Posted on 12/05/2009 6:00:32 PM PST by NYer
Yep. Aggression is aggression.
Regardless, how can anyone say that modern warfare methodology doesn't virtually constitute an inherent war crime? Even with the best of initial intentions, all modern combatants seem to be incapable of not escalating to very morally shaky tactics in pretty short order. Gone are the days when even defensive warfare could even potentially be directed solely at combatants. But this is due to tactical choices, not inherent issues concerning legitimate self-defense. Modern warfare, as practiced for at least 100 years, is virtually incapable of being conducted in a moral fashion. I believe that everyone willingly partaking of the blood-lust that leads to atrocities will have to answer for them. I certainly believe that everyone involved in the decision to use atomic weapons against civilian populations in an already-defeated Japan, having already met his Maker, was, shall we say, rendered "uncomfortably speechless" at that portion of his particular judgment. Maybe God was more merciful to them than they were to their victims, but I'm glad that I definitely won't be put in the same hot seat for those same actions! I have more than enough to answer for already!
This is the Religion Forum. I am interested in hearing a religiously-based defense of the deliberate killing of civilians in wartime, from a Christian perspective. One that would make Jesus proud to give full approbation to it. I strongly suspect that there will be no such defense forthcoming that does not engage in disingenuous mumbo-jumbo.
And your “honest” intention in using the term “murdered” instead of “killed” in the year 2009 is what?
Who started WW2?
Uh-huh. We didn’t deal them terrible blow ‘cause we were bored and there was nothing on TV. There was a reason. Folks need to consider the adversary’s actions that precipitated it. They need to consider the other options that were available.
Hundreds of thousands, millions are going to die. That’s given. Whether they die in one big bang or a billion smaller ones, is human suffering not at least equal?
IMO, Best to end it in 1 or 2 big bangs, shatter their will to fight immediately than to slog through the entire country for years fighting battles in every town.
One punch knockout. Done. Lost quick, and hurt a lot but when they woke up they didn’t have a pumpkinhead, 2 black eyes, mouthful of broken teeth, ear missing, fractured ribs, and a broken ankle too.
The conditions, by May 1945, were pretty much restricted to keeping Hirohito on the throne. They weren’t in much of a position to bargain, but that didn’t matter. We, for polemic reasons, were entirely dug-in about “Unconditional Surrender,” which we stated as a goal somewhat earlier. If anything, stupid usage of such terminology only tends to make the enemy fight more desperately. It is therefore rather amazing that the Japanese wanted so few conditions by mid-1945.
Do you know how many Chinese POW's taken by the Japanese were still alive when Japan finally surrendered? 56. Not 56 hundred or 56 thousand. Just 56. By order of by Emperor Hirohito there were no constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese POW's.
I prefer to listen to what the Japanese themselves have to say. And they say that they were not ready to surrender.
Ah there’s the issue isn’t it:
“I certainly believe that everyone involved in the decision to use atomic weapons against civilian populations in an already-defeated Japan..”
It may have been an inevitably-defeated Japan, but not one willing to surrender unconditionally...and there is absolutely no evidence that before August 6th Suzuki’s War Cabinet would have voted to surrender unless:
1. No occupation
2. No war trials by the allies
3. Emporer is left untouched
Please keep your delusional lies to yourself...regardless of your “Christian” intentions oh Pharisee...
That was the total war doctrine...and both the axis and the allies did it.
It was in part an artifact of the armaments of the era, but also of the philosophy of the day.
To behave like that today, holding the entire population of a combatant nation as targets in battle would certainly be a war crime, especially since we can fine target those we’re really after. And in WWII all the combatants had some pretty bloodstained hands. I’m not going to cast the rock of who was more guilty, except to remember our side didn’t start the conflict.
Some more light reading.
It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers—and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4% chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30%. -Looting of Asia
No they don’t, you’re right. It as disgusting as listening to Germans say the bombing of Dresden was a ‘’war crime’’, never taking into account Warsaw or Rotterdam or Coventry or Auschwitz. I had never known so few Chinese prisoners were left alive at the end of the war. Do you know the Germans murdered 800,000 people at the Treblinka concentration camp. When the Russians liberated it they found three people left alive. Just three out of 800,000.
War is evil. That being said, sometimes war is the lesser of two evils. For the record, I would have given the order to firebomb Tokyo, Osaka, and the other cities of Japan, just as Gen. Curtis LeMay did. I would also have given the order to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just as Truman did. However, I would have done so with the full awareness that I was committing murder by doing so. LeMay, the man behind the firebombings of Japan that killed so many innocent civilians, refused to attempt to weasel his way out of what he had done. In an interview conducted after the war, LeMay famously said that "killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.... Every soldier thinks something of the moral aspects of what he is doing. But all war is immoral and if you let that bother you, you're not a good soldier."1
All war is immoral. LeMay didn't punk out and try to paper over his deeds with a thin tissue of patriotic self-righteousness. He murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and he lived with it. He faced up to the reality of his deeds like a man.
I'm with him. When war comes, let's get it over with as quickly as possible, and then let's beg God for His forgiveness for the sin of taking innocent lives.
Most of the areas were never under Allied control at the end of the war so there were no film crews to cover what had happened. And unless it is on film some people have trouble picturing it. The best place to find the records is, oddly enough, in Japan. They do not go out of their way to make them known but the records are there. And what they reveal in their dispassionate way is enough to give you unending nightmares.
The fact of the matter is that no one in Japan just plain wanted to fight to the bitter end, without consideration of any conditions. And they were incapable of mounting any meaningful defense offshore anyway; if it came down to it, we could have simply blockaded them and deprived them of all outside resources if we were so worried about really losing up to a million men. The peace-wing in the government, along with the general population, would have overridden whatever hawks were left in the military in pretty short-order, once blockade-induced privations really kicked in. The evidence is overwhelming that our own military leaders never bought-into that figure of a million casualties, it was purely for public consumption as a justification for dropping the atomic bombs.
War has always been hell for everyone at times...we folks down south of my age can remember the tales told to us and see the remains of the civilian destruction
that’s why slavery or forced servitude sounded good once upon a time after defeat..you lived even after you were vanquished..it was sorta humane
take yer average medieval siege with some hard feelings involved..say involving a sister’s honour or something Medici like:
the overwhelming force outside the wall Sir Kills Alot might tell Sir YerToast inside that if he gives it up now his womenfolk will only be taken as concubines or handmaidens or domestics depending on beauty and fertility (if Lord Big Britches wants to up his gene pool or pay off horny subordinates) and your spawn say under aged 16 will be allowed to live and raised as their own......scout’s honour.. and you and all the men older than mid teens will only be piked or beheaded or hanged...hell, that was a deal to sir doomed and his posse and they were likely to take considering the alternative was to be skinned alive or disembowled and watch yet kids on pikes and babies boiled and whatnot and yer women still raped and violated in every imaginable way
we lull ourselves (not u skeeter..u purty durn smart) into thinking we are different or more humane
we just can afford the indulgence to be humane and puff ourselves up over that and worrying about silly crap like sexism, racism, homophobia, banning foie gras and other bigotry.... let things go Omega man around here and we can get just as wet as the Saxons or Mongols or Longshanks or whomever....we are civilized because we can be...that’s all
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