305
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2024
305 points (96.6% liked)
World News
39112 readers
710 users here now
A community for discussing events around the World
Rules:
-
Rule 1: posts have the following requirements:
- Post news articles only
- Video links are NOT articles and will be removed.
- Title must match the article headline
- Not United States Internal News
- Recent (Past 30 Days)
- Screenshots/links to other social media sites (Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/reddit, etc.) are explicitly forbidden, as are link shorteners.
-
Rule 2: Do not copy the entire article into your post. The key points in 1-2 paragraphs is allowed (even encouraged!), but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. If you have to stop and think "Is this fair use?", it probably isn't. Archive links, especially the ones created on link submission, are absolutely allowed but those that avoid paywalls are not.
-
Rule 3: Opinions articles, or Articles based on misinformation/propaganda may be removed. Sources that have a Low or Very Low factual reporting rating or MBFC Credibility Rating may be removed.
-
Rule 4: Posts or comments that are homophobic, transphobic, racist, sexist, anti-religious, or ableist will be removed. “Ironic” prejudice is just prejudiced.
-
Posts and comments must abide by the lemmy.world terms of service UPDATED AS OF 10/19
-
Rule 5: Keep it civil. It's OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It's NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
-
Rule 6: Memes, spam, other low effort posting, reposts, misinformation, advocating violence, off-topic, trolling, offensive, regarding the moderators or meta in content may be removed at any time.
-
Rule 7: We didn't USED to need a rule about how many posts one could make in a day, then someone posted NINETEEN articles in a single day. Not comments, FULL ARTICLES. If you're posting more than say, 10 or so, consider going outside and touching grass. We reserve the right to limit over-posting so a single user does not dominate the front page.
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
Lemmy World Partners
News !news@lemmy.world
Politics !politics@lemmy.world
World Politics !globalpolitics@lemmy.world
Recommendations
For Firefox users, there is media bias / propaganda / fact check plugin.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/media-bias-fact-check/
- Consider including the article’s mediabiasfactcheck.com/ link
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
I have lots of Japanese family and friends, and none of them understand the horrors of WW2. As far as they were taught, America just randomly dropped nukes on them. They're mad because they think of Japan as a victim, not a monster that needed to be stopped. They raped and pillaged everyone who wasn't Japanese.
At least Germany teaches their kids about their atrocities in hopes that they never repeat it.
Japan was definitely a monster that needed to be stopped. But to say that made it okay to drop two nukes instantly killing thousands of civilians is not okay in any case.
Well. The war took 20.000 lives daily. The bombs took about 140k if i recall right.
If the war lasted 7 more days it would even out. The bombs ended it instantly.
The Japanese doctrine was to fight to the very last man, woman and child.
The Japanese are like everyone else. Only more. They had some powerful cultural settings to be able to do what they did.
My problem with this account is I read it in an American text book.
I'm not saying it false. I just have doubts.
Most of the American history revolves around how the Japanese treated the Prisoners of War, who were all men.
Ask the Koreans or Chinese what they thought about the Japanese occupation of their countries a hundred years ago.
This right here, there is a reason for a lot of the hate towards Japan in East and Southeast Asia, their reputation in the world today has drowned a lot of that out but it still happened and the crimes of imperial Japan are on the same level of cruelty as many crimes committed in the Holocaust some are worse
That to me seems like the same logic being used by the israelis to justify killing the Palestinians. Its never justified to go after the civilian population and non combatants.
The difference though is the availability of precise targeting of the enemy versus the civilians.
Do you potentially end the lives of a million of your own drafted citizens just for more precise targeting of the enemy? One hell of a moral dilemma for any leader to decide.
Absolutely agree with this, and one of the reasons I'm upset personally with Israel right now is that they are fairly infamous for being able to precisely target their enemy when they want to, and hence what they've done in Gaza to the civilian population that had nothing to do with the conflict is just horrific.
Having said all that, there is a nuance in the two scenarios, they are not equal.
Mostly agreed. Historians and philosophers can argue ad nauseum about if the bombs were the only way to end the war, but we literally can't know. Some argue that everyone will listen to the emperor while others argue that they would fight to a long, drawn-out death, citing the coup that happened even after the Japanese saw the immense power of the bombs.
My comments just give insight into the ferocity with which they attack the movie. Japan doesn't teach their population about all of the war, the invasion of China and the Philippines, the rape of Nanjing...any of it. They are only taught that they were one day minding their own business when Americans destroyed two cities. It makes sense they don't want to consume this media.
this isn't specifically a Japanese thing though, most American kids are taught that dropping both bombs was the only way to win the war, when this is still the subject of a lot of debate. for that matter, they probably aren't taught about how eugenics were effectively exported from America to Germany. I'm from the UK and I had to wait until I was reading history for fun to learn about most of the UK's colonial crimes. the way history is taught in schools is just a bit shit
Wholeheartedly agree, history books are basically propaganda. Like, I it get if you don't want to get into the gory details of war, but if that's the case, why talk about murdering civilians at all.
Americans learn everything about the middle-eastern conflict from Sept. 11th, 2001 and on. They don't know anything of what happened before then, or why these evil bastards were so mad, etc.
Do they actually get anything about the “and on” bit in high school? Feels like the kind of thing they’d have to wait til uni for.
From what I understand this is not the main point of contention among historians. That Imperialist Japan, like all Axis powers, was a cancer that demanded amputation was not the justification for the deployment of nukes. Rather, the debatable justification was their leadership's inability to surrender unconditionally.
thousands is tiny compared to how many japan killed
I think there's a difference between killing Japanese military and Japanese civilians. With that logic the american civilians deserved dying on 9/11
I never said they deserved to be killed. They needed to be killed but they didnt deserve it. It just had to happen that way or they would have decimated their population fighting a losing battle.
My understanding was they were actually attacking manufacturing for the war, it's just that an atom bomb is not that discriminatory, and that all the military-only targets had already been bombed out of existence by that point.
Not saying it was right, just explaining it wasn't as black-and-white as you express.
No, the targeting committee was very clear that the targets were selected mainly based on spectacle and effect.
They purposely kept a few cities in a "pristine" (or as close as possible) by disallowing other bombings so when the nukes were finished the before and after would look more dramatic.
The fact that they could just ignore these cities before dropping the nukes shows that the targets were of little to no military value
That's not my understanding at all, only just that having witnesses was a side effect, but not the primary reason.
From what I remember from watching documentaries there were military targets in the cities, I think (don't hold me to it) bomb making factories.
~~Feel free to pass on some links if you know otherwise, as history is always a learning experience.~~ (See edit below.)
Edit: Looking at the Wiki page, under the section about targeting, it mentions this about Hiroshima...
... and...
The wiki article does mention what you're stating as well, so in essence we're both right, though I would still argue that the military objective was primary, and the spectacle as you call it was secondary, even if it was a close secondary.
Thats and interesting point, but it does make me think, why drop the nukes when they can just bomb the manufacturing hubs without incurring as much civilian death
That's just it, they had been, for quite a while, but the Japanese would not capitulate.
So just bombing military targets with regular ordinance wasn't enough. The type of bombing was a signal and a message in and of itself.
Interesting post. I was unaware of this "random attack" teaching. Is this present day curriculum? Japan isn't closed off to Western internet and media. It can't be that close of a secret, I mean they're watching Oppenheimer right now. Not like China where they lose you in a prison colony if you talk about certain historical facts and the internet and media are fully censored.
I'm reminded of the Japanese guy who remained encamped on some spit of jungle in the Pacific Islands until something bananas like 1975 or something, and he had been out there with two others still holding their position, and had shot like 15 locals. Even when NGOs brought them newspapers, they assumed it was an American trick because they were taught and still believed that Japan would never surrender and would die fighting door to door to the last. It must have seemed paradoxical to them. They had to bring back the guy's commanding officer fom a retirement home or something and fly him to the island to get the guys to come out. As far as I understand, that sort of rhetoric is viewed in Japan how anti semitic rhetoric is viewed by most Germans.
Personally I think those two bombs saved a lot of lives by destroying Japan's will to continue prosecuting the war, and two showed restraint that the world has continued to this day. As I understand, some in America argued for more targets, like as many as 50(?) cities? If that had happened, Japan wasn't going to be any more beaten than if they lost the will to fight and surrendered unconditionally after just two bombs, and I wonder what might have happened if that tradition of restraint didn't exist all these years. You know, if it had been fifty, sometime by now some despot would have been saying "what's the big deal, not like we did fifty."
Mines is mostly anecdotal - I grew up in Hawaii and became friends with a lot of Japanese nationals + my wife's family constantly has get-togethers in Japan or America. Thankfully there's several testimonies on Reddit and YouTube that I sadly can't reference because I'm on mobile.
I want to clarify as well, I'm not saying the Japanese are bad, I'm saying why Oppenheimer would spark outrage for Japan's general public. Some comments in this post could benefit from cultural context. It's not as simple as "haha people who got beat up don't want to watch the replay". It's tragic, and I get it.
As I said in a comment below, a country's history curriculum seems to always show the country as a winner, or the victim of an atrocity. Every country seems to be guilty of this to some degree, I just like how Germany handles it: "we did dumb shit, we're never doing it again, and here's why."
And still, even here in Germany, people played victim, the perpetrators just weren’t the people who "freed" us. There was (and still is to some extent) a "we didn’t know about anything about the holocaust, we’re all victims of the evil Nazis" mentality. This was, of course, most prominent in the years after the war because being a Nazi suddenly had consequences. And it’s obviously not true. While a majority of the population might not have known about death camps or the exact conditions in the camps, they certainly knew about the persecution of the jewish community.
Of course, our history classes do now teach about that (meaning that we did know, even though we liked to pretend we didn’t).
Right, just like 9/11 was justified due to U.S. imperialism.
Lol
Hitting too close to home?
Huh. It's almost like history is written by the victor.