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The Conflict in Vietnam


Jace, Extat

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1 hour ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Well, we did handle Japan with kid gloves. We rebuilt their economy, allowed them to build up their military again well before Germany, and gave most of their war criminals a pass while we went ahead hanging Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.

How does "fini Japs" imply that the bombings were racially motivated? Because he used the word Japs? That's not racism, it's war.

And I'm sorry, but Vonnegut was stupid to say that, and I will call it out. Even if he was right (which he wasn't), and the second bombing was racist, is it really even close to a second after slavery? More racist than the Mexican-American war? Than Indian removal? Than the laws that governed early Chinese immigrants? Than Jim Crow? Than Black Codes? Than the KKK? Than Social Darwinism?

This last part is quite interesting, because it went much further than just sparing most of them from execution or imprisonment. What actually happened was that many of them just regrouped into the right wing Liberal Democratic Party that has ruled Japan for most of the time since. Shinzo Abe, the current Prime Minister of Japan, is the descendant of Nobosuke Kishi for example. One of the most prominent Japanese politicians of the reconstruction period (and Prime Minister between 1957-1960), and a Class A war criminal to boot.  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi 

Very pleasant guy...

To some extent this happened in Germany as well, but not to the same degree. It would have been like having Reinhard Heydrich lead West Germany after the war, had he still been alive.

 

 

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1 hour ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

and gave most of their war criminals a pass while we went ahead hanging Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.

I mean this is basically two factored, one Macarthur had a hard on for royalty (and military) and didn't want to behead the leadership of Japan as a result.

And two, Japan had a rich history of extensive conservative business connections with America's conservative business culture. The party of bizness Republicans took control of congress in the midterms and put a stop to the removal of Japan's war criminals and the Pacific Theatre equivalent of Nuremberg since many of the Japanese war criminals were great business friends of Republicans before the war and the Republicans wanted them back in charge in their proper place in charge of the country.

Partly, republicans rushing to re-empower the japanese war criminals was because Japan was having a lot of labor strife as the New Deal ethos of the American Occupation was encouraging unionization and greater workers rights. Republicans wanted to help out their Japanese war criminal buddies and put a stop to this, so the occupation switched policy and opposed labor rights.This basically allowed all the war and pre-war zaibatsus that had been hobbled or shuttered by the occupation, to revive and to rise up and crush the labor movement, with murderous crackdowns (employing of course ex military war criminals to do the anti union slaughtering)--which of course american republicans found delightful, right and just.  The zaibatsus then  resumed their dominance of the Japanese economy, methodically eradicating all the sector competition that had arisen in the short hiatus when they were functionally non operational.  As a result, only one of the post-war companies surviving and rising to zaibatsu status (Sony)

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10 minutes ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Hate to argue semantics again, but no it wasn't. The Nagasaki bombing predated the Nuremberg Principles. Atrocity? Sure. War crime? Not so much. These terms matter. If progressives (myself included) hadn't spent so many years calling the Bush family "Nazis", maybe as a country we would have taken the educated community more seriously when some asshole came along who actually did ape Hitler.

I mean insofar as those treaties that predate the Nuremberg Principles did not use the term war crime you are correct. But the Hague Conventions and Geneva Conventions were about establishing laws regarding war. And what is it when you break a law? A crime. I mean the Nuremberg trials used the Hague convention and essentially declared that you didn't have to even have signed them for them to apply. Ultimately if we use your definition, then Japan is guilty of no war crimes. I cannot accept that.

By the treaties of the first and second Hague Conventions virtually all the major bombing campaigns of WW2 were crimes. Because the Hague treaty says,

It is forbidden to:

declare that no quarter will be given;

employ arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering;

destroy or seize the enemy's property, unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war;

attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended

And that you must:

In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.

 

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I have to jump in and support Kraken here the bombing of Japan with atomic weapons was absolutely not a racist act. World war 2 was a total war with a massive cost no one was pulling any punches because the consqunces of losing were so dire. That set the tone we used the Atomic bombs because we had them, this is after six years of inventing new weapons and using them the second we got them. They were used on the nonwhite member of the Axis because the others had already fallen Germany mind had been forcible split into four peaces, the eastern half having experienced mass rape and then the dismantling and shipping of it;s industrial base to the Soviet Union. Japan by contrast got to keep their emperor, the head of state who presided over a regime of literal conquest rape and genocide a man who could have ended it all with a word. The idea that America went hard on Japan is just absurd.

And yes the Japanese were willing to "surrender" but only if they got to keep Korea Manchuria and Taiwan, and keep their leadership leaving millions of  people at the mercy of a cruel xenophobic regime. Not to mention that just being a hard reset to the borders they had before they invaded literally every country within their range, minus the Soviet Union.

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  • 3 weeks later...

By the treaties of the first and second Hague Conventions virtually all the major bombing campaigns of WW2 were crimes. Because the Hague treaty says,

It is forbidden to:

 declare that no quarter will be given;

employ arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering;

destroy or seize the enemy's property, unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively demanded by the necessities of war;

attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended

And that you must:

In sieges and bombardments all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.

 

 

I do note that it is questionable whether or not the atomic bombs would actually qualify in this. The US did gave the Japanese opportunities to surrender, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained military targets (they were "defended"), and so forth. 

The atomic bomb was definitely not designed to cause unneccessary suffering in that sense either. 

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On 10/18/2018 at 5:58 PM, Serious Callers Only said:

That just means they wanted to target a primarily civilian city but backed out of Kyoto for optics. Nagasaki was a war crime and a enormous one. They could just as easily waited a month and bombed mount fujii with 3 bombs or something, hard to misread that message (in fact a symbolic gesture like that should have been done before Hiroshima, but i guess that when you're firebombing everyday symbolic gestures with million dollars worth weapons are considered crazy).

 

Nagasaki was not a civilian target. It was a major shipbuilding centre and military port. (though it wasn't the primary target, Kokura was, but the weather was bad so they changed it) But none of the potential targets were "undefended" (by as defined by the laws of war) or civilian targets, they all had military installations and infrastructure. 

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On 10/18/2018 at 6:33 PM, Serious Callers Only said:

Yeah, well, just like Caligula was smeared as a criminal for (allegedly) burning Rome down, i can criticize a government as racist when they (truthfully) decide to drop two annihilation bombs on two major cities instead of doing the honorable thing from a position they held all the cards and strength and enemy defeat was inevitable.

The US just decided to keep doing their fire-bombings and why not add another city to the toll. Did it make Japan surrender faster? Maybe, but not doing it wouldn't exactly make the USA invade faster and lose 'american lives', which is the inane argument used by apologists and a demonstration that wasn't built on mass murder wasn't even considered.

Just how many assets did imperial japan have on those islands that a certain revisionist segment of the USA public harps on and was it 'really' incredibly urgent to make Japan surrender right now before they do some crazy guerrilla attack with 20 guys with no fuel or other supplies from dumbfuck desert island to fortified position 36?

On the other hand i can readily accept that those people were better than the shitstains today. Today, Japan would not get the reconstruction. Those days we didn't have the fascist memeplex running on fox news selling state aid and reconstruction as handouts instead of the immensely valuable soft power investments they were.

 

The problem here is that you are assuming perfect knowledge. Yes, the US could simply wait, but given the situation it's actually unclear if that would have lead to less deaths. (and the US government did pretty much continously press the japanese to surrender, so it wasn't just a one-off thing) 

 

What you might have missed is that the US had (or was in the process of) dismantling most of Japan's food production. (most of Japan's shipping capacity was sunk, and the continuing strain of the war was likely to make a harvest difficult) even historically the '45-'46 winter lead to tens of thousnads of death from famine and starvation (and this was despite US forces providing large amounts of grain during the occupation, the same was true in Germany btw, though to a lesser extent) US estimates (by the planning commission) estimated that had the war continued (and thus no relief been brought) the death toll could have reached millions. 

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