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>No. There were no US Einsatzgruppen, there was no US equivalent to the nazi Backe-Plan.

Why bother when you can just drop some atomic bombs to test on them (to "make them surrender")? Or spray them with agent orange? Or just help Suharto get rid of some millions and let him do the footwork?

>The US occupation of Japan was remarkably benign, for a country concerned with "systematic and indiscriminate extermination"

Or course it was. As was their post-war dealings of West Germany. It helps that there was a large competitor eyeing both regions, so they had to make friends quickly...

> Why bother when you can just drop some atomic bombs to test on them (to "make them surrender")?

Why the scare quotes? It is still debated, and the fanaticism of the Japanese resistance (for instance, in Okinawa) makes a fairly compelling case that a land-based invasion of Japan would be extremely costly for both the invaders and the civilian population.

> Or spray them with agent orange?

It's pretty terrible as a weapon of mass destruction. Don't you think that if the US had wanted to annihilate the population of North Vietnam, they would have employed something a bit more direct?

Comparatively, I don't see the general disregard for civilian casualties exhibited by the Saudis in their ongoing bombing campaign in Yemen as a sign that they intend to wipe out the population wholesale.

> Or just help Suharto get rid of some millions and let him do the footwork?

Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not condoning the US foreign policy. But I don't see the US involvement in the mass killings conducted by Suharto as something racially motivated against Asians. It was a case of "the only good communist/leftist sympathizer is a dead one".

>Why the scare quotes? It is still debated

Only as much as needed to clean-up a predetermined decision for a show of power for the post-war era to fit the official narrative.

(And even if it was "that a land-based invasion of Japan would be extremely costly for both the invaders and the civilian population" still wouldn't justify nuking civilians. War crimes are not excused when they make one win more cheaply).

>It's pretty terrible as a weapon of mass destruction. Don't you think that if the US had wanted to annihilate the population of North Vietnam, they would have employed something a bit more direct?

Why would they want to annihilate them? They wanted to win the war. So fucking their livelihood and health over AND still getting to use the hypocritical defense of "see, we weren't meaning to annihilate them" works even better when you need to maintain face.

If anything of the kind was done on their own soil of course, they'll still be screaming bloody murder for all eternity (like Pearl Harbor, even though they purposefully provoked Japan for months before it acted).

> (And even if it was "that a land-based invasion of Japan would be extremely costly for both the invaders and the civilian population" still wouldn't justify nuking civilians. War crimes are not excused when they make one win more cheaply).

War crimes are not, in themselves, "programs of systematic and indiscriminate extermination" as claimed by OP, unless they are part of a wider policy. I'd argue if the US had the intention to conduct such a policy, the results would have been very different (as can be deduced by looking at successful genocides).

> Why would they want to annihilate them? They wanted to win the war.

Exactly.

> If anything of the kind was done on their own soil of course, they'll still be screaming bloody murder for all eternity (like Pearl Harbor, even though they purposefully provoked Japan for months before it acted).

I agree that Pearl Harbor needs to be seen in the wider perspective of the US-Japan relationship. And yes, most countries are a lot better at forgetting slights against them than the offenses they themselves committed (ironically enough, both protagonists of the conflict are an excellent example of this problem).

It seems to me that you are arguing that the US disregard the human cost of their foreign policy and have little regard for "collateral damage", not that they have been engaged in some bizarre extermination program of Asians, which is what OP was suggesting.

Beyond saving hundreds of thousand of Allied soldiers, using nuclear weapons on Japan saved millions of JAPANESE lives. The conventional Allied bombing in preparation for invasion would have laid waste to the entire country. (Indeed the conventional firebombing raid on Tokyo killed more civilians than either nuclear strike). And the Imperial government was training civilian (women and children) suicide squads, and Japanese civilians had already conducted mass suicides in the face of capture in places like Saipan.

Out of available targets [1], even taking into account air defense, neither Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to fit the narrative of the US aiming for maximum civilian casualties. And especially given that Kyoto was struck from the Nagasaki target list as being too culturally significant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_cities_in_Japan_by_pop...

> Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not condoning the US foreign policy. But I don't see the US involvement in the mass killings conducted by Suharto as something racially motivated against Asians. It was a case of "the only good communist/leftist sympathizer is a dead one".

It also completely ignores the historical context - events like the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, or actions of the Khmer Rouge were still casting a shadow over what people thought would happen if these countries were taken over by Communists.

As a kid I remember learning that the atomic bombs contributed to Japan's surrender in WW2, but as a grown-up I also learned that Russia (a neighboring country) declared war on Japan two days after the first bomb was dropped, and I wonder which made more of a difference.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War_(1...

The US government did a lot of things to affect the way communism was viewed in the US, so I suspect there may have been some official spin involved here.

Having done some light reading on the topic a while ago, I recall there is evidence that of the people deciding on the peace treaty, several were not actually aware of the atomic bombings, given it was only recently learned of by the military a few hours beforehand due to damaged communication infrastructure.

Its basically unknowable, lest we find some memoir of somebody who was present claiming one way or another, especially confounding is the fact that the meeting was planned before the bombings

> Or just help Suharto get rid of some millions and let him do the footwork?

That logic completely ignores historical events like the mass starvation under Mao during the Great Leap Forward, the crimes of the Japanese during WW2 (the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, comfort women etc), and millions killed in the post WW2 independence conflicts (partition of India etc).

Putting the blame on the US alone is some seriously inaccurate historical revisionism.

> Why bother when you can just drop some atomic bombs to test on them (to "make them surrender")? Or spray them with agent orange?

How is that categorically different than the firebombing of Germany?

You can skin a cat in many ways. For one case where the architects of the genocide did not get away with it there are multiple where they did.

I am not implying that what US did was a planned genocide.

I am just pointing out that above is not a rebuttal of it.

> You can skin a cat in many ways. For one case where the architects of the genocide did not get away with it there are multiple where they did.

Of course. The US genocide of Native Americans did not lead to the Nuremberg trials.

> I am just pointing out that above is not a rebuttal of it.

It is about giving an example of what a policy of genocide lead by a technologically equivalent power looks like, and contrasting it with the actual behaviour of the US in the same area. Shoplifting and murder are both against the law, but there is a marked difference between the two.

No, you are just giving a concrete example of one case of the well documented genocide.

Here is one much more subtle example of genocide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingrian_Finns

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deportations_of_the_Ingrian_Fi...

  The deportations led to the rapid ethnic assimilation of
  Ingrian Finns. After 1956, return to Ingria was officially allowed 
  but made unfeasible in practice;

That's not a genocide, that's a deportation followed by forced cultural assimilation. It's bad, too, but it's not the same thing as exterminating a population.

If we take into account how these deportations usually proceeded and what surrounded them then you can count also on murders, including torturing to death and dying due to extremely inhuman conditions. But this is not important because it would still be genocide without all of it.

Genocide is not killing of people but killing a génos (nation, race, religious group etc).

As the author of the term Raphael Lemkin put

>Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.

So yes, what happened to the Ingrian Finns was a genocide.

Thanks for taking the time to include the quote. However, please don't use code blocks (indentation) for quoting blocks of text like this as it forces side scrolling, which is particularly difficult on mobile devices. It's common on HN to prefix paragraphs with > to indicate a long quote. I also like to italicize block quotes to further set them off. For example:

> Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify…

Is like this better?

Perhaps it would be possible to display such cases with indentation so that they would stand out more and look more like real quotes?

Thanks! I'm sure those on mobile in particular will appreciate you doing so.

As for indenting block quotes, I agree it would be a nice-to-have, though I think it's unlikely that HN will update the formatting options, at least any time soon. The formatting on HN is limited, though workable.

Or the Rape of Nanking.