Hacker News Reader

> 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

>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...