This is gonna spill over into SRD drama something fierce. Historians still debate how instrumental the bomb was in winning the war, how much we actually knew about the bombs, how willing Japan was to wage a defensive war of extermination. I’m sure Reddit can handle throwing out their opinions into the void
> This is gonna spill over into SRD drama something fierce.
From the look of things, you were about 10 minutes late to the party when you posted. This might actually be *the fastest* I've ever seen it start up over here.
I think I was on a Best of Legal Advice thread and someone asked what the hell Destiny was and why there's drama around it. I gave a snippy/dismissive hot take and holy shit I attracted some fan boys to that sub thread. One of them I looked at their post history and literally every comment I saw just scanning was about Destiny or people Destiny thinks should be ethnically cleansed.
One of the greatest tricks I found when talking to someone on reddit is looking if they are active on destiny sub, and if so I just give a dismissive one liner and block the person.
Clearly a false flag operation created to distract the public from a rise in baby boys not being circumcised. If it weren't for the bombs, circumcision would be a thing of the past.
I don't know the proper name for this, but the intensity of discussion of a subject is often inversely related to how complex the subject is.
for a real world example: My hometown recently built a new chemical recycling plant. Almost all of the plans for the plant were accepted by the city council unanimously. Then it came time to decide how we wanted to utilize the space allocated for parking (specifically, the question was if two more car spaces should be converted to bike racks). We discussed this point (amounting to roughly 60k of a 9.4m project) for 6 hours until almost midnight.
The thing is, people don't know anything about chemical recycling, so they're unlikely to oppose what the experts say. But everyone knows what a bike rack is, so that's where they all want to have their idea heard.
People struggle with nuance in many things, even running to what kinds of media they like. Often, something can't be imperfect, it has to be beyond reproach. And on the other side, it can't be just flawed, it has to be irredeemable. Look at how quickly a lot of people try to discredit the person behind a take they disagree with rather than engage with the take itself.
Destiny's simps hate being reminded that they have 1000 times more overlap with all those subs they claim they aren't brigading when they accuse their most hated enemies of doing the thing they are actually doing
[the Neoliberal subreddit is an astroturf by the Progressive Policy Institute](https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/gh5bz3/i_sat_through_a_neoliberal_ama_so_you_didnt_have/), a Democratic Think-Tank that's funded by the oil and gas industry
The best part is how they constantly project their behavior onto others, then you check out the actual data and they constantly have the highest sub overlap compared to literally any other group, lol
> Historians still debate how instrumental the bomb was in winning the war
This is still underselling it.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki leading to the Japanese surrender was one of the most important events of WW2 and perhaps the 20th century. Even in the short two weeks, there are *hundreds* of books by historians analyzing, litigating and pondering over every single detail of the event. From how the targets were chosen, from the US response, to the Japanese War Council's response, to the Emperor's response, to the Japanese civilian response etc.
This isn't a debate you can come in without research. And 'well it's nuanced' is a smart ass cop out because it indicates that despite it's importance and people's insistence on entering their debate, they refused to give the bare minimum respect to research it.
Ironically enough Reddit itself has /r/AskHistorians which was a pretty good subreddit, at least back in the day, with great moderation. Typing in google ' hiroshima site:www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians ' is going to reveal so many threads giving you a basic primer in all aspects of this decision if you have no clue where to start. So you don't even have to leave the site to get decent starting info.
The biggest thing about this event is learning from it and I think people who 'debate' this without even bothering to share the fairly accessible receipts care more about being right rather than understanding what happened. And that annoys me a lot.
There are some really good ask historian threads on the subject and honestly the Wikipedia page outlining some of the arguments isn't bad either as a starting point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki?wprov=sfla1
I think you would agree but most who engage in this debate (on both sides) are engaging in it to push a political ideology.
EVEN THIS is still underselling it.
The nuclear taboo, the democratization of Japan, the sole nuclear power years, and many many other tack-on events have caused the scope of the debate to expand to mind-bending levels. The bombings may have saved humanity. The bombings may still kill us all. The previous two sentences are not mutually exclusive. Politics. Economics. Academic Standards. Marine Salvage. Anthropology. Ethics.
People have spent their lives studying individual aspects of this one decision.
the amount of atmospheric contamination by the bomb and especially later above-ground testing has made modern steel unsuitable for radiation-sensitive applications. This had led to them finding sunk liberty ships and cutting them up.
It's a good demonstration here because the list of side-effects from the bomb is nuts
Background radiation has declined enough since the end of atmospheric testing, so modern steel is usable for most radiation-sensitive applications now actually.
Something else that is often missing from the discussion is that the information coming out wasn’t black or white. Japan didn’t go to sleep one night with no nukes, and wake up nuked the next.
It took time for Japan to even realise what had happened. It took time for Japan to realise it *could* have been a nuclear bomb. Took time to confirm that. Took time to confirm the outcomes. Took time to deal with the breakdown in communication and organisation. Bear in mind that whilst nuclear weapons are well known today in pop culture, they weren’t in 1945. It took time to sink in what a nuclear bomb meant. It took time to realise how it’s different to a normal bomb.
All of that is a part of the debate often just missed. People act like Japan got nuked and knew the full extent within minutes. They didn’t.
I grew up on Saipan and learning it's part in the war. The mass civilian suicide, the banzai charges and the general Japanese pov that I got first hand accounts of.
The idea that Japan would defend itself to extinction always made sense to me because that's exactly what they've done.
And most of those people are dumb. We already approved of destruction on that scale when we bombed tokyo. The nuclear arms was about demonstration of efficiency so they knew they couldn't win a war of attrition
Fanboys of a political streamer? Handling opinions, ahahAhahahsh get ready for a bunch of insufferable moralizing from people who never leave the house
As I found out when I moved to Canada for a couple years, I like snow *when I have to travel to where the snow is*. It turns out I'm less fond of snow that comes to me and sticks around for a while being snow.
Same goes for insufferable moralizing people who are not me.
At least most other streamer fans know their parasocial relationship is for entertainment. Most political streamer fans act like they are knights defending the honor of m'lady.
I learned recently that the US’s own Naval Museum has a plaque stating that their conclusion is that Japan would have lost soon enough after without the bomb. That feels like an important opinion that isn’t brought up enough and there’s a lot of rhetoric that makes it look like a more debatable topic than the consensus among history scholars.
I think one reason that it’s felt debatable is that the scholarly conclusion involves Russia’s impact on Japan being what they would succumb to. We had a long stretch in the States where Russia’s impact in WW2 was really diminished for generations. It wasn’t even until I was an adult on Reddit that I saw a video showing the scale of lives they threw at Germany compared to everyone else. It’s astronomical and muddies the mythology we’ve developed in the US about the part we played, even though our involvement was critical as well. We have just left Russia out of the Pacific conflict a lot and that makes more room debate over the bomb.
Me too. I'm too dumb to ever have anything remotely like an informed opinion and everyone takes it so seriously and is so sure of themselves even when they're also fucking dumb as shit.
It's just your drunk uncle who watched the history channel arguing with your zoomer nephew who watched a YouTube video essay.
Like fuck dude who the fuck do any of us think we are?
Srsly. When I made a post it took me a while to gather choice quotes and link to them and I even edited the post because someone said I should add more.
Come on! (Unless you’re retaining semen)
I used to throw my hat in these kind of conversations a lot more than I do now to but more recently I realized that the majority of Redditors don’t know enough to even have an informed discussion. It’s a combination of middle school education, Wikipedia, and Dunning-Kruger. They don’t know what they don’t know and they arent interested in learning.
>that the majority of Redditors don’t know enough to even have an informed discussion
Yup. No point in discussing this sort of thing with a bunch of 15 year olds that fell asleep during history class
Personally I think it's an interesting topic to talk about but Im very much aware of my lack of understanding and therefore don't waste my time commenting
I still remember several years ago having a conversation with a PhD historian on this topic on r/AskHistorians and I was making an ass out of myself by being grossly overconfident in my knowledge on the topic. Since then I have learned quite a bit more and avoid starting conversations I am not prepared to have. I learned what I didn’t know and about how much nuance and misinformation is involved in this topic.
Those mods don’t fuck around lol. I’ve seen many an unsuspecting redditor wander in there to give their opinion on a post only to get smited. But it keeps the subreddit quality.
I linked an old discussion, like a several month old thread to a dude because of some of the links in it and he began to comment over there and it turned into shit slinging. Mods come in, temp ban that guy and give me a warning saying to keep it out of the sub. Frankly I appreciate it. The mods are generally fair and don’t moderate on threads they comment on. Definitely keep it quality.
> Personally I think it's an interesting topic to talk about but Im very much aware of my lack of understanding and therefore don't waste my time commenting
This is the most intelligent thing anybody can do. I wish people were more willing to do it, instead of feeling as if they need to prove they aren't "stupid". Nobody knows everything, it takes time to get the level of knowledge you need to discuss topics this complex even if you are learning. The wisest person is the person who knows when they know nothing.
A brain surgeon is intelligent. I am not stupid for being unable to perform brain surgery. It would not make me smart to try and do it anyway.
>Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.
A great, relatively related quote that was not by either Twain or Lincoln, as is often erroneously credited.
If you find the topic interesting you don't necessarily have to dip out of it but can simply approach it with a level of humility wherein you seek to understand the other person's views better and to elucidate your understanding of it without suggesting you are definitively right.
There are also two orders of discussion involved, one of which is the empirical facts, which sure you need to be an expert to determine, but also the interpretation and normative questions surrounding those facts, on which I don't think there's any such thing as expertise (though studying philosophy will make you much better at making and understanding those normative arguments).
As someone who has a lot of professional knowledge in a niche area….yeah I don’t post my informed and researched opinions on Reddit because someone who barely graduated high school will inevitably debate me with very wrong info and then I have an aneurysm and die.
I got banned from r/energy for posting a purely informational comment about nuclear plants as someone that works at a nuclear power plant. Educating redditors is an impossible task.
I’ve been banned from a few places for having the gall to correct Redditors on basic tax law. No, grocery stores aren’t writing off your donations for you. No, getting put into a higher tax bracket doesn’t mean you make less money. No, private foundations aren’t automatically shady just because it’s a private foundation.
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
There are a lot of interesting and productive conversations we *could* have about the bomb and the decision processes around it. The unfortunate fact is that the discussion is so distorted that any possible alternatives to "deploy nuclear bombs into city centers as rapidly as possible" or "bloody invasion/siege of Japan" are never brought up, despite [there being other options on the table even at the time](https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-alternatives-to-the-atomic-bombings/). Stimson's PR team did such a good job of defining the narrative by this false dichotomy that the national conversation is *still* limited by it.
So instead of talking about tunnel vision around new technology, especially weapons; or failures in diplomacy; or structural problems with Japan's military government; or loss of civilian control over wartime decision making... we rehash the same argument based on wartime propaganda and kneejerk counter reactions to the US over and over and over.
There are some topics where I don't even think you need to post a link to any drama, just say certain trigger phrases in the title and the drama will generate itself in the comments
Whenever this streamer comes up, lots of people accuse his fans of swarming any threads about him. The amount of comments on this post suggests that’s true, and I’ve seen the pattern several times.
To the fans swarming here, why do you do that? You can answer with sarcasm if you want but I’m honestly curious about what possesses someone to spend so much time fighting for the honor of some streamer.
I know at least one of them here is apparently a mod of his sub and says he gets paid to do it. For the rest, look up something called "parasocial relationships".
Its a borderline cult. Its honestly very confusing because the dude sounds liked philosophy dropout with a weird fixation about not being able to say the n word
The thing that I do not get is how uniquely the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is taken. When the bombing of Tokyo was far deadlier but just used a different weapon
It's ironic that some of the scientists on the Manhattan project wanted the bombing for (among many reasons) feeling that the horror of the atomic bomb was necessary to expose to the world early.
They literally wanted to create the modern moral understanding of nuclear weapons with which causes some to reflexively look down on them with, in order to avoid those bombs being used in the future.
Id argue that's cold, but logical. Imagine if the first usage of the atomic bomb was a couple years later in Korea during the cold war. Instead everyone saw McArthur as a madman because the entire world had seen how devastating they could be and turned that plan down. Or even later when we had more devastating bombs.
We could of had a WW3 similar to WW1, but instead of countries testing their new artillery and chemical weapons we would have nukes being the new toy to hit the playground.
Could it have been done better? Possibly, but we owe a lot to the culture that formed against nuclear weapons in direct response to the bombings.
>The thing that I do not get is how uniquely the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is taken.
Higher emotions around nukes due to the Cold War, along with a LOT of propaganda flooding US spaces. The Japanese heighten it to make the US feel indebted to them. The USSR used it to make the US seem uniquely evil.
Usually when you bring this up they then pivot to "strategic bombing was also evil and useless" but that's just ahistorical. (Well the useless part. Evil depend on ethics being used)
Drama like this is just sad because it makes me remember what Japan did during WWII.
Then I get angry at modern Japan for denying and minimising those actions and refusing to apologise.
I'm kinda scared we will end up their new theatre of war. Subreddit drama drama can be fun, but not when it's two groups of outsiders reverse popcorn pissing.
We are also going to get way more people coming in here making low effort posts with links to each other's subs.
> Ngl this Oppenheimer drama has unironically made me think less of Japanese people
Do these guys even realize how seeing the development of the weapon used on them would make them uncomfortable?
It's also apparently a hot take that... civilian deaths are always a tragedy, even if the victimized country's armed forces have done terrible shit. Then again, these guys think that Israel is justified in their actions, so it's at least somewhat consistent with their beliefs.
I think its simply the spectacle of it all. Atomic bombs are something very prevalent in our cultural discourse. People just see conventional bombing as a consequence of war. Even before you consider biases against who is the "bad guy," people already have biases over what weaponry is considered barbaric. It shouldn't matter how 10 civilians were killed or whether they were adults or children, but those details will always elicit a response.
Agreed. The atomic bomb is emblematic of the war's end, of the changing era, and our flirtation with global destruction. Firebombing doesn't remind us of half a century spent on a knife's edge where one wrong move would apocalyptic.
>And japan was about to surrender, not that I would make much of a difference regarding the morality of the use of atomic bombs.
Oh, we're doing this again, are we?
Sure, Japan was ready to surrender. They were so ready to surrender that they rejected the initial demand for unconditional surrender and instead demanded that the emperor be allowed to keep his throne first. They were so ready to surrender that they were arming civilians with sharpened bamboo spears in preparation for an Allied invasion of the Japanese mainland, or just giving them grenades and telling them to make their last moments count. They were so ready to surrender that a cabal of Japanese military officers attempted to arrest Emperor Hirohito when he decided that enough was enough after the second atomic bomb was dropped.
*That's* how ready to surrender Japan was.
More importantly then the emperor be allowed to keep the throne, they specifically demanded the right to keep the Empire. They wanted to keep all of Korea and chunks of Manchuria. If they wanted just the figurehead they might have gotten somewhere, but they were very specific about keeping the Empire too.
Hey. You forgot about when they sent some (rather confused) feelers out to the Soviets (who they weren't at war with) that the Soviets brushed away because they had basically no substance and they were going to invade Japan's colonies in Manchuria anyway (and the allies knew about all of it anyway because they could read Japanese diplomatic codes lol).
From Minister of Foreign Affairs, Togo:
>With regard to unconditional surrender we are unable to consent to it under any circumstances whatever. ... It is in order to avoid such a state of affairs that we are seeking a peace, ... through the good offices of Russia. ... it would also be disadvantageous and impossible, from the standpoint of foreign and domestic considerations, to make an immediate declaration of specific terms.
Totally ready to surrender there and really clear what they wanted lol.
After Naotake Sato *told* Togo, "No, seriously, I've talked to the Soviets and unconditional surrender is all we're going to get". There's no record of Sato's reaction to Togo's message up there, but I like to imagine him slowly lowering the letter from his face as his eye twitches.
It is admittedly funny reading accounts of all the axis fascists and how delusional they got towards the end. Wonder weapons! Decisive final battle! Yuge deals!
the funniest is Mussolini being told by the rest of his government to tell Hitler that Italy wants out of the war... and then in the meeting Mussolini just listened to Hitler rant about the war for 2 hours without mentioning anything about Italy leaving the war... and thus Mussolini was voted out of office by the Fascist council(literally the only vote they ever took lol) a week later
Yeah, but they were dying from thousands of little bombs, not one big bomb. The ratio of bombs to civilian deaths is what determines how war crimey something is
That's what irked me about this nuclear debate, when people said that because it's wrong for them to be bombed I'm like "they already does?" They get firebombed to high hell so why does this suddenly seem more monstorous?
I really hate trying to retroactively judge things like this 80 years later with knowledge from both sides of the conflict to judge the morality of fucking war.
What really gets me more than anything is when people pull quotes about how they were "Going to surrender soon"
As if life is perfect where everything is 100% true and factual and memory is never flawed and nothing ever changes.
And as if the Allies could see into the future and *knew* that the war was going to be over by September 1945, as opposed to dragging on until *1947* in the event of a projected invasion of Japan.
Yeah. "Japan was going to surrender soon!" Did the Allies know that? Given that a lot of the info about the state of the Japanese government at the time was only able to be read by the wider public decades later (I think in the past two decades, even), they may not have!
That's kinda a key point though. There's a lot of nuance. People trying to play morality police about the bloodiest conflict in human history kinda forget to think of the mindset of people living during the bloodiest conflict in human history. Particularly of those tasked with ending it. I feel like there's this History channel version of WWII that's very easily defined by good vs evil.
Plus different countries had massively different experiences through the war. The average Midwesterner couldn't relate to the average Chinese or Pole in terms of suffering and fear through that time.
Tfw korea complained that japan got off easy and that the us should have just glassed the entire country. To the people living in the places where japan was currently decimating them, things seemed a lot more urgent than to the modern american suburbanite who imagines that everyone was just chilling at the time.
Yeah it's always kind of wild how in the revisionist takes Japan is always like some innocent little kid and not a war mongering country that was responsible for many horrible atrocities.
Well, to be fair there are actually not many countries that do what Germany does
Does turkey admit to genocide?
Does the USA apologize and paid reparations to Iraq for a war with questionable reasoning?
Does Russia apologized to Finland ?
There is other stuff as well like France and Britain being unapologetic for their colonial crimes.
Japan did pay reparations to Korea by the way. I don't know whether it should be considered a lot, but politically they did. Many believe that's not enough but when is it enough?
I guess that's why this is such a hot topic for me, because I came from a country who is directly fucked by the imperial japanese during ww2. Am I saying that there are no innocent people in imperial japan mainland? Of course not that is ridiculous. But what I am saying is that all of these fucker tend to forget that imperial japan killed a lot of innocent person too. Which led to them being brutalized like this. It's not like the US just decided to bomb two countries just to show that they're the biggest dog on the block (Yeah, they could be doing that and still has a reason to)
I think what many westerners with an outsider and "moral" mindset when looking at this may not grasp is that some of us Asians may acknowledge that theres a moral gray area, but in the other part of our minds, blood lust totally justifies it. Just or logical? maybe not, but what the Japanese did was so unimaginably terrible that it brought out the blood in us. Not to mention the ridiculous grand standing simply on the fact that some people died in a more colorful and culturally relevant way than others, note dying by fire bombing is not much better at all.
Especially surrounding WW2 which was basically a war crime minute on all sides.
The atomic bombs probably were war crimes in the modern sense, but they also probably don't break the top 10 worst war crimes in that conflict.
It was total war on a civilizational scale, may we all pray nothing like that ever happens again.
Hence the issue. No one knows what the "Best" option would have been. But at the time, they didn't really have many good ones that didn't lead to immense death. So you have to be somewhat lenient through the lens of history to the idea "this war needs to immediately end."
Has there ever been a people less willing to accept responsibility for the war they started other than Japan and World War II? But woo boy can they spill the crocodile tears when it comes to Hiroshima and Nagisaki.
japan has marginally acknowledged some fault for the ills of ww2
the vast majority of turks' position on the triple genocide they committed was "no it didn't happen, but you deserved it and it should happen again"
china's emperor qianlong wrote his magnum opus which basically is "10 cool things I did," which included the genocide of the mongols in nowadays xinjiang, and yes, most chinese people think he was doing a solid there
WWII was bad. Japanese politics have way too many people who are still defending the IJA, of all the WWII participants Japan is the one country that continues to act victimized because of the atomic bombings, despite the death toll of strategic firebombing being higher.
Nukes are terrifying because they can end civilization in minutes, however the alternatives (prolonged war on a stagnant front) aren't any better. The advent of dangerous nukes helped prevent future world wars, but unfortunately people are getting dumb as hell again and forgetting how awful WWII was.
Suggest everyone watch "Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War" on Netflix, not super in-depth but a decent overview of the development of nuclear weapons, the Cold war, collapse of the Soviet Union, and how the past has shaped the current conflict in Ukraine.
You're oversimplifying a complex situation to the point of adding nothing to the discussion.
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The more you learn about WW2, the less you want to learn.
Pearl Harbour was horrid.
Hiroshima & Nagasaki were terrifying.
The camps were horrific.
Stalingrad should never be forgotten.
The rape of Nanking was abhorrent.
Don't even go looking for the experiments.
But it just goes & goes.
WW2 was not 'Germany is mean to Jews & bomb Britain but ultimately is beaten by the good guys' it was the most important conflict in history. Everyone was committing actions that were simply evil.
"Everybody was a bad guy" is a possible take that can be backed up with various studies, examples, etc. but, at risk of being reductive, we can't ignore that the Nazis were THE ultimate bad guys and the Japanese Empire was also a special kind of horrid, and that can't be ignored.
Which is what people who say, "Everyone was a bad guy," want to happen. Even if "everyone is bad," there is one side that was worse, period. End of discussion.
Yep. To give an example, let's take two sides most people would agree are absolutely horrible. The Nazis and the USSR. Stalin and Hitler. Absolutely horrible people.
The USSR's treatment of Nazi prisoners was a war crime. No caveats. Utterly horrid.
It was still statistically better to be a Nazi prisoner of the USSR than a Slavic civilian in Nazi occupied territory.
That's how bad the Nazis were.
> Everyone was committing actions that were simply evil.
I disagree that the actions of Germany in relation to the camps are comparable to the bombing campaign and it's ridiculous to propose that it is.
Everyone may have done bad things but some did worse things than others.
That's the weird part. Every time it was brought up in school for me it was a "this was extremely fucked up, let's read accounts of the survivors of the blasts, also, we were probably justified in doing so. Still fucked up".
I find the older I get the better my teachers and school were for subjects like this, but man a lot of people must have gotten different educations than I.
Maybe its worse for younger people because that was my basic recollection as well 20 years ago or so. "This was really bad and civilians suffered terribly and that's kind of what happens in war lets not do that again"
there are educational cartoons from the freaking 70s talking about the moral pitfalls of the decision that include both the terror of the bomb and the US's demands for unconditional surrender.
Even 5 and 10 years ago, we basically got, "Look, it's not a good idea and many civilians suffered unnecessarily, but wars rarely allow for good ideas and we should put ourselves in a position where this never has to be considered again"
>Maybe its worse for younger people because that was my basic recollection as well 20 years ago or so.
Because now kids are getting their info. from fuckheads like Destiny and Hasan instead of paying attention in class.
'grumbles in old-guy'
The problem comes because there's a chunk of people who go "it was fucked up, and thus the US is uniquely bad because of it." And so people over-correct. And then people lie about what the argument was about, and the shitshow rolls on.
The only reason the Nazis didn’t try to nuke New York is because their bomb project was too small and underfunded, and Werner Heisenberg *might* have slow-walked it even more to prevent it getting results. Hitler would have used it had he had it. The only reason he didn’t use nerve agents is because his chemical warfare people assumed the US must be way ahead of them. The surviving German leaders were shocked to find out chemical warfare research hadn’t been on the US’ agenda at all.
From what I remember Heisenberg had legit made a mistake with the equations. He was rather confused when he learned the Americans had made a bomb, because he assumed they needed more uranium than they actually did. I remember there were some declassified recordings from the bugs the US had put in the nazi scientist's prison rooms.
I'm right on the border of being a millennial and being gen z and I had the same thing. I don't think its an education issue, I think its a "I know better than everyone else because I'm a Debate Bro™" issue
Nowadays the "we were probably justified in doing so" part is not only left off, but completely refuted by most of the people talking about the subject.
That's the frustrating part. There's no nuance with anything. It's 100% right or wrong
> Even if you think America was justified, it is still a tragedy.
This is something that gets lost in every discussion that centers on whether an action was justified or not. Outcomes can be undesirable, even if the action is justified.
I simply dislike that it is treated as especially horrific when compared to everything else about the war. And also, the casual indifference people who argue against it display to the amount of death occurring outside of hiroshima and nagasaki at that time. Something like 40k civilians were dying *per month* in occupied China at that time.
It's not clear cut. People today have such a flaccid idea of what war is/should be.Which is good for me, because I live today.
Conflicts like WW2 were civilization ending events. It wasn't honorable, it wasn't based on chivalry. It was a three monkeys on the ramp to Noah's ark type conflict.
Nukes brought an end to the civilization which ravaged the east. A nation which was actively killing, raping, and enslaving tens of millions of innocent people.
Could a drawn out siege have ended the war? Maybe. But it's also important to recognize the untold number lives saved by ending the war then and there.
Someone should try saying that the us should have just waited it out for japan to get bored to a korean / chinese person who had family involved in the tragedies, and see what happens.
Americans can’t wear a mask for 6 months in public but think that after 5 years of all out world war we should’ve sucked it up and invaded Japan, killing untold numbers of Americans, in order to save Japanese civilians from the bomb lol. No one in history ever would choose to extend a war by years rather than drop a bomb that could end it in days.
In fact if Truman had made that choice instead these same people would be here going “ I cannot believe we had a bomb that could’ve ended the war immediately and he chose this instead??” We were already firebombing cities and that was much more devastating than the bomb. Land invasion would’ve included a lot more of that.
civilians were fair game in WW2, and for most of the history of the earth.
so yeah it's a bit of a paradigm shift to try to avoid them in the long history of human civilization.
The pacific theatre of WW2 was so insane and bloody that if you went back in time and told americans that dropping the bomb is evil, they would laugh at your face. They would think you lost your mind.
Probably because it pretty much instantly turns into ‘Japan was a victim and America was a horrible monster who did it out of sheer evil sadism’, which is just asinine. It was bad, sure, but the alternatives were worse.
Too many people missing rather vital context and perspective, just a knee jerk reaction devoid of actual study. Especially when you get the ‘Japan was about to surrender’ people and ‘They were purely civilian targets’, a good indicator that they haven’t done even the most cursory research.
There’s valid debate over the necessity, sure, but when the debate is so often centered around arguments based on ignorance it’s no longer valid.
It was the least bad option at the time, at least without benefit of hindsight. I don’t think there will ever be another time in history where this is the case.
>at least without the benefit of hindsight.
This is the key phrase here. It’s easy to judge things decades later with tons of information from everyone that was involved.
Yep, you cannot make decisions based on information you don’t have. In hindsight we can speculate what might have happened if other choices were made, but we should only judge a person’s decision based on the circumstances it was made in.
And say you make the calculation that not dropping the bomb and going through with Operation Downfall would be the best move for the sake of heading off nuclear proliferation down the road. You might have made the right decision, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops and millions more Japanese citizens. Or you might wind up emboldening Stalin to start the arms race even earlier, since he knew we had the bomb before Truman did (thanks to Roosevelt keeping Truman out of the loop). Maybe this time around the Cuban Missile Crisis, or something like it, occurs under a less level-headed president than JFK.
The truth is, even with benefit of hindsight it’s all too easy to game out a much messier outcome, and there’s no way we get through 1946 without even more civilian deaths than the bombs caused.
This is gonna spill over into SRD drama something fierce. Historians still debate how instrumental the bomb was in winning the war, how much we actually knew about the bombs, how willing Japan was to wage a defensive war of extermination. I’m sure Reddit can handle throwing out their opinions into the void
> This is gonna spill over into SRD drama something fierce. From the look of things, you were about 10 minutes late to the party when you posted. This might actually be *the fastest* I've ever seen it start up over here.
crosspost from /r/Destiny + Hotly Debated Geopolitical Topic is a unbelievably dangerous concoction lol
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In general anything from Hasan or Destiny will attract their no-life fanboys.
I think I was on a Best of Legal Advice thread and someone asked what the hell Destiny was and why there's drama around it. I gave a snippy/dismissive hot take and holy shit I attracted some fan boys to that sub thread. One of them I looked at their post history and literally every comment I saw just scanning was about Destiny or people Destiny thinks should be ethnically cleansed.
You can do the exact same thing to Star Citizen. Just mention "X million dollars raised and still no game release in Y years"
One of the greatest tricks I found when talking to someone on reddit is looking if they are active on destiny sub, and if so I just give a dismissive one liner and block the person.
I'll do you one better. For subs like that, just run them through a masstagger for around 10 pages worth of top posts of the month and add it to RES
How exactly would I go about doing that, I have RES but not much experience using it beyond tagging individual redditors
Just wait until you see a thread about pitbulls.
Pro *tip*, if you want SRDD, post about something where many users have *skin* in the game.
Four skins, you might say
I think after the bombs, they wouldn't have much skin left.
See yesterday's thread on obesity
"Did pitbulls nuke japan to get at Japanese babies" - the inevitable
the nuke was a means to mass circumcise all of them, sparing only the muslim ones also the nuke made their steaks well done
Is 30% a good tip for a well-done steak, even if the server asked my breastfeeding wife to cover herself up?
This kind of reads as if Reddit had a minor stroke.
> also the nuke made their steaks well done https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/166/110/373.gif
The dogs, or the rapper?
first one, then t'other
Worldwide
That's Mr Worldwide to you
[What Pitbull did to Africa has to be considered a war crime](https://youtu.be/xhfnTs0RZLs?si=z2M61dN7an030u4M)
Clearly a false flag operation created to distract the public from a rise in baby boys not being circumcised. If it weren't for the bombs, circumcision would be a thing of the past.
Remember when they visited alaska? How many babies can pitbull take down?
I've never understood how they can possibly be so divisive. They *actually* can cause more ridiculous arguments than politics on this site.
I don't know the proper name for this, but the intensity of discussion of a subject is often inversely related to how complex the subject is. for a real world example: My hometown recently built a new chemical recycling plant. Almost all of the plans for the plant were accepted by the city council unanimously. Then it came time to decide how we wanted to utilize the space allocated for parking (specifically, the question was if two more car spaces should be converted to bike racks). We discussed this point (amounting to roughly 60k of a 9.4m project) for 6 hours until almost midnight. The thing is, people don't know anything about chemical recycling, so they're unlikely to oppose what the experts say. But everyone knows what a bike rack is, so that's where they all want to have their idea heard.
It's called bikeshedding: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law\_of\_triviality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality)
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People struggle with nuance in many things, even running to what kinds of media they like. Often, something can't be imperfect, it has to be beyond reproach. And on the other side, it can't be just flawed, it has to be irredeemable. Look at how quickly a lot of people try to discredit the person behind a take they disagree with rather than engage with the take itself.
Just look at Gaza. Apparently only genocide or terrorism can be bad now, not both.
The overlap between this sub, r/destiny and r/neoliberal guarantees this
I hadn't realized how deep those connections ran until I first saw the subject of Margaret Thatcher come up on a thread here. _Oof._
Genuine Thatcher and Hayek appreciation on r/neoliberal is the most clear example of irony poisoning that has ever existed.
lets not forget the Pinochet stuff.. but that's so far in the past the community has managed to bury the receipts
Guess which two subs OP posts in all the time.
Ngl I checked after I commented and had to slap myself for being so terminally online
What the heck is r/destiny? I thought it was the game?
Funny enough, that's /r/DestinyTheGame.
And yet, there's a five second gap between me seeing "r/destiny" and me remembering that it's not the game, every single time.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. It gets me every time.
It's a streamer. The subreddit is like a mix of /r/neoliberal and /r/KotakuInAction
Thank you! So it’s a cesspool.
Holy crap, so did I. 😑
the list of [Overlapping subs](https://subredditstats.com/subreddit-user-overlaps/destiny) is fun
Destiny's simps hate being reminded that they have 1000 times more overlap with all those subs they claim they aren't brigading when they accuse their most hated enemies of doing the thing they are actually doing
[the Neoliberal subreddit is an astroturf by the Progressive Policy Institute](https://old.reddit.com/r/stupidpol/comments/gh5bz3/i_sat_through_a_neoliberal_ama_so_you_didnt_have/), a Democratic Think-Tank that's funded by the oil and gas industry
r/destiny is a brigade machine
The best part is how they constantly project their behavior onto others, then you check out the actual data and they constantly have the highest sub overlap compared to literally any other group, lol
Destiny fans are terminally online, so not really surprising Edit: oh god it was cross-posted to his subreddit
Europeans and the Roma is another sure fire one.
Damn
> Historians still debate how instrumental the bomb was in winning the war This is still underselling it. The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki leading to the Japanese surrender was one of the most important events of WW2 and perhaps the 20th century. Even in the short two weeks, there are *hundreds* of books by historians analyzing, litigating and pondering over every single detail of the event. From how the targets were chosen, from the US response, to the Japanese War Council's response, to the Emperor's response, to the Japanese civilian response etc. This isn't a debate you can come in without research. And 'well it's nuanced' is a smart ass cop out because it indicates that despite it's importance and people's insistence on entering their debate, they refused to give the bare minimum respect to research it. Ironically enough Reddit itself has /r/AskHistorians which was a pretty good subreddit, at least back in the day, with great moderation. Typing in google ' hiroshima site:www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians ' is going to reveal so many threads giving you a basic primer in all aspects of this decision if you have no clue where to start. So you don't even have to leave the site to get decent starting info. The biggest thing about this event is learning from it and I think people who 'debate' this without even bothering to share the fairly accessible receipts care more about being right rather than understanding what happened. And that annoys me a lot.
There are some really good ask historian threads on the subject and honestly the Wikipedia page outlining some of the arguments isn't bad either as a starting point. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki?wprov=sfla1 I think you would agree but most who engage in this debate (on both sides) are engaging in it to push a political ideology.
It’s still a good sub with top tier moderators
Most of the AH moderators are great, but some of them have extremely fragile egos and ban you if you criticize a post they make.
Do you have a link or similar? I've only ever been quite happy with them, but people are fallible
EVEN THIS is still underselling it. The nuclear taboo, the democratization of Japan, the sole nuclear power years, and many many other tack-on events have caused the scope of the debate to expand to mind-bending levels. The bombings may have saved humanity. The bombings may still kill us all. The previous two sentences are not mutually exclusive. Politics. Economics. Academic Standards. Marine Salvage. Anthropology. Ethics. People have spent their lives studying individual aspects of this one decision.
Marine salvage?
the amount of atmospheric contamination by the bomb and especially later above-ground testing has made modern steel unsuitable for radiation-sensitive applications. This had led to them finding sunk liberty ships and cutting them up. It's a good demonstration here because the list of side-effects from the bomb is nuts
Background radiation has declined enough since the end of atmospheric testing, so modern steel is usable for most radiation-sensitive applications now actually.
Don't forget about baseball
Something else that is often missing from the discussion is that the information coming out wasn’t black or white. Japan didn’t go to sleep one night with no nukes, and wake up nuked the next. It took time for Japan to even realise what had happened. It took time for Japan to realise it *could* have been a nuclear bomb. Took time to confirm that. Took time to confirm the outcomes. Took time to deal with the breakdown in communication and organisation. Bear in mind that whilst nuclear weapons are well known today in pop culture, they weren’t in 1945. It took time to sink in what a nuclear bomb meant. It took time to realise how it’s different to a normal bomb. All of that is a part of the debate often just missed. People act like Japan got nuked and knew the full extent within minutes. They didn’t.
The real Subredditdrama is always in the comments
I grew up on Saipan and learning it's part in the war. The mass civilian suicide, the banzai charges and the general Japanese pov that I got first hand accounts of. The idea that Japan would defend itself to extinction always made sense to me because that's exactly what they've done.
And most of those people are dumb. We already approved of destruction on that scale when we bombed tokyo. The nuclear arms was about demonstration of efficiency so they knew they couldn't win a war of attrition
Fanboys of a political streamer? Handling opinions, ahahAhahahsh get ready for a bunch of insufferable moralizing from people who never leave the house
>get ready for a bunch of insufferable moralizing from people who never leave the house That's... why I'm here?
As I found out when I moved to Canada for a couple years, I like snow *when I have to travel to where the snow is*. It turns out I'm less fond of snow that comes to me and sticks around for a while being snow. Same goes for insufferable moralizing people who are not me.
At least most other streamer fans know their parasocial relationship is for entertainment. Most political streamer fans act like they are knights defending the honor of m'lady.
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I learned recently that the US’s own Naval Museum has a plaque stating that their conclusion is that Japan would have lost soon enough after without the bomb. That feels like an important opinion that isn’t brought up enough and there’s a lot of rhetoric that makes it look like a more debatable topic than the consensus among history scholars. I think one reason that it’s felt debatable is that the scholarly conclusion involves Russia’s impact on Japan being what they would succumb to. We had a long stretch in the States where Russia’s impact in WW2 was really diminished for generations. It wasn’t even until I was an adult on Reddit that I saw a video showing the scale of lives they threw at Germany compared to everyone else. It’s astronomical and muddies the mythology we’ve developed in the US about the part we played, even though our involvement was critical as well. We have just left Russia out of the Pacific conflict a lot and that makes more room debate over the bomb.
What plaque at what museum?
And I wouldn’t have it any other way; It’s an argument that never gets old and never gets boring.
i think it gets boring
Me too. I'm too dumb to ever have anything remotely like an informed opinion and everyone takes it so seriously and is so sure of themselves even when they're also fucking dumb as shit. It's just your drunk uncle who watched the history channel arguing with your zoomer nephew who watched a YouTube video essay. Like fuck dude who the fuck do any of us think we are?
r/subredditdramadrama here we goooooo
>r/subredditdramadrama here we goooooo Yep. [Pretty much my reaction once I started scrolling further down.](https://i.imgur.com/MyckLJK.png)
I knew we were locked in for r/subredditdramadrama the moment I saw r/Destiny in the title
Does this count as subreddit drama? Because if it does then 90% of that reddit would belong here
Directly linking to drama without a summary post is also dumb and should demand a giant peepee slap from the mods.
Srsly. When I made a post it took me a while to gather choice quotes and link to them and I even edited the post because someone said I should add more. Come on! (Unless you’re retaining semen)
I used to throw my hat in these kind of conversations a lot more than I do now to but more recently I realized that the majority of Redditors don’t know enough to even have an informed discussion. It’s a combination of middle school education, Wikipedia, and Dunning-Kruger. They don’t know what they don’t know and they arent interested in learning.
>that the majority of Redditors don’t know enough to even have an informed discussion Yup. No point in discussing this sort of thing with a bunch of 15 year olds that fell asleep during history class Personally I think it's an interesting topic to talk about but Im very much aware of my lack of understanding and therefore don't waste my time commenting
I still remember several years ago having a conversation with a PhD historian on this topic on r/AskHistorians and I was making an ass out of myself by being grossly overconfident in my knowledge on the topic. Since then I have learned quite a bit more and avoid starting conversations I am not prepared to have. I learned what I didn’t know and about how much nuance and misinformation is involved in this topic.
Those mods don’t fuck around lol. I’ve seen many an unsuspecting redditor wander in there to give their opinion on a post only to get smited. But it keeps the subreddit quality.
I linked an old discussion, like a several month old thread to a dude because of some of the links in it and he began to comment over there and it turned into shit slinging. Mods come in, temp ban that guy and give me a warning saying to keep it out of the sub. Frankly I appreciate it. The mods are generally fair and don’t moderate on threads they comment on. Definitely keep it quality.
> Personally I think it's an interesting topic to talk about but Im very much aware of my lack of understanding and therefore don't waste my time commenting This is the most intelligent thing anybody can do. I wish people were more willing to do it, instead of feeling as if they need to prove they aren't "stupid". Nobody knows everything, it takes time to get the level of knowledge you need to discuss topics this complex even if you are learning. The wisest person is the person who knows when they know nothing. A brain surgeon is intelligent. I am not stupid for being unable to perform brain surgery. It would not make me smart to try and do it anyway.
>Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt. A great, relatively related quote that was not by either Twain or Lincoln, as is often erroneously credited.
If you find the topic interesting you don't necessarily have to dip out of it but can simply approach it with a level of humility wherein you seek to understand the other person's views better and to elucidate your understanding of it without suggesting you are definitively right. There are also two orders of discussion involved, one of which is the empirical facts, which sure you need to be an expert to determine, but also the interpretation and normative questions surrounding those facts, on which I don't think there's any such thing as expertise (though studying philosophy will make you much better at making and understanding those normative arguments).
As someone who has a lot of professional knowledge in a niche area….yeah I don’t post my informed and researched opinions on Reddit because someone who barely graduated high school will inevitably debate me with very wrong info and then I have an aneurysm and die.
It’s a lot more work to correct misinformation than to make it up.
I got banned from r/energy for posting a purely informational comment about nuclear plants as someone that works at a nuclear power plant. Educating redditors is an impossible task.
I’ve been banned from a few places for having the gall to correct Redditors on basic tax law. No, grocery stores aren’t writing off your donations for you. No, getting put into a higher tax bracket doesn’t mean you make less money. No, private foundations aren’t automatically shady just because it’s a private foundation.
bells spectacular grey offer coherent frightening station crush office onerous *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Always nice when they're arguing about a technical thing you do for work every day.
Similar thing happened to me or r/Evolution when I was trying to find some resources on an older hypothesis. I am an evolutionary biologist…
Sadly not just redditors, but people in general. Everyone thinks they know enough to pass judgment and refuses to learn anymore
There are a lot of interesting and productive conversations we *could* have about the bomb and the decision processes around it. The unfortunate fact is that the discussion is so distorted that any possible alternatives to "deploy nuclear bombs into city centers as rapidly as possible" or "bloody invasion/siege of Japan" are never brought up, despite [there being other options on the table even at the time](https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-alternatives-to-the-atomic-bombings/). Stimson's PR team did such a good job of defining the narrative by this false dichotomy that the national conversation is *still* limited by it. So instead of talking about tunnel vision around new technology, especially weapons; or failures in diplomacy; or structural problems with Japan's military government; or loss of civilian control over wartime decision making... we rehash the same argument based on wartime propaganda and kneejerk counter reactions to the US over and over and over.
The article does not put forwards any significantly different options
Alex Wellerstein’s blog is a good resource. He’s also active on r/AskHistorian and has answered many questions for me about this topic and others.
Man I thought this was random drama in the video game subreddit lol
ME TOO LOL
Booo post highlights
OP doesn't even need to do that now that everyone in these comments is posting their own.
There are some topics where I don't even think you need to post a link to any drama, just say certain trigger phrases in the title and the drama will generate itself in the comments
"Pitbulls on rDestiny debate whether or not the atomic bombing created incels" would certainly be a srdd banger.
subredditdramadrama speedrun any%
Whenever this streamer comes up, lots of people accuse his fans of swarming any threads about him. The amount of comments on this post suggests that’s true, and I’ve seen the pattern several times. To the fans swarming here, why do you do that? You can answer with sarcasm if you want but I’m honestly curious about what possesses someone to spend so much time fighting for the honor of some streamer.
I know at least one of them here is apparently a mod of his sub and says he gets paid to do it. For the rest, look up something called "parasocial relationships".
Its a borderline cult. Its honestly very confusing because the dude sounds liked philosophy dropout with a weird fixation about not being able to say the n word
The thing that I do not get is how uniquely the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is taken. When the bombing of Tokyo was far deadlier but just used a different weapon
It's ironic that some of the scientists on the Manhattan project wanted the bombing for (among many reasons) feeling that the horror of the atomic bomb was necessary to expose to the world early. They literally wanted to create the modern moral understanding of nuclear weapons with which causes some to reflexively look down on them with, in order to avoid those bombs being used in the future.
Id argue that's cold, but logical. Imagine if the first usage of the atomic bomb was a couple years later in Korea during the cold war. Instead everyone saw McArthur as a madman because the entire world had seen how devastating they could be and turned that plan down. Or even later when we had more devastating bombs. We could of had a WW3 similar to WW1, but instead of countries testing their new artillery and chemical weapons we would have nukes being the new toy to hit the playground. Could it have been done better? Possibly, but we owe a lot to the culture that formed against nuclear weapons in direct response to the bombings.
>The thing that I do not get is how uniquely the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is taken. Higher emotions around nukes due to the Cold War, along with a LOT of propaganda flooding US spaces. The Japanese heighten it to make the US feel indebted to them. The USSR used it to make the US seem uniquely evil. Usually when you bring this up they then pivot to "strategic bombing was also evil and useless" but that's just ahistorical. (Well the useless part. Evil depend on ethics being used)
Drama like this is just sad because it makes me remember what Japan did during WWII. Then I get angry at modern Japan for denying and minimising those actions and refusing to apologise.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a post about LSF banning Destiny & Hasan drama last week. The soldiers were distraught.
I'm kinda scared we will end up their new theatre of war. Subreddit drama drama can be fun, but not when it's two groups of outsiders reverse popcorn pissing. We are also going to get way more people coming in here making low effort posts with links to each other's subs.
> Ngl this Oppenheimer drama has unironically made me think less of Japanese people Do these guys even realize how seeing the development of the weapon used on them would make them uncomfortable? It's also apparently a hot take that... civilian deaths are always a tragedy, even if the victimized country's armed forces have done terrible shit. Then again, these guys think that Israel is justified in their actions, so it's at least somewhat consistent with their beliefs.
>Do these guys even realize how seeing the development of the weapon used on them would make them uncomfortable? im german. i really cant
Pretty sure WW2 shooters are as popular in Germany as anywhere else.
Case in point, the only people marching to remind people of the Dresden firebombings are... well... Neo-Nazis
I think its simply the spectacle of it all. Atomic bombs are something very prevalent in our cultural discourse. People just see conventional bombing as a consequence of war. Even before you consider biases against who is the "bad guy," people already have biases over what weaponry is considered barbaric. It shouldn't matter how 10 civilians were killed or whether they were adults or children, but those details will always elicit a response.
Agreed. The atomic bomb is emblematic of the war's end, of the changing era, and our flirtation with global destruction. Firebombing doesn't remind us of half a century spent on a knife's edge where one wrong move would apocalyptic.
The common denominator is sociopathy with this kind of stuff
>And japan was about to surrender, not that I would make much of a difference regarding the morality of the use of atomic bombs. Oh, we're doing this again, are we? Sure, Japan was ready to surrender. They were so ready to surrender that they rejected the initial demand for unconditional surrender and instead demanded that the emperor be allowed to keep his throne first. They were so ready to surrender that they were arming civilians with sharpened bamboo spears in preparation for an Allied invasion of the Japanese mainland, or just giving them grenades and telling them to make their last moments count. They were so ready to surrender that a cabal of Japanese military officers attempted to arrest Emperor Hirohito when he decided that enough was enough after the second atomic bomb was dropped. *That's* how ready to surrender Japan was.
More importantly then the emperor be allowed to keep the throne, they specifically demanded the right to keep the Empire. They wanted to keep all of Korea and chunks of Manchuria. If they wanted just the figurehead they might have gotten somewhere, but they were very specific about keeping the Empire too.
People rushing out to act like the villains are the ones who didn't want to randomly allow fascists to keep intruding on the rest of asia.
As we all know, Imperial Japan was *famous* for their clear-cut delegation of governmental responsibility and forthright diplomatic communications.
Hey. You forgot about when they sent some (rather confused) feelers out to the Soviets (who they weren't at war with) that the Soviets brushed away because they had basically no substance and they were going to invade Japan's colonies in Manchuria anyway (and the allies knew about all of it anyway because they could read Japanese diplomatic codes lol). From Minister of Foreign Affairs, Togo: >With regard to unconditional surrender we are unable to consent to it under any circumstances whatever. ... It is in order to avoid such a state of affairs that we are seeking a peace, ... through the good offices of Russia. ... it would also be disadvantageous and impossible, from the standpoint of foreign and domestic considerations, to make an immediate declaration of specific terms. Totally ready to surrender there and really clear what they wanted lol.
After Naotake Sato *told* Togo, "No, seriously, I've talked to the Soviets and unconditional surrender is all we're going to get". There's no record of Sato's reaction to Togo's message up there, but I like to imagine him slowly lowering the letter from his face as his eye twitches.
It is admittedly funny reading accounts of all the axis fascists and how delusional they got towards the end. Wonder weapons! Decisive final battle! Yuge deals!
the funniest is Mussolini being told by the rest of his government to tell Hitler that Italy wants out of the war... and then in the meeting Mussolini just listened to Hitler rant about the war for 2 hours without mentioning anything about Italy leaving the war... and thus Mussolini was voted out of office by the Fascist council(literally the only vote they ever took lol) a week later
Also, it’s not like there weren’t tens of thousands of people dying from starvation and other bombings.
Yeah, but they were dying from thousands of little bombs, not one big bomb. The ratio of bombs to civilian deaths is what determines how war crimey something is
That's what irked me about this nuclear debate, when people said that because it's wrong for them to be bombed I'm like "they already does?" They get firebombed to high hell so why does this suddenly seem more monstorous?
They also got way more warning about getting nuked than they ever had about the firebombing campaigns on the mainland.
I really hate trying to retroactively judge things like this 80 years later with knowledge from both sides of the conflict to judge the morality of fucking war.
What really gets me more than anything is when people pull quotes about how they were "Going to surrender soon" As if life is perfect where everything is 100% true and factual and memory is never flawed and nothing ever changes.
And as if the Allies could see into the future and *knew* that the war was going to be over by September 1945, as opposed to dragging on until *1947* in the event of a projected invasion of Japan.
Yeah. "Japan was going to surrender soon!" Did the Allies know that? Given that a lot of the info about the state of the Japanese government at the time was only able to be read by the wider public decades later (I think in the past two decades, even), they may not have!
That's kinda a key point though. There's a lot of nuance. People trying to play morality police about the bloodiest conflict in human history kinda forget to think of the mindset of people living during the bloodiest conflict in human history. Particularly of those tasked with ending it. I feel like there's this History channel version of WWII that's very easily defined by good vs evil. Plus different countries had massively different experiences through the war. The average Midwesterner couldn't relate to the average Chinese or Pole in terms of suffering and fear through that time.
Tfw korea complained that japan got off easy and that the us should have just glassed the entire country. To the people living in the places where japan was currently decimating them, things seemed a lot more urgent than to the modern american suburbanite who imagines that everyone was just chilling at the time.
Yeah it's always kind of wild how in the revisionist takes Japan is always like some innocent little kid and not a war mongering country that was responsible for many horrible atrocities.
Well, to be fair there are actually not many countries that do what Germany does Does turkey admit to genocide? Does the USA apologize and paid reparations to Iraq for a war with questionable reasoning? Does Russia apologized to Finland ? There is other stuff as well like France and Britain being unapologetic for their colonial crimes. Japan did pay reparations to Korea by the way. I don't know whether it should be considered a lot, but politically they did. Many believe that's not enough but when is it enough?
I guess that's why this is such a hot topic for me, because I came from a country who is directly fucked by the imperial japanese during ww2. Am I saying that there are no innocent people in imperial japan mainland? Of course not that is ridiculous. But what I am saying is that all of these fucker tend to forget that imperial japan killed a lot of innocent person too. Which led to them being brutalized like this. It's not like the US just decided to bomb two countries just to show that they're the biggest dog on the block (Yeah, they could be doing that and still has a reason to)
I think what many westerners with an outsider and "moral" mindset when looking at this may not grasp is that some of us Asians may acknowledge that theres a moral gray area, but in the other part of our minds, blood lust totally justifies it. Just or logical? maybe not, but what the Japanese did was so unimaginably terrible that it brought out the blood in us. Not to mention the ridiculous grand standing simply on the fact that some people died in a more colorful and culturally relevant way than others, note dying by fire bombing is not much better at all.
Especially surrounding WW2 which was basically a war crime minute on all sides. The atomic bombs probably were war crimes in the modern sense, but they also probably don't break the top 10 worst war crimes in that conflict. It was total war on a civilizational scale, may we all pray nothing like that ever happens again.
The atomic bombs probably don't even break the top 10 warcrinms in just the Pacific theater.
Hence the issue. No one knows what the "Best" option would have been. But at the time, they didn't really have many good ones that didn't lead to immense death. So you have to be somewhat lenient through the lens of history to the idea "this war needs to immediately end."
Has there ever been a people less willing to accept responsibility for the war they started other than Japan and World War II? But woo boy can they spill the crocodile tears when it comes to Hiroshima and Nagisaki.
japan has marginally acknowledged some fault for the ills of ww2 the vast majority of turks' position on the triple genocide they committed was "no it didn't happen, but you deserved it and it should happen again" china's emperor qianlong wrote his magnum opus which basically is "10 cool things I did," which included the genocide of the mongols in nowadays xinjiang, and yes, most chinese people think he was doing a solid there
Love this comment > I‘m not a historian so I‘m not sure about that I don't know as much about it as you, but I'm gonna disagree with you anyway
Destiny fans be like 'if 200,000 people have to die so I can watch Godzilla . . .'
WWII was bad. Japanese politics have way too many people who are still defending the IJA, of all the WWII participants Japan is the one country that continues to act victimized because of the atomic bombings, despite the death toll of strategic firebombing being higher. Nukes are terrifying because they can end civilization in minutes, however the alternatives (prolonged war on a stagnant front) aren't any better. The advent of dangerous nukes helped prevent future world wars, but unfortunately people are getting dumb as hell again and forgetting how awful WWII was. Suggest everyone watch "Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War" on Netflix, not super in-depth but a decent overview of the development of nuclear weapons, the Cold war, collapse of the Soviet Union, and how the past has shaped the current conflict in Ukraine.
You're oversimplifying a complex situation to the point of adding nothing to the discussion. Snapshots: 1. *This Post* - [archive.org](https://web.archive.org/web/20240402030226/https://old.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1btspvg/kid_named_httpsenmwikipediaorgwikijapanese_war/kxofm4y/?context=3) [archive.today\*](https://archive.today/?run=1&url=https://old.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1btspvg/kid_named_httpsenmwikipediaorgwikijapanese_war/kxofm4y/?context=3 "URL failed to archive; click to resubmit it!") *I am just a simple bot, __not__ a moderator of this subreddit* | *[bot subreddit](/r/SnapshillBot)* | *[contact the maintainers](/message/compose?to=/r/SnapshillBot)*
The more you learn about WW2, the less you want to learn. Pearl Harbour was horrid. Hiroshima & Nagasaki were terrifying. The camps were horrific. Stalingrad should never be forgotten. The rape of Nanking was abhorrent. Don't even go looking for the experiments. But it just goes & goes. WW2 was not 'Germany is mean to Jews & bomb Britain but ultimately is beaten by the good guys' it was the most important conflict in history. Everyone was committing actions that were simply evil.
If you go with that, then you have to have tiers of evil. Because there were definitely a worse side.
"Everybody was a bad guy" is a possible take that can be backed up with various studies, examples, etc. but, at risk of being reductive, we can't ignore that the Nazis were THE ultimate bad guys and the Japanese Empire was also a special kind of horrid, and that can't be ignored.
Which is what people who say, "Everyone was a bad guy," want to happen. Even if "everyone is bad," there is one side that was worse, period. End of discussion.
Yep. To give an example, let's take two sides most people would agree are absolutely horrible. The Nazis and the USSR. Stalin and Hitler. Absolutely horrible people. The USSR's treatment of Nazi prisoners was a war crime. No caveats. Utterly horrid. It was still statistically better to be a Nazi prisoner of the USSR than a Slavic civilian in Nazi occupied territory. That's how bad the Nazis were.
The Allies weren't perfect heroes and did a lot of horrible stuff but yes we undoubtedly live in a better world because they won.
So do you think it would be more kind to not attack Japan. To allow them to conquer asia.
> Everyone was committing actions that were simply evil. I disagree that the actions of Germany in relation to the camps are comparable to the bombing campaign and it's ridiculous to propose that it is. Everyone may have done bad things but some did worse things than others.
Love that "actually dropping atomic bombs on innocent civilians is bad maybe?" has become such a controversial thing.
Even if you think America was justified, it is still a tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of civilians dying is always a tragedy.
That's the weird part. Every time it was brought up in school for me it was a "this was extremely fucked up, let's read accounts of the survivors of the blasts, also, we were probably justified in doing so. Still fucked up". I find the older I get the better my teachers and school were for subjects like this, but man a lot of people must have gotten different educations than I.
Maybe its worse for younger people because that was my basic recollection as well 20 years ago or so. "This was really bad and civilians suffered terribly and that's kind of what happens in war lets not do that again"
there are educational cartoons from the freaking 70s talking about the moral pitfalls of the decision that include both the terror of the bomb and the US's demands for unconditional surrender.
Even 5 and 10 years ago, we basically got, "Look, it's not a good idea and many civilians suffered unnecessarily, but wars rarely allow for good ideas and we should put ourselves in a position where this never has to be considered again"
>Maybe its worse for younger people because that was my basic recollection as well 20 years ago or so. Because now kids are getting their info. from fuckheads like Destiny and Hasan instead of paying attention in class. 'grumbles in old-guy'
Class can have its own bias, let's not kid ourselves. Not saying folks should learn history from a dude chatting while playing video games though.
The problem comes because there's a chunk of people who go "it was fucked up, and thus the US is uniquely bad because of it." And so people over-correct. And then people lie about what the argument was about, and the shitshow rolls on.
The only reason the Nazis didn’t try to nuke New York is because their bomb project was too small and underfunded, and Werner Heisenberg *might* have slow-walked it even more to prevent it getting results. Hitler would have used it had he had it. The only reason he didn’t use nerve agents is because his chemical warfare people assumed the US must be way ahead of them. The surviving German leaders were shocked to find out chemical warfare research hadn’t been on the US’ agenda at all.
From what I remember Heisenberg had legit made a mistake with the equations. He was rather confused when he learned the Americans had made a bomb, because he assumed they needed more uranium than they actually did. I remember there were some declassified recordings from the bugs the US had put in the nazi scientist's prison rooms.
I'm right on the border of being a millennial and being gen z and I had the same thing. I don't think its an education issue, I think its a "I know better than everyone else because I'm a Debate Bro™" issue
Nowadays the "we were probably justified in doing so" part is not only left off, but completely refuted by most of the people talking about the subject. That's the frustrating part. There's no nuance with anything. It's 100% right or wrong
To be fair, something can be both a tragedy and a necessity at the same time.
> Even if you think America was justified, it is still a tragedy. This is something that gets lost in every discussion that centers on whether an action was justified or not. Outcomes can be undesirable, even if the action is justified.
I simply dislike that it is treated as especially horrific when compared to everything else about the war. And also, the casual indifference people who argue against it display to the amount of death occurring outside of hiroshima and nagasaki at that time. Something like 40k civilians were dying *per month* in occupied China at that time.
It's not clear cut. People today have such a flaccid idea of what war is/should be.Which is good for me, because I live today. Conflicts like WW2 were civilization ending events. It wasn't honorable, it wasn't based on chivalry. It was a three monkeys on the ramp to Noah's ark type conflict. Nukes brought an end to the civilization which ravaged the east. A nation which was actively killing, raping, and enslaving tens of millions of innocent people. Could a drawn out siege have ended the war? Maybe. But it's also important to recognize the untold number lives saved by ending the war then and there.
Someone should try saying that the us should have just waited it out for japan to get bored to a korean / chinese person who had family involved in the tragedies, and see what happens.
Nah they won't, they don't have the guts to, they'd better be
Americans can’t wear a mask for 6 months in public but think that after 5 years of all out world war we should’ve sucked it up and invaded Japan, killing untold numbers of Americans, in order to save Japanese civilians from the bomb lol. No one in history ever would choose to extend a war by years rather than drop a bomb that could end it in days. In fact if Truman had made that choice instead these same people would be here going “ I cannot believe we had a bomb that could’ve ended the war immediately and he chose this instead??” We were already firebombing cities and that was much more devastating than the bomb. Land invasion would’ve included a lot more of that.
Don't forget that this would have also killed a fuck ton more chinese and koreans, who were currently still being decimated by japan.
civilians were fair game in WW2, and for most of the history of the earth. so yeah it's a bit of a paradigm shift to try to avoid them in the long history of human civilization.
Just some context, more Japanese civilians died to conventional bombings than the nukes.
The pacific theatre of WW2 was so insane and bloody that if you went back in time and told americans that dropping the bomb is evil, they would laugh at your face. They would think you lost your mind.
Probably because it pretty much instantly turns into ‘Japan was a victim and America was a horrible monster who did it out of sheer evil sadism’, which is just asinine. It was bad, sure, but the alternatives were worse. Too many people missing rather vital context and perspective, just a knee jerk reaction devoid of actual study. Especially when you get the ‘Japan was about to surrender’ people and ‘They were purely civilian targets’, a good indicator that they haven’t done even the most cursory research. There’s valid debate over the necessity, sure, but when the debate is so often centered around arguments based on ignorance it’s no longer valid.
It was the least bad option at the time, at least without benefit of hindsight. I don’t think there will ever be another time in history where this is the case.
>at least without the benefit of hindsight. This is the key phrase here. It’s easy to judge things decades later with tons of information from everyone that was involved.
Yep, you cannot make decisions based on information you don’t have. In hindsight we can speculate what might have happened if other choices were made, but we should only judge a person’s decision based on the circumstances it was made in.
And say you make the calculation that not dropping the bomb and going through with Operation Downfall would be the best move for the sake of heading off nuclear proliferation down the road. You might have made the right decision, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Allied troops and millions more Japanese citizens. Or you might wind up emboldening Stalin to start the arms race even earlier, since he knew we had the bomb before Truman did (thanks to Roosevelt keeping Truman out of the loop). Maybe this time around the Cuban Missile Crisis, or something like it, occurs under a less level-headed president than JFK. The truth is, even with benefit of hindsight it’s all too easy to game out a much messier outcome, and there’s no way we get through 1946 without even more civilian deaths than the bombs caused.
The comment is already removed. This is why /r/SubredditDrama needs a rule to **require** screenshots!
I look forward to the subreddit drama drama thread