What makes My Lai wrong and Hiroshima right?

[ParanoiD84]

Those bombs probably saved more people then if they never would have dropped them, the japanese would fight to the death for the emperor just like they did on all the islands around japan.

[caervek]

No I'm not. Negotiating doesn't mean you get what you want.
You have A and want to achieve X
Other side has B and wants room achieve Y
Is A good enough to guarantee X?
Is B good enough to guarantee Y?
Let's find out.
No actually let's not, let's drop 2 atomic bombs at random to prove the rest of the world how STRONK we are.

It went like this:

Allies: Okay Japan, you're beaten, give up.
Japan: No! It will cost you many lives to win the war, if you want us to give up you must let us keep the territory we annexed and give us special conditions!
Allies: That's not how it works.
*Hiroshima has been annihilated*
Japan: WTF!
Allies: Okay Japan, you're beaten, give up.
Japan: No! It will cost you many lives to win the war, if you want us to give up you must let us keep the territory we annexed and give us special conditions!
*Nagasaki has been annihilated*
Japan: Again! OMG!
Allies: Okay Japan, you're beaten, give up.
Japan: No! It will cost you many lives to win the war, if you want us to give up you must let us keep the territory we annexed and give us special conditions!
*USSR has declared war on Japan*
Japan: Seriously!?
USSR: Don't worry we're still friends, we just need to do this because we're in no position to invade with them and want to make sure we get a piece of the surrender pie too.
Japan: FFS we're not surrendering! We will never give up our emperor!
Japan's emperor: Actually I'm very much in favour of surrender!
Japan: Really? okay lets vote on it.
Allies: Next bomb will be ready in a couple of days
*Japan has voted to surrender*

No one would have negotiated with the Japanese, they started a war of aggression against their neighbours, committed countless atrocities which they are still a bit edgy about saying 'sorry' about to this day and were run by a goverment that was fundementally insane.

Pretty much says it all.

[Deleted]

2 bombs and ~150k people in a week, or another 2 years, and millions, with the possibility of Japan going into communist rule and being invaded by russia

Hmmm I wonder

There's conflicting information in this regard. There may not even had been a need for the bombs, but they dropped them anyway because they wanted a demonstration of power.

But we could argue ifs and buts forever. What happened, happened.

[Deleted]

It went like this:

No it was like this.

Japan: Okay US, you're beaten us, we want to negotiate a surrender.
US: No! Unconditional surrender or noting.
Japan: We will fight to the last!
BOOOM!
BOOOM!
Japan: We surrender! But we must be keep the emperor!
US: Whatever, we acepte your surrender.

They never come to the part there Japan have opportunity to demand to keep the territory the annexed and get special conditions. Ultimately Japan did manage to get a through a negotiated peace, the conditon they was granted they was allow to keep the emperator. Not a huge remission becuse the emperator was only a figherhead.

[Deleted]

Not a huge remission becuse the emperator was only a figherhead.

He is now.

Then he was a living god, something the Japanese believed. he was a diety made flesh. In terms of hard power, he had little, in terms of soft power (influence etc) he had huge amounts. And to the Japanese, he's a god.

[Faenskap]

So let me get this right: people here claim being terribly burned*, living in pain for the rest of your life and having your family eradicated is >*10000 communism?
Is the actual misery of other people that much better than an ideology that could have become Japan's fate?

*I googled "hiroshima victims". 6th photo not pretty


I just read about My Lai, as I hadn't heard about it, and I'm disgusted. Disgusted about the civilians murdered, the old people shot, the children shot, the women gang raped, but more than that, I'm disgusted that there was no real punishment from the juridical system.

I find that My Lai and Hiroshima were both wrong. War does not at all justify murder, torture and rape of civilians. Anyone who thinks so can sod off.

[Deleted]

[QUOTE=madassa648;42289412Then he was a living god, something the Japanese believed.[/QUOTE]

Yes but hes practical political power was still minimal. Shogons and Warlord did have a long traditon to controll the emperator.

[Logwyn]

What prevented Russia from invading afterwards?

USSR invading Japan after WW2? For a while supposedly "the bomb". A wrecked economy from WW2. Solidifying Eastern Europe for the West? War-weary population. Not wanting to tangle with a build up US war machine and economy?

One of the issues with discussing some of history is that we see it for 20/20 hindsight. Sometimes with more facts than the people in the age had at the time. Some say that Japan was trying to use USSR/Stalin as a go between to get a message to the West about surrender. Yet Stalin dragged his feet so that he could enter the war grab territory etc. and didn't pass the message along. What happens if he doesn't drag his feet?

The problem with Hiroshima is the aircraft crash effect. Many more people are killed by cars each year than in air plane crashes. Yet what makes the news and seems worse the air plane as it was more people at one time. There were many more people killed via all the other bombings than the two a-bombs. Yet we seem to be ok with those or at least slide them to the side.

[Deleted]

Those bombs probably saved more people then if they never would have dropped them, the japanese would fight to the death for the emperor just like they did on all the islands around japan.

But it was the words of the emperor that stopped the war. He went out on a live radio broadcast to the nation for the first rim ever, and said that they had to surrender. Albeit because of the bombs.

[Adam Jensen]

What does that mean? You somewhat support genocide?

If you mean you didn't support attacking the Axis powers during the war that would make you neutral.

- - - Updated - - -



Perhaps but that is somewhat overstating how "dire" the situation was for the allies, specifically the US which had plenty of resources and troops left when the bomb was dropped over Hiroshima.

It wasn't a dire situation, but the generals conducting the war believed that an invasion of Japan would be worse for Japan and the US than dropping the bombs.

[Deleted]

USSR invading Japan after WW2? For a while supposedly "the bomb". A wrecked economy from WW2. Solidifying Eastern Europe for the West? War-weary population. Not wanting to tangle with a build up US war machine and economy?

One of the issues with discussing some of history is that we see it for 20/20 hindsight. Sometimes with more facts than the people in the age had at the time. Some say that Japan was trying to use USSR/Stalin as a go between to get a message to the West about surrender. Yet Stalin dragged his feet so that he could enter the war grab territory etc. and didn't pass the message along. What happens if he doesn't drag his feet?

The problem with Hiroshima is the aircraft crash effect. Many more people are killed by cars each year than in air plane crashes. Yet what makes the news and seems worse the air plane as it was more people at one time. There were many more people killed via all the other bombings than the two a-bombs. Yet we seem to be ok with those or at least slide them to the side.

True, it's a strange hypocricy we commit. The Allies firebombed so many places. Purely civilian targets.

[oxymoronic]

That is part speculation and part poor morality.

Firstly, you don't know that millions would have died in an invasion (if one was even necessary) and you don't know that Russia would have invaded and demanded to control a large portion of the country to exert communist influence over the Japanese.

Secondly, you fall for one of the logical inconsistencies that Caplan points out. If you are argue that it was a moral action because it ended the war, you are also implying that if it had failed to end the war it would become an immoral action. Therefore, My Lai would have been moral if it somehow had ended the Vietnam war.

so in other words you dont know. why question it then? i mean we have learned from it and a nuke hasnt been dropped on an enemy since. what more do you want? its called beating a dead horse.

[Igi]

I didn't know we had so many people with Ph.D. in history on mmo-champion.

[Ishayu]

The reason why the discussion is important is so that people like you saying "the end justify the means" realise that they're wrong.

This is a clear cut example that I'm not wrong, though. It's evident that the act of ending the war with nukes worked and did tremendous amounts of good.

The problem with saying "the ends justify the means" is when there is great uncertainty about what the ends actually are. We make the judgement of doing something we don't like to get something we do like every single day of our life, because we KNOW that the outcome is positive.

To take it from something super serious to something really banal: When you get out of bed in the morning to go to work, a lot of those of you reading this won't like that - you don't like the means. But you know it puts food on your table that night, so you do it, because the good of the ends outweigh the troubles of the means.

To bring it back on topic: The only bad thing about it is the death toll. Yes, that is very bad, but given the sheer amount of good the surrender did, it's difficult to consider the event as having been a bad thing.

The problem is that hindsight is 20/20, but foresight is not. If you're not ABSOLUTELY ****ING SURE it will do tremendous good, you're taking a risk, and taking a risk with someone else's life is what's REALLY immoral.

So the difference between the two bombings can, I suppose, be summed up in one phrase: One was a gamble with other people's lives, the other was not.

If the nuking of Japan was a gamble, the public doesn't know it, which is why it isn't considered by the public as having been immoral.

But I still think this whole debate is a bit silly. It's fine. There's no reason to be digging in the salt mine. If something had gone wrong, then that is a reason for digging into it.

PS: Yes, the Americans did say sorry to the Japanese. They themselves were astonished and horrified at the devastation they caused.

[Flarelaine]

I didn't know we had so many people with Ph.D. in history on mmo-champion.

Duh, gaming nerds are WWII buffs all the way.

[Deleted]

It went like this:

Allies: Okay Japan, you're beaten, give up.
Japan: No! It will cost you many lives to win the war, if you want us to give up you must let us keep the territory we annexed and give us special conditions!
Allies: That's not how it works.
*Hiroshima has been annihilated*
Japan: WTF!
Allies: Okay Japan, you're beaten, give up.
Japan: No! It will cost you many lives to win the war, if you want us to give up you must let us keep the territory we annexed and give us special conditions!
*Nagasaki has been annihilated*
Japan: Again! OMG!
Allies: Okay Japan, you're beaten, give up.
Japan: No! It will cost you many lives to win the war, if you want us to give up you must let us keep the territory we annexed and give us special conditions!
*USSR has declared war on Japan*
Japan: Seriously!?
USSR: Don't worry we're still friends, we just need to do this because we're in no position to invade with them and want to make sure we get a piece of the surrender pie too.
Japan: FFS we're not surrendering! We will never give up our emperor!
Japan's emperor: Actually I'm very much in favour of surrender!
Japan: Really? okay lets vote on it.
Allies: Next bomb will be ready in a couple of days
*Japan has voted to surrender*




Pretty much says it all.

No it was like this.

Japan: Okay US, you're beaten us, we want to negotiate a surrender.
US: No! Unconditional surrender or noting.
Japan: We will fight to the last!
BOOOM!
BOOOM!
Japan: We surrender! But we must be keep the emperor!
US: Whatever, we acepte your surrender.

They never come to the part there Japan have opportunity to demand to keep the territory the annexed and get special conditions. Ultimately Japan did manage to get a through a negotiated peace, the conditon they was granted they was allow to keep the emperator. Not a huge remission becuse the emperator was only a figherhead.

This is a clear cut example that I'm not wrong, though. It's evident that the act of ending the war with nukes worked and did tremendous amounts of good.

The problem with saying "the ends justify the means" is when there is great uncertainty about what the ends actually are. We make the judgement of doing something we don't like to get something we do like every single day of our life, because we KNOW that the outcome is positive.

To take it from something super serious to something really banal: When you get out of bed in the morning to go to work, a lot of those of you reading this won't like that - you don't like the means. But you know it puts food on your table that night, so you do it, because the good of the ends outweigh the troubles of the means.

To bring it back on topic: The only bad thing about it is the death toll. Yes, that is very bad, but given the sheer amount of good the surrender did, it's difficult to consider it as having been a bad thing.

The problem is that hindsight is 20/20, but foresight is not. If you're not ABSOLUTELY ****ING SURE it will do tremendous good, you're taking a risk, and taking a risk with someone else's life is what's REALLY immoral.

So the difference between the two bombings can, I suppose, be summed up in one phrase: One was a gamble with other people's lives, the other was not.

If the nuking of Japan was a gamble, the public doesn't know it, which is why it isn't considered by the public as having been immoral.

PS: Yes, the Americans did say sorry to the Japanese. They themselves were astonished and horrified at the devastation they caused.

Once again, Japan was surrendering as they had nothing left.

In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)

This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:

Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
Surrender of designated war criminals.
Is this memorandum authentic? It was supposedly leaked to Trohan by Admiral William D. Leahy, presidential Chief of Staff. (See: M. Rothbard in A. Goddard, ed., Harry Elmer Barnes: Learned Crusader [1968], pp. 327f.) Historian Harry Elmer Barnes has related (in "Hiroshima: Assault on a Beaten Foe," National Review, May 10, 1958):

The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.

- - - Updated - - -

This is a clear cut example that I'm not wrong, though. It's evident that the act of ending the war with nukes worked and did tremendous amounts of good.

The problem with saying "the ends justify the means" is when there is great uncertainty about what the ends actually are. We make the judgement of doing something we don't like to get something we do like every single day of our life, because we KNOW that the outcome is positive.

To take it from something super serious to something really banal: When you get out of bed in the morning to go to work, a lot of those of you reading this won't like that - you don't like the means. But you know it puts food on your table that night, so you do it, because the good of the ends outweigh the troubles of the means.

To bring it back on topic: The only bad thing about it is the death toll. Yes, that is very bad, but given the sheer amount of good the surrender did, it's difficult to consider the event as having been a bad thing.

The problem is that hindsight is 20/20, but foresight is not. If you're not ABSOLUTELY ****ING SURE it will do tremendous good, you're taking a risk, and taking a risk with someone else's life is what's REALLY immoral.

So the difference between the two bombings can, I suppose, be summed up in one phrase: One was a gamble with other people's lives, the other was not.

If the nuking of Japan was a gamble, the public doesn't know it, which is why it isn't considered by the public as having been immoral.

PS: Yes, the Americans did say sorry to the Japanese. They themselves were astonished and horrified at the devastation they caused.

There was NO threat from the japanese at that stage consider how they were a broken nation:

Apart from the moral questions involved, were the atomic bombings militarily necessary? By any rational yardstick, they were not. Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945. Almost nothing was left of the once mighty Imperial Navy, and Japan's air force had been all but totally destroyed. Against only token opposition, American war planes ranged at will over the country, and US bombers rained down devastation on her cities, steadily reducing them to rubble.

What was left of Japan's factories and workshops struggled fitfully to turn out weapons and other goods from inadequate raw materials. (Oil supplies had not been available since April.) By July about a quarter of all the houses in Japan had been destroyed, and her transportation system was near collapse. Food had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.

On the night of March 9-10, 1945, a wave of 300 American bombers struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. Dropping nearly 1,700 tons of bombs, the war planes ravaged much of the capital city, completely burning out 16 square miles and destroying a quarter of a million structures. A million residents were left homeless.

On May 23, eleven weeks later, came the greatest air raid of the Pacific War, when 520 giant B-29 "Superfortress" bombers unleashed 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the already battered Japanese capital. Generating gale-force winds, the exploding incendiaries obliterated Tokyo's commercial center and railway yards, and consumed the Ginza entertainment district. Two days later, on May 25, a second strike of 502 "Superfortress" planes roared low over Tokyo, raining down some 4,000 tons of explosives. Together these two B-29 raids destroyed 56 square miles of the Japanese capital.

Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were "driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age." Henry H. ("Hap") Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: "It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse." This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: "Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s."

So I'm not sure what RISK would the leader at the time be taking by talking instead of dropping 2 atomic bombs.

[caervek]

Once again, Japan was surrendering

You can say it as much as you like, nothing will ever make it true. More powerful men than you have tried and failed to rewrite history.

[Mihalik]

This entire thread is stupid.

The nuclear bombing of Japan (whether it was necessary or not is a different debate) was part of overarching military strategy that involved the destruction of civilian infrastructure required to support the Japanese national war effort, combined with a need to demonstrate that the US could destroy Japan completely without a costly land invasion. In the war itself Japan was the aggressor. I personally don't think the bombings were necessary nor do I think they achieved their intended purpose and the Japanese surrender had more to do with the overall military/economic situation and the Soviet entry into the war than with the Nuclear weapons. But the point is that the primary purpose of the bombings wasn't the mass killing of civilians to "punish" them for their support of the Japanese war effort.

The Vietnamese situation is not comparable. First of all the actual political situation behind who was being the aggressor was much more muddled. The fact is that the US intentionally broke a standing agreement it had with the Soviet Union about the reunification of the country. It failed to hold the elections intended to decide whether that would happen or not and instead installed a loyal but utterly unpopular government in South Vietnam which had no legitimacy or popular support for that matter, and it kept that government in power by the force of arms, essentially turning itself into the aggressor, occupying a country which was mostly hostile to it. This is why civil wars are always so messy.

Now whether the villagers were sheltering VC or not, is largely irrelevant, because the very presence of US forces there was already a war crime in the sense of them being a foreign occupying power.

But even if they had been sheltering VC soldiers that doesn't justify the targeted killings of civilians who aren't in effect combatants or put up any sort of armed resistance. Had the soldiers simply evacuated the civilians and then proceeded to destroy the village itself to deny the VC "infrastructure" to use than that incident wouldn't have even made the historical record. But the indiscriminate, targeted murder of civilians is a different thing.

And there is one more factor that cleanly places My Lai in the category of war crime. The massacre went beyond the killings, into the area of rape, torture and mutilation. None of which have any sort of strategic value, and are prohibited by international law and US military codes of conduct.

The soldiers themselves were in fact committing war crimes by the standards of their own government.

And finally... imagine this scenario.

Your country is invaded and occupied by a foreign power. They create a puppet government. A part of your country that is still unoccupied joins forces with resistance fighters in the occupied areas and begins a long armed struggle to displace the puppet government and the foreign occupation force. You personally might not agree with them, but most of your countrymen do.

Then you hear the news that a town or village was sheltering some of the resistance fighters in occupied areas, and then you hear that the occupation force has killed all the people in the village, men, women, children, and that many were gang raped, others tortured and mutilated.

Would you consider that a War Crime?

[unbound]

Reading through old blog posts, I found one by economist Bryan Caplan which poses the question of why the general public considers the My Lai massacre a terrible war crime while Hiroshima is considered either an unfortunate but necessary action or a even a heroic one.

Here's the blog post.

These are his analyses of common moral comparisons between the events. TLDR warning.



What are your thoughts Has he missed something that makes Hiroshima a moral killing of civilians while My Lai an immoral one?

What he missed is that we had a lot more reporters on the ground for the Vietnam war (most ground battle), whereas we really only had the word of a few people that Hiroshima was necessary. Basically, people saw and read about hard evidence that things in Vietnam was not as black and white as the warmongers wanted you to believed...but they weren't able to get the hard evidence that Japan was trying to surrender months before we dropped the bombs.

Heck, even today despite the fact that we very well know that the Japanese were trying to surrender, many people still think the bombs were necessary. Once a lie gets stuck in people's mind, they think it is the truth and will defend that lie.

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

[Ishayu]

Once again, Japan was surrendering as they had nothing left.

In that case it was immoral, but that neatly sidesteps the point of the thread, which doesn't ask why Hiroshima was actually moral, but asks why it is considered moral. It is considered moral on the assumption that the US didn't just nuke Japan because they bloody well felt like it, among many other things.