by new hope and happiness 108 Replies latest jw friends
True lalika, but Truman made a decision based on the information he had at hand and we are 65 years on with the benifit of 20/20 hindsight.
B.B. As Tolstoy said " Any mans death effects me, we are all living vital members of the humunity". But would you or i have made Trumuns decision based on the facts available then? I think he was sincere in dropping the bomb to end the war quickly with as little further loss of life as possible.
NHAH - I agree with you, but my point was really that although we may justify the action,does it become an act of good because it produced less death, or is it still an act of evil, albeit of a lesser evil than the consequences, which still makes it an act of evil does it not?
The Japanese were willing to negotiate for peace before the bombs were dropped but wouldn't commit to unconditional surrender as they wanted to protect the emperor. Truman had that information but still demanded unconditional surrender and went ahead with the bombings. If he had really have wanted to end the war with as little further loss of life as possible he would have gone to the negotiating table.
B.B in my opinion under any circumstances it was an act of evil.
Lalika:- if what you say is correct then maybe i was foolish to believe Trumans own words. ( i should have learnt that from my G.B exsperience)
The US was dropping incendiary bombs on 100s of Japanese cities prior to the two nuclear bombs. The Russian army has defeated the last Japanese army in the Mongolia region. Japan could not have lasted much longer as a military threat.
The US war planners were looking ahead as to who would emerge as the world power. The nuclear bombs have given the US 70 years of dominance. But things are now changing.
War is evil no matter the extensiveness of the attack you make.
One bomb Can kill 50 people or one bomb can kill 10,000.
The American Atomic bombs dropped on Japan was actually an effort to stop Japan in its military aggression in Asia.
It was successful in that regard.
I just look at what the Japanese did in Manchuria Burma and their other occupied territories.
How they treated women and child prisoners. Their emperor worship that made surrender inconceivable. How many soldiers lives would have been lost fighting their way across Japan? Truman wd not put any more lives on the line by pitying a pitiless vicious imperialistic aggressor.
How in 1937 they came to Washington DC and cooed about wanting peaceful relations with the US as they pranted chelly tlees as symbahl of peace. Then they pulled off the Pearl Harbour Heist.
Why should Truman say "we're so sorry for letting you be the aggressor instead of us. Can we negotiate a peace that makes you happy after all the suffering you started?"
So: NO
We in the west now lack any stomach to really stand up for ourselves. There is too much self effacement and giving in an inch at a time to anybody who is offended by us. We are perceived as weak and vacillating ( as Japan did in the 30s ) A big fight is in the making, and the use of lethal force will be necessary to survive - or just make the other guy think twice. We lack the stomach for it, and will probably apologise for being here in the first place.
Even if America had not dropped the Bomb, there are plenty of enemies of democracy who view our lives as of no value and would drop as many nukes on us as they can without a qualm.
The only difference in these two raids,- one with the uranium bomb, and the Nagasaki Plutonium device was the efficiency of the killing by one single plane.
Nearly as many people died in one night in the Tokio fire storms. I one afternoon more people died in Hamburg, later Dresden,- than in the whole Blitz in London earlier.
War is atrocious, once you start it, expect maximum response.
Allowing Japan to surrender, spared it the fate of Eastern Europe with it's savage rampage experience from the east.
We mourn all victims of war, that is why The WT message was so appealing, the deception so appalling.
The Soviet Union was the only real threat to Japan's existence and its territory, (and lost some irretrivialy to Russia), so, these 2 events though SUDDEN were -in retrospect- no more damaging then carpet bombing- but kept overall damage to Japan and the US to a minimum.
will Vladimir get the message?
The written history is that "the bomb was to end the war" but the reality is that the bomb was possibly to show Russia that they had it ansd pay-back for Pearl Harbour. Of course generations in the US have been brought up to believe what they have been indocrinated to believe about it in the same way that the Boston tea party rebels were against unfair British taxation, even though it's not true. The Japanese tried to surrender before the bombs were dropped but America refused to talk until they had a chance to use their new bombs.
Was it evil? I think it was. The city was undefended and the lone bomber circled the bomb site for a good while before dropping it. The civilian population suffered terribly, the accounts are awful to read.
Were Japanese people as a whole evil? Maybe - their army killed many and treated prisoners terribly and surprisingly seem to have changed as a people so maybe it accomplished 'some good' (which doesn't justify it). But do the women and children killed really make military policy?
Ultimately, the US is the only country in history to deploy nuclear weapons against civilian targets ... not it's proudest moment and no surprise that it tries to justify it's actions, however abhorent they were.
BTW: Do Americans know that Britain knew about the coming attack on Pearl Harbour from their listening posts in the far east and breaking of the Japanese naval codes but didn't pass on the warning because they needed America to engage in the war effort?
http://ospreypearlharbor.com/debate/churchill.php
But America was warned about it apparently - one theory being that Roosevelt needed it to provide the impetus and public support to declare war on Japan:
http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4211
Was this why America was 'lucky' that the important ships (aircraft carriers) were out on manouvers that day? We'll probably never know the real truth - sometimes sacrifices are made for a greater good, sometimes it's just the chaos of war and result of mistakes. People were knowingly sent to their deaths during the war to protect knowledge of intelligence sources - necessary acts of evil?
If anyone thinks good and evil is clear and simple on national grounds they are deluded. There were good and evil people on all sides just like in any war, although it's hard to argue that there wasn't a concentration of evil in Germany and Japan in that period.
Another theory is the failure of imagination, just like with 9/11. The attack on Pearl Harbour was the first dramatic use of Aircraft Carriers to great effect but ironically, even the Japanese using them focused on the Battleships, the capital ships at the time and focus of most naval strength so they ignored the missing US aircraft carriers as unimportant and these ships allowed the US to fight back during important naval engagements later.
