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Comment by qubax | Hacker News Reader

It's a bit strange that we are remembering the "hero" but not the 500 or so innocent vietnamese men, women, children and infants who were raped, tortured and/or killed. Strange how we always have to make ourselves the good guys. The "heroes".

If you look at the war photos. You'll see infants. Such a horrific war.

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

It's also strange that we say this is the worst event in vietnam war, when we dropped napalm on people ( chemically burning them to death ) and more than 4 million people were killed in that terrible war. God knows how many vietnamese women and children were raped. My Lai was one of thousands of my lai incidents in vietnam.

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I see what you're saying here. But unfortunately, civilians get massacred in wars. If you laud the people who stop the massacres as heroes, you hopefully increase the odds of someone stopping the next massacre.

Finally, Hugh Thompson absolutely is a hero. Your quotes around that word are unnecessary.

Yes civilians do die in wars but the conduct of the US forces in South east Asia was pretty reprehensible by any measure. Particularly if you’ve read “Kill anything that moves” by Nick Turse

I completely agree - US forces behaved terribly during the Vietnam war. Sadly, I can't think of a war where civilians didn't get massacred. Maybe not to the same extent as in Vietnam, but massacres happen. The truly fucked up part is that there are likely many massacres that have never been reported.

Ok, so if you agree, there is no need to give the caveat "massacres happen". I recognize that you don't mean anything by it and it's a natural response when you are somehow associated with something icky to try and rationalize it. Still, it comes off as trying to soften the significance. If this was a discussion of war crimes perpetrated by some other country, would you feel compelled to point out that "massacres happen"? Americans committed the crimes, and America is responsible, period. Let's not try to blunt it. There's a measure of humility to be gained here, if we look for it, instead of a way to save face.

I'm sorry, but you completely missed the point of what I was saying.

I'm not American, so I have nothing to save face for. And 'massacres happen' is not a caveat, it is a fact. Civilians get massacred in every single war. And the military organizations involved still try to cover it up.

Consider the Haditha massacre in Iraq in 2008. A group of US Marines killed 24 civilians. And yet, despite all the tough talk about My Lai and how it's completely unacceptable, two things came out of Haditha:

- the US military tried to cover it up as soon as it happened.

- nobody served any time for their role in the massacre.

And again, as I said to conclude my last post. "The truly fucked up part is that there are likely many massacres that have never been reported."

I don't understand how that constitutes rationalizing something. Rather, as a society, we must celebrate the people who stop these massacres and human rights violations because they still happen. They have always happened.

Isn’t that how it usually works. Japan remembers its war dead, we remember ours. They rember their heroes, we remember ours. Same for Soviets, Germans, British, French, Spanish, Philipinoes, Indians, Pakistanis, etc..

Since you mention the Germans: Their process of working through the past ("Vergangenheitsbewältigung") very much includes remembering the victims, massacres and non-heros, as well as embarrassement and remorse, while spending very little energy discussing the actions of positive figures. And even they are seldomly described as "heroes" ("Helden"), probably to avoid any ambiguity regarding the responsibility of the German people for the horrible events. Alas, Germany might be unique in that regard.

I have the utmost regard for Germany. I cant think of another example where the entire country acknowledged their own wrongdoings with sincerity. I have no skin in the game, but in some weird way it makes me feel proud for them

Sadly these days we have a lot of alt-right people arguing that this kind of working through the past has made us weak. In terms of WW2 they argue for recognition of all the German civilian dead in WW2.

The irony of trying to push for sympathy for German refugees in the war and at the same time disregarding the humanity of Syrian refugees is lost on them.

All of America's wars since Vietnam have been horrific war.

You should put as much energy into observing the victims of Americas illegal wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, too .. America hasn't stopped killing innocent children.

Americans, however, have stopped caring about it.

See also: people who claim that the atomic bombings of Japan saved lives, and the people who claim that white people deserve credit for being the people who ended slavery in the United States.

As a student of WW2, millions of Japanese lives were saved by the atomic bombs:

1) Japanese military leaders were planning to continue fighting until no citizens were left: "even if the Japanese people die, their spirit will live on."

Surrender rates in previous island battles were on the order of 1% (ie. 99% killed or seriously injured.)

2) the Japanese people were facing starvation had the war continued. The early surrender helped with the rebuilding effort and prevented the nation from literally starving to death.

3) American leaders chose to bomb secondary cities, rather than completely destroy Tokyo, a capital city

4) had Russia invaded Japan, they typically would de-industrialize the enemy by transporting power plants and other facilities back to Russia

5) Japan actually refused to surrender to the USA. The emperor's broadcast never used the word, and the leader who signed the surrender document was approx. #10 in the leadership hierarchy.

The emperor was a serious amateur microbiologist and realized what an atomic bomb was, so did not need convincing that the war was lost.

(He was against starting the war with China and the USA and said so, but faced assassination and constitutional issues if he made a serious effort to change sentiment.)

This is not true, serious military figures in the US armed forces concluded that Japan was utterly defeated and was making peace feelers. They were basically defenseless at that stage of the war, against the bombing raids.

The civilian massacre could have been prevented by merely demonstrating the bomb. However they chose to experiment by dropping it on an city.

Two cities.

They didn't stop at one, they did it twice.

Sure, since they didn't surrender after the first one. And there might have been a third one...

Yeah, three days seems a reasonable time to wait before having another go after using the first nuclear bomb offensively in the history of mankind.

Stupid Japanese for not surrendering immediately...

I think it's more complicated than that. There were at least some people who were not planning to surrender. If it was up to me, I would have probably dropped it on a mostly uninhabited island near Japan. It's probably true we wanted to scare the Russians with our new super weapon.

But the big question is if Japan was close to surrendering anyway is why didn't Japan surrender after the first one, why did it take a second one?

Ernest Lawrence, who worked on the Manhattan Project (and won the Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing the cyclotron), famously recommended a non-lethal demonstration of the bombs:

> At the May 31 meeting, Lawrence suggested that a demonstration of the atomic bomb might possibly convince the Japanese to surrender. This was rejected, however, out of fear that the bomb might be a dud, that the Japanese might put American prisoners of war in the area, or that they might manage to shoot down the plane. The shock value of the new weapon could also be lost.

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event...

I think this ignores the historical context. The US had air control and been bombing the mainland relentlessly for a while. The firebombing of Tokyo had already caused bigger loss of life than the Hiroshima bomb did. So it was clear to both parties that the US did have the destructive capability and were willing to use it. This did not cause the Japanese to surrender. Why would it have made any difference to "demonstrate" the bomb, if actually bombing the capital and killing 100000 did not have that effect?

Even after the second bomb, just before announcing the surrender, there was an attempted coup d'etat by high ranking officers to prevent the surrender. So its not like surrender was a given after seeing a nuclear bomb.

It is only in retrospect it seems obvious that the nuclear bomb would lead to surrender. Even taking about "the decision to drop the bomb" as it was some unique moral dilemma is kind of anachronistic. Of course they were going to drop the bomb, just like they used any other weapon at their disposal.

Don't forget demonstrating both ability and willingness to the keen onlooker standing eagerly in the wings: the Soviet Union. It was ready to take on a weakened Japan in a drawn out conflict. Also, who knew what ambitions there were for Europe?

Best nip any grand ambitions in the bud.

(The Soviet Union was still some years away from having nuclear bombs.)

Tokyo was off the initial atomic bombing target list because it had already been mostly destroyed by firebombing.

This is incorrect. The Japanese were trying to negotiate surrender through the Russians, with their sole condition being that they could keep their Emperor. The Russians had not informed the USA.

The USA knew all of this, because they had cracked the Japanese codes and read their messages.

So yes, dropping the bombs was a straightforward attrocity.

All these points are fair except for #3. Tokyo was already burnt to the ground during the firebombing campaign.

History is written by victors.

Not necessarily. For example, the history of the Vietnam War is mostly written by Americans, even though the US lost.

Who deserves credit for ending slavery? Or is it no one because it was an immoral practice to start with? Or are you saying that just because a subset of white people were involved, that credit would not extend to white people as a whole? I guess I don't really see the significance of making a point of this. If someone is hurting me repeatedly, and then they decide to stop, I think they'd deserve credit for realizing they should stop. Furthermore, I'd want them to have that credit to encourage sensible acts going forward.

Also, ending slavery but then basically having effectively an analogue of apartheid right after does look like a minimal-motivation approach in retrospect.

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