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I was reading about the atomic bombings the other day [no graphic descriptions in post] (lemmygrad.ml)
submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by King_Simp@lemmygrad.ml to c/genzedong@lemmygrad.ml
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If you want the descriptions of what it was like just after the Atomic bombings in Hiroshima, the source I read got their excerpts from "To hell and back: last train to Hiroshima." [I think it's factually fine. The original book got retracted but I haven't seen anyone object to the second printing, and most of the issues related to the stories of the Enola Gay or the science and not the stories of victims].

As I was reading these horror stories, there was something in my mind that kept just weeping. This was a terrorist attack. Not just against the Japanese but against the whole world. Hundreds of thousands of people died, either instantly vaporized or agononizingly slowly over the course of hours to years. Elderly, women, children, disabled, and even Korean victims of Japanese slavery. All of that was done so the US could intimidate the world [more specifically, the USSR]. It wasn't an unfortunate sacrifice, it wasnt a mistake. It was an act of pure and unfettered terrorism, that gets justified in schools and propaganda outlets.

And they wanted to do it again. Douglas MacArthur wanted to drop 50 along the Korean-chinese border, Eisenhower (or people in the government associated with him at least) essentially threatened the chinese with the same thing. The soviets were threatened on a scale of thousands of hiroshimas before the Cuban missile crisis.

The way I felt when I was reading the accounts of these attacks was the same way I felt when reading about the Nanjing massacre. Almost incomprehensible horrors.

I get not a lot of people will disagree with me here but I just had to get it out because fuck I'm depressed

Edit:I forgot to add. I know this wasn't the worst crime during the war. I don't feel like ranking crimes against humanity but the crimes committed during the Holocaust and the Japanese war of aggression in China were obviously worse. I just wanted to say that because occasionally I get accused of being one of those "Japan [as a whole] is a victim" people

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[–] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 12 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Probably the most heinous war crime ever committed, zero need for it. thank god the USSR got nukes imagine the world of they hadn't

I am sure we will see one get dropped in our lifetime, probably by Israel

[–] Malkhodr@lemmygrad.ml 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

It's mind numbing how many people still support the bombings under the pretext of "an invasion would kill more people." Like that's just a blatant lie and misinformation but it's taught in US history classes as if it's an indisputable fact.

It's really the most succinct example of how freedom of information is a farce in the US. Sure you can come across information that leads you to the truth, but every vector of soceity a normal person will come into contact with, reinforces the narrative of the bombings necessity. And when you disagree with people on this point, you can see in their eyes how they feel you are naive and ignorant,as if they are special for knowing the narrative that's shoved down all our throats since childhood.

The thing that gets me is the fact that when you prove that your more knowledgeable on the subject then those people, who only repeat what they learned unce and never investigated further, those people don't change their view. They'll say, "oh I didn't know that but-" and come out with some other bullshit.

More recently people will say "do you know what Japan did during the war?" It's seriously baked into a lot of Americans that a nation's people are somehow collectively responsible for their leaders actions. They say that people shouldn't suffer for a government's choices but immediately fold into that kind of thinking, even with people who I know are trying to be genuine, it's this reflexive behavior that I assume is really difficult to unlearn. I was blessed enough to grow up Muslim after 9/11, so this behavior had a harder time sticking to me.

I mean it when I say blessed honestly. I wouldn't trade my experience for the false comforts that whites have, as I know I'd be frustrated by how difficult it is to untangle your thinking from some of these things.

[–] Assian_Candor@hexbear.net 10 points 2 weeks ago

These are all the easiest lines to attack as well

  1. if the bombings prevented more life, are we saying the US would have killed 200,000+ civilians in a land invasion (they would have) and if so what does that say about the US

  2. do you know what the US did during its wars? (No they don't). Does destroying 94% of structures in DPRK and reducing them to a population of cave dwellers mean you deserve to be nuked (yes they do but not for that reason, and their kids sure as hell don't)

USians are allergic to critical thinking or learning history. No wonder they're getting owned by AI tbh

[–] cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml 9 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

I get not a lot of people will disagree with me here

Yeah, i think you're preaching to the choir here. At least for my part, i completely agree with you on this.

I just wanted to say that because occasionally I get accused of being one of those "Japan [as a whole] is a victim" people

Japan's own incredibly horrific crimes don't change the fact that the US dropping the nuclear bombs was a terrorist act and a crime against humanity. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Today Banderite Nazis are regularly shelling Russian civilians purely to inflict terror. Russia still doesn't respond in kind, because no crime justifies committing atrocities against civilians.

[–] Carl@hexbear.net 8 points 2 weeks ago

I know the feeling, reading about something horrible happening and wondering how on Earth people were able to do it in the first place. We've got so many ways of dehumanizing others through racism, nationalism etc, but I think we also dehumanize ourselves when we pass the buck on responsibility the way we do - the scientists don't feel responsible, the pilots don't feel responsible, the politicians don't feel responsible, the military planers and commanders etc... nobody's fucking responsible, so this horrible thing that we did becomes treated like a natural disaster or an inevitable outcome that we had no control over.

And a lot of that's by design, and a lot of it is a defense mechanism cooked up by the people who are definitely the most responsible for the thing that was done, but god damn it things didn't need to be that way. It is fully possible to have systems that don't dehumanize everyone they interact with and don't cook up these kinds of horrible actions as default.

Like, take the example of the Soviets rolling into Berlin. They knew that SA would be a problem, that they had a lot of very justifiably angry conscripts and no feasible way to police them at all times, but the leaders of the Red Army were fundamentally humanists, so they imposed very harsh policing on their own people in order to prevent as much of that as they could. And of course it still happened, of course German civilians were harmed during the occupation, but far fewer than the Soviet civilians that were harmed during fascist occupation. Berlin wasn't treated like Nanjing, not even close, and the Red Army ended the war with by far the most prosecution and punishment of criminals within its own ranks of any of WW2's large armies.

When the decision was made to drop the bombs, Japan was done. They had no navy and no air force and we controlled all the waters around their island. We had been "strategically" bombing them for over a year without any resistance, long enough that we had figured out that strategic bombing doesn't actually work. We now know that the Japanese ambassador was trying to go through the Soviets to get a peace deal on the table while we were planning the bombings, all it would have taken from Eisenhower was an indication that he was interested in accepting Japanese surrender and the negotiations could have begun in earnest. Since the Allies held literally all of the cards it was possible to hold, such a deal would have almost certainly wound up being the exact same unconditional surrender that we got after dropping the bombs.

[–] amemorablename@lemmygrad.ml 7 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, I mean it's an ongoing act of terror that has held the world in its grip ever since. The post "we could die in a nuclear war" world is fundamentally not the same as the world before. I would say it's not dissimilar to climate change that way. It represents an existential threat to the entire species.

Japan did terrible things at home and abroad, but that doesn't mean civilians in Japan deserve to have been slaughtered. But if anyone is going to use that kind of reasoning, of course it would be the US who would push it, the same country that on a regular basis since, uses atrocity propaganda to justify massacring large portions of another country's people and destroying their infrastructure.

The history of it is pretty clear, that the war was all but over already. The US had already brutally bombed tons of Japanese cities, including the firebombing of Tokyo. There was no need for it but racism and intimidation. Then they went on to do similar horrors in Korea, just without the nukes, and that one doesn't even have the excuse of "but Japan was doing bad stuff." Literally just an occupation and continuation of what Japan did to Korea. Which is an important point of connection there. The very country (the US) that supposedly did this bombing of Japan "for good" took over for Japan on brutalizing Korea. In general, the concept that the US was some kind of anti-fascist hero in WWII is utter horseshit. Probably some of its soldiers believed that, but the entity as a whole? No fucking way. Yet it tries to take credit in propaganda like it was, while simultaneously having been the biggest fascist, imperial force since.

[–] panopticon@lemmygrad.ml 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

It's a pretty cut-and-dry warcrime/atrocity. Even if Japan had hypothetically somehow been directly responsible for every other atrocity committed between 1940-1945, collective punishment of a civilian population is still a crime and Truman is still a criminal.