‘US government documents admit that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington’s Cold War on the Soviet Union. Ben Norton reviews the historical record.’
The Japanese Empire was killing a lot of civilians. Chinese civilians, Burmese civilians, Vietnamese civilians. Explain to me why their lives shouldn’t be considered important?
Explain to me how murdering a bunch of Japanese grandparents, children, babies, and non-combatant adults does anything to remedy that.
By that logic, it’s A-OK for Iraq to come murder everyone in NYC and for Afghanistan to kill the entire state of Wyoming.
To repeat something that I wrote a dozen days ago, it is good to see somebody acknowledging some of the Empire of Japan’s violence against civilians, but two wrongs don’t make a right. Most of the victims of the bombings were civilians who had no direct involvement in their government’s atrocities, and we’ve seen from the Axis’s reprisals how counterproductive it was to use the local civilians as whipping boys, so punishing them for ‘their’ military’s atrocities is not only grossly unfair but wasteful.
That said, I should get around to talking more about the Eastern Axis’s atrocities against other Asians. I already talked about the famines in Java and Vietnam, but that is far from enough.