August 6 and August 9.

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On August 6 and 9 of 1945 we got our final revenge for the attack on Pearl Harbor. The death toll at Hiroshima was ultimately 140,000. 80,000 right off and the rest died mostly from wounds or radiation poisoning. My reaction was: not nearly enough died. I am really bothered that over 90 percent of the Japanese survived the Pacific War. The generation that lived at that time were a nasty bunch who deserved much more death than they finally suffered.

ruveyn

I'm not so much concerned about revenge as the fact that the bombs prevented us from having to invade the mainland, where they were preparing to throw their entire population at us in human wave assaults. We would have had to decimate Japan's population to win the war that way.

...and the Obamanation of desolation wants to offer a tacit apology for saving their stupid butts...

Those were civilians who died there. Now, bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have been necessary to force a quick end to the war, but let's not pretend that killing (mostly innocent) civilians is a good thing.

Unfortunate but necessary.

Who cares? What do you think about modern Japanese people?

So I assume you wouldn't have a problem with
Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos killing a few hundred (or
perhaps a few million considering their own losses)
American civilians today???

See http://www.counterpunch.org/galleymore08052010.html

I must say ruevyn....your reasoning seems rather incongruent
from my perspective.

After all...how one can be an avowed materialist who must
also believe wholeheartedly in free will in order to logically
validate his lust for revenge is beyond me.


Care to explain this?

Well, Ruveyn, I had held respect for you up until now.

If I were to know that you were representative of the American population, I would have cheered the 9-11 attacks, and only be saddened by the fact that they were not nuclear and more prolific, and still going on today, daily.

Are you even aware that MacArthur and Truman had received surrender requests from the Japanese before the bombs? That they ignored them?

Why? Cause they wanted to prove they had the biggest pricks!
What DID they prove? that they WERE the biggest pricks!

I am utterly and disgustingly revolted. You make me sick!

It hurts my stomach to read these words.

I doubt you can picture 140,000 people in your mind. Much less their families. Their lives, their existences in four dimensions.

Some people in Japan - a vast minority - chose to bomb a small Hawaiian outpost. Did even they deserve to die?

Please consider your perspective. It's at extreme odds with mine, and I believe there is a concession to be attained on both sides.

To me...the most disturbing thing about all this is that many
who share his obviously high intelligence also share his
worldviews.

Such ideas wouldn't be so unnerving if only 8th grade
drop-out crackheads who rob convenience stores held
them.

They seem to have avoided the excesses of their grandmothers, grandfathers, grand aunts and grand uncles. The only annoyance I have is the tendency of the Japanese cultural establishment to not fully acknowledge the nastiness of that prior generation. The Japan of the 30's and 40's inflicted death and destruction upon the rest of Asia and the responsibility is generally evaded in their school textbooks. On translation you will read phrases such as "and then war came....". War does not come. War is brought.

The corresponding thing that Americans do is to evade the fact that the generation of the early to mid nineteenth century American stole the land and wreck the culture of the Plains aboriginal nations and in some cases actually did genocide on tribes. See "Ishi, the Last of his People". Ishi was the last surviving member of a Pacific coast tribe that we hunted and slaughtered to extinction. It was an act similar to what the Brits did in Tasmania.

You still hear some Americans justifying the wreckage of aboriginal culture and justification to what happened in such places as the Black Hills of Dakota. I find that quite annoying.

In Turkey, the current government still refuses to admit the genocide inflicted by the last of the dying Ottoman government on the Armenians. And the Armenians are justly ticked off about that.

To repeat: I have no great animus toward the current generation of Japan. They never made war on me or mine so I have no beef with them. I just wish their education establishment were more straight up about the history of the Asian war than they are at present.

ruveyn

I have no problem with that. But almost all nations have committed crimes that they will not admit.

Indeed! Convenient historical amnesia seems to be a common ailment in some nations.

ruveyn

I didnt think you did.

Did the post war children reject and rebel against those social structures, or did the adult war population undergo a metamorphosis in thinking?

Unfortunately no. The children, by and large, bought the story that the Establishment in Japan sold them.

In current Japanese text books that deal with the period from 1930 to 1945, the authorized editions are less than forthright about how bad the Japanese government of that time was. Look at the politics. It took 60 years for the current Japanese government to apologize to the Koreans about what Japan did to Korea (back in the 30's). In addition to which Japanese citizens who have Korean ancestry are discriminated against even today, as though having a Korean relative were a taint or defect. The Japanese are very conscious of pedigree (in the same sense that dog and cat fanciers are). The Japanese are among the most racist people in the world. The surely were back in the period 1930-1945.

During the second world war two of the most racist nations in the world made war upon each other. I grew up during WW2. I can tell you from direct knowledge that the kind of language Americans used about Japanese (we called them Japs and Nips) was positively shameful. We referred to the Japanese as lice, bedbugs, rats and other very subhuman animal species. We even put American citizens with Japanese parents into prison camps. Thank G-D we didn't do to them what the Germans (at that time) did to Jews. It was a very bad and unpleasant time, I can tell you that. I recall very distinctly that when we burned Japan to the ground (many more people were killed with non-nuclear weapons than with two A-bombs dropped in anger) there was a great cheer that went up. Good! said we. They deserved it! And it so happens that they did. The War Cry was -Remember Pearl Harbor-. About the children (particularly infants) that were cooked and roasted ---- So Sorry. That is how it was at that time. Most of you guys missed out by thirty for forty years so you simply do not know how it was.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was actually a cleaner operation than low level area bombing by incendiary weapons against Japanese cities. The Japanese operation was purely against military targets, mostly airfield, naval assets and some fuel and storage facilities and barracks. We went after civilians in much the same way as the British "Bomber" Harris went after German workers. But you should understand; much of what we did was revenge. The Pacific war was a hate-hate relationship.

ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 06 Aug 2010, 2:58 am, edited 1 time in total.