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Hindsight is easy isn't it?

Thoughts on the matter might be different when fighting an enemy that has more or less threatened to wipe out all who disagree with them. Including the fact they have no problem killing your women and children before you've even decided to fight back.

You should really speak to some Chinese that are old enough to remember what they survived before you start judging with your modern sensibilities.

It was total war not declared by the side that eventually won. Consider yourself lucky.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting, but I don't think he or she is referring to only the Allies side doing harm. The same blame would be placed on any war-wager, and that includes Japan.

This feels a bit like a "the other side did worse things therefore revenge or killing is justified" type of argument to me. Using this kind of justification, either side could use it to their own advantage and we'd end up with an long spiral of justifications simply because "the other side attacked first" or "the other side did bad things, and we'll make it right by killing more people".

That said, this is just my view of what's right and wrong, and I'm quite ignorant on WWII - but the idea of attacking and invading in the name of preventing killing would seem to be not only unethical (killing is being done) but also irresponsible because the other side will retaliate with more killing. Not many people think of the responsibility.

well then I would recommend to educate yourself what lead to and happened during WWII...

If you are referring to me, I am speaking in terms of the actions of the Japanese against the Chinese. I'm not even discussing Allied behaviors. I do feel that in many ways the Allies did things I personally would not have approved of, I still have no problems that they were done.

The problem as I see it with these discussions, much as you point out you are ignorant of WWII, is that too many people do not fully understand WWII. They look at it with their modern sensibilities and judge accordingly. This is extreme ignorance in action. The simplest reason is because we are now working on our second or third generation of separation of the time. We have not had a total war like there was with WWII. People are losing that perspective, that it was total war. I would imagine many recent college grads don't even realize what the term total war means.

So, why do I not have a problem with the nuclear bombings of Japan and the potential invasion? Because the Japanese were the aggressors. I have little problems with the actions of people defending themselves against aggression.

They look at it with their modern sensibilities and judge accordingly.

It seems that they think that Hitler was evil and everyone else got taken along for the ride. It's so much more complicated than that, especially for those people who were there at the time.

I would imagine many recent college grads don't even realize what the term total war means.

A great many college grads, high school grads and people born after 1950.

We're talking about people who don't understand that "War" means more than people shooting at each other. People who don't understand that we haven't had a war in over 70 years.

The enemy has no problem killing you exactly for the same reason that you have no problem killing the enemy.

If these kids didn't listen (weren't forced by the State to listen) to older men telling them horror stories about the 'enemy', they would just hang out, drink and party together.

Anyway, it's impossible and inappropriate to explain this on HackerNews.

Above all, War is an infectious mental disease and we need to vaccinate ourselves from it if we don't want to get infected by it in the future.

It occurs primarily in our minds and then it manifests in destruction and bloodshed.

That's why I recommended Tolstoy's book. He does a much better job than I at explaining it.

Its prisoner's dilemma. If all nations would only read this book or that, then voila the world is a better place. But the first one to read and adopt (No more war!) is the first to be victimized. Its not a disease; its game theory. Tragic, tragic game theory.

Also called the human predicament.

> "If these kids didn't listen (weren't forced by the State to listen) to older men telling them horror stories about the 'enemy', they would just hang out, drink and party together."

I'm sorry, but that shows a complete misunderstanding of human nature. It's the same kind of "everyone is the same and wants exactly the same things as we do" attitude that led to the belief that we need to bring democracy to the Middle East, leading to the Arab (nuclear?) Winter there is now.

People fight wars. Always have and always will. And they don't stay out of wars in order to drink and party together - they stay out when the perceived costs are greater than the perceived benefits.

If a person is faced with a choice of ending ongoing bloodshed at a cost of participating in that bloodshed ... then it is a coward and a despicable man who doesn't act.

Those who were a part of that mission acted with the intention of ending the war. And that's exactly what happened.

There would have been many, many more dead on both the Japanese and the American side if those bombs didn't drop. That was painfully obvious. Every single Axis power fought to the last man up to that point. Japan was the most fervent, fanatical of them all. There isn't a single shred of evidence to suggest that a ground invasion of Japan, which would have been necessary if it wasn't for the bombing, wasn't going to be an absolute horror worse than any nuclear bombing.

They didn't know of the effects the bomb would have on the hibakusha.

In a total war scenario, civilians who are engaged in support activities for the war effort are valid targets.

If the Germans or the Japanese could have, do you think they wouldn't have bombed American steel factories and weapons plants?

After what the Japanese military did to the people in Nanking, they have NO right to stand on moral high ground and complain about what happened to their civilians.

Americans didn't force children to watch their mothers being raped, the Japanese did that. Americans didn't give children candy laced with anthrax spores, the Japanese did that. Americans didn't force Japanese women to endure hundreds of rapes as "comfort women", the Japanese did that. Americans didn't force Japanese civilians or POWs to take part in lethal experiments, the Japanese did that.

Dropping those bombs was right. Dropping those bombs was just. Yes, those were the times and the existential threat of nuclear weapons was the only message that particular enemy was prepared to receive.

They didn't know of the effects the bomb would have on the hibakusha.

As far as I can tell, it's the severe discrimination they received at the hands of their countrymen that was/is their biggest problem, e.g. as Wikipedia puts it, "The government of Japan recognizes about 1% of these as having illnesses caused by radiation."

The physical injuries we inflicted with the atomic bombings were on a par with our systematic firebombings of their cities, especially when everything came together and a firestorm developed, like in the first firebombing of Tokyo that killed 100,000, and Hiroshima.

Right. American troops even sang Kumbaya in Vietnam. Napalm, agent orange cough cough. Remind me again which country has dropped the most amount of explosives in other countries and how does that measure up with the second highest.

American soldiers have done terrible things.

Know what's different? When they were running amok in My Lai, there were American civilians protesting against the war back at home.

There were American civilians being shot by national guardsmen because they were opposed to what the military was doing to strangers on the other side of the planet.

The Japanese had been preparing to fight to the last man before those bombs dropped. It was the right thing to do.

It should also be pointed out that My Lai and Kent State were aberrations, the former punished, the latter unsuccessfully prosecuted, but the authorities did attempt it.

The mass murder of untermenschen in the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere by every means known to man, the Bataan Death March and general savagery towards POWs, was Imperial Japanese policy.

To me what is very amusingly different is the holier than though, upholder of freedom and democracy chip on their shoulder many wear to a fault. Given history (both old and recent) it takes some chutzpah (and perhaps ignorance / indoctrination) to wear that attitude when one is responsible for enslavement of one race and, for all practical purposes, political depopulation of another. I bear no ill will, far from it, just something that tickles my funny bone in some dark way.

My ancestry contains enslaved Africans, indentured servant Irish and Native Americans.

The history of this country isn't some dry, academic matter for me. It's how I came to exist.

This country isn't perfect. This country has done some terrible things, especially to non-whites and Jews but that doesn't change any of my previous points.

I totally agree, that it's immoral to participate in war, but how to reconcile that position with current world? Imagine you are a Kurd and ISIS is attacking your home. What would you do? The only way I see is to flee, but it's not scalable.

Based on many people's opinions, the only thing to do is die now or flee to die later.

It's never immoral to resist evil. That way lies barbarism.

Unfortunately participating in a war means not only resisting evil, but also hurting innocents. Even modern wars kill large number of civilian population. For example, lowest estimations of Iraq War civilian casualties are in the tens of thousands.

And Saddam genocidal murders were greater than 50,000. Evil has a great capacity and an endless thirst. It has to be opposed.

So to oppose evil you have to kill as much innocents as the evil itself? I don't see how it can be ethical.

>We all have a choice not to participate in the insanity (or "immorality") of war. In fact, if we all did, wars wouldn't exist at all. Refusing to go to the battlefield and kill other young people is not immoral. It is the most moral and humane thing you can do.

That's just a defense of the status quo, though.

Going to war is automatically immoral if we are at a global maximum for, I don't know, whatever quantity you're trying to indirectly adjust by going to war.

The easiest example to use is probably WW2 (it also happens to be relevant to the article): If you want to minimize oppression, and you judge the morality of actions based on whether they increase or decrease the amount of oppression in the world, then refusing to go to Europe and fight the Nazis is not the most moral thing you can do - it's an act that doesn't decrease oppression as much as agreeing to fight the Nazis, and since you rank the morality of actions by the change in oppression, then going to Europe to kill young Wehrmachts is more moral than not going to Europe to kill young Wehrmachts.

I'm not sure what the point of your post is. The whole discussion happening around the atomic bombs dropped on Japan is - have they actually prevented more deaths, because Japan would not have surrendered otherwise? More people have died in firebombing of Tokyo, yet Japan was not willing to surrender.

Of course, you could shield yourself behind morals and just say "well, they could have chosen not to go to war and not to kill other people!", but it's no different than a 5 year old child saying "people just shouldn't kill each other", without real understanding why people do it. To err makes us human.

This is the utilitarian argument. The other one is, never agree to killing for any reason. But I'm certain that any pilot of that time had long given up the finer points of philosophy. Their cohort was diminished daily; they'd seen far too much death. A utilitarian view (kill these families to save many more) would have made complete sense to them. While modern, civilized (and maybe coddled) people have a hard time appreciating that view.

The dicussion of the morality of Nuclear Weapons is complicated.

>The whole discussion happening around the atomic bombs dropped on Japan is - have they actually prevented more deaths, because Japan would not have surrendered otherwise?

This is a common counter point. But ultimately we don't, and won't ever know. Some sources say Japan may have accepted a surrender that made some governmental provisions (namely saying that the Empiror was immune from war crimes) had been issued instead of pushing for unconditional surrender.

The nuclear debate isn't settled because, we're still trying to define our civilations relationship with it.

> Saying later that "those were the times" does not exonerate you from the sins committed.

Exonerate? Perhaps not. But context does matter, and people make decisions with the information they have available at the time.

One thing I have found helpful in understanding what you describe as "the insanity of war" is Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. He has an episode on this very topic, which he entitled "Logical Insanity[0]" regarding the build up to the dropping of the atomic bombs, and how the incremental escalation of savagery in WWII might gradually alter people's perspectives on morality.

[0] http://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-42-blitz-l...

what i fail to understand is why female lives are worth more than mens?

while i agree that war is despicable and we all have the responsibility to work against systems and circumstances that will lead to war i think you coose the easy way.

from your comment I doubt you have ever been in the army- I have it's compulsory where I live so I can understand the pressure a bit better than somebody who never experienced this system.

another thing: during WWII in the Nazi regime it was not only your live that was forfeited when refusing to join the army but your family had to face repressions too.

I consider myself very lucky to not face such grave circumstances and decisions...

Female lives have always been more valuable. The survival odds (fitness) of a clan are directly related to the number of females. Because, of course that limits the size of the next generation i.e. growth.

Because ten women and one man can give birth to ten babies every 9 months (the next generation will be hideous, but one step at a time!). Ten men and one woman can only give birth to one baby in the same time period.

Are you talking about the Japanese pilots that bombed Pearl Harbor?

Pacifists are great as long as there is someone to defend them.