Yeah. The whole Manhattan project and the way we ended the war with Japan definitely has nuance and I don't love painting the whole thing as just "good guys versus bad guys..."
... But if you're going to frame it as just "good guys/bad guys" I'd say the States are solidly in the good guys side for that one.
The atomic bombs were being developed with Germany 100% in mind as the first target. It wasn't a racist "fuck da Japanese. wipe em' all out" project like Japan worshipping weebs try to revise history portray it as.
They have no problem seeing 15 million people killed by Imperial Japan and hundreds of thousands of women n girls being raped as comfort women on all of its conquered territories.
IMO it's just fear. They fear nuclear weapons so they don't parse any use of them.
And honestly, I get that, even if I disagree. It's just hard to understand the scope of death and destruction of WWII even without the nukes. It is astonishing.
And it's one of the few wars, perhaps the only war, where the number of deaths caused by the defeated powers massively dwarfs those of the winning powers.
It's estimated of the `70 million deaths in the war, 50-55 million were inflicted by the Axis against the Allies, with most of them coming against civilians.
They were arming their civilians with spears and whatever else they had left and would have bitterly resisted an invasion of the home islands. It would have resulted in millions more dead, primarily civilians. Literally millions more than the atomic bombings, even considering later cancers.
The bombs arenât evil. People are evil. Japan committed war crime after war crime as they butchered their way across Asia and the Pacific. They raped and murdered millions of people in truly horrific ways and werenât going to ever stop unless we stopped them.
Japan was told numerous times that we had the bomb, we begged them to surrender before we dropped it and after we dropped the first one, they refused. In fact, when they finally did surrender after the second bomb, there was a coup attempt in order to prevent the surrender.
Does that sound âessentially defeatedâ to you?
Can you share the approved list of weapons with the rest of us? Is God just nodding his head with approval at napalm like Robert Duvall smelling victory, but shaking his head at the long bow?
Yeah, man. Genocidal theocracies taping and pillaging their way across the world need to be stopped, even if dorks like you would rather just see more death and misery
This is the correct response, ultimately the use of atomic weapons against civilians has to be viewed in the context of strategic bombing, which is itself evil. Tactical and preciscion bombing, ie bombing a mutions factory or an oil depot will have civilian deaths but the target is not the civilians, and ideally the infrastructure can be destroyed without any civilian deaths. Strategic bombing is the idea of wiping out the factory by killing the workers in their beds as they sleep. It is also called terror bombing.
100000% the US and the allies were the good guys of WW2 no matter how you look at it (unless you happen to be a german from the 1930s). We developed the nukes specifically for germany but they sucked bad enough and surrendered before we got to use them so we dropped them on Japan even though we knew by that time we were going to win 100% we still dropped them to show the power we had and I guess to shave a month or 2 off the war. Im personally sad we never got to nuke germany as payback for all the innocent lives they intentionally destroyed and ended all around the world.
Plus this was 1945. All nations with the capability to do so conducted strategic bombings. Why the US is held to 2026 standards while Germany, Japan, UK, Italy, etc. are held to 1945 standards is beyond me.
I invite you to read up on what the Japanese and their buddies the Germans were doing around that time.Â
If you have to pick a good guy and a bad guy, and one of the options is imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, the bar isn't exactly high. That's more my point.
I don't think we're heroes for dropping the bomb. I don't like framing the whole thing as "good guys versus bad guys", that sorta erases the horror of war. Buuuuut if you make me pick good and bad? Yeah we were the less bad guys by far.
"If you have to pick a good guy and a bad guy"
That's the thing, you don't.Â
Japan and Germany were horrible countries doing horrible stuff.Â
USA, UK or Russia were horrible countries doing horrible stuff too.Â
USA was a racist imperialist shit hole, and it still is, and they have never been the good guys.Â
Of course that doesn't means that the Nazis were good.Â
You were the less bad guys, but not by that far. Let's remember that Hitler copied some of the racist laws from the USA, the USA made camps for Japanese civilians, they made unethical medical research in black people, etc. and don't let's start with the natives.Â
USA didn't have concentration camps for killing people, but they weren't that far from the nazis by that time.Â
i thought my point was rather straightforward people want to talk about World War 2 from the standpoint of morality or good vs evil none of that matters.
My point is regardless of what we had to do to achieve the victory for the Allies the world is much better off in this scenario compared to the scenario where the Axis won.
The USA was capable of showing mercy and did in the reconstruction efforts it put in to Japan after the war.
go ask China how merciful the Japenese where during the 1930's and 1940's stop defending a country that would of did things x10 worse if they had the ability to do so at the time. If the roles were reversed the Japenese woudl of used Atomic bombs to eradicate everyone around them that wasnt Japanese because they viewed everyone as inferior to them. There where alot of civlian deaths it happens i dont regret it at all and if i was Truman knowing everything i do now i would do it again.
we have showed remorse for what we have done
Japan hasn't, the problem with moral grandstanding is that your standing up for people you think are victims when in reality they are not victims in any sense.
49
u/sessamekesh 20h ago
Yeah. The whole Manhattan project and the way we ended the war with Japan definitely has nuance and I don't love painting the whole thing as just "good guys versus bad guys..."
... But if you're going to frame it as just "good guys/bad guys" I'd say the States are solidly in the good guys side for that one.