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No Apologies For Hiroshima or Nagasaki
Townhall.com ^ | August 8, 2015 | John Hawkins

Posted on 08/08/2015 4:27:51 AM PDT by Kaslin

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To: Kaslin
This week was the 70th anniversary of the United States nuking Hiroshima and as expected, there has been plenty of second guessing, attacks on America, and claims that nuking the Japanese wasn’t necessary.

The nuking was necessary to save the lives of the POWs that were located on the island of Japan. Given the other strategic reasons for the bomb, there is little doubt that President Truman made the correct decision.

41 posted on 08/08/2015 5:47:29 AM PDT by olezip
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To: Squantos
Actually, "Beheading, torture and cannibalism of POWs"
42 posted on 08/08/2015 5:49:43 AM PDT by DuncanWaring (The Lord uses the good ones; the bad ones use the Lord.)
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To: fatnotlazy

“Truman had to put America first — something the current occupant of the White House won’t do.”

Neither would about 50% of the field of Republicans running for that office in 2016.


43 posted on 08/08/2015 5:49:47 AM PDT by The Antiyuppie ("When small men cast long shadows, then it is very late in the day".)
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To: central_va

Correction about the first attack on home soil since Pearl.. We mustn’t forget 1993, the first attempt to bring down the WTC..
And you are correct about revised history here.. Severe whitewashing.


44 posted on 08/08/2015 5:50:35 AM PDT by Bikkuri (Molon Labe)
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To: sneakers

My father’s unit was scheduled to be part of the invasion of Japan as well...The bomb saved thousands of American lives.

Thank God we had leaders who did what was in America’s best interest.


45 posted on 08/08/2015 5:51:45 AM PDT by runfree
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To: MissionaryRidge; Old Sarge; Darkshear; Norm Lenhart; TheOldLady

I caught a ZoT!
It’s been awhile, hehe..


46 posted on 08/08/2015 5:55:32 AM PDT by Bikkuri (Molon Labe)
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To: central_va

When wife and I toured the Arizona Memorial, our Navy boat was filled with young Japanese.
I asked why they wanted to see this. They said they wanted to see what their grandfathers had done. They couldn’t believe it...


47 posted on 08/08/2015 5:58:28 AM PDT by Eric in the Ozarks ("If he were working for the other side, what would he be doing differently ?")
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To: fatnotlazy
But in the end Truman realized that saving thousands of American lives was far more important than the number of Japanese civilian casualties.

I think it went even deeper than that.IIRC the estimates were that a full scale invasion of Japan would cost a million lives...soldiers and civilians,Allies and Japanese.

48 posted on 08/08/2015 6:10:11 AM PDT by Gay State Conservative (Obamanomics:Trickle Up Poverty)
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To: Kaslin

Truman was right to drop both bombs. The projected causality rate for the invasion of Japan was 1,000,000 plus.
History has been kind to the old liberal, former KKK member. In my opinion, warts and all, Harry Truman ranks as the best President in the 52 years between Calvin Coolidge and Ronald Reagan.


49 posted on 08/08/2015 6:11:38 AM PDT by Tupelo (Corrupt politician McCain trumps war hero McCain.)
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To: jjotto
The question was whether to burn a city to the ground with one new bomb or tens of thousands of incendiary bombs dropped by hundreds of planes. The immediate effects were similar and I doubt anyone thought enough about radioactivity or long term cancer to even brief Truman on it.
50 posted on 08/08/2015 6:18:20 AM PDT by KarlInOhio (The 1st amendment is the voice and the 2nd is the teeth of freedom. Obama wants to knock out both.)
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To: Kaslin

In all the hand-wringing, has it been reported that the President (Truman) who ordered the bombings was a DemocRAT?


51 posted on 08/08/2015 6:30:11 AM PDT by Arm_Bears (Biology is biology. Everything else is imagination.)
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To: Kaslin
Even if the author's underlying premise can legitimately be debated, this article is littered with a lot of outrageous self-serving justifications. I'm surprised someone like John Hawkins would even write some of this.

..............

Let me say something that a lot of people think, but don’t want to say because we’re friendly with Japan now: Japan deserved to be nuked and it deserved it ten times over.

Really? If this is the case, then what does the United States deserve today? More on that below.

Japan was allied with the Nazis in a war of world conquest that would have exterminated freedom and democracy across the globe if they were successful. The Japanese deliberately starved and slaughtered millions of civilians, they raped children and pregnant women, they forced families to have sex with each other for the fun of it, they tortured and experimented on prisoners of war -- and then there was Pearl Harbor.

If Japan deserved to "nuked ten times over" for all this, then what price should the United States of America pay for slaughtering 50+ million of our own defenseless children since Roe v. Wade? It's astonishing how freely this guy is willing to rain death down upon someone else for crimes and abominations that aren't nearly as horrific as our own.

First off, Pearl Harbor needed to be avenged in a manner so terrible that it made our enemies think twice about striking our homeland again. In fact, some might argue that Japan got off light.

This is baloney. Pearl Harbor was barely "our homeland" in 1941. Hawaii wasn't even a state at the time -- and when the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor was hitting the airwaves that day, the vast majority of Americans didn't even know where it was.

Happily, it didn’t have to come to that and yet Japan was punished for what it did in a way so terrible that it will live on until the end of human history. That’s no small matter because after what we did to Japan, nobody tried going after us again on our home turf until 9/11. What’s 50+ years of going without a strike on America as devastating as Pearl Harbor or 9/11 worth? Actually, quite a lot.

The author makes it sound like we have made it through the last 70 years unscathed. We have a homosexual Muslim who is a radical Islamic interloper sitting in our White House, dude. And look around you at what America has become. We destroyed Japan so we could be free to build this?

When people moan about the use of nuclear weapons in Japan, what they’re really saying is that they’d rather hundreds of thousands of American families had grown up without husbands, fathers and sons than see us use nuclear weapons on a genocidal nation bent on world conquest.

No, that's B.S. The author makes a common logical mistake of laying out one scenario with millions of casualties, then retroactively justifying it by claiming to demonstrate that the alternative was "better" by some objective measure. What would the logical extension of this argument be if Japan didn't surrender after Nagasaki?

The Japanese weren’t the victims in WWII; they were the bad guys.

This is where the author's initial argument completely falls flat on its face. You can't argue on one hand that Japan was governed by a brutal, totalitarian regime that was hell-bent on eradicating democracy ... and then paint Japanese civilians as complicit players who deserved to pay for the sins of their leadership.

In fact, historical facts expose the author's entire underlying premise is exposed as a fallacy. The Japanese royal family who were ultimately responsible for all of the crimes that the author claims justified the annihilation of Japanese cities were never prosecuted after the war.

You gotta do better than this, Mr. Hawkins.

52 posted on 08/08/2015 6:37:25 AM PDT by Alberta's Child ("It doesn't work for me. I gotta have more cowbell!")
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To: MissionaryRidge
Good for them if they fought like hell wherever we attacked them. Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?

They were fighting to defend an empire of slaughter and rape. They fought like hell but what they were defending was pure evil.

53 posted on 08/08/2015 6:37:54 AM PDT by palmer (Net "neutrality" = Obama turning the internet into FlixNet)
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To: Kaslin

The Japanese should be kissing our arses for dropping both bombs.

The Japanese were preparing to FIGHT TO THE LAST MAN. Truman saved a LOT of lives: Both Japanese as well as as American.


54 posted on 08/08/2015 6:39:23 AM PDT by Willie From Austin
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To: Kaslin

My only apology is that we didn’t drop one on Berlin.

Sorry, Israel.


55 posted on 08/08/2015 6:39:23 AM PDT by Longdriver69
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To: Alberta's Child
You can't argue on one hand that Japan was governed by a brutal, totalitarian regime that was hell-bent on eradicating democracy ... and then paint Japanese civilians as complicit players who deserved to pay for the sins of their leadership

We eradicated that culture and the world is a better place. Expecting perfection in war is a little silly.

56 posted on 08/08/2015 6:39:53 AM PDT by palmer (Net "neutrality" = Obama turning the internet into FlixNet)
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To: MissionaryRidge
I agree that Hiroshima was justified but how are your examples a justification ? Pearl Harbor was a naval base. Good for them if they fought like hell wherever we attacked them. Isn’t that what they’re supposed to do?

It's funny how that inconvenient little fact gets overlooked in our colored view of history. Whether the attack was justified or not, Pearl Harbor was a military target -- and it was located in a disputed American possession that wasn't even a state at the time. What was the military value of killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians?

57 posted on 08/08/2015 6:40:31 AM PDT by Alberta's Child ("It doesn't work for me. I gotta have more cowbell!")
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To: kenmcg

I think it’s an important distinction that Truman did not bomb Japan, he acceded to the military strategy of bombing Japan. And for good reasons.

It’s a distinction little made, let alone contrasted with the dichotomy of leaders of the current era, responsible for demoralizing ROE and leaving behind the prior strategies of both ‘winning the war’ as well as ‘winning the peace’...


58 posted on 08/08/2015 6:40:54 AM PDT by logi_cal869 (-cynicus-)
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To: Longdriver69
My only apology is that we didn’t drop one on Berlin.

Berlin surrendered in early May. The first nuke test was mid July 1945.

59 posted on 08/08/2015 6:41:56 AM PDT by palmer (Net "neutrality" = Obama turning the internet into FlixNet)
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To: Alberta's Child
What was the military value of killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians?

Gee, I don't know. Unconditional surrender maybe?

60 posted on 08/08/2015 6:42:51 AM PDT by palmer (Net "neutrality" = Obama turning the internet into FlixNet)
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