Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/05/20/japan-disagrees-with-lindsay-grahams-enthusiasm-for-nuclear-wars.html
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You’d think the one country that has been hit with nukes in war time would be all in! /s
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Seems like there might be a WHOLE BUNCH of context missing from these statements. Oh well, I’m sure it will inspire a well-informed discussion at the highest levels of government, and not just a bunch of knee-jerk effort to confirm priors.
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Yes, civilians deserved to be hit by nukes because war crimes… That’s how we fix the world, ever escalating violence. Works EVERY TIME… just ask 35,000 dead Palestinians… oh wait, YOU CAN’T, cause they’re dead… /s
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Yeah, it’s hard to imagine but some people believe some ridiculous things when it comes to this topic.
We had to use them because Japan was on the verge of developing their own! Japan was already trying to surrender but we wouldn’t let them! The bombs were justified because of Pearl Harbor! Or Bataan. Or because of something! The only reason Truman dropped the bombs was to scare the Soviets! We spared Kyoto because Henry Stimson went there on his honeymoon!
Even people who should know better triumphantly cut and paste the results of google searches without reading them or caring about their authors. Events are viewed in a total vacuum, with no regard to what led up to that point, the political landscape, or the reality of the alternatives.
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Secretary Hayashi is correct about nukes. Full stop. I’m not sure we need to relitigate the entire tortured debate on whether or not it was moral to drop nukes on Japan just to show Stalin what we had to come to that conclusion. They are horrific weapons and talking about dropping them on a tiny enclave of people is just fucking racist and sickening. 
He’s right on that.
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Definitely agree that doesn’t need to be relitigated, and no reasonable person can come to any other conclusion than that these were unimaginably horrible acts at the end of an unimaginably horrible war.
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You seemed to question the conclusion of the Secretary there in your first post, so maybe make your comments clearer?
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I pointed out the lack of context in the exchange, which in my opinion tends to lead to unproductive and ill-informed policy discussions from people who should know better in government.
For example, when “Austin suggested, in response to a question from Graham, that the U.S. atomic bombings were necessary to end the war,” that word “necessary” is incredibly misleading and produces a fundamentally flawed understanding of the event. And that leads to a fundamentally flawed discussion of how the event should inform current policy.
In my opinion, it is a far too important event in human history to cede control to tossed-off sloganeering, even if that’s where almost any discussion of it tries to veer.
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Honestly, I feel like the whole discussion is giving Graham far too much credit here. He wasn’t making an argument for the use of nuclear weapons. He replaced the actual context of the use of nuclear weapons with a completely imaginary one he also attributed to the current genocide - that these were somehow existential conflicts for the US/Israel, and thus the killing of any number of civilians is justified. That’s transparent - and morally grotesque - nonsense. He was really just making the argument that the US got away with mass murdering civilians, and Israel should be afforded the same privilege.
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Such as?
Okay - that makes sense for the context you were talking about but not showing…
It IS the official stance of the US government, however. Austin isn’t a historian or an anti-Nukes activists, he’s the Secretary of Defense… you really expect him to go against official doctrine?
That’s how states work, however. The more simplistic narrative that shores up the moral authority of the state is the one that they’re going to go with…
But none of that was obvious from your first comment. People can’t read your mind, so be specific when you are pushing back against something.
Then perhaps he should not have invoked nukes… he knew what he was doing, which was further dehumanizing the palestinians and saying that he’s in favor of their total annihilation.
And at the end of the day, the method of genocide hardly matters.
More to just one person, Stalin. The US, Soviets and Germans had been in a 3 way race to the bomb.
Also, racism…
I’m sure that they knew some would, but not anyone the US government thought mattered.
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Such as what “necessary” means. Such a what was happening each and every day the war continued. Such as what US leadership actually had as options to end the war, and conversely what Japanese leadership was actually doing instead of ending the war.
For what it’s worth, while a demonstration of the bomb was absolutely part of the decision-making process, it was not at the top of the list.
I’m not sure what “official doctrine” you’re pointing to. Could you be a little more specific?
I’d posit that “unpopular” might be underselling it a bit when it came to Japan and Germany of 1945.
Again, speak for yourself, because many of us don’t view the world that way or think in those terms. How the culture might be shaped by particular interests is not how everyone actually functions.
Don’t put words in my mouth, please.
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How the US government official understands their actions in war time, in this case, the dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan. Given that Austin is the Secretary of Defense, he’s speaking that capacity, so his understanding of that is how the defense department views it… not to mention many, many professional historians (who are of course, wrong).
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I think we can all agree that Lindsay Graham should stick his dick in a light socket.
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That’s what I was getting at, and why “necessary” is such a misleading term without context. There is no “official doctrine” that the bombs were the only avenue available to end the war with Japan, in fact quite the opposite. I’m not aware of any prominent military historians who think the bombs were “necessary” to end the war; the overwhelming consensus is that the bombs did end the war and many argue that the alternatives to dropping the bombs ultimately would have led to greater death and destruction, but that most definitely isn’t the same thing as arguing the bombs were “necessary.”
Invasion, continued strategic bombing, and/or blockade would have ended the war eventually (especially in light of Soviet invasion of Manchuria) and each had their proponents within the different services following the war.
Once again, it’s very much the case that Austin speaking in his role as the secretary is stating an official position of the DoD… Not sure why anyone who believe otherwise? Of course the DoD is going to defend all it’s prior actions as defensible, because the point is to argue that even if some consequences are tragic, ultimately, the actions undertaken by the US military - especially in the second world war - were moral and ethical. That’s an imperial institution covering its ass…
And yes, some historians do argue that the bomb was necessary - here is an annotated bib on the topic… There is no historical field with complete agreement on events of the past… and as a field, military historians tend to be centrist and even rather conservative… Now, it’s true that that is a less well accepted view of the bombings than it used to be, but the reality is that professional historians DO make that argument, whether YOU like that or not is frankly irrelevant, because it’s true.
And popular opinion is STILL divided on the issue, even as fewer Americans agree it was the right thing to do…
And popular views are in part shaped by historians and films on which historians consult… so…
Yes. But some don’t agree with that, and that’s my point. That’s how history as a field functions - via discussion and debate about even contentious issues and there is often very little agreement on just about anything…
[ETA] Also, the DoD has their own office of the historian, and likely their view of historical events is the ones understood as “official”…
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Don’t look at the flash.
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