‘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.’
Your description of the conditions is correct but your conclusion is a non-sequitur. It does not follow logically that the only or best option to stop those atrocities was to mass murder civilians. Despite what the propaganda about the bombings that has since been inculcated into the western public claims, they were not in fact necessary for compelling Japan’s surrender. There were already internal disputes about this in the Japanese leadership for some time, but after their decisive defeat in Manchuria at the hands of the Red Army the decision to surrender as soon as possible became pretty much unanimous. Every day that went by was another day that the Soviets took more territory and came closer and closer - through the Kurils - to the Japanese home islands. The Japanese imperialists knew just as well as the Nazis that they stood a much better chance of avoiding punishment for their crimes (and some of them even being allowed to retain some power in the post war state) if they surrendered to the US rather than the USSR. Moreover we now know that the US leaders knew this. Their primary motivations were to have a live weapons test and to intimidate the Soviet Union.
You say there were ‘options,’ yet somehow managed to avoid actually naming them.
What would you tell the Koreans/Chinese/Burmese whose families died while the negotiations stretched out?
And what of the Japanese civilians? Are their lives automatically forfeit because they had the gall to be born in the bad guy country?
Do not justify atrocities with other atrocities. And do not ignore the bulk of another person’s argument to pretend they had no argument. You just look like an idiot when you do that.
What of the Japanese civilians?
You haven’t given me one word about why their lives were more valuable than the enslaved peoples.
Not much since there’d be quite few of them. Japan would be on the retreat at that point and would have very limited capacity to carry out further atrocities.
What would you tell people that lost their families in the Korean war to support the atomic bombs, since Japan surrendering to the US instead of the USSR all but guaranteed that war?
“A limited capacity.” Or, they might have decided that if they were going to lose, they would take as many people as they could with them.
Read up on biological warfare Unit 731 and tell me that there was no chance they’d have killed as many people as they could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Fascists are often cowards, I’m not saying they wouldn;t callously kill people during their retreat, rather that atrocities take planning and coordination, ergo time, time they wouldn’t have if they wanted to flee and they would have,
If your logic held up there’d be little stopping them from committing these light-speed atrocoties between the second bomb and the surrender.