You are, of course, entitled to that opinion. But like any opinion, it is not immune from criticism, especially from those who would suggest that “winning at any cost, because to the victor go the spoils” is generally a terrible way to do almost anything in life unless you really do have zero fucks to give about anyone else.
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If I say I’m frustrated that people seemed to be relitigating world war II, and you didn’t do that, then why would you think I was talking about you?
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Again, they didn’t name their team the “Plutonium Planters” or the “Fission Fighters” or the “Atom Smashers” or the “Reactors.” They named their team the “Bombers.”
Also, your insistence that this mascot has nothing to do with the Atomic bombings of Japan is somewhat undercut by the fact that your first contribution to this conversation was to share your thoughts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You even closed by stating
So to now reverse course and say you believe this mascot has nothing to do with the bombings of Japan strikes me as disingenuous.
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The student in question is fully entitled to her own personal opinion, just as everyone else is.
An opinion that one does not agree with is not automatically some kind of “misjudgment.”
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The underlying theme of Sun Tzu’s Art of War was not “Fuck 'em!” Otto.
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Why keep repeating yourself in such new and interesting ways, then?
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TLDW: they were about to be crushed by the Red Army. A substantial motivation for the bombing was the US desire to prevent the Soviet occupation of Japan.
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This is like saying it’d be ok to use a drone strike of a wedding as a mascot because 9-11.
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Some strange edits here, but okay, whatevs.
It appears I have to explain my first reply to you. Between leaving work and getting home, I believe your reply to me was removed from this thread, but I do have something I need to say to you.
I apologize if I was vaguebooking in my first reply. I will try to do better here.
For most of my life - those years since I learned to read and comprehend and begin to understand the world around me - I have lived with the knowledge that my dad had something to do with the deployment of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
However small his role, the knowledge that my dad was a SeaBee who helped build the runway on Tinnian lives on in me and is, at times, a heavy burden. Had the bombs not been dropped, I might not be walking around in 2020 to argue with you - my dad was slated for the invasion of Japan.
Those who were there 75 years ago are few and far between and those of us at one remove are getting into our retirement years, yes, but I believe we all need to discuss the topic of nuclear annihilation as though Hiroshima and Nagasaki were yesterday and we need to view it through the lenses of all we’ve learned since.
So, no, it’s not 75 years ago in the minds of us who were either there or grew up with August 6 and August 9, 1945; we’ve been living with it all this time.
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Some worthy commentary going down here. I think folks from either side of this debate will find this article interesting reading: https://mises.org/library/hiroshima-myth
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One could argue that signing up as an adult with agency to be a military combatant places you in a slightly different class than a child with no agency who just happens by chance to live in a particular geographic area… Neither “deserves to die”, but I’m betting that we can agree that these may be two slightly different classes of tragedy as far as “death in a war” is concerned…
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I think you’ve misspelled ‘fighting’ there. The word does begin with an f and end in ing, though.
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Interesting article! I wish I’d known about it before I did an 8/6 sermon, “My Relationship With the Bomb,” in 2017. Revisions are in order.
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It’s as if they’ve never heard the term “conscientious objector.”
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There’s a country committing war crimes, killing and torturing civilians and starting wars pretty much each decade whose citizens think they’re doing no wrong and are educated poorly about their governments crimes. It isn’t Japan.
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With all due respect to the author of this piece, if one either doesn’t understand or intentionally misrepresents the difference between “surrender” and “armistice” and micharacterizes what Truman actually knew of Japan’s position through our decrypts, I’m not sure one is starting the argument from a place of intellectual honesty.
Not to mention the fact that this willingness to let Imperial Japan dictate the terms of an armistice that would have left millions under their domination when it is very doubtful the same people would have been quite so willing to let Nazi Germany off with same sort of deal.
Frankly, I think we often value the lives of tens of millions of Chinese, Korean, Filipino people that Imperial Japan enslaved, tortured and butchered less than the European victims of the Nazis, thus the revisionism to downplay why an armistice would have been utterly unacceptable under any of the terms the Japanese military would have willingly accepted.
Just as a negotiated armistice that left the government and military intact and allowed the retention of some conquered territory would have been unacceptable when it came to Germany, even while Himmler was making peace overtures.
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Maybe. I think that the retention of conquered territories was an ambit claim. Needless to say they were beat and simply starving them out would have produced the desired result - complete capitulation. But in that instance some wit would try to reverse engineer and fly the canard that dropping 2 atomic bombs actually saved the lives and needless suffering of millions of Japanese. I am more satisfied that it was for the benefit of the Soviets.
We can estimate the rate at which people would likely have been dying from starvation and disease, and the best estimate of the time were looking at several times the number of casualties of the bombs, and continuing the war for months.
We might have to agree to disagree about whether starving hundreds of thousands (at a minimum, including all US POWs) would have been a more moral action and/ or reduced aggregate suffering.
Of course that was one of the motivations. But no decision of this magnitude is for one reason, good or ill. It was A reason, but most definitely not THE reason.
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