitudes to others we thing ' don't really matter'.

Sad but true.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

There were less prisoners in Joe Stalin's Gulag than in todays USofA.

Re: Sad but true.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

source, please.

[thies.livejournal.com]

There is a whole lot of jumbled together stuff and weird comparisons in your post. You compare von Braun and Hirohito as if they are equals, which is ludicrous. One was the revered ruler of a country, the other a somewhat single minded scientist employed by those in power.

You make allusions to wanting to see anything related to the Third Reich and Hirohitos Japan banned and censored - when's the last time censorship worked out well? You know, all that stuff where you force adherents of that banned ideology out of public view and give them a persecution complex? After all it's not as if all the (Neo) Nazis in Germany vanished in a puff of smoke just because their groups were publicly banned and criminalized.

To aim this back at your ogirinal point, the nuclear bombings, I really don't see what Dresden has to do with that in comparison. You make it out as if Dresden were not a military target - large amounts of soldiers had been pulled into the city. Not to forget the war related manufacturing going on there at the time and general inability to make precision airstrikes. Carpet bombing was all they had.

As for the nuclear bombing itself which I thought your post was supposed to be about, it prevented a long and bloody ground invasion which would have made D-Day look like kindergarden with losses on both sides dwarfing casualties from the bombing. So, tossing nukes onto the aggressor to minimize the deathtoll? Sounds like a good thing.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

While I don't doubt the IJA would have tried for its own Leyte Gulf scenario it's worth noting US invasion plans included things like nuking regions and then moving troops in and stationing them there, while the Japanese were in a perfect scenario to use Bakka Bombs and the weapons developed at Unit 731. People who dismiss the idea that Japan would have fought on absent the nukes forget that people were still surrendering the Axis Cause as part of the IJA.....in the 1970s. And this was well into the Lighter and Softer one party state period. In 1945.....

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

One was the revered ruler of a country, the other a somewhat single minded scientist employed by those in power.

Yeah , and One was a german , the other was Japanese.

What links both men though , was a keen involvement in the business of waging the wars their countries fought. Of hirohito it says

"On November 3, Nagano explained in detail the Pearl Harbor attack plan to the Emperor.[19] On November 5, Emperor Shōwa approved in imperial conference the operations plan for a war against the Occident and had many meetings with the military and Tōjō until the end of the month. On December 1, an imperial conference sanctioned the "War against the United States, United Kingdom and the Kingdom of the Netherlands." On December 8 (December 7 in Hawaii) 1941, in simultaneous attacks, Japanese forces struck at the US Fleet in Pearl Harbor and began the invasion of Malaysia.

With the nation fully committed to the war, Emperor Shōwa took a keen interest in military progress and sought to boost morale. According to Akira Yamada and Akira Fujiwara, the Emperor made major interventions in some military operations. For example, he pressed Sugiyama four times, on January 13 and 21 and February 9 and 26, to increase troop strength and launch an attack on Bataan. On February 9, March 19 and May 29, the Emperor ordered the Army Chief of staff to examine the possibilities for an attack on Chungking, which led to Operation Gogo.[20]

As the tide of war gradually began to turn (around late 1942 and early 1943), some people argue that the flow of information to the palace gradually began to bear less and less relation to reality, while others suggest that the Emperor worked closely with Prime Minister Tōjō, continued to be well and accurately briefed by the military, and knew Japan's military position precisely right up to the point of surrender.

So, how responsile do you make him for what happened?
The only reason he never ended up in a Nuremberg style trial as a war criminal was that the Americans needed someone to run post war Japan.

Now, with Von Braun , although he was under Hitler, did he give as much as a damn about who died and what heppened to the slaves labourers who worked on his rocket launching programme?

This is the crucial question - how much responsibility did each man bear for the loss of inniocent lives in WW"? I would say that both have blood on their hands. In diffferent ways, maybe , but both were guilty of war crimes, and never stoood trial b/coz of their usefunness to the victorious powers. Well, America, mostly...

I refer to censorship merrely to show that the Germans today will have nothing to do with the glorification of Hitler.
He is viewed as an odious mark on Germany's history.
I don't agree with censorship in principle, but it shows how peole running germany and it's society today feels about Hitler. Compare that with Japan, where the atrocities they committed in nanking and elsewhere are never even mentioned in their schools and the rest of society.

And did I say that Dresden *wasn't* a military target?
Why do you think it got bombed in the first place?
But people are inclined to mention the appalling loss of civilian lives and forget that this was what Germany had done to Coventry.

iin like manner, let us not forget the military significance of the places in Japan that were nuked.

it prevented a long and bloody ground invasion which would have made D-Day look like kindergarden with losses on both sides dwarfing casualties from the bombing. So, tossing nukes onto the aggressor to minimize the deathtoll? Sounds like a good thing.
I was expecting to have to remind people of this. Thanks for doing it for me.

It was not a 'good thing', but rather a neccessary evil.
But like I said, the Japanese had it coming in the same way that Germany had Dresden coming to them.

Do you dissagree?

[futurebird.livejournal.com]

What is this?

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

It's an invitation for the yearly banter over whether the atomic bombs should have been used or not.

U.S. haters will talk about how horrible it was (agreed), ignoring the fact that more Japanese died in Tokyo from our conventional bombing (which was apparently OK). They frequently forget the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese.

My uncle had just spent two years fighting in France and Germany, and was expecting to be sent to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan's home islands. He didn't have a problem with the atom bombs being used.

I guess it all depends on one's perspective. Most of the people whose lives were directly affected are gone now; the rest of us can re-write history to our heart's content.

[skull-bearer.livejournal.com]

I think this would have been better if you had just stuck with the Japanese as an expample, bringing in slavery just makes you sound like a proponent of reverse racism.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

I call shenanigans! That cats grammar is correct, ergo this must be a forgery!

[reflaxion.livejournal.com]

I'm a pretty liberal person, so either I'm in the miniority on the left (not the first time) or your opinion of liberals is wrong (not too familiar with you personally, but it wouldn't be the first time it's happened in this community).

My opinion - it was a World Frigging War. If any other nation had The Bomb™, you can bet they'd have dropped it too. It's horrible in retrospect, but that's the nature of total war.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

well, i am over 50, and I have heard lotas liberals castigate the Us for bombing Japan , and completely ignore the things that Stalin did.

Did you know that George Orwell#s Animal farm was suppressed by the british Government b/coz it was so critical of our wartime ally, Stalin?


Ok, so I'm a brit myself, so maybe I have some advantage on that. yeah , that war was pretty awful. And maybe I should have expressed more sympathy for the japanese kids who got caught up in a war they never started or condoned - but the fact remains that the Americans were faced with doing that or facing an enemy that had trops that were still in hiding and fighting for the Emporor in the 1970s.

Can you imagine the carnage that would have ensued if the Americans had to invade and conquer mailand Japan like they did Okinawa and Iwo Jima?

I am not saying we abandon critique and introspaction entirely, But let's be balanced and not just assume that the world would be a wonderful place without those awful white folks and the 'damned Yankees' in it.

The rest of the world can be downright mean on it's own account.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Sorry bub, there's no way to negate that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were explicit targetings of civilian populations.

Now, that said, World War II has pretty much been whitewashed during and after the war. The Allies and the Axis were playing for keeps from day 1 of the war (as the Chinese dead butchered by Hirohito's horde would testify). It was a brutal and ugly conflict and any attempts to paint it as something other than that pale when one realizes that the Axis started mass-scale civilian bombing at Rotterdam, obliterated London in response to five bombs on Berlin, unleashed terror bombing on the wide scales in China and the Soviet Union......

And then the Allies reciprocated in full by sustained strategic bombing designed to kill Axis civilians in carload lots. It didn't work very well in Germany but sure the Hell did in Japan. The Bomb came from Guernica as surely as one event can be said to have led to another.

Now, bringing up the USA's past it is very interesting that approaches to the Confederacy usually acknowledge neither its string of massacres of black Union POWs nor its order to kill all black Union troops captured on the battlefield. The USA also tends to ignore that in WWII there was a headhunting practice including everything up to and including GIs shipping severed Japanese heads home to their wives/girlfriends/fuck buddies as trophies. And they kept them and treasured them.

Your statement that the civilian population had it coming to them is also collective punishment. It fits right into the mindset of the Axis, not the one the Allies deluded themselves into believing they lacked. Tojo and company were military dictators who had bloodily repressed all internal dissent. Mass targeting of civilians was universal in WWII but represents the single nastiest legacy of the war.

And that about the Germans is a load of horseshit. If Neo-Nazis were legal they could easily get 1/3 the vote in Germany. Half of Germany remained totalitarian right into the 1990s and the direct descendant of the totalitarian apparatchiks continues to have influence on German politics. They haven't changed a bit, they just keep outlawing it *because* they haven't changed.

[enders-shadow.livejournal.com]

"Mass targeting of civilians was universal in WWII but represents the single nastiest legacy of the war."

I'm not sure that is true. The 12 million killed in camps might just be nastier.

[chessdev.livejournal.com]

Happy B-day Minto...

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Hi - and thanks!

[http://users.livejournal.com/-wanderer-/]

As it was, the USA bit back - and as far as I'm concerned, the civilian population had it coming to them. Now, maybe that sounds a bit harsh, but lets remember that even now, a democratic Japanese nation still has not faced up to what it did, as a nation back then.

One need not claim that somehow the civilian population "deserved" to be obliterated to justify dropping the bomb(s). All you need to say is that was the best option in a bad situation. The say that the population had it coming is way off. Wars shouldn't be fought to punish people, they should be fought to achieve specific goals.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Well, that one certainly was.
No, nobody inteneded to punish the people of hiroshima, or the japanese public generally.

they just wanted to end the war before the russians got to tokyo and claimed it all like they claimed half of Berlin.

And your claim that my statement is "way off" is noted, and severely disagreed with.
Although there is a case for feeling sorry for the children , the parents had ample time to reflect on the war crimes thier government and armed forces committed before the bombs landed, and there has been no public outcry over the fate of the comfort women , or anyone else that the japanese oppressed and exploited in so many ways. Personally , I have no sympathy for them, unless they are prepared to acknowledge the wrongfulness of the Imperial Japanese forces.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Go to wiki and look at the miltary connections to both places. Each city had military significance.

One was an HQ for 2 different army groups.
the other a major manufacturing centre fror war materials.

yes, they were chosen to demonstrate the destructiveness of the new type of bomb- but were not the peaceful, purely civilian settlements i was given to believe by my peacenick teachersat school.

It was an evil, but a neccessary evil. One that the japanese government brought upon it's people.
And yet, the japanese ppl, even in peacetime and under democratic government, have never pressuered their elected representatives to apologise to the 'comfort women ', or to offer them meaningful compensation . the japanese public has shown no compassion for their nations victims whatever, and i feel no compassion for any of the adults who died or suffered as a result of the bombs. They had it coming to them.

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

Good post, I agree.

I second that.

[papasha-mueller.livejournal.com]

-

What Would Ike Say?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them
with that awful thing."

- Dwight Eisenhower- Ike on Ike,
Newsweek, 11/11/63

"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in
Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic
bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of
cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ...the Secretary, upon
giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the
plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous
assent.

"During his 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'. The Secretary was deeply
perturbed by my attitude..."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

Re: What Would Ike Say?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Ike would be wrong given that even after the Emperor had voted for surrender there was a fair-sized chunk of the IJA's Officer Corps that planned to depose him and continue the war anyway.