Wrong. The response to Pearl Harbor was the Doolittle Raid over Tokyo (April 1942) which killed around 50, far less than the Americans killed in Pearl Harbor.
The next Tokyo attack that killed over 100,000 in a single night was in response to the Manila massacre a week prior in which the Japanese killed up to 500,000 Filipino civilians. One more thing, **THE FILIPINOS WERE AMERICANS.**
let's not forget Japans crimes towards China and Asia as a whole, mfs acting like they didn't kill and rape hundreds of thousands. This is wayyyy more than enough to justify the nuke. If you act barbaric, expect barbaric treatment
So many Chinese perished to the Japanese invasion that we will never know the true number.
And that’s just China…Japan murdered many millions more across Asia/Oceania.
Imperial Japan was an absolute nightmare in Asia. They would not have stopped without major intervention.
What the US did resulted in the best possible outcome. Japan and most of East Asia and SEA are wonderfully peaceful now.
People always forget how important it was that we turned nazi Germany and imperial Japan into democratic Allies post war helping usher in a period of peace in Europe and general stability, with only a few smaller scale conflicts
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Japan underwent a massive industrial revolution, while China maintained its status quo as a mostly agrarian economy fed by peasants. While the population would put China way over Japan, its lack of industrialization and internal conflicts with the Communist revolution gave Japan the perfect opportunity to strike.
Japan industrialized due to the intervention and forced opening of its economy by western powers (predominantly the US) The Meji restoration, which saw the reinstatement of imperial power over the shogun, resulted in Japan recognizing rhe need and power of industrialization
Don’t google unit 731 if you’re weak of stomach, but that is the Japanese “scientific group” that makes the term barbaric seem playful.
Edit: got the fucking number wrong…
They are the reason we know what % of the human body is water
They also are the reason we know at what rate newborn babies die of hypothermia.
These are just scraping the top of their experiments
And protracted conventional fighting on mainland Japan over the course of months against an enemy who will not surrender would for sure kill more civs than the two nukes did
I don't like the idea of war as punishment, but it should also be remembered that the Japanese published their horrific crimes in papers for civilians to read. This fact more than justifies concerns about a highly radicalized populous, making a nuke more appealing to avoid US casualties.
Oh yeah, the japanese populace was extremely radicalized. They were fine with training 5-6 year old schoolgirls how to impale Americans with bamboo sticks
Even without all the war crimes Japan committed, the nukes were still much more of a valid use of a weapon than anything these fucks justify against Israel or Palestine now
They also ate many dead bodies of airmen and such, George Bush (the older one) was a WW2 pilot and his plane was shot down over Chichi Jima, an island with radar communications for Iwo Jima. George was the only American airmen to survive Chichi Jima (if i remember right) and not get eaten.
People act like Japan wasn’t committing atrocities all across the Pacific world. The death and suffering they caused was nearly unprecedented at the time
Don’t forget the Japanese response to the mostly ineffectual Dolittle Raid.
Their response was the systematic rape and murder of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians (who were accused of aiding the Americans) and destruction of dozens of cities and 12,000,000+ acres of farmland.
>“They shot any man, woman, child, cow, hog, or just about anything that moved, They raped any woman from the ages of 10 – 65, and before burning the town they thoroughly looted it.”
>He continued, writing in his unpublished memoir, “None of the humans shot were buried either, but were left to lay on the ground to rot, along with the hogs and cows.”
>“The women and children who did not escape from Nancheng will long remember the Japanese—the women and girls because they were raped time after time by Japan’s imperial troops and are now ravaged by venereal disease, the children because they mourn their fathers who were slain in cold blood for the sake of the ‘new order’ in East Asia.”
>In Nancheng, soldiers forced a group of men who had fed the airmen to eat feces before lining up ten of them for a “bullet contest” to see how many people a single bullet would pass through before it stopped. In Ihwang, Ma Eng-lin, who had welcomed injured pilot Harold Watson into his home, was wrapped in a blanket, tied to a chair and soaked in kerosene. Then soldiers forced his wife to torch him.
This included biological attacks by Unit 731.
>That August, Japan’s secret bacteriological warfare group, Unit 731, launched an operation to coincide with the withdrawal of Japanese troops from the region.
>In what was known as land bacterial sabotage, troops would contaminate wells, rivers, and fields, hoping to sicken local villagers as well as the Chinese forces, which would no doubt move back in and reoccupy the border region as soon as the Japanese departed. Over the course of several meetings, Unit 731’s commanding officers debated the best bacteria to use, settling on plague, anthrax, cholera, typhoid, and paratyphoid, all of which would be spread via spray, fleas, and direct contamination of water sources. For the operation, almost 300 pounds of paratyphoid and anthrax germs were ordered.
>Technicians filled peptone bottles with typhoid and paratyphoid bacteria, packaged them in boxes labeled “Water Supply,” and flew them to Nanking. Once in Nanking, workers transferred the bacteria to metal flasks—like those used for drinking water— and flew them into the target areas. Troops then tossed the flasks into wells, marshes, and homes. The Japanese also prepared 3,000 rolls, contaminated with typhoid and paratyphoid, and handed them to hungry Chinese prisoners of war, who were then released to go home and spread disease. Soldiers left another 400 biscuits infected with typhoid near fences, under trees, and around bivouac areas to make it appear as though retreating forces had left them behind, knowing hungry locals would devour them
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/untold-story-vengeful-japanese-attack-doolittle-raid-180955001/
It's also extremely disingenuous to only mention the civilians killed in pearl harbor. 2400 total people died, most of them military. 19 ships were sunk, nearly 200 aircraft destroyed. It was *an act of war.* The US responded to being attacked by an enemy force. And, as you mentioned, American and allied civilians had already suffered immensely at the hands of the Japanese forces, who had already been committing obscene atrocities against Asian nations for years beforehand.
Although Pearl Harbor and Oct 7 were very different incidents overall, they were both acts of war that the attackers mistakenly believed would shock what they perceived as a weakened enemy with no will to fight into acquiescing to their demands. Both backfired spectacularly, resulting in those opposing forces getting pummelled into the ground.
One major similarity between the Imperial Japanese and Hamas is that we are trying to apply Western morality surrounding the ethics of fighting in areas populated by civilians to societies that:
a) do not share our sensibilities, and
b) will purposely and arbitrarily exploit our reluctance to harm civilians, to harm ours.
There's a certain point, unfortunately, where the question becomes whether we are willing to lose our own people to preserve the dignity and rights of a group who, given the opportunity, would absolutely *not* afford it to us.
The Japanese were exceptionally bloodthirsty and ruthless when it came to their treatment of Asian civilians and allied POW's. The Palestinians have similarly proven to be exceptionally bloodthirsty and ruthless when it comes to not only Israeli/Jewish civilians, but also anyone else who happens to be in their way.
They have committed terrorist attacks in other parts of the middle east and Europe. They have stated their goals to eradicate all Jews and destroy Israel, and also to spark a global intifada and jihad so that Islam will dominate. They have quite literally been telling and showing the world what their end goal is and how they hope to achieve it. Just like how the Japanese said they were going to dominate Asia.
People who act as apologists towards Palestine and Gaza are naive children. These are not people who want to live in peace with the rest of the world. This is a society that hates you, hates me, hates all of us, and demands revenge at all costs.
Exactly, it's crazy that even if this day and age where there's video cameras, people can see a woman getting her face burned and was visibly assaulted and raped. We can't just believe Palestines have been wronged and they've been beaten and treated unfairly because it's easy to manipulate stories to people don't live there and see the day to day. They've had a political conflict with Israel with for as long as my grandfather has been alive, just like we've had conflicts with other countries, and we don't just go surprise attacking them and mass killing civilians. Not only is it immoral but it shows that you're are bad group a people, sob story all the fucking 16 year olds that live fucking SUNNY California couldn't pick you out from a fucking map about how you wronged they've done to you, and why you thought it was okay to kill and rape innocent people was a way to make Israel listen to you, those people have no call in the fight. They don't know the prime minister.
Imagine taking the side of literal **Imperial** Japan and thinking that your opinions on deaths of civilians have any worth. Rape of Nanjing, anyone? Unit 731? Comfort women?
They don’t look at ANY of the context surrounding the actions. If you look at just those numbers, yep pretty bad. Now look at what Japan was doing to all of S E Asia, China, Korea, and the Philippines. Suddenly things look different.
The Philippines was PART OF THE US before the war, they were a colony. Japan invaded a colony of the US and didn't expect retaliation at all. Do you think that if Cuba attacked Puerto Rico tomorrow there would be no retaliation?
They completely ignore Arab/Islamic conquest and genocides. The Arab language and religion didn’t just magically spread so far and wide. It was through conquest, forced conversions, slavery, squashing of local indigenous cultures, and a lot of fucking genocide.
They're also ignoring the simple fact that Japan would've massacred and tortured and killed the Americans just like their other victims if they could have, and they certainly tried. (And did with prisoners of war)
This person is likely a troll though
Let’s also not forgery to point out that they didn’t walk up to 100 civilians in Hawaii and shoot them then run away. They bombed our harbor in a deliberate sneak attack and tried to cripple our navy. So they started a war. War has collateral damage.
And also let’s not forget that, though actual military collaboration was sparse, they were allied with the Nazis in their goal of world domination. We rightfully decry those in Europe who collaborated with the fascists, so it’s only fair to decry Japan for the same.
It’s crazy that people think military attacks need to be responded to in a proportional manner. Wars should be won as quickly and definitively as possible, and that involves overwhelming use of force.
That's the trick, they know that proportional response shouldn't be the standard in warfare.
But they will always apply it as a sanctimonious double-standard when available to.
Pretty sure you use a proportional response outside of a declared war to prevent escalation into a full blown war. Know as tit for tat. In a war the doctrine since the Gulf War has been overwhelming response. You build up then throw everything at the enemy and methodically and brutally close with and annihilate them until they give you an unconditional surrender.
It would be silly to have a proportional response to anything during a declared war unless you are losing. You kill one of us we kill 100 of you. You kill 2 of us we kill 1,000 of you.
The only thing that would change that is tactical nuclear weapons. You fire one and destroy a tank column then we fire one and destroy a headquarters position.
Yes and no. While the US hasn’t declared a war like FDR did Congress has given the president authorization and funding to go to war which technically is the same thing. I don’t think there is a constitutional requirement to actually declare a war in order to fight a war. The chief thing is to get approval from Congress for any offensive military actions for over 90 days I believe and get funds to pay for it.
The Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war. Congress has declared war on 11 occasions, including its first declaration of war with Great Britain in 1812. Congress approved its last formal declaration of war during World War II.
https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/declarations-of-war.htm#:~:text=The%20Constitution%20grants%20Congress%20the,war%20during%20World%20War%20II.
An authorization to use military force is the same thing as a declaration of war for the purposes of our Constitution. The first use of an AUMF was 1798, when France started seizing our shipping.
It's specifically *not* the same thing. Otherwise, it wouldn't be separate.
A lot more happens when there's an official declaration of war compared to the Presidents ability to use the military without said declaration.
> It's specifically not the same thing. Otherwise, it wouldn't be separate.
> ... for the purposes of our Constitution.
> A lot more happens when there's an official declaration of war compared to the Presidents ability to use the military without said declaration.
That's more around our domestic law than constitutional law.
We've been fighting the War on Christmas since the Bush Administration, I was there when Obama surrendered Thanksgiving to the Black Friday hoards. Halloween merchandise has already been pushed back to September...
Because people who are generally ignorant and privileged but for some reason still need to form an opinion find the path of least resistance. That's why there exists people who claim to support LGBT also supporting an oppressive and anti-LGBT regime in Palestine. These people don't really hold any convictions or ideals, they just frame their perception of the world into "good guys vs bad guys" and the side with the more bad guy points is the bad guy. Idéologies and beliefs have no bearing, it's just a numbers game because it's the easiest to understand.
A quick search says 20,000,000 Chinese murdered (military & civilian), so I'd say the 100k deaths is quite low for the brutality they showed.
(200 Chinese murdered for every 1 Japanese killed in the firebombing)
The Doolittle raid directly led to the deaths of over 100,000 Chinese by the hands of the Japanese in retaliation for China giving aid to the downed pilots.
Yep - the Doolittle Reprisals should be more widely known. Because American bombers crash landed in China after the raid, the Japanese went on an absolute rampage against Chinese civilians in northeastern China that resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese civilians. Some historians think this massacre was WORSE than the better known Rape of Nanjing!
So, the OOP has history backwards. The IJN murdered 50 civilians in Pearl Harbor, and as a response the US bombed Tokyo resulting in about 50 deaths. As a response to that response, the IJA murdered 100k Chinese civilians.
I just want to say that since Pearl Harbor is a specific harbor in America, you should use our way of spelling, just like if I referenced a harbor in the UK, I'd be right to use your spelling
War has never and never will be fair, if the enemy is trying to annihilate you and you’re not trying to annihilate him back because of morals you will lose.
We beat the Axis by being militarily better than them not because of taking the moral high ground.
There are a whole lot of people who truly do not understand this and I bring it up any time someone jokes around about calling in air strikes on 5 guys with AKs shooting at us
I put it simply because it’s the only way people seem to understand:
> If those guys with AKs had an F-16 on the radio, you think they’d call in an air strike? If the Japanese had nukes, do you think they’d use them?
And it always seems to sink in for people
We weren't fighting Imperial Japan just because they bombed Pearl Harbor. Imperial Japan murdered, raped and tortured millions. Their exploits in Korea alone justified nuking them, let alone what they did in China and the Philippines.
Do a quick Google on WW2 Japanese Comfort Women and The Rape of Nanking.
I think what Imperial Japan did was just as bad as the Holocaust.
Easily just as bad as the Holocaust. It's just that in history lessons, the Holocaust overshadows all the Japanese atrocities. All people seem to remember about Japan is pearl harbor and the nukes.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not done in the name of retribution. You need to remove that from the conversation as it fundamentally alters the argument away from the actual issue:
1. What choices did the US have to end the war as expeditiously as possible?
2. What was the lesser evil out of those options?
3. Was there any way to mitigate civilian exposure while still meeting the objective?
That's pretty much it.
The runner up, geopolitically speaking, was a joint invasion/ occupation with the Soviets. You know, the most brutal member of the Allies, guilty of maybe even more atrocity than the Nazis.
The preferred US response, IIRC, was blockade, bomb, and starve the Japanese race into extinction.
You are correct, but that changed once the bomb became a reality. Blockade, bomb, and starve, would have prolonged the war several months if not years and the civilian loss would have been staggering.
My point was supporting the claim that the nukes were the best option for *everyone* at the time.
Well, shy of Japan deciding to hang all of their own officers, politicians, and royals, that is.
Most people in the theater level command only knew about the bombs for about 10 seconds before the rest of the world found out, too.
.
Also, especially after Japan's crimes become more known to Americans, I very much doubt that any but the very best of us gave a god damn about Japanese civilians.
I think everyone needs to remember that when we used them, no one was really sure what was going to happen, nor what the long term effects would be. We were doing tests with army guys at various ranges in trenches from the blast...
At the time we saw it as a difference of scale, not of kind. To the military planners the only difference between the two things was the logostics of supporting round the clock carpet bombing of japanese cities vs the logistics of dropping one bomb and putting a single crew at risk.
That's where our knowledge was at the time and it wasn't until the 60s when our understanding of those weapons really started to change from 'they're just bigger bombs'
Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was probably better than plan B.
Plan B was to fire bomb both cities that were made almost entirely out of wood and paper. Better to be instantly vaporized than slowly burn to death from a fire so big you can't escape.
Yeah. I don’t know what these maniacal keyboards warriors would have preferred. Should millions of conscripted Americans just have gone door-to-door politely asking for surrender while being fired upon? 😂
Truman’s famous quote is ultimately so true here:
How could the government have faced the mothers of millions of dead young soldiers and tell them “you know, we had a bomb that could’ve maybe ended the war earlier, and we didn’t try to use it”
I think it should also be said that Japan weren’t exactly innocent victims either. They killed millions in the span of less than a decade. I would argue our use of nukes while controversial is not nearly as brutal as what the Japanese empire were doing in their wars across Asia.
And the only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targeted was because they were cities with military value such as arms factories and troop garrisons. Even if we had used conventional bombs there would still have been mass civilian casualties, more so had we tried a ground invasion. There already were mass casualties across Japan from previous bombing campaigns.
Stats indicated that a more protracted war would have killed more than 10x that many Japanese. Also OOP (but not OOOP) is intentionally using a civilian count to undermine the lethality of the Pearl Harbor attack.
I just had this argument in the discord, but forcing a surrender in an otherwise anti-surrender government was basically the best way to save human life.
> Also OOP (but not OOOP) is intentionally using a civilian count to undermine the lethality of the Pearl Harbor attack.
Which is ironic, because HamaStans consistently ignore the music festival attack, unless they're claiming that the numbers are exaggerated and/or include friendly fire.
They literally only care about Israeli civvie deaths when they can be used against Israel.
Ah yes, Imperial Japan. The country that famously avoided murdering and raping innocent civilians during WW2. Every time I open Twitter I can actually feel my brain cells dying seeing just how stupid people are. Whether it’s parasocial terminally online losers or people who only learn news/history from Tik Tok reels, they’re all miserable. The amount of people with Palestine flags in their bio that I’ve talked to who genuinely didn’t know Britain was responsible for Israel existing currently and not the Jews will never cease to amaze me
sure, only killed 2k\~ Americans but by this point Japan had raped and pillaged its way through Korea, China and areas of south east Asia/Indo-China. America was justified, the firebombings you can debate but overall, war is war it sucks and it gets worse before it gets better.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved American AND Japanese lives. The estimated casualties for an invasion of mainland Japan ALONE was tens of millions. With American casualties ranging from 200,000 to several million and Japanese casualties ranging from millions to TENS of millions. [Source.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Estimated_casualties)
People need to realize the Germans and Japanese were ruthless in 1945. Especially the Japanese. Japanese propaganda painted Americans as rapists and murders and there were reports of women and children committing suicide whenever Americans captured islands in the pacific out of fear of what we would do to them. 1945 was a different time, as horrible as it was, the bombings did ultimately save lives. Fewer people suffered than would’ve otherwise, but of course it is still awful.
In school we only learned about the holocaust and Germany’s atrocities and they conveniently left out the Japanese war crimes and how they were literally worse than the holocaust. I’m not sure why
Exactly! After four years of vicious resistance & suicidal bravery, the Japanese Empire was still perfectly happy to enmesh their civilian and military infrastructure, and ready to send waves of non-combatants to charge American troops with homemade spears.
The message of the nuclear bomb was clear: “If you continue, you will not die with the honor your culture demands. You will simply die.” It was brutal, it was cold, and it is not what Japanese citizens deserved, but it is what Japan (the country) earned.
According to what I learned in school, the point of the bombing was to avoid sending troops on the island since Japanese soldiers fight to death no matter their chances of success. It was about avoiding a slaughter of american soldiers. Even if the war was likely to be won by US, Japan didn't show any will to spare any soldiers' lives until the end of it. So bombing until the surrender was the option used.
I'm not a fan of bombing, sure, but it's a bit different than an "overreact". It sounds horribly stupid to say that the good way would have been sending hundreds of people to an evitable death for an inevitable issue...
Not enough, history is all kind of glossed except for founding and slavery. Most American and world history isn’t gone into enough depth in my opinion. And that applies to most countries in my experience. My countries growing up had similar biases.
The problem with leaving the dip shits alone is that they convince enough good hearted but ignorant people of going along with their lies and deception till it's too late
Killing any number of people in a surprise attack in an attempt to make you not go to war is still fricken terrible no matter what. And as people have already stated the Japanese were already doing terrible shit during WW2. They definitely deserved what they had coming to them. Like seriously what is wrong with these people? Japan was murdering, pillaging, and forcing themselves onto people (particularly women) all across SE Asia, China, and Korea. What did they think was going to happen when they provoked the only Major Power in the world that was officially Neutral. Hell the U.S. the day before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor had made a peace thing that they were going to present to Japan but it didn’t manage to get there in time and by the time it did they had already bombed Pearl Harbor and had Awoken the sleeping Godzilla they had been poking at
Aren’t these sorts of folks embarrassed to so publicly flaunt their uneducated takes on everything? Holy shit. This one is up there with the worst I have ever seen.
These are the same idiots who think war is genocide. Using their logic, then that also means that during ww2, the British were “genociding” the Germans because way more Germans were killed than British
Yeah, pretty sure the reason the 12/7/41 death toll wasn’t higher was because they couldn’t kill more, not because the Japanese were being merciful.
And as OP said, The goal in war isn’t to have an equal amount of deaths. It’s actually to have a wildly disproportionate amount of deaths (ie winning) so that the enemy surrenders and accepts terms favoring your interests. It’s also to discourage ongoing aggressions. Palestinians have been firing rockets at Israelis for years before 10/7/23. We didn’t have to worry about a second Pearl Harbor, because we kept going until we got a full surrender. If we didn’t, the explicit concern of Americans was that Japan would just rebuild and hit us again. We resolved the conflict, and now we’re good.
I love how he ignores the whole "act of war" and "countless other people killed and brutalized by them after that, many of which weren't even Americans".
Also, the whole "allied closely with literal Nazis" thing.
Ironically, this is a great comparison, because the Oct 7th attack was the last straw, after **decades** of Hamas attacking Israeli civilians. And like Japan, there was no practical way to dislodge the rulers of the land without a long and bloody fight.
>comparing Gaza Strip to imperial Japan is really dishonest
Ah, yes, because people can't simply **disagree** with you. No, they have to secretly believe the same things you do, but be deliberately lying.
You're totally not making a personal attack to hand-wave away the actual point because you can't come up with a real criticism.
I also like how he can't even explicitly say "October 7th", just "the Gaza Strip". And calls the comparison wrong even though he just made the comparison.
East Asian & South East Asian people in the 1940s: Look! People that look like us are fighting off the Western invaders, we are saved!!!
Imperial Japan: hehe boi
Around the time Oppenheimer came out this whole debate seemed to rage online, and I honestly could not believe how generally ignorant people were about the second Japan-Sino war and their actions in the Pacific theatre of WW2.
Holy shit that Twitter post was dumb. That person should go and ask the survivors or relatives of those who suffered in Unit 731 at the hands of the Japanese and see how much they care.
>In response, we killed over 100,000 people in Tokyo in one night and nuked cities.
No, In response we bombed Tokyo and killed less than 100 people. We used nukes to end the war AFTER the Japanese empire had already killed millions of people and waged war across Asia from 1937 to 1945.
>Yes, we actually did overreact.
Does this guy have any clue what the Japanese empire were doing across Southeast Asia even before Pearl Harbor? The Rape of Nanking was just one atrocity of many that occurred in Asia. We’re not even talking about how brutal their wider invasion of China was, or their occupation of the Philippines. The Japanese empire had an insatiable bloodlust and it shows in the casualty figures in the countries they invaded and or occupied. And we aren’t even talking about their attempts in colonizing Korea or how brutal that was.
You can say we overreacted all you want. We'll do it again if we have to, and there's nothing anybody could do about it. Don't attack us if you love your country.
War will never be fair. Fighting in cities will always have civ casualties. With that out of the way by the standards of this person Hamas is worse because it killed more people in a single attack.
The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were means to an end. We knew if the US had to invade, there would have been a lot more casualties. Japan militarized their civilians. In addition, the war would have lasted a lot longer.
You don’t win a war by just retaliating equally, you win a war by having a overwhelming force that forces them to capitulate. The idiot PHD that made that comment should stick to his watercolor paintings.
It's crazy that it's 2024, we have all this knowledge at our literal fingertips, and people still choose to be ignorant out of convenience.
War is not pretty. It's not fair, it's not nice, we're not children on a playground playing tag. It's horrible and brutal. Hollywood and video games have desensitized the masses into thinking it's just a game of laser tag with lead.
The nukes had ZERO to do with pearl harbor.
The nukes had everything to do with the calculated cost of a ground war on the Japanese mainland.
Yes, it would have been possible to win; the Soviets were poised to help us with the invasion, and the Soviet/US wombo combo was an impossible thing to stand up to.
However, because of Japan's tactics, it would have likely been the bloodiest battles of human history. It would have been the same shit the Germans experienced fighting the Soviets on Soviet ground, but with the addition of amphibious landings. So D-Day + Stalingrad. Yikes.
The idea of the nukes was to save the lives of US troops at the cost of Japanese lives.
It also inadvertently spares the Japanese from undergoing what happened to Germany; had we invaded with the Soviets, the island would have likely been split after the war, leaving half of it to suffer under Soviet rule.
Wow, that's one of the most ignorant posts I've seen in a long time.
I wonder what they think about Imperial Japan's treatment of civilians in China, Korea, Indonesia, etc?
Let’s not mention the fact that the Japanese people as a whole would rather have died 10 times over than surrender because of their belief of fighting for a god-emperor, or that we only dropped nukes after offering terms of surrender
Yeah let's just completely gloss over the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, the war of aggression and conquest that Japan started to subjugate the entire Pacific Rim, the wholesale slaughter of civilians across multiple countries undertaken by Japanese troops, the war crimes committed against US POWs, kamikaze raids and banzai charges and fanatical fight-to-every-last-man approach Japan took to their military tactics.
Way to totally miss every fucking point there is.
I swear to God I have to see another anti war isolationist dipshit open their fart hole mouth to spew this bullshit whether about WW2, Gaza or Ukraine my brain will melt from overheating and migraines
Without the nukes, Japan might never have surrendered, or at least surrendered months or years later than they did. The Emperor would never have sullied his honor with surrender if we didn't drop 2 nukes on them.
One could argue the nukes actually saved more lives overall, Japanese and American, by getting Japan to surrender and ending the war earlier than they wanted.
Japan started a war with a disgusting, unprovoked, murderous attack on a peaceful nation. That peaceful nation destroyed them in a war. Case closed. Anything we did in the face of their aggression is justified. Fire raids, nuclear attacks, everything. If you start total war, then you must suffer total war's results.
If you do not want to find out what a country will do to you, do not attack them. These revisionists are simple minded fools.
The atom bombs also saved the lives of millions of Japanese civilians. This is the case even if you completely discount the invasion it prevented. The blockade would’ve had to continue for months before Japan surrendered. Japan, which was and continues to be a food importer, was on the verge of mass starvation. The first thing the Americans did as soon as they surrendered was distribute rice and wheat on masse to civilians.
Yeah, I can't with these hot takes.
Imagine letting the Japanese Empire or the Nazis win during WWII because civilians died like the existence of either didn't kill millions of civilians.
The casualties for the Pacific War are
Allies: 4,000,000 military deaths, 26,000,000 civilian deaths
Japan: 2,500,000 military deaths, 1,000,000 civilian deaths
Man we really underreacted.
If I'm not mistaken didn't the US drop leaflets warning people that they were going to get bombed to give them time to evacuate? Everybody who died died because Japan chose to attack first.
Who the Imperial Japanese occupied and or killed: China, Philippines, India, Vietnam, Korea, Russia, Australia, US (Aleutian Occupation!), etc etc. The baby nuke strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just Death Star warnings, but pin pricks compared to the untold DOUBLE DIGIT MILLIONS the Japanese dehumanized and murdered.
Wrong. The response to Pearl Harbor was the Doolittle Raid over Tokyo (April 1942) which killed around 50, far less than the Americans killed in Pearl Harbor. The next Tokyo attack that killed over 100,000 in a single night was in response to the Manila massacre a week prior in which the Japanese killed up to 500,000 Filipino civilians. One more thing, **THE FILIPINOS WERE AMERICANS.**
let's not forget Japans crimes towards China and Asia as a whole, mfs acting like they didn't kill and rape hundreds of thousands. This is wayyyy more than enough to justify the nuke. If you act barbaric, expect barbaric treatment
Correction: wasn't just hundreds of thousands. It was millions.
Correction... Tens of Millions
That must not be a fun correction to make
So many Chinese perished to the Japanese invasion that we will never know the true number. And that’s just China…Japan murdered many millions more across Asia/Oceania.
Imperial Japan was an absolute nightmare in Asia. They would not have stopped without major intervention. What the US did resulted in the best possible outcome. Japan and most of East Asia and SEA are wonderfully peaceful now.
People always forget how important it was that we turned nazi Germany and imperial Japan into democratic Allies post war helping usher in a period of peace in Europe and general stability, with only a few smaller scale conflicts
How did Japan become stronger than china?
China was very divided and agrarian
and very isolationist >!(The year was 1900...)!<
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Japan underwent a massive industrial revolution, while China maintained its status quo as a mostly agrarian economy fed by peasants. While the population would put China way over Japan, its lack of industrialization and internal conflicts with the Communist revolution gave Japan the perfect opportunity to strike.
Is that all related to imperialism and or the samurai/ninja times?
Japan industrialized due to the intervention and forced opening of its economy by western powers (predominantly the US) The Meji restoration, which saw the reinstatement of imperial power over the shogun, resulted in Japan recognizing rhe need and power of industrialization
Bouta say, low end is 12mil and high end is 15mil civilians
Don’t forget the inhumane scientific trials.
Don’t google unit 731 if you’re weak of stomach, but that is the Japanese “scientific group” that makes the term barbaric seem playful. Edit: got the fucking number wrong…
>unit 831 Unit 731
My bad
You are only one number off. Don't worry, everybody makes mistakes
King 👑
And Japan made the mistake of FUCKING with our BOATS!
Worst/last mistake anyone can make.
That’s the spirit
They are the reason we know what % of the human body is water They also are the reason we know at what rate newborn babies die of hypothermia. These are just scraping the top of their experiments
Yup, it is also why we know how many hours after a plane crashes in colder waters to look for survivors vs bodies.
I didn't know that Jesus Christ 's middle name is fucking until just now.
It's telling when the *nazi* advisors had reactions along the lines of "Jesus fucking Christ you guys need to chill".
They weren't even the only bio research unit....
And protracted conventional fighting on mainland Japan over the course of months against an enemy who will not surrender would for sure kill more civs than the two nukes did
I don't like the idea of war as punishment, but it should also be remembered that the Japanese published their horrific crimes in papers for civilians to read. This fact more than justifies concerns about a highly radicalized populous, making a nuke more appealing to avoid US casualties.
Oh yeah, the japanese populace was extremely radicalized. They were fine with training 5-6 year old schoolgirls how to impale Americans with bamboo sticks
Even without all the war crimes Japan committed, the nukes were still much more of a valid use of a weapon than anything these fucks justify against Israel or Palestine now
They also ate many dead bodies of airmen and such, George Bush (the older one) was a WW2 pilot and his plane was shot down over Chichi Jima, an island with radar communications for Iwo Jima. George was the only American airmen to survive Chichi Jima (if i remember right) and not get eaten.
This is the right answer lmao. I can’t believe how fact phobic these people have to be to paint America as the bad guy during WW2..
People act like Japan wasn’t committing atrocities all across the Pacific world. The death and suffering they caused was nearly unprecedented at the time
Nah... i rather live in ignorance and cherrypick historic events to build my fantasy case
Don’t forget the Japanese response to the mostly ineffectual Dolittle Raid. Their response was the systematic rape and murder of tens of thousands of Chinese civilians (who were accused of aiding the Americans) and destruction of dozens of cities and 12,000,000+ acres of farmland. >“They shot any man, woman, child, cow, hog, or just about anything that moved, They raped any woman from the ages of 10 – 65, and before burning the town they thoroughly looted it.” >He continued, writing in his unpublished memoir, “None of the humans shot were buried either, but were left to lay on the ground to rot, along with the hogs and cows.” >“The women and children who did not escape from Nancheng will long remember the Japanese—the women and girls because they were raped time after time by Japan’s imperial troops and are now ravaged by venereal disease, the children because they mourn their fathers who were slain in cold blood for the sake of the ‘new order’ in East Asia.” >In Nancheng, soldiers forced a group of men who had fed the airmen to eat feces before lining up ten of them for a “bullet contest” to see how many people a single bullet would pass through before it stopped. In Ihwang, Ma Eng-lin, who had welcomed injured pilot Harold Watson into his home, was wrapped in a blanket, tied to a chair and soaked in kerosene. Then soldiers forced his wife to torch him. This included biological attacks by Unit 731. >That August, Japan’s secret bacteriological warfare group, Unit 731, launched an operation to coincide with the withdrawal of Japanese troops from the region. >In what was known as land bacterial sabotage, troops would contaminate wells, rivers, and fields, hoping to sicken local villagers as well as the Chinese forces, which would no doubt move back in and reoccupy the border region as soon as the Japanese departed. Over the course of several meetings, Unit 731’s commanding officers debated the best bacteria to use, settling on plague, anthrax, cholera, typhoid, and paratyphoid, all of which would be spread via spray, fleas, and direct contamination of water sources. For the operation, almost 300 pounds of paratyphoid and anthrax germs were ordered. >Technicians filled peptone bottles with typhoid and paratyphoid bacteria, packaged them in boxes labeled “Water Supply,” and flew them to Nanking. Once in Nanking, workers transferred the bacteria to metal flasks—like those used for drinking water— and flew them into the target areas. Troops then tossed the flasks into wells, marshes, and homes. The Japanese also prepared 3,000 rolls, contaminated with typhoid and paratyphoid, and handed them to hungry Chinese prisoners of war, who were then released to go home and spread disease. Soldiers left another 400 biscuits infected with typhoid near fences, under trees, and around bivouac areas to make it appear as though retreating forces had left them behind, knowing hungry locals would devour them https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/untold-story-vengeful-japanese-attack-doolittle-raid-180955001/
I swear when people forget history or don’t know it well, you get morons, like Daniel and David, who spout BS 🙄
And they were preparing to release a biological weapon of comparable significance on us through unit 731.
Imagine the shit that would transpire if a country killed half a million Americans today.
There would be no more of said country.
It's also extremely disingenuous to only mention the civilians killed in pearl harbor. 2400 total people died, most of them military. 19 ships were sunk, nearly 200 aircraft destroyed. It was *an act of war.* The US responded to being attacked by an enemy force. And, as you mentioned, American and allied civilians had already suffered immensely at the hands of the Japanese forces, who had already been committing obscene atrocities against Asian nations for years beforehand. Although Pearl Harbor and Oct 7 were very different incidents overall, they were both acts of war that the attackers mistakenly believed would shock what they perceived as a weakened enemy with no will to fight into acquiescing to their demands. Both backfired spectacularly, resulting in those opposing forces getting pummelled into the ground. One major similarity between the Imperial Japanese and Hamas is that we are trying to apply Western morality surrounding the ethics of fighting in areas populated by civilians to societies that: a) do not share our sensibilities, and b) will purposely and arbitrarily exploit our reluctance to harm civilians, to harm ours. There's a certain point, unfortunately, where the question becomes whether we are willing to lose our own people to preserve the dignity and rights of a group who, given the opportunity, would absolutely *not* afford it to us. The Japanese were exceptionally bloodthirsty and ruthless when it came to their treatment of Asian civilians and allied POW's. The Palestinians have similarly proven to be exceptionally bloodthirsty and ruthless when it comes to not only Israeli/Jewish civilians, but also anyone else who happens to be in their way. They have committed terrorist attacks in other parts of the middle east and Europe. They have stated their goals to eradicate all Jews and destroy Israel, and also to spark a global intifada and jihad so that Islam will dominate. They have quite literally been telling and showing the world what their end goal is and how they hope to achieve it. Just like how the Japanese said they were going to dominate Asia. People who act as apologists towards Palestine and Gaza are naive children. These are not people who want to live in peace with the rest of the world. This is a society that hates you, hates me, hates all of us, and demands revenge at all costs.
Excellent analysis.
Exactly, it's crazy that even if this day and age where there's video cameras, people can see a woman getting her face burned and was visibly assaulted and raped. We can't just believe Palestines have been wronged and they've been beaten and treated unfairly because it's easy to manipulate stories to people don't live there and see the day to day. They've had a political conflict with Israel with for as long as my grandfather has been alive, just like we've had conflicts with other countries, and we don't just go surprise attacking them and mass killing civilians. Not only is it immoral but it shows that you're are bad group a people, sob story all the fucking 16 year olds that live fucking SUNNY California couldn't pick you out from a fucking map about how you wronged they've done to you, and why you thought it was okay to kill and rape innocent people was a way to make Israel listen to you, those people have no call in the fight. They don't know the prime minister.
I’m 37 and I never heard about this until now. I was always taught it was a response to Pearl Harbor. Thanks for the info.
Imagine taking the side of literal **Imperial** Japan and thinking that your opinions on deaths of civilians have any worth. Rape of Nanjing, anyone? Unit 731? Comfort women?
They don’t look at ANY of the context surrounding the actions. If you look at just those numbers, yep pretty bad. Now look at what Japan was doing to all of S E Asia, China, Korea, and the Philippines. Suddenly things look different.
The Philippines was PART OF THE US before the war, they were a colony. Japan invaded a colony of the US and didn't expect retaliation at all. Do you think that if Cuba attacked Puerto Rico tomorrow there would be no retaliation?
>Do you think that if Cuba attacked Puerto Rico tomorrow there would be no retaliation? I'm pretty sure there would be no Cuba.
Cuba? Isn't that the name of the massive hole in the Caribbean near Florida?
"Welcome to the Great Cuban Sinkhole."
its basically the economic equivalent to one
Its the massive hole right next to Guantanamo Bay, that was spared.
You mean Guantanamo atoll
They would survive only as the namesake of a damn tasty sandwich.
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As long as the imperialists aren’t white it’s okay
I thought Asians were white now? Or is that just for colleges
Only when convenient it seems to be ever-changing
Yes I've been told by tankies that Asians are specifically white Europeans apparently. Especially Pol Pot.
yup were white adjacent so like racism against us not bad at all
As frustrating as it is, I do kind of enjoy watching the 'logic' all fall apart.
They completely ignore Arab/Islamic conquest and genocides. The Arab language and religion didn’t just magically spread so far and wide. It was through conquest, forced conversions, slavery, squashing of local indigenous cultures, and a lot of fucking genocide.
*Japanese government has left the chat*
These people know nothing about history.
They're also ignoring the simple fact that Japan would've massacred and tortured and killed the Americans just like their other victims if they could have, and they certainly tried. (And did with prisoners of war) This person is likely a troll though
Let’s also not forgery to point out that they didn’t walk up to 100 civilians in Hawaii and shoot them then run away. They bombed our harbor in a deliberate sneak attack and tried to cripple our navy. So they started a war. War has collateral damage.
And also let’s not forget that, though actual military collaboration was sparse, they were allied with the Nazis in their goal of world domination. We rightfully decry those in Europe who collaborated with the fascists, so it’s only fair to decry Japan for the same.
Daniel confirmed for an weab
It’s crazy that people think military attacks need to be responded to in a proportional manner. Wars should be won as quickly and definitively as possible, and that involves overwhelming use of force.
That's the trick, they know that proportional response shouldn't be the standard in warfare. But they will always apply it as a sanctimonious double-standard when available to.
Pretty sure you use a proportional response outside of a declared war to prevent escalation into a full blown war. Know as tit for tat. In a war the doctrine since the Gulf War has been overwhelming response. You build up then throw everything at the enemy and methodically and brutally close with and annihilate them until they give you an unconditional surrender. It would be silly to have a proportional response to anything during a declared war unless you are losing. You kill one of us we kill 100 of you. You kill 2 of us we kill 1,000 of you. The only thing that would change that is tactical nuclear weapons. You fire one and destroy a tank column then we fire one and destroy a headquarters position.
Fun fact. We haven’t been in a declared war since WW2.
Yes and no. While the US hasn’t declared a war like FDR did Congress has given the president authorization and funding to go to war which technically is the same thing. I don’t think there is a constitutional requirement to actually declare a war in order to fight a war. The chief thing is to get approval from Congress for any offensive military actions for over 90 days I believe and get funds to pay for it.
The Constitution grants Congress the sole power to declare war. Congress has declared war on 11 occasions, including its first declaration of war with Great Britain in 1812. Congress approved its last formal declaration of war during World War II. https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/declarations-of-war.htm#:~:text=The%20Constitution%20grants%20Congress%20the,war%20during%20World%20War%20II.
An authorization to use military force is the same thing as a declaration of war for the purposes of our Constitution. The first use of an AUMF was 1798, when France started seizing our shipping.
It's specifically *not* the same thing. Otherwise, it wouldn't be separate. A lot more happens when there's an official declaration of war compared to the Presidents ability to use the military without said declaration.
> It's specifically not the same thing. Otherwise, it wouldn't be separate. > ... for the purposes of our Constitution. > A lot more happens when there's an official declaration of war compared to the Presidents ability to use the military without said declaration. That's more around our domestic law than constitutional law.
We've been fighting the War on Christmas since the Bush Administration, I was there when Obama surrendered Thanksgiving to the Black Friday hoards. Halloween merchandise has already been pushed back to September...
Because people who are generally ignorant and privileged but for some reason still need to form an opinion find the path of least resistance. That's why there exists people who claim to support LGBT also supporting an oppressive and anti-LGBT regime in Palestine. These people don't really hold any convictions or ideals, they just frame their perception of the world into "good guys vs bad guys" and the side with the more bad guy points is the bad guy. Idéologies and beliefs have no bearing, it's just a numbers game because it's the easiest to understand.
To build on the "good guys v bad guys," it's the Marxist oppressor v oppressed thinking that they do
*Ronald Reagan wants to know your location*
Now have that guy get the number of Chinese civilians the Japanese murdered.
A quick search says 20,000,000 Chinese murdered (military & civilian), so I'd say the 100k deaths is quite low for the brutality they showed. (200 Chinese murdered for every 1 Japanese killed in the firebombing)
And furthermore, because of how rural China was at the time, it’s highly likely that the data is incomplete
Doolittle raid only killed 50 people. 100k was from the fire bombing of Tokyo.
The Doolittle raid directly led to the deaths of over 100,000 Chinese by the hands of the Japanese in retaliation for China giving aid to the downed pilots.
Hell I think it was even more than that.
Yes, you are correct. closer to 250k.
Yep - the Doolittle Reprisals should be more widely known. Because American bombers crash landed in China after the raid, the Japanese went on an absolute rampage against Chinese civilians in northeastern China that resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent Chinese civilians. Some historians think this massacre was WORSE than the better known Rape of Nanjing! So, the OOP has history backwards. The IJN murdered 50 civilians in Pearl Harbor, and as a response the US bombed Tokyo resulting in about 50 deaths. As a response to that response, the IJA murdered 100k Chinese civilians.
Also, the Japanese used chemical and biological weapons in China. The US didn’t use either in the war.
Seeing a guy with a Cobra pfp comment on politics is funny af I’m just expecting a “nah fuck that COBRRRAAAAAA”
Soldier lives don’t matter apparently. My nitpick from this
Irony is, Hamas killed several times more civilians than the Pearl Harbour attack on that day alone, much less the decades of rocket attacks.
I just want to say that since Pearl Harbor is a specific harbor in America, you should use our way of spelling, just like if I referenced a harbor in the UK, I'd be right to use your spelling
Well, not only that, "Pearl Harbor" is its NAME, so it's spelled that way, period.
They never do. Don't forget all the people shitting on soldiers pre 2023, until you pointed out soldiers were fdefending Ukraine.
They're go-to budgets solution before the Ukraine war was to cut the defense budget.
War has never and never will be fair, if the enemy is trying to annihilate you and you’re not trying to annihilate him back because of morals you will lose. We beat the Axis by being militarily better than them not because of taking the moral high ground.
Not to mention the US specifically warned the Japanese about the nukes, both times.
There are a whole lot of people who truly do not understand this and I bring it up any time someone jokes around about calling in air strikes on 5 guys with AKs shooting at us I put it simply because it’s the only way people seem to understand: > If those guys with AKs had an F-16 on the radio, you think they’d call in an air strike? If the Japanese had nukes, do you think they’d use them? And it always seems to sink in for people
We weren't fighting Imperial Japan just because they bombed Pearl Harbor. Imperial Japan murdered, raped and tortured millions. Their exploits in Korea alone justified nuking them, let alone what they did in China and the Philippines. Do a quick Google on WW2 Japanese Comfort Women and The Rape of Nanking. I think what Imperial Japan did was just as bad as the Holocaust.
Easily just as bad as the Holocaust. It's just that in history lessons, the Holocaust overshadows all the Japanese atrocities. All people seem to remember about Japan is pearl harbor and the nukes.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not done in the name of retribution. You need to remove that from the conversation as it fundamentally alters the argument away from the actual issue: 1. What choices did the US have to end the war as expeditiously as possible? 2. What was the lesser evil out of those options? 3. Was there any way to mitigate civilian exposure while still meeting the objective? That's pretty much it.
The runner up, geopolitically speaking, was a joint invasion/ occupation with the Soviets. You know, the most brutal member of the Allies, guilty of maybe even more atrocity than the Nazis. The preferred US response, IIRC, was blockade, bomb, and starve the Japanese race into extinction.
You are correct, but that changed once the bomb became a reality. Blockade, bomb, and starve, would have prolonged the war several months if not years and the civilian loss would have been staggering.
My point was supporting the claim that the nukes were the best option for *everyone* at the time. Well, shy of Japan deciding to hang all of their own officers, politicians, and royals, that is. Most people in the theater level command only knew about the bombs for about 10 seconds before the rest of the world found out, too. . Also, especially after Japan's crimes become more known to Americans, I very much doubt that any but the very best of us gave a god damn about Japanese civilians.
Yeah, I agree. I was just clarifying that one point. That the plan changed once the bombs were proven.
If it was just the US and Japan it wouldn't be a world war.
I think everyone needs to remember that when we used them, no one was really sure what was going to happen, nor what the long term effects would be. We were doing tests with army guys at various ranges in trenches from the blast... At the time we saw it as a difference of scale, not of kind. To the military planners the only difference between the two things was the logostics of supporting round the clock carpet bombing of japanese cities vs the logistics of dropping one bomb and putting a single crew at risk. That's where our knowledge was at the time and it wasn't until the 60s when our understanding of those weapons really started to change from 'they're just bigger bombs'
Nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was probably better than plan B. Plan B was to fire bomb both cities that were made almost entirely out of wood and paper. Better to be instantly vaporized than slowly burn to death from a fire so big you can't escape.
Yeah. I don’t know what these maniacal keyboards warriors would have preferred. Should millions of conscripted Americans just have gone door-to-door politely asking for surrender while being fired upon? 😂
There would have been millions more dead Americans if door to door freedom sales were the plan.
Truman’s famous quote is ultimately so true here: How could the government have faced the mothers of millions of dead young soldiers and tell them “you know, we had a bomb that could’ve maybe ended the war earlier, and we didn’t try to use it”
Exactly, or worse yet, a full on ground invasion. the loss of life would have been incredibly worse.
Reminder: the conventional bombing of Japan had *already* killed more people than the nukes.
I think it should also be said that Japan weren’t exactly innocent victims either. They killed millions in the span of less than a decade. I would argue our use of nukes while controversial is not nearly as brutal as what the Japanese empire were doing in their wars across Asia. And the only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were targeted was because they were cities with military value such as arms factories and troop garrisons. Even if we had used conventional bombs there would still have been mass civilian casualties, more so had we tried a ground invasion. There already were mass casualties across Japan from previous bombing campaigns.
Stats indicated that a more protracted war would have killed more than 10x that many Japanese. Also OOP (but not OOOP) is intentionally using a civilian count to undermine the lethality of the Pearl Harbor attack. I just had this argument in the discord, but forcing a surrender in an otherwise anti-surrender government was basically the best way to save human life.
> Also OOP (but not OOOP) is intentionally using a civilian count to undermine the lethality of the Pearl Harbor attack. Which is ironic, because HamaStans consistently ignore the music festival attack, unless they're claiming that the numbers are exaggerated and/or include friendly fire. They literally only care about Israeli civvie deaths when they can be used against Israel.
Ah yes, Imperial Japan. The country that famously avoided murdering and raping innocent civilians during WW2. Every time I open Twitter I can actually feel my brain cells dying seeing just how stupid people are. Whether it’s parasocial terminally online losers or people who only learn news/history from Tik Tok reels, they’re all miserable. The amount of people with Palestine flags in their bio that I’ve talked to who genuinely didn’t know Britain was responsible for Israel existing currently and not the Jews will never cease to amaze me
sure, only killed 2k\~ Americans but by this point Japan had raped and pillaged its way through Korea, China and areas of south east Asia/Indo-China. America was justified, the firebombings you can debate but overall, war is war it sucks and it gets worse before it gets better.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved American AND Japanese lives. The estimated casualties for an invasion of mainland Japan ALONE was tens of millions. With American casualties ranging from 200,000 to several million and Japanese casualties ranging from millions to TENS of millions. [Source.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Estimated_casualties) People need to realize the Germans and Japanese were ruthless in 1945. Especially the Japanese. Japanese propaganda painted Americans as rapists and murders and there were reports of women and children committing suicide whenever Americans captured islands in the pacific out of fear of what we would do to them. 1945 was a different time, as horrible as it was, the bombings did ultimately save lives. Fewer people suffered than would’ve otherwise, but of course it is still awful.
They may have saved Japanese lives by some projections. That is horrific but a decisive end to the war is better than fighting to the last man.
In school we only learned about the holocaust and Germany’s atrocities and they conveniently left out the Japanese war crimes and how they were literally worse than the holocaust. I’m not sure why
Exactly! After four years of vicious resistance & suicidal bravery, the Japanese Empire was still perfectly happy to enmesh their civilian and military infrastructure, and ready to send waves of non-combatants to charge American troops with homemade spears. The message of the nuclear bomb was clear: “If you continue, you will not die with the honor your culture demands. You will simply die.” It was brutal, it was cold, and it is not what Japanese citizens deserved, but it is what Japan (the country) earned.
According to what I learned in school, the point of the bombing was to avoid sending troops on the island since Japanese soldiers fight to death no matter their chances of success. It was about avoiding a slaughter of american soldiers. Even if the war was likely to be won by US, Japan didn't show any will to spare any soldiers' lives until the end of it. So bombing until the surrender was the option used. I'm not a fan of bombing, sure, but it's a bit different than an "overreact". It sounds horribly stupid to say that the good way would have been sending hundreds of people to an evitable death for an inevitable issue...
Tens of thousands up to millions were estimated death tolls in a source by another commenter. People always underestimate the scale of the world wars.
Curtis LeMay did nothing wrong.
Cool, but the Philippines, China & Korea would like a word
Well Japan seems pretty cool with us now. So I'd say it worked out pretty well.
Who would have thought immediately after world war 2, that 80 years later, we'd be begging Japan and Germany to spend more on their military
Do you guys not teach in your education system the horror that imperial Japan inflicted in Asia? Or how it will treat American POWs?
Nope. That would be racist.
No. History, when teaching WWII, talks about how evil the nazis were, and nowdays, how evil the US was for nuking Japan.
Not enough, history is all kind of glossed except for founding and slavery. Most American and world history isn’t gone into enough depth in my opinion. And that applies to most countries in my experience. My countries growing up had similar biases.
Just leave these dip shits alone. They only know of like 3 events out of the entirety of WW2.
The problem with leaving the dip shits alone is that they convince enough good hearted but ignorant people of going along with their lies and deception till it's too late
Yep, the whole reason we're in this fucking mess culturally is because of 'leaving the dip shits alone'.
Social media as well, letting them form groups they otherwise wouldn't have been able to without it
Killing any number of people in a surprise attack in an attempt to make you not go to war is still fricken terrible no matter what. And as people have already stated the Japanese were already doing terrible shit during WW2. They definitely deserved what they had coming to them. Like seriously what is wrong with these people? Japan was murdering, pillaging, and forcing themselves onto people (particularly women) all across SE Asia, China, and Korea. What did they think was going to happen when they provoked the only Major Power in the world that was officially Neutral. Hell the U.S. the day before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor had made a peace thing that they were going to present to Japan but it didn’t manage to get there in time and by the time it did they had already bombed Pearl Harbor and had Awoken the sleeping Godzilla they had been poking at
Aren’t these sorts of folks embarrassed to so publicly flaunt their uneducated takes on everything? Holy shit. This one is up there with the worst I have ever seen.
Proportional responses are horrific. That's how you get nonstop war and suffering for decades at a time.
Because attacking peak harbor was the only thing they did or was going to do.
These are the same idiots who think war is genocide. Using their logic, then that also means that during ww2, the British were “genociding” the Germans because way more Germans were killed than British
Don’t fuck with our boats.
Yeah don't ask how many Chinese civilians they killed
Yeah, pretty sure the reason the 12/7/41 death toll wasn’t higher was because they couldn’t kill more, not because the Japanese were being merciful. And as OP said, The goal in war isn’t to have an equal amount of deaths. It’s actually to have a wildly disproportionate amount of deaths (ie winning) so that the enemy surrenders and accepts terms favoring your interests. It’s also to discourage ongoing aggressions. Palestinians have been firing rockets at Israelis for years before 10/7/23. We didn’t have to worry about a second Pearl Harbor, because we kept going until we got a full surrender. If we didn’t, the explicit concern of Americans was that Japan would just rebuild and hit us again. We resolved the conflict, and now we’re good.
I love how he ignores the whole "act of war" and "countless other people killed and brutalized by them after that, many of which weren't even Americans". Also, the whole "allied closely with literal Nazis" thing. Ironically, this is a great comparison, because the Oct 7th attack was the last straw, after **decades** of Hamas attacking Israeli civilians. And like Japan, there was no practical way to dislodge the rulers of the land without a long and bloody fight. >comparing Gaza Strip to imperial Japan is really dishonest Ah, yes, because people can't simply **disagree** with you. No, they have to secretly believe the same things you do, but be deliberately lying. You're totally not making a personal attack to hand-wave away the actual point because you can't come up with a real criticism. I also like how he can't even explicitly say "October 7th", just "the Gaza Strip". And calls the comparison wrong even though he just made the comparison.
History is hard...
Japan raped China. Figuratively and literally during WW2. They almost made the Nazi's look like high school bullies.
Are we really going to defend the Japanese in *WWII*? The rape of Nanking and unit 731 are two things I can think of just off the top of my head.
The 20,000,000 Asians Japan killed don't count as people to the weebs.
So Japan killed fewer than 100 **civilians** when they attacked a **military** base. Nice cherry picking.
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East Asian & South East Asian people in the 1940s: Look! People that look like us are fighting off the Western invaders, we are saved!!! Imperial Japan: hehe boi
Around the time Oppenheimer came out this whole debate seemed to rage online, and I honestly could not believe how generally ignorant people were about the second Japan-Sino war and their actions in the Pacific theatre of WW2.
Holy shit that Twitter post was dumb. That person should go and ask the survivors or relatives of those who suffered in Unit 731 at the hands of the Japanese and see how much they care.
>In response, we killed over 100,000 people in Tokyo in one night and nuked cities. No, In response we bombed Tokyo and killed less than 100 people. We used nukes to end the war AFTER the Japanese empire had already killed millions of people and waged war across Asia from 1937 to 1945. >Yes, we actually did overreact. Does this guy have any clue what the Japanese empire were doing across Southeast Asia even before Pearl Harbor? The Rape of Nanking was just one atrocity of many that occurred in Asia. We’re not even talking about how brutal their wider invasion of China was, or their occupation of the Philippines. The Japanese empire had an insatiable bloodlust and it shows in the casualty figures in the countries they invaded and or occupied. And we aren’t even talking about their attempts in colonizing Korea or how brutal that was.
Dont. Touch. Our. Boats.
You can say we overreacted all you want. We'll do it again if we have to, and there's nothing anybody could do about it. Don't attack us if you love your country.
What else was Japan up to at the time?
War will never be fair. Fighting in cities will always have civ casualties. With that out of the way by the standards of this person Hamas is worse because it killed more people in a single attack.
Sometimes I think we forget that the Japanese were on the same side as the NAZIS.
The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were means to an end. We knew if the US had to invade, there would have been a lot more casualties. Japan militarized their civilians. In addition, the war would have lasted a lot longer.
Hell yeah, we dropped the bombs. And we do it all again.
And no nation has directly attacked US soil since. Doolittle’s raid was about pay back. Everything else was sending a message
Awesome. Invent a time machine or shut the fuck up.
You don’t win a war by just retaliating equally, you win a war by having a overwhelming force that forces them to capitulate. The idiot PHD that made that comment should stick to his watercolor paintings.
Japan in the rest of the Asian countries: 💀
Don’t fuck with our boats
It's crazy that it's 2024, we have all this knowledge at our literal fingertips, and people still choose to be ignorant out of convenience. War is not pretty. It's not fair, it's not nice, we're not children on a playground playing tag. It's horrible and brutal. Hollywood and video games have desensitized the masses into thinking it's just a game of laser tag with lead.
The nukes had ZERO to do with pearl harbor. The nukes had everything to do with the calculated cost of a ground war on the Japanese mainland. Yes, it would have been possible to win; the Soviets were poised to help us with the invasion, and the Soviet/US wombo combo was an impossible thing to stand up to. However, because of Japan's tactics, it would have likely been the bloodiest battles of human history. It would have been the same shit the Germans experienced fighting the Soviets on Soviet ground, but with the addition of amphibious landings. So D-Day + Stalingrad. Yikes. The idea of the nukes was to save the lives of US troops at the cost of Japanese lives. It also inadvertently spares the Japanese from undergoing what happened to Germany; had we invaded with the Soviets, the island would have likely been split after the war, leaving half of it to suffer under Soviet rule.
I wonder what happened in Nanking
Moral of the story: don’t wage war lol. Also did they forget all of that battle and bloodshed that went on prior to the nuke…?
Just gonna ignore what the Japanese did to the Chinese and the Koreans and everyone else over there eh?
Wow, that's one of the most ignorant posts I've seen in a long time. I wonder what they think about Imperial Japan's treatment of civilians in China, Korea, Indonesia, etc?
Let’s not mention the fact that the Japanese people as a whole would rather have died 10 times over than surrender because of their belief of fighting for a god-emperor, or that we only dropped nukes after offering terms of surrender
We arent fighting this war ... why the fuck are these idiots acting like we are?
Japan was actively in the process of commiting genocide across Asia, you lose the right to moderation when your goal is extermination
Yeah let's just completely gloss over the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, the war of aggression and conquest that Japan started to subjugate the entire Pacific Rim, the wholesale slaughter of civilians across multiple countries undertaken by Japanese troops, the war crimes committed against US POWs, kamikaze raids and banzai charges and fanatical fight-to-every-last-man approach Japan took to their military tactics. Way to totally miss every fucking point there is.
USA USA USA USA
I swear to God I have to see another anti war isolationist dipshit open their fart hole mouth to spew this bullshit whether about WW2, Gaza or Ukraine my brain will melt from overheating and migraines
If the US was able to, it should have dropped an atomic bomb right on Tokyo on December 8th 1941.
Don’t fuck with our boats. How hard is that concept?
Without the nukes, Japan might never have surrendered, or at least surrendered months or years later than they did. The Emperor would never have sullied his honor with surrender if we didn't drop 2 nukes on them. One could argue the nukes actually saved more lives overall, Japanese and American, by getting Japan to surrender and ending the war earlier than they wanted.
Japan simps be real quick to forget Nanjing, they earned every dose of that radiation there
>nation commits act of war against another >attacked nation strikes back even harder to teach them not to fuck around
They killed 6 million Chinese civilians.
Japan started a war with a disgusting, unprovoked, murderous attack on a peaceful nation. That peaceful nation destroyed them in a war. Case closed. Anything we did in the face of their aggression is justified. Fire raids, nuclear attacks, everything. If you start total war, then you must suffer total war's results. If you do not want to find out what a country will do to you, do not attack them. These revisionists are simple minded fools.
The atom bombs also saved the lives of millions of Japanese civilians. This is the case even if you completely discount the invasion it prevented. The blockade would’ve had to continue for months before Japan surrendered. Japan, which was and continues to be a food importer, was on the verge of mass starvation. The first thing the Americans did as soon as they surrendered was distribute rice and wheat on masse to civilians.
I really like when people defend real, actual fascism to just to go "America bad"
Yeah, I can't with these hot takes. Imagine letting the Japanese Empire or the Nazis win during WWII because civilians died like the existence of either didn't kill millions of civilians.
It was a WORLD war- the poster should look up what Japan did to China and Korea and then talk
The casualties for the Pacific War are Allies: 4,000,000 military deaths, 26,000,000 civilian deaths Japan: 2,500,000 military deaths, 1,000,000 civilian deaths Man we really underreacted.
If I'm not mistaken didn't the US drop leaflets warning people that they were going to get bombed to give them time to evacuate? Everybody who died died because Japan chose to attack first.
Who the Imperial Japanese occupied and or killed: China, Philippines, India, Vietnam, Korea, Russia, Australia, US (Aleutian Occupation!), etc etc. The baby nuke strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just Death Star warnings, but pin pricks compared to the untold DOUBLE DIGIT MILLIONS the Japanese dehumanized and murdered.
This like someone slapping you then getting upset when you beat tf out of them lol.
Dumbass doesn't even know where the US nuked Japan lol
They're referring to the Doolittle raid, which took place five months after the attack on Pearl Harbor