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Comment by amoss | Hacker News Reader

Sarcasm is cheap, even when a point is indisputable. But when a point is heavily under dispute it comes across as a lack of understanding. While Japan was losing the war they were far from crippled, and had shown that they were willing to continue fighting despite the "partial" destruction of many cities by that point.

If you have not watched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War then it provides an interesting point of view to counter the simplistic "the war was already over we only did it to scare the russians" viewpoint.

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Japan was crippled, on every front. By then, it was just a question of when they surrender and not if. By the way, the USSR declaring war on Japan played an equally large role in Japans surrender to the Western Allies as the atomic bombs did.

It is funny so, how many people still fail to see the targeted and indiscriminate bombing of civilians done during WW2 by the allies as the war crime it was. Heck, even the RAF bomber command addmitted that in internal memos.

It takes heaps of irrefutable facts and very strong moral national character (for the lack of better words) to admit fucking up big time, apologizing for it and making yourself a better version thanx to such experience.

I'd claim in modern history, on large enough scale only Germany went properly through this, and is still source of a lot of guilt in their population. Allied fire bombings of whole cities, turks doing Armenian genocide, Japanese atrocities in China, russians with whatever they did anywhere in past 50 years etc... I see rather ignorance and lies and desperate attempts to look the other way rather than anything else.

> Japanese atrocities in China

Don't forget Chinese atrocities in China.

I just left Berlin this afternoon after spending a week here. I knew this aspect would be present, but I was surprised how present it is. My impression is the culture here prides itself on being extremely socially and ecologically progressive as a way of atonement.

Grafitti/street art seems to be encouraged as an emotional and creative outlet. Plenty of world class free museums, and most others are rather cheap (8-10 euros) compared to other locations in Europe.

Berlin is special. Germany as a whole is much more conservative.

"Never again" is still a big part of the culture. The rise of the Nazis is a common theme at school, not only in history lessons, but also others ("analyze this speech's rhetoric").

I suppose as a German it feels natural to be able to criticize what the people in your country have done before yourself and some patterns are fairly easy to spot. It's sometimes hard to understand why it can be so difficult for others.

And yet... fascism is on the rise again all over Europe. Amazing really, when you think of it, it's 100% known what it leads to and yet there are people that refuse to learn these lessons.

I am affraid it is worse: those people actually want all those things, the bad effects are not part of the risks coming with fascism, they are part of the promise. Sad indeed...

Yeah, it's amazing what people will buy when they feel their circumstances are poor. I feel like Berlin putting it very in front of your face means the youth will never forget or misinterpret what happened.

My partner on this trip is a Brazilian (from Sao Paolo) who has been living in Paris for the past decade. She touched on the fairly complex history of that country and how someone like Bolsonaro could be popular. The country is large with very different regions, each with their own capital, etc, which leads to a sort of isolation in ways. Yet their supreme court was still able to see fit to punish claims of election fraud that the US is incapable of doing.

It’s very worrying that in the US criticism of the government is now being actively censored and suppressed.

Is it true that US whistleblowers should consider getting to Berlin before leaking their information as German laws on speech would help protect them? For example wouldn’t Assange and Snowden have been much better off if they had?

Being in Germany wouldn’t have saved them, and it’s fantasy to think they would have. They’d have to have been in Venezuela, Iran, NK, China, or as worked for Snowden, Russia.

Anti-whistleblower/leaker sentiment has always been a strong force in every gov’t - only being physically in the jurisdiction of the ‘enemy’ is decent protection, and even then assassinations happen.

Hate speech isn't protected, in case you mean that.

Governemt criticism and whistleblowing is generally regarded more highly. As far as I can tell Snowden is well respected and the idea of granting him asylum is fairly popular (it almost happened, but the US's pressure is strong).

The laws in place aren't as good as you'd hope, though. The powers that be are, for some reason, not very happy with the idea of it becoming easier to expose their misbehavior, so protections for whistleblowers are not all that great. There was a recent attempt to pass a law that improves these protections, but it got watered down quite far.

Hirohito himself calls this a lie:

But now the war has lasted for nearly four years. Despite the best that has been done by everyone – the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of our servants of the state, and the devoted service of our one hundred million people – the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.

I don't see the contradiction:

Japan lost the war in the Pacific by then (the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage).

The USSR entered war, but had yet to actively fight imperial Japan (while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest). Also, Germany had lost, and most of the troops and resources bound in Europe could be redeployed now.

Re atomic bombs: The enemy so was only the US (in practical terms, the other allies did not play a major role, except the fighting in India that Japan had already lost a year prior), and yes, the atomic bombs were devastating.

But Hihoroto himself said, it was much more than just the two atomic bombs being dropped.

Go check out Sean McMeekin's Stalin's War for a pithy rebuttal to this point of view - but the idea that Soviet entry was a equal reason to the atomic bomb is a minority view (at best saying it nicely) in the historical community, but rather a very successful propaganda effort that Stalin launched shortly after the war to justify his taking of larger portions of asia.

Ah, the guy who claimed WW2 was a Stalin and not an Axis thing? Well, that is a minority view at best. At worst, it is repeating a bunch Nazi appologist views about the whole affaire. Heck, he even claims a seperate UK-Germany peace after the Battle of France was a potential thing, talking fringe theories ignoring historical facts here...

But hey, if ypu need to justify the use of WMDs against civilians, every excuse is a good one I guess.

Both Hitler and Stalin believed a separate peace was possible - and if Halifax or Chamberlain led the government, rather then Churchill, and if Churchill had actually been open to the communication with the Nazis that met his famous quote that if he thought he could get out of it by only giving up Gibraltar he would, the story might be different. Hitler was gobstocked.

Your claim Sean as a Nazi apologist to discredit him literally are repeat soviet propaganda lines. In fact Putin recently made all of these arguments again to justify his invasion of Ukraine - I trust you see the irony.

War is hell - and atomic war is hell. War isn’t justifiable, and yet war is part of human nature. This is something that Historians have studied since there were historians. Ignore that research at your peril. The WW2 and modern conflict historians have done just that.

Oh, Hitler believed a lot things... Bad for both, that Churchill was prime minister, right?

Also, I didn't say Stalin's War is Nazi apologist BS, just that it seems borderline to some BS that was spread right after the war. Which makes sense, since it was the early days of the Cold War.

Churchil was never in favor of a seperate peace, nor someone else in the Allied camp. Every declaration made that extremely clear. Claiming otherwise is delusional.

>it was just a question of when they surrender and not if

You are glossing over this as if it means nothing. The "when" is incredibly important during an active war. Would the "when" be after an American invasion? Taking Okinawa killed 12,500 Americans, 77,000 Japanese military, and at least 100,000 Japanese civilians. That was less than 2 months before the dropping of the atomic bombs. If didn't Japan surrender then, how many more of those battles would it have taken to produce the "when" of a Japanese surrender? How many battles on the Russian side in Manchuria would it have taken? Not only had Japan never surrendered in it's entire 2,000 year plus history, no military unit had surrendered during the entire war. There was organized coup attempted literally the night before the surrender was broadcast and Prime Minister Suzuki, who had survived a different assassination attempt 9 years earlier, only escaped by minutes. Prime Ministers that were not ultranationalist enough had been assassinated in 1921 and 1930, with two former Prime Ministers dying during another coup attempt in 1936.

The casual confidence in the outcome of the war is so disconnected from reality that it is laughable. Japanese political surrender, and that surrender being followed by the military was not in any way, some sort of forgone conclusion.

So? We talk WW2, military casualties were to be expected, weren't they? Just look at Soviet and Russian casualties on the Eastern front. Also, as an alternative to an invasion mainland Japan, cut them of by sea, bomb their cities to dust (still a war crime, but Tokyo was already fire bombed anyway), so basically what happened, atomic bombs or not.

And yes, tze end of WW2 was predictable in mid 1944, no doubt about that in any shape or form. The details were up for grabs, sure, the overall outcome was not.

>military casualties were to be expected, weren't they?

First, convenient to ignore the 100,000 civilian deaths. Second, what you are saying is the war was basically won*

*After hundreds of thousands of additional military deaths fighting to completely dismantle Japan.

>The details were up for grabs

Again, these "details" are hundreds of thousands to millions of deaths. You are acting like death from atomic bombs are the only deaths that matter, so people that die during battle or millions of deaths from starvation from a blockade[1] are fine. This is just so divorced from reality I don't even understand what you are trying to say. Yeah, we could have just killed millions Japanese people with a blockade or kill 100,000 Americans and a million Japanese during an invasion. Atomic weapons were totally unneeded.

[1]https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/victory-in-ja...

We're closing in on the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the end of World War II.

To put that in perspective, the Civil War ended 80 years prior to that. We are almost as far removed from WWII as WWII is from the Civil War. While there are still people alive today who were alive during WWII, we're talking about people like Joe Biden, who is 80, who was 3 when it ended.

It if very likely that no one who served is still alive. Our fathers and grandfathers are the ones who had fathers and grandfathers serve.

All of our information about World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is from stuff written about it. Something told to someone who then told it to us. So of course there's a disconnect.

No it is not funny at all. Terrible things were done in world war 2. I don't see any humor in that. It would be great to think that the world has seen the end of totalitarian regimes determined to expand at any cost, but world politics suggests otherwise.

You are sticking to the term "militarily crippled" but is it justified? Yes, Japan had lost the war by that point. But crippled implies that they could not fight back, or inflict losses on an invading force. There is no evidence to suggest that.

If the two bombs had not been used, when would the war have ended and how many lives would it have cost on both sides before it was over? More or less than 200 000? Would that have been better or worse morally?

Those are difficult questions. I don't claim to have good answers to them, but I would not glibly dismiss them with sarcasm.

From the Wikipedia article you linked:

> Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.

> McNamara talks about the proportions of cities destroyed in Japan by the US before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, comparing the destroyed Japanese cities to similarly-sized cities in the US: Tokyo, roughly the size of New York City, was 51% destroyed; Toyama, the size of Chattanooga, was 99% destroyed; Nagoya, the size of Los Angeles, was 40% destroyed; Osaka, the size of Chicago, was 35% destroyed; Kobe, the size of Baltimore, was 55% destroyed; etc. He says LeMay once said that, had the United States lost the war, they would have been tried for war crimes, and agrees with this assessment.

The firebombings were really, really terrible. No question. They would have continued to near total obliteration of the country if it hadn’t been for the nukes forcing the surrender, that much was quite clear.

Your evidence is a movie whose raison d'etre is to elucidate the viewpoints of an American citizen and military leader who is heavily implicated in this decision and in other American war crimes, and even that document does not support your point (McNamara openly admits that US bombing of Japanese population centers was a war crime.)

I'm not sure I would class that as 'heavily under dispute'.

It's not clear what point you are trying to respond to. I am aware that McNamara discusses the firebombing of Japanese cities cities as a warcrime. The main point of the movie is asking the question if nuking two cities was a lesser evil than continuing to try to force Japan into submission by continuing the campaign. The movie is not presented as evidence of anything: it was presented explicitly to provide the alternative viewpoint to the post I replied to.

Certainly the death toll would have been higher without the two bombs. By what measure would you claim that there is no dispute that Japan was "militarily crippled"? There is difference between losing a war and being unable to mount a punishing defense.

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