Jon Stewart: You know who was a war criminal? Harry Truman

Drum:

Are you an idiot, or just pretending to be one?

Truman is a war criminal for dropping the bombs.

The fact that people vilify Truman, FDR, Wilson, Harris, and CO today while lionizing Che, Fidel, Haber, and Rommel is sickening.

Listen to what Nimitz, Leahy, MacArthur, and even Eisenhower (”completely unnecessary”) thought of it.

I have. And I don’t believe them. If you looked past the complaints of Nimitz and Co and looked at the ACTUAL JAPANESE ARCHIVES, you will SEE how necessary the bombs were to prevent the Japanese from committing a national “suicide by GI” and possibly taking us with them in the face of a growing Soviet threat.

These fanatics blocked themselves in their bunkers, rabidly prepared for an Apocalyptic battle, and literally planned to fight to THE VERY LAST drop of Japanese blood. Literally.

Those who could walk were given a spear and some training to use it. Those who could not were simply rigged to blow up.

It was estimated the Western Allies would have lost half a million men taking the Home Islands, not counting the “moping up” of fanatical holdouts in Indonesia, Burma, Indochina, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, etc (who historically killed and killed and killed until the surrender, and some until they were wiped out AFTER the surrender). Japanese losses would have numbered in the millions and been nearly total.

Barbarism, pure and simple.

Yes indeed. But such is war.

Truman only dropped the bombs to flash his small and shriveled nuts to Stalin.

No. Why? Because while we were not completely trusting of Uncle Joe, we still thought of him as an ALLY when Japan surrendered, and it was only after the Gouzenko Affair that we began seeing him as an opponent. And you are also ignoring the fact that we had just seen the end of the Germans (who themselves had fought like hell towards the end, fortunately mostly in the East) and had just wrapped Iwo Jima and Okinawa up, all of which had a MAJOR influence on discussions regarding the bomb.

Studies show that 60,000 US troops might have been spared because the bombs were dropped. At the cost of 200,000 innocent Japanese lives. Now that’s Christian, eh?

The stupidity of that one paragraph is toxic. So, without further ado, here are the questions for you:

A. What “studies” are those, and where did you get those numbers? Library, Internet, Magic 8 Ball? Where are your sources?

B. Obviously, you have never seen the official estimates, have you?

C. Not all of those were “Innocent”, as shown by the number of Japanese military personnel who died (indeed, Hiroshima was the HQ for the Southern defense of the Home Islands and Nagasaki where they were keeping much of what was left of the Imperial Navy), and not all of them (hell, I’d go so far as to say most of them) were not “innocent” by any definition.

d. How many of those innocent Japanese would have perished in an invasion due to the fanaticism of their delusional, bloodthirsty Junta?

E. What about the hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers and civilians in Souteast Asia, China, and the Northern Pacific who were STILL at risk if the war continued? How many of THEM would have perished?

F. Since you have the gift of epic knowledge, can you devise a strategy that could have devised an ALTERNATIVE strategy that avoided the slaughter of Operation Downfall, the rampage of the Japanese military elsewhere, and the famine of the blockade?

G: Would it have been “more Christian” to simply wipe the Japanese from the face of the Earth in Operation Downfall or to let them starve as opposed to dropping the bombs?

I await your replies.

Turtler on April 29, 2009 at 11:30 PM

progressoverpeace:

The only real war crime is losing.

And I am sure the Belgians, Jews, Italians, Greeks, Frenchmen, Luxembourgers, Koreans, Filipinos, Dutch, Danes, Norse, Finns, Hungarians, Poles, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Kuwaitis, Iraqis, Persians, Indians…. butchered throughout the past century by tyrannical and amoral monstrocities like Ottoman Turkey, the Kaiserreich, Imperial Japan, the Third Reich, the USSR, Russia, China, the VC, the Khmer Rouge, the Islamists, the Nasserites, and the Baathists would agree completely with you.

If any of them were still alive, that is.

Winning a war is important, and justifies doing some ugly things. But let’s not fall into the moral abyss our opponents inhabit, OK?

Turtler on April 29, 2009 at 11:37 PM

SuperCool:

Would have been great if the joker that was talking to Skidmark Stewie would have mentioned the saturation and firebombings campaigns of Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Dresden and the Japanese home islands ordered by Liberal America’s God, Himself, FDR…more civs killed by conventional weapons than both A-Bombs combined.

All of which were provoked by German and Japanese aggression and war crimes.

Don’t demonize FDR for doing what had to be done. He does not deserve it, even for all his screw-ups with the New Deal.

Turtler on April 29, 2009 at 11:39 PM

We threatened to exterminate the Japanese and started it. They wouldn’t have surrendered otherwise. It wasn’t even our choice. They forced it.

Percisely. However, you are drawing a false analogy with what I was saying.

If wthe Imperial Junta forced us to kill every single person of Japanese blood to end the war due to their fanatacism and refusal to surrender, that would have been justified.

However, would it have been justified for us to simply declare that we were going to wipe the Japanese from the face of the Earth not because of strategic necessities but because of some racial ideology or because capitation and reformation was not punishment enough?

Now THAT is far different from what you are referring to.

Our strategic nuclear arsenal is an extermination threat that stands, and must stand.

Agreed. However, you are again missing the point: any use of our nuclear arsenal would have to be under extreme duress and a result of considerable debate, as opposed to-say- a decision to wipe an ethnic/religious group from the face of the Earth more rapidly or to crush some area of minor resistance to save our blood at the expense of the innocent in there.

By any of these moralistic arguments, our nuke arsenal would be illegal to use, thereby destabilizing this world, as this new stance sinks in.

Obviously, you are misinterpreting what my “moralistic arguments” are. Our nukes are a necessary evil in a world infested by tyrannies, religious radicals, digital-era gangsters, and increasingly powerful cartels. However, while it is moral to have them, is it not amoral to use them against civilian targets when they can be REASONABLY avoided (key word is REASONABLY)?

Now, that is truly dangerous stuff that makes any talk about moralizing seem a bit distant. It’s like talking about leash laws in the jungle.

True, but in order to rise above the jungle, you must realize that there is more out there than just being the top predator there.

Turtler on April 30, 2009 at 1:04 AM