Say it a little louder for all the dipshits trying to argue that a trump presidency would be better for Gaza than Biden is.
Why aren’t the “But Biden!” people in this thread? It’s so very strange they seem to be absent (no, it really isn’t).
I feel like the narrative surrounding the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings has changed enormously since I was a kid.
I remember learning that, while tragic, the number of lives lost in the bombing paled in comparison to the numbers of lives being lost and that would be lost in winning the war by conventional means. That it was a way to minimize further bloodshed.
I’m not super well read on the subject, but is that not true? Or, if it is true, does it not matter?
I’m mostly just trying to figure out what caused the shift.
Back in HS, I think I was told that it was a regrettable ending and we probably went a bit overboard.
I highly recommend this video from Shaun on the matter. It’s long but you can listen to it instead of watching it and you won’t miss much. Excellent video on this subject that really put a lot of the propaganda around the bombing in a new light.
I remember watching it. The problem with the video is that they seriously overestimate the willingness of the Japanese to surrender without giving any evidence to back this up. The Japanese were absolutely not willing to surrender. I mean, just look at their reaction after Hiroshima. There was a lot of debate AFTER an entire city had been razed to the ground. Japan was absolutely not going to surrender without a nuke being dropped.
The Japanese were attempting to negotiate surrender with the “neutral” USSR prior to the nuclear bombs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan The US wanted an unconditional surrender which included the destruction of the Japanese emperor, who at the time, was the head of the Japanese religion. To put this into perspective, consider the United States request similar to requesting the destruction of the Pope within the Vatican. Because of this, the Japanese were seeking better terms of surrender which did not involved the removal of their religious leader. What the Japanese did not know at the time was the USSR was not a neutral party, and they were secretly mobilizing their forces on mainland Asia due to an agreement Stalin made with FDR prior to the US entering the war in Europe.
The reality is, once Japan learned that the USSR was not neutral and they were going to be fighting the US and the USSR in a two front war, this is when the emperor forced Japan to surrender.
To put things into perspective, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were sadly, just another two cities leveled by the US. The US were performing night carpet bombing on Japanese cities as soon as 1944. Many of these raids leveled several square km of urban areas. https://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=217. This is why people argue that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were probably not the catalyst to Japan’s surrender because the US have been leveling Japanese cities, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens, long before the two nuclear bombs were dropped. None of these raids caused Japan to surrender before.
Yikes 2 hours and 20 minutes. I’ll try to watch as much as I can today, but probably can’t get through the whole thing. Any high points I should watch?
Been a while since I watched it, like I said I’d recommend listening to it. Treat it like a podcast, for me the time flew by and I ended up listening to every video he has over the following weeks. 😂
I wasn’t planning on spending my morning watching a 2 and a half hour YouTube video, but here we are and that’s exactly what happened. That was a fascinating watch. I’d say for others that the TLDW is this:
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The narrative that the atomic bombs were dropped to prevent an invasion of Japan is false and was constructed afterwards as a plausible and easy to understand solution that allowed all parties (both the US and Japan) to come out looking good in the end.
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The reality of the situation was much more complicated. At the time, there was never a US plan to invade Japan.
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Japan was already thoroughly defeated militarily and was looking to negotiate a surrender. Japan was hoping that Russia would be useful to negotiate peace with the US.
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The US had previously asked Russia to enter the war, but then later realized it was not necessary to bring about an end to the war. The US actually realized having Russia involved would complicate the post-war logistics and would bolster Russia as a world super power. When sending terms of surrender to Japan, the US removed Russia as a signer of the terms, leaving Japan a false hope that Russia could still be used help them secure better terms.
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Russia informed the US that they would be declaring war with Japan on August 15. The US dropped the bombs on Japan a week earlier in hopes of accelerating Japan’s surrender before Russia entered the war.
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As a result, Russia declared war on Japan in the days between the bombs being dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Japan issued their surrender shortly afterwards. In all likelihood, dropping the bombs accelerated the surrender timeline by about a week. Though it could be argued that had Russia’s signature been kept on the surrender terms sent to Japan, it would have also ended the war earlier.
Isn’t he fantastic? His videos are so well-researched and well-written that I’d listen to his vaguely monotonous scouse voice talk about pretty much anything.
Yeah it really was a good watch. The length and minimal use of graphics at first were intimidating, but he still kept it interesting so it was easy to absorb.
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It depends whether you think killing 200,000+ civilians is a defensible act.
300,000+ if you include the bombing of Tokyo.
Nobody knows how a conventional war would have played out. To assert civilian deaths would have been higher is pure speculation and a gross attempt to justify the slaughter of noncombatants.
Though it is likely that even without nukes, the US would have still razed these cities with conventional munitions, given the events in Tokyo.
There is a book I liked about this, it is about Allied civilian bombing in WWII in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Dead_Cities
It’s by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, needless to say ‘Responses were divided.’
I highly recommend this video from Shaun on the matter. It’s long but you can listen to it instead of watching it and you won’t miss much. Excellent video on this subject that really put a lot of the propaganda around the bombing in a new light.
There’s also the possibility that because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons have never since been used. What would cold war been like in that case?
The cognitive dissonance is fascinating. The Hammas attack on 10/7 is all but universally condemned in public discourse because civillians were targeted. Even die-hard militant anti-Zionists will not attempt to justify the Hammas attacks because they know it will only turn the public against them. When a brown force attacks civillians, it is terrorism and reviled.
Here on lemmy.world condemnation of Israel’s indiscriminant bombing is also prevalent. Maybe 5%-10% of commenters support Israel’s conduct. But of the at least eight people who have expressed an opinion on nuking Japan here in this thread, roughly 75% of them defend it as justifiable and no one has outright said it was wrong.
There are over 100,000 American WWII veterans alive today. They saved the world from the Nazis. We love that for us. Coming out of WWII, we dove right into the cold war. We were battling the USSR for the hearts and minds of the globe. McCarthyism silenced internal criticism. We had no patience for second-guessing our actions in WWII. It was our patriotic duty to convince the world that ours was the side of freedom, democracy, and justice.
So for 80 years now our culture has been saturated with propaganda promoting our glorious, righteous role in WWII. You, your parents, and your parents’ parents have been told the same thing in school and have seen the same messages in TV, books, and movies. And I’m not saying it’s all a lie. Sure, the defeat of Hitler was a high point in American history. But our understanding of our role lacks any nuance or self-criticism. For example, the Russian front was arguably more crucial to the fall of Germany than the Western front. Churchill is hailed as a hero, but he was an antisemetic racist. E.g.:
WINSTON CHURCHILL published a newspaper article. It was February 8, 1920. Churchill had a different enemy now. Now his enemy wasn’t Germany, it was the “sinister confederacy” of international Jewry.
“This movement among the Jews is not new,” Churchill said. It was a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.” He listed Marx, Trotsky, Béla Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman as some of the malefactors. The conspiracy had been, he said, the “mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century.” It had played a recognizable part in the French Revolution. All loyal Jews, he advised, must “vindicate the honour of the Jewish name” by rejecting international bolshevism.
And:
“I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury on them,” Churchill wrote Trenchard. Churchill was an expert on the effects of mustard gas—he knew that it could blind and kill, especially children and infants. Gas spreads a “lively terror,” he pointed out in an earlier memo; he didn’t understand the prevailing squeamishness about its use: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” Most of those gassed wouldn’t have “serious permanent effects,” he said.
Churchill’s War Cabinet ignored the repeated pleas of the British colonial government in India for food aid, allowing between one and four million people to die of hunger in 1943 and 1944.
Churchill was a horrible person.
And likewise, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unconscionable acts of evil. It is never acceptable to target civillian populations. It wasn’t acceptable on 9/11/2001 or 10/7/2023 when brown Arabs did it, and it wasn’t acceptable when white Americans did it either.
This is obvious to anyone who wasn’t raised inside the Western bubble.
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My understanding is that even after Hiroshima, the Imperial Army attempted a coup to avoid surrender.
The Japanese were not stopping. The only alternative at hand was a full invasion, which would have killed many, many more.
Modern commentary on the use of nuclear weapons on Japan mostly conclude it was not necessary and that a full scale invasion would not have been necessary to force a full surrender.
What I find fascinating is how hyper focused everyone became on the nuclear bombs due to the spectacular nature of the technology, whereas things like the firebombing of Tokyo are discussed far less.
“The raids that were conducted by the U.S. military on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, are the single most destructive bombing raid in human history.[1] 16 square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.[1] The atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, by comparison, resulted in the immediate death of an estimated 70,000 to 150,000 people.”
My man, read the fucking room
Dude is illiterate regardless of the room he’s in.
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Back in 2017 or so, I had a full on MAGA coworker who was ecstatic about the migrant detention centers at the border. If anything, he felt we weren’t torturing them enough. One day, he dropped a line that was so heinous it still sticks with me to this day: “we used to do the same to the Japanese and no one cared about it then, so why is everyone up in arms about it now?”
All this to say I’m not at all surprised they’re saying this now. They’ve always felt this way, and they know how despicable it is.
Fwiw, the dude was a 50-something year old Israeli immigrant. He also joked about wanting to join the military to “practice on live targets”
I hate this timeline so much
“we used to do the same to the Japanese and no one cared about it then, so why is everyone up in arms about it now?”
Btw, people cared about it back then, especially the Japanese-Americans being interned.
One of the many shameful moments of American history conveniently left out of grade school history classes.
This was definitely mentioned multiple tribes even i was in school.
What’d you say back to him or do?
I knew better than to engage. The guy was a nutter. He got laid off shortly after that thankfully.
Bonus story about this fucker. When I adopted a dog, he told me that “in five years you won’t give a shit about the dog and will only care about your boyfriend”. Eight years later, my girlfriend and I co-parent the same dog like she’s our daughter.
Not to defend the viewpoint, but I assume he was referring to interment camps and not nuclear bombing. That would be more analogous to the border detentions.
Your coworker has serious mental health issues. I hate the party but I also hate that our mental health system won’t address the negative impact religion plays in forming negative views and that our laws prevent therapists and those in mental health from doing their actual jobs.
Or that a significant number of these “therapists” just push religion like it’s the solution. Disgusting.
I gotta give these people credit. It must take a massive amount of effort to try and be this consistently on the wrong side of history. Like, at some point, it has to be deliberate…
They think they’re on the right side of history. It’s 100% deliberate. They never admit they are wrong about anything because the thought is completely foreign to them. Right wing boomers absolutely believe they are 100% in the right on every single issue. They can’t even imagine they aren’t.
boomers
Why specifically call out people over 60 here…?
Because they vote republican by a large margin?
Looks like 35% republican vs 33% democrat (versus 32% “independent” who might all vote republican for all I know).
But there’s a lot of republicans under 60 too so not getting the point of the random ageism.
Lemmy is big on ageism and throwing around the word boomer (incorrectly.)
Which is funny since there are a lot of older people on Lemmy, who most likely do not agree with the Republican agenda.
Except the Senate actually is boomers. Average age over 60
Here’s one reason:
The average age of senators in the 118th Congress was 64 years old
The average age of the 118th Congress was 58 years old
The geriatric kleptocracy is a serious problem in the US.
So… he knows that… like… Israel would be in the blast radius and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv probably affected by a shit ton of radiation….
Its literally him
You assume that these guy know much about anything except corruption, graft, and drug fueled sex orgies.
At Farmers, they know a thing or two about drug fueled sex orgies.
Nevermind all the other obvious reasons this is terrible but I’m sure Egypt would have some objections to being blasted by a nearby nuke.
He knows that he’s not the one who’s going to be pushing the button, but that his rabid out-for-blood base won’t even think about that. He’s just throwing them meat.
“The left are the real violent racists! Anyway, we should nuke Gaza. Filthy animals.”
-Magamorons
You can’t be a racist if they’re not real humans!
Israel is rumored to have tactical nukes that are much smaller yield than the large ICBMs we hear about all the time. Super destructive force in only 1 or 2 km blast radius, which would even fit inside a small area like Gaza. Of course, in addtition to devastating Gaza, there would still be fallout and issues over Israel, and using them in this manner is definitely Not OK. However, I can believe that there are some deluded people in government (both in Israel and in the US) who would view that as acceptable.
Russia would immediately nuke them. It would be the end game for Israel. Hopefully they aren’t that stupid.
Russia wouldn’t get involved. Many of the Jewish Mafia reside in Israel and are essential to maintaining Putin’s power in the country. Russia in many ways would be more inclined to encourage Israel to use nukes to cause destabilization in US politics.
Ghouls like him love Israel, it’s just all those… you know, those people who live there
Maybe the cunt is waiting for suitable wind direction before nuking.
These are End Times cultists we are dealing with, the more death and destruction the better so daddy Jesus can come back and punish their enemies. Pathetic sick weak minds.
How fucking Christian of him. Jesus would be sooooo fucking proud.
I can’t hardly take them or anyone that tosses the xtian mythology around. Why should we? History hasn’t shown us a “god”. Only shifty humans arguing over imaginary friends.
Can we stop letting them in positions of power already? They obviously aren’t fit for leadership or power.
That’s because he’s a performative Christian, or “Christian.” He doesn’t believe in anything unless it help him get ahead in life - just like most politicians and other moderate-to-high functioning psychopaths and sociopaths.
I mean, he’s not wrong, he’s just an asshole. By most historians accounts, Fat Man and Little Boy caused less death than an actual war with Japan would have.
They were also retaliatory strikes after a direct attack on an American base, at the tail end of a global conflict, and we just got a new toy. The bomb was basically telling Japan to fuck off with their bullshit, and it did a pretty good job of it.
That doesn’t make it the right answer, per se. Glassing the strip probably would net less death and destruction than continuing the genocide or especially allowing it to escalate more. I still have a hard time calling that “the good choice”
And what happens after the glass hardens? We all gonna be honky dory or is somebody else gonna star lobbing nukes?
Um, Actually, I would hardly call it settled or that most historians agree.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/debate-over-bomb-annotated-bibliography/
The senator continued to call the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “the right decision” by the U.S. That decision ended the war with Japan, but killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians between the initial blasts and the deadly radiation that followed.
“Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war they can’t afford to lose, and work with them to minimize casualties,” Graham insisted.
He didn’t directly suggest nuking Gaza, but he made multiple parallels between ending the war in Japan by using nukes and then basically says we should give bombs to Israel to finish the job without specifying what he means.
So while someone might argue black and white letter of what he said isn’t “nuke Gaza”, he’s still implying something along those lines - the quick finish and a method that can do it.
He is, in fact, saying “nuke Gaza”, just in a way that allows him to deny it.
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When his male lover is revealed, it will be a glorious day.
It’ll never happen. He’s doing exactly what they want gay people to do, being “decently” quiet about it.
what exactly will be glorious about that in your mind?
Hypocrisy.
when has that ever mattered to a republican?
Exactly
Nuke Jerusalem; piss off everyone. It’s the only truly even-handed action.
Hit Mecca, Medina, and Haifa as well to really piss off all the Abrahamic religions.
And Rome to piss off the pastafarians (and Catholics some more too)
Nothing of value would be lost
I wasn’t aware vaporizing thousands of years of human history would be “nothing of value” being lost.
Which is also to say nothing of value being lost when the people who still live in those historic cities are also vaporized.
Lemmy really goes full “cut off your nose to spite your face” if they find out that face might be even slightly associated with religion
Calm down Francis, it’s fucking joke.
Jokes are typically supposed to be at least somewhat funny.
Lindsey is part of the swamp. He’s a Christian Zionist, a doomsday Christian. These types of Christians want to hasten the Day of Judgement. Pretty much they’re psychopaths thanks to the Scofield Reference Bible.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why, if you believe in Christian Mythology, even to the point of wanting Judgement Day to come during your lifetime, why you would personally take efforts that you know are going to end in mass civilian deaths.
Assuming you are right and Judgement Day is on the horizon, are you not damning yourself to the deepest pits of Hell by spending your time leading up to the Rapture ordering the slaughter of innocent people, rather than say glorifying and spreading the word of God?
I don’t believe in any of it, but if I did, I sure wouldn’t be advocating for mass-murder right before God shows up to judge me for the way I lived my life on Earth.
Number one rule of Christian Narcissism: That rule was written for the others. It doesn’t apply to me. I’m not doing anything wrong.
I am christian because I say I am, therefor everything I do is christian and thus righteous.
You are giving them way too much credit. Any combination of “god wants me to” with “God works in mysterious ways” and “the will of God is 100% infallibly and unerringly good” can justify pretty much any heinous act you can think of.
I agree with you 100%. In my belief, it is God who wills when Judgement Day comes. It is not the will of a human. Christians and Zionists together think they can some how bypass the will of God.
I’m getting a little tired of people using “Zionist” when they actually mean “Jew”. Jews don’t even have a “judgement day” or even the concept of Hell for that matter, so I quite frankly have no fucking clue what you think you are saying here…
If you have criticism of religion, go for it. If you have criticism of a nation, go for it. But one by one I keep watching people like you knock down the “criticism of Israel isn’t antisemitic” house of cards by making it clear you don’t see a difference between an Israel apologist and a Jew, and are just using the term “Zionists” as a placeholder for “Jews” so you can make weird blanket statements about Jews…
I wasn’t criticizing Jews exclusively. If I want to criticize a Jew or a group of Jews, I will. Idgaf quite frankly.
Judaism =/= Zionism. I’m criticizing the secular political ideology in which cherry picks from Judaism and incorporates it into it’s political ideology. Some of the things they cherry pick when it comes to human relations… is pretty fkin Nazi-like, who am I kidding… worst than Nazi’s treatment of their opposition. Reference the Talmud regarding gentiles.
Neturei Karta is the only Torah practicing Jews that I recognize as my brethren. Because they actually practice the teachings of the Torah. If you’re a “practicing Jew” in Israel… you’re doing it wrong. Not because I say so, because your Torah says so.
I bet they would be off the rails no matter of the literature choices
I can’t reinforce the idea enough that they believe god is eal and that they can trick a prophecy to being fulfilled by naming a british colony “Israel”.
The biblical Israel is long gone and the current Israel is obviously a different state; you can “fulfill the prophecies” the same way by naming your dog “the kingdom of Israel”
This should disqualify him from ever holding office again. I know it won’t, but it should.
Couldn’t ask for a better positioning of titles.
There’s really no reason to ever report on or pay attention to things Lindsay Graham says. He has no real values or stands of his own. He is a spineless jellyfish that goes with the tide wherever it allows him to keep the most power.
I have never seen any evidence of him ever voicing and sticking to an actual personal belief.
On the other hand, we should keep outing these Nazis whenever we can so that the decent part of society doesn’t collectively forget who punched down and who punched up.
Also, social consequences are IMPORTANT for fighting fascism. Making them feel unwelcome at every table, every party, every workplace, EVERYWHERE is a time-tested and actually fairly effective way to fight the spread of fascist thought. It won’t get rid of the most entrenched, the true believers - but it can help the knock-on effect of “hey maybe that guy has a real point”.
In case you’re wondering, these religious freaks believe that they can force Jesus to return by instigating WW3. So long as Israel is involved, they consider that to be fulfilling prophecy; and the nuclear, the better. I’m sure some of them even consider Trump to be the actual Antichrist, while as usual, most of them think it’s whoever the Democrats have in office.
its also stupid because old country of Israel is gone and making a new colony and calling Israel also isn’t fulfilling a prophecy - its cosplaying. Might as well call your dog “Israel” and say it fulfills the prophecy
Well, if they continue this way, we all may get to know Jesus together pretty soon
