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this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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I saw those pictures in school. We know that Truman signed off on dropping the bomb on two civilian cities and it was a horror that had never been seen in the world before or since.
Dude, we talk about our atrocities all the time. The current push to whitewash Native American genocide and slavery is actually getting a huge pushback, because we talk openly about this stuff in the US and it's only a minority that tries to silence it. We talk openly about the atrocities during the Vietnam War, and about the invasion of Iraq, and about prosecution for war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.
You can say a LOT about the US, and even the amount of denial we have about our standing in the world, but you can't call us in denial about stuff like that. We're in conflict within ourselves about it, but it's a well known and well discussed thing in the US.
And wait... are you from lemmygrad? The tankie server?
I think terminally online people and their kids probably know mostly the truth (or closer to it) than the average American. The fact that one major political party in America is having pretty major success pushing whitewashed history or at least preventing they're history from being taught strongly undercuts your contention that "we talk about our atrocities all the time."
If it was some fringe group like the John Birch Society or some Ayn Rand cult, sure. But it's almost every Republican primary candidate.
I suppose I am being too optimistic.
I also have a major problem whenever I get the sense a European is trashing the US for problems and a history that are absolutely being ignored in Europe. There's been a glut of that making me over-sensitive perhaps. My Brit-sense was tingling for the original comment, but it may be off.
We do not talk about our atrocities all the time. Politicians can almost never reference them. In the rare cases they allude to them, they never apologize and they never take material steps to repair the damage.
We allow private corporations to produce student text books for profit, and when the monopoly status of these corps causes the largest states to control the curriculum, everyone suffers. When you combine that with the Daughters of Confederacy movement to rewrite history in the text books, and Texas being one of the biggest markets for text books, you end up with over a century of white washing indoctrination in schools for 12 years, minimum, of almost 100% of children in the country.
I grew up in a liberal-ass state we still called the first settlers "pilgrims" and said their motivation was religious freedom. We celebrate Thanksgiving and Columbus and everyone who tries to speak out against it is literally risking their safety and the safety of their family because we have such a massive and deep-seated problem that random acts of terror are carried out without any coordination.
Lynchings never stopped, but no one except radicals talk about it. The police are literally an occupying military force, but no one except radicals talk about it.
No, we're not in conflict with ourselves about it. There is a very small radical group within the country that attempts to raise the level of discourse and nearly every single institution, every seat of power, every media company, every billionaire, every major land owner, every politician, nearly every educator, nearly every judge - everything is aligned against raising this discourse.
If you think we're earnestly and honestly struggling with this stuff as a nation, you are delusional.
I've been out of the country and we are lightyears ahead of other countries when it comes to reckoning with our past. No, we're not perfect, but we're a hell of a lot more open. You know how I know?
Because I was raised in Trumpland, PA and I joined the military and served in Mississippi, Texas, Oklahoma and Europe and I was able to learn about the Native American genocide, slavery, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki at school, and managed to absorb the rest through pop culture. We had a variety of differing assumptions when we talked, but we still talked. Yes, I heard that Lee was a gentleman but a trip to Gettysburg easily discarded that notion. My history teacher was quick to point out the founding fathers were opportunists.
There is stuff, like the bullshit we've been pulling in South America, that hasn't gotten discussed. That's true. But it's not just the radical minority that's aware the country is basically built on rivers of blood. The awareness is all over our pop culture.
You're not hearing what's good enough in your liberal state, but I have been knee deep in conservatism since birth and I've still managed to pick up on the horrors of our national history.
Now, just for comparison, go ask a Brit or a Frenchman about the Native American genocide and their country's role in it.
The only places we should be comparing ourselves against in this regard are other colonies and former colonies: Canada, Australia, South Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, etc.
For example, compared with Haiti, we're way behind.
Despite you learning about the Native American genocide, we still commit atrocities against them, en masse. We still leave open uranium waste in their areas. We nuked their desert environments hundreds of times. We are currently actively in the process of stealing more water from them. There may be some people who are aware, like you said, and for whatever reason the military appears to be a place where some units get conscious quickly while others devolve into xenophobia just as quickly, but the national conversation is about anti-science and anti-progress indians that deserve to be put in their place and stay quiet and maybe they should work on their alcoholism. The same is true for the national conversation about black people. We elected Joe fucking Biden. There's only a conversation about his role in maintaining structural racism in radical spaces, and even fewer and smaller radical spaces are discussing Harris's maintenance of structural racism.
Yes, Gettysburg discarded the notion that Lee was a gentlemen for you, and yet millions maintain that the Civil War pitted brother against brother and therefore the losers should be able to lose with dignity. And US LIBERALS are saying this!
But not that they're entire project was to privilege white land owning men and that white men laborers should not be allowed to vote because they weren't rich enough, and then of course everyone else. That the entire American project was to extract as much wealth as possible and had nothing to do liberty and justice for all but rather privilege for super profits and legal protections for white male land owners. Yes, there are some cracks beginning to open in less than half of the social studies classes, but they still celebrate Columbus Day and make pilgrim hats.
That awareness is not what I'm talking about. Most of that awareness is part of the rationalization/justification process. It's considered ancient history, and it's coupled with projection about other historical events. It's not an awareness of injustice that we continue to perpetrate and participate in. It's not understood that cultural genocide in America is happening right now. It's not understood that eugenics was guiding domestic policy up through the 70s while we were sterilizing a third of Puerto Rico.
Everyone knows we nuked civilians. Most people will tell you it was better than the alternative. This is a performative level of awareness. It is not an awareness of the context and the implications. It is a minimal awareness required to operate in the world.
Wow the denial is strong with this one.
Ugh, look. I don't want to fight because clearly you are in a different environment and social circle and you're right that stuff like the practice of overthrowing governments in South America to benefit businesses and a large number of horrors are not discussed.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not among them. And when it comes to racism, we are actually talking about it unlike Europe. The most powerful people in the country want to kill this discourse, but they CAN'T except in pockets of the most brainwashed home-schooled isolated people in the country.
But I resent being called delusional. Because we are earnestly and honestly struggling with this stuff as a nation. It's just that we're struggling against all the powers you name, and the dark history of the United States is not hidden like it is in other countries. It's present and on most people's minds.
Talk is cheap in a country that has a history of blood on its hands. Pushback on rhetoric isn't the only thing worth being proud about nor is it very productive. Just as another user pointed out, there's no material solutions being offered to the remainders of a group that was victim of colonialism, that is still prevalent today.
Every great nation has blood on its hands. The Japanese aren’t exactly Mother Theresa’s themselves. Oh and they shouldn’t have attacked us if they didn’t want to deal with the consequences. They had no problem killing or injuring thousands of our service men and women. Oh…..THAT. Give it a rest.
I didn't intend for this to devolve into Whataboutism.
I don't want to get into it with the guy from lemmygrad, but the idea that the US behavior can be compared only to colonized countries is ridiculous. We're in the tier of countries like Australia, New Zealand and such where the colonizers split off from the greater colonial power, and we're also in the tier of colonizers like Britain, Spain, Japan and France for our activities in the Pacific and South America.
I can't comment on Japanese crimes, that's for another continent, or if they were better or worse than the US's or say, Britain's. Still, if atomic bombs were dropped on two cities in Britain it would be a travesty and a crime no matter what Britain's done. Same as if we exploded a bunch of atomic bombs and poisoned the earth near where Native Americans live. Which we did.
I still don't think we're in denial. Umm, the previous poster might be. But as a whole I think we know these decisions were immoral. I just think that, as a nation, we don't have the political will built yet to make reparations. I think the left group is larger. The right is a minority, it's just a minority where the money and power is concentrated. Concentrated in many cases by generational wealth, which means the same people stopping us from enacting any meaningful reparations are the descendants of the people who made the decisions. Which makes sense, those decisions got them the power they have now. It's a hell of a thing to fight against.
But the difference between us simply may be optimism on my part.
How are you going to participate in this discussion and just whip out a "I can't comment on Japanese crimes"?
The rape of Nanking.
I went to public school.
Public schools cover this. Even if they didn't, it would take little effort to discover such an atrocity via the internet.
It was a joke to lighten the tension but mine really didn't cover much of anything in Asia. All right. Let's get serious.
I can't comment on Japanese crimes, though, because while yes I am not as well-versed in the history as I am in Western history, I'm still not going to comment because I'm actually not in the group that suffered from Japanese war crimes.
I'm also not about to get into a body count contest because that way lies madness and a whole bunch of "well, this justifies this" arguments.
But if you must know what I think about your Nanking argument, it's this. The atomic bomb was not intended as retaliation for Japan's crimes against China. The uS did not have the right to retaliate against Japan for crimes done to China. Pretty sure the Chinese, if asked, would not have voted to have a nuclear detonation so close to their country given the risk of enviromental destruction.
It wasn't retaliation for anything, it was entirely about prevention. So, it can't be justified by well... ANYTHING Japan did because it wasn't a response to anything Japan did. It was, pure and simple, a show of force on the part of the United States to establish that "Hey, we will END this war."
Furthermore, if it was justified well... it wouldn't be by virtue of the fact that those are civilian cities. We all agreed on the Geneva Conventions and the other treaties making up the Law of Armed Conflict that war crimes don't justify other war crimes, and the principles of military necessity, humanity and proportionality tell us it's a war crime to drop a nuclear bomb on a civilian-occupied city. All of these treaties came after World War II, of course, but they were informed by the events on the Pacific Front.
Basically, the actions of Japan and the actions of the United States in World War II were so terrible that International Law was agreed upon to make sure that people who performed any such action in the future even during wartime would be tried and imprisoned, and that any attempt to use actions like that to retaliate for actions like that would also be prosecutable.
Which is to say, the world as a WHOLE agreed that Japan's military behavior, while horrible, did not justify retaliation against civilians and did not justify the atomic bomb and so on. The entire world agreed that war crimes retaliating for other war crimes were not justified.
This did not stop the nuclear arms race, of course, because everyone involved knew from Mutually Assured Destruction no one would be around to try the guys who started a nuclear war in the end. But suffice it to say, any use of a nuclear weapon is wrong.
None of that has anything to do with my comment. Lol
Anyone claiming the US was retaliating on behalf of the Republic of China is a fool.
@Fazoo Your comment is just "The Rape of Nanking." You were commenting in response to me not wishing to comment on Japanese War Crimes. Yes, I've heard of it. Yes, I had to look up the details.
My original point was that it didn't matter what a country's government had done before when weighing the morality of dropping an atomic bomb on a city, and because I don't know details about Japan I used Britain as an example because I can list off colonization sins by the British Empire. Your response implied that I should specifically address Japan and Nanking. I did. I clarified to you that the US dropping an atomic bomb on a city had fuck-all to do with Nanking, so Nanking has nothing to do with the conversation at hand--the morality of the US dropping a bomb on an atomic city. Then I told you that war crimes in retaliation are still war crimes even if it had.
If you meant something else... What was it? That I had to be qualified to comment on Nanking? I'm actually not, because I didn't know the details until I looked it up on Wikipedia.