Singling out the US from WW2 seems odd. It was the one with Nazis, you know? Also during that war Japan did some absolutely despicable shit, like Nanjing massacre, there were the Nazis which, yeah no need to explain that one, USSR had their own massacres and “forced relocations” of peoples, there was the fascist Italy which at least in Africa did awful shit, Croatia had Ustaše and their own holocaust, Lithuania same deal, don’t remember off the bat what horrible shit Brits did but knowing Brits you know there’s something there, Finland had horrific prison camps for Soviet prisoners…
Looking at WW2 and coming to the conclusion that the US specifically is bad is weird. There’s so much fucked up shit done by almost everyone.
Also tbh I’ve never really understood what the big difference between using nukes and just bombing the absolute shit out of a population with conventional weapons is. Nowadays the difference is that you don’t want to trigger a nuclear exchange, but that wasn’t really a case then. One difference is that it’s new and different weapon, but that’s not very concrete. Radiation and lasting effects is more concrete, but also, unexploded shit manages to still kill people. You’ll have horrific after effects from conventional weapons too.
This is something I’ve never understood but would be glad if someone explains. It’s often just said as self-evident thing but I’ve never seen the argument spelled out. Might help me change my mind about it if someone does.
But first, be careful not to talk about a second holocaust taking place in Eastern Europe because it’s part of the famous anti-Semitic double genocide conspiracy theory.
Alright. So America dropped two nuclear bombs on civilian populations. It’s not significant that the bombs were dropped on civilians, because America was in the middle of a campaign of terror bombing against civilian targets in Japan already. It is significant because the type of weapon and results of its use inflicted a new kind of terror. Rather than the “simple” mass death that would force a population into the countryside to recover over generations, the atomic bombs represented destruction of the capacity of people to reproduce, to occupy the places where it was deployed and to recover from the war.
I say what it represented because the world leaders knew about atomic weapons to various degrees and were kinda having a tiny dancer moment when the bombs were dropped. They knew it was a possibility that someone could, but having it actually happen meant that the nation who got bombed would have to immediately put whatever plan they had for it into action. Often these were based on flawed understandings that represented the best they could come up with given the internal knowledge and external intelligence. Which meant if you’re on an island surrounded by enemies slowly getting carpet bombed to shit trying to extract the most favorable terms from the one you wanna surrender to (the us, had already been real nice with Nazis after they surrendered) even though the other one is closer (ussr, extremely going to purge your fascist ruling class), when the first guy drops the Bomb that Makes Land Unusable and People Unable to Reproduce you just fold and stop trying to play your hand up.
But gayhitler420, you say, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are big cities now, doesn’t that poke a huge hole in your thesis that the atomic bombs represented denial of land and people’s future?
They didn’t know that then. Hell, America didn’t know that then. It wasn’t until the postwar tests that the army and Air Force tried to figure out what the long term effects of atomic bombardment were. A ton of money and effort went into destroying the old irradiated infrastructure and people during occupation.
So the result is a quarter million or so casualties and the “unconditional” surrender of Japan to the us. I use scare quotes around the word unconditional because while the terms agreed to are literally that, the postwar occupation represented basically keeping the ruling classes from the war in power.
The whole point of forcing a quick Japanese surrender by using a new literally unprecedented type of terror weapon was to allow the us to rally and start posturing against its former “ally” the ussr. I once again deploy the scare quotes because up until the attack on Pearl Harbor the us was playing both sides and allowing us based companies to do so too. America had open Nazis calling for it to join on the axis side until the attack, so it’s not like the us ever saw the ussr as an ally in any real sense.
So even if the direct effects of the two bombs were only comparable to conventional munitions (they weren’t, there’s a Wikipedia article all about it and you should read it), the use of terror bombing with the implication of genocide on an opponent who was gonna surrender to you anyway so you can whip around and start fighting your old ally is evil demon shit.
It is my fervent hope that you come around to ending all sentences with “death to America” after reading this.
So even if the direct effects of the two bombs were only comparable to conventional munitions (they weren’t, there’s a Wikipedia article all about it and you should read it), the use of terror bombing with the implication of genocide on an opponent who was gonna surrender to you anyway so you can whip around and start fighting your old ally is evil demon shit.
I’ve read about it, unless you mean there’s an article discussing the differences, then I have to say I haven’t seen it. What I gathered is that it is the unprecedented nature, the intentions and the possibility of what could’ve happened that makes it much more evil than “just” conventional munitions?
I think we at least as of right now differ on our feeling on the concrete effects and how much they differ, but I understand and agree with the argument about the things surrounding the use of the nukes. It does make sense why it is considered differently. Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain it, I think this helped a lot in understanding the argument. I was always much more focused on the effects of the bombing and didn’t really consider that the discussion was about much more.
But first, be careful not to talk about a second holocaust taking place in Eastern Europe because it’s part of the famous anti-Semitic double genocide conspiracy theory.
Do you mean when I talked about Croatia? It is just the term Wikipedia used, “the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia”. I’m not familiar with the implications about second holocaust, definitely not purposeful on my part.
But gayhitler420, you say
This made me laugh, I hadn’t noticed your username before and almost snorted my tea. “I say what???”
It is my fervent hope that you come around to ending all sentences with “death to America” after reading this.
Hah, I’ve never been a big fan of the US, but I guess I’m not quite there yet.
the thing that peaked my ol nazi particle detector was lithuania, since the double genocide theory comes from their postwar fascist movements. if youre not out here saying the soviets were as bad as the nazis then we’re cool.
main concrete effects that are significantly different from conventional bombardment: you die in a month if youre within two kilometers of the bombing, the doctors don’t know how to treat your injuries even if you don’t die, when the doctors do know how to treat your injurues they aren’t trained on burns and trauma as exacerbating factors of acute radiation, if you aint got it so bad you still die from bullshit cuts and bruses because the radiation killed your immune system, when you survive that you get cancer, if you live through the cancer or manage to avoid it youre not allowed to live in good neighborhoods, get good jobs or marry (in some cases denied by the municipality!) because people think theyre gonna catch radiation from you.
a common conventional munition used during the bombing of japan was the 1000 lb m65. it was about half tnt, with a 100m blast zone if youre in a building and 500m or so in the open.
if a normal b29 had been carrying its full payload, which they generally didn’t, of m65 conventional bombs and dropped them all perfectly with as little overlap as possible in either city it could match the damage area, but thats not how they were used. usually theyd make bombing “runs”, line up to get the best possible angle on the target and drop em all in one go. the idea was to maximize the chance of hitting targets with unguided bombs as opposed to maximizing the surface area affected. everyone on the ground knew what to expect so they’d flee perpendicular to the approach of bombers. when the “get behind a building” distance is 100m, there’s a chance youre gonna be okay. when it’s 2km, there’s none whatsoever.
oh yeah, and all the studies that said “it’s fine, youre gonna be fine” are no longer considered valid because they used the free air radiation measurement method and unit “grays” as opposed to the dosimetric unit “sieverts”. basically all the effects are actually way worse because they were measuring how brightly people glow as opposed to how irradiated their tissues are and now all the statistical research based on it is wrong and we can never go back and find out how bad shit actually was because everyones dead and buried. “we trained him wrong as a joke” but it’s research into incidence of developmental disorders and impact of radiation on brain development.
i’m not trying to beat you over the head about this, when taken along with the effects of america’s campaign of terror bombing it’s easy to look at the comparable effects of the atomic bombings like burns and trauma and say “pfft, those are rookie numbers” and it doesn’t make you a bad person to come to that conclusion. what makes them abhorrent is that the effects go much farther than the directly comparable effects and those are rookie numbers. nuclear weapons we have now are several orders of magnitude, no i’m not using the phrase orders of magnitude incorrectly, more powerful and integrate technologies intended to make them more effective terror weapons employed on urban population centers.
It’s sorta hard to learn about the argument or the difference when people outright refuse to spell it out.
If you can’t tell the difference in “just bombing” and what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki… well that says more about you than anything else.
Of course my opinion says things about me. But like I said, I don’t see the big difference to conventional weapons. That’s why I’m asking you to explain it to me ffs
What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t worse than Dresden, Tokyo, or several other bombings (especially Cambodia in the Vietnam war). They are notable in terms of being a nuke, but in terms of damage overall unremarkable.
This is my feeling too. With the number of killed and the destruction they caused they don’t seem that different from conventional weapons.
I’m not sure what makes the nukes worse and this guy just outright refused to even explain it to me since they didn’t feel likely they’d manage to convince me. Kinda infuriating, especially when I’m genuinely interested in understanding the argument.
A lot of focus is in those bombs and generally the complete destruction of conventional weapons is glossed over or even ignored. Especially when it was the allies targeting civilian infrastructure.
Singling out the US from WW2 seems odd. It was the one with Nazis, you know? Also during that war Japan did some absolutely despicable shit, like Nanjing massacre, there were the Nazis which, yeah no need to explain that one, USSR had their own massacres and “forced relocations” of peoples, there was the fascist Italy which at least in Africa did awful shit, Croatia had Ustaše and their own holocaust, Lithuania same deal, don’t remember off the bat what horrible shit Brits did but knowing Brits you know there’s something there, Finland had horrific prison camps for Soviet prisoners…
Looking at WW2 and coming to the conclusion that the US specifically is bad is weird. There’s so much fucked up shit done by almost everyone.
Also tbh I’ve never really understood what the big difference between using nukes and just bombing the absolute shit out of a population with conventional weapons is. Nowadays the difference is that you don’t want to trigger a nuclear exchange, but that wasn’t really a case then. One difference is that it’s new and different weapon, but that’s not very concrete. Radiation and lasting effects is more concrete, but also, unexploded shit manages to still kill people. You’ll have horrific after effects from conventional weapons too.
This is something I’ve never understood but would be glad if someone explains. It’s often just said as self-evident thing but I’ve never seen the argument spelled out. Might help me change my mind about it if someone does.
I got u fam.
But first, be careful not to talk about a second holocaust taking place in Eastern Europe because it’s part of the famous anti-Semitic double genocide conspiracy theory.
Alright. So America dropped two nuclear bombs on civilian populations. It’s not significant that the bombs were dropped on civilians, because America was in the middle of a campaign of terror bombing against civilian targets in Japan already. It is significant because the type of weapon and results of its use inflicted a new kind of terror. Rather than the “simple” mass death that would force a population into the countryside to recover over generations, the atomic bombs represented destruction of the capacity of people to reproduce, to occupy the places where it was deployed and to recover from the war.
I say what it represented because the world leaders knew about atomic weapons to various degrees and were kinda having a tiny dancer moment when the bombs were dropped. They knew it was a possibility that someone could, but having it actually happen meant that the nation who got bombed would have to immediately put whatever plan they had for it into action. Often these were based on flawed understandings that represented the best they could come up with given the internal knowledge and external intelligence. Which meant if you’re on an island surrounded by enemies slowly getting carpet bombed to shit trying to extract the most favorable terms from the one you wanna surrender to (the us, had already been real nice with Nazis after they surrendered) even though the other one is closer (ussr, extremely going to purge your fascist ruling class), when the first guy drops the Bomb that Makes Land Unusable and People Unable to Reproduce you just fold and stop trying to play your hand up.
But gayhitler420, you say, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are big cities now, doesn’t that poke a huge hole in your thesis that the atomic bombs represented denial of land and people’s future?
They didn’t know that then. Hell, America didn’t know that then. It wasn’t until the postwar tests that the army and Air Force tried to figure out what the long term effects of atomic bombardment were. A ton of money and effort went into destroying the old irradiated infrastructure and people during occupation.
So the result is a quarter million or so casualties and the “unconditional” surrender of Japan to the us. I use scare quotes around the word unconditional because while the terms agreed to are literally that, the postwar occupation represented basically keeping the ruling classes from the war in power.
The whole point of forcing a quick Japanese surrender by using a new literally unprecedented type of terror weapon was to allow the us to rally and start posturing against its former “ally” the ussr. I once again deploy the scare quotes because up until the attack on Pearl Harbor the us was playing both sides and allowing us based companies to do so too. America had open Nazis calling for it to join on the axis side until the attack, so it’s not like the us ever saw the ussr as an ally in any real sense.
So even if the direct effects of the two bombs were only comparable to conventional munitions (they weren’t, there’s a Wikipedia article all about it and you should read it), the use of terror bombing with the implication of genocide on an opponent who was gonna surrender to you anyway so you can whip around and start fighting your old ally is evil demon shit.
It is my fervent hope that you come around to ending all sentences with “death to America” after reading this.
I’ve read about it, unless you mean there’s an article discussing the differences, then I have to say I haven’t seen it. What I gathered is that it is the unprecedented nature, the intentions and the possibility of what could’ve happened that makes it much more evil than “just” conventional munitions?
I think we at least as of right now differ on our feeling on the concrete effects and how much they differ, but I understand and agree with the argument about the things surrounding the use of the nukes. It does make sense why it is considered differently. Thanks a lot for taking the time to explain it, I think this helped a lot in understanding the argument. I was always much more focused on the effects of the bombing and didn’t really consider that the discussion was about much more.
Do you mean when I talked about Croatia? It is just the term Wikipedia used, “the Holocaust in the Independent State of Croatia”. I’m not familiar with the implications about second holocaust, definitely not purposeful on my part.
This made me laugh, I hadn’t noticed your username before and almost snorted my tea. “I say what???”
Hah, I’ve never been a big fan of the US, but I guess I’m not quite there yet.
the thing that peaked my ol nazi particle detector was lithuania, since the double genocide theory comes from their postwar fascist movements. if youre not out here saying the soviets were as bad as the nazis then we’re cool.
main concrete effects that are significantly different from conventional bombardment: you die in a month if youre within two kilometers of the bombing, the doctors don’t know how to treat your injuries even if you don’t die, when the doctors do know how to treat your injurues they aren’t trained on burns and trauma as exacerbating factors of acute radiation, if you aint got it so bad you still die from bullshit cuts and bruses because the radiation killed your immune system, when you survive that you get cancer, if you live through the cancer or manage to avoid it youre not allowed to live in good neighborhoods, get good jobs or marry (in some cases denied by the municipality!) because people think theyre gonna catch radiation from you.
a common conventional munition used during the bombing of japan was the 1000 lb m65. it was about half tnt, with a 100m blast zone if youre in a building and 500m or so in the open.
if a normal b29 had been carrying its full payload, which they generally didn’t, of m65 conventional bombs and dropped them all perfectly with as little overlap as possible in either city it could match the damage area, but thats not how they were used. usually theyd make bombing “runs”, line up to get the best possible angle on the target and drop em all in one go. the idea was to maximize the chance of hitting targets with unguided bombs as opposed to maximizing the surface area affected. everyone on the ground knew what to expect so they’d flee perpendicular to the approach of bombers. when the “get behind a building” distance is 100m, there’s a chance youre gonna be okay. when it’s 2km, there’s none whatsoever.
oh yeah, and all the studies that said “it’s fine, youre gonna be fine” are no longer considered valid because they used the free air radiation measurement method and unit “grays” as opposed to the dosimetric unit “sieverts”. basically all the effects are actually way worse because they were measuring how brightly people glow as opposed to how irradiated their tissues are and now all the statistical research based on it is wrong and we can never go back and find out how bad shit actually was because everyones dead and buried. “we trained him wrong as a joke” but it’s research into incidence of developmental disorders and impact of radiation on brain development.
i’m not trying to beat you over the head about this, when taken along with the effects of america’s campaign of terror bombing it’s easy to look at the comparable effects of the atomic bombings like burns and trauma and say “pfft, those are rookie numbers” and it doesn’t make you a bad person to come to that conclusion. what makes them abhorrent is that the effects go much farther than the directly comparable effects and those are rookie numbers. nuclear weapons we have now are several orders of magnitude, no i’m not using the phrase orders of magnitude incorrectly, more powerful and integrate technologies intended to make them more effective terror weapons employed on urban population centers.
You have no intentions of changing your mind…
If you can’t tell the difference in “just bombing” and what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki… well that says more about you than anything else.
It’s sorta hard to learn about the argument or the difference when people outright refuse to spell it out.
Of course my opinion says things about me. But like I said, I don’t see the big difference to conventional weapons. That’s why I’m asking you to explain it to me ffs
What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t worse than Dresden, Tokyo, or several other bombings (especially Cambodia in the Vietnam war). They are notable in terms of being a nuke, but in terms of damage overall unremarkable.
This is my feeling too. With the number of killed and the destruction they caused they don’t seem that different from conventional weapons.
I’m not sure what makes the nukes worse and this guy just outright refused to even explain it to me since they didn’t feel likely they’d manage to convince me. Kinda infuriating, especially when I’m genuinely interested in understanding the argument.
A lot of focus is in those bombs and generally the complete destruction of conventional weapons is glossed over or even ignored. Especially when it was the allies targeting civilian infrastructure.