Posted on 08/08/2015 4:27:51 AM PDT by 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.
Understandably perhaps, that’s how the Japanese feel. I can tell you that with certainty because back in 2008, the Japanese equivalent of PBS flew me out to New York to be part of an online discussion between a crowd of Americans and a group of people from Hiroshima. Again, perhaps understandably, the tone from the people of Hiroshima was very self-pitying. They asked us to look at pictures of Hiroshima as if we hadn’t seen them before. They talked about how devastating the attack was for them. It was like they wanted a big apology from all of America because we hit them so hard after their sneak attack.
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.
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.
Today, we think of the Japanese as polite people who are good at making electronics, cars and monster movies, but during WWII they were just as fanatical and evil as ISIS or Al-Qaeda. Unfortunately, they also had the military, intelligence and organization to inflict their evil on a much wider swath of the planet. They needed to be stopped by any means necessary, that’s exactly what we did and the world, INCLUDING JAPAN, is a much better place for it.
Strategically, it also made sense.
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.
“When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell!” — Admiral Bill Halsey on December 7, 1941
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.
Additionally, since it had become clear that Stalin might be almost as dangerous after the war as Hitler was during it, it was also important for the United States to deal with Japan instead of leaving another strategic, potentially dangerous nation to be conquered by the Soviets. Ultimately, we ended up fighting a cold war instead of a hot war against the Soviets and it’s entirely possible that our willingness to do what it took to subdue Japan scared them enough to play a significant role in that.
Most importantly, we saved hundreds of thousands of American lives. By 1945, the Japanese had essentially been defeated, but they refused to unconditionally surrender. Allowing a nation as dangerous and evil as Japan to rearm, especially after the world’s post-WWI experience with Germany, seemed like little more than an invitation to an even more brutal war in another 20 years.
Initially, America prepared for a ground invasion, but after seeing the ferocity with which Japan defended Okinawa, we realized taking Japan would cost the lives of millions of Japanese and much more importantly, hundreds of thousands of American soldiers would die in the process.
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.
Like most people who second guess the hard choices that are made in war, critics of nuking Japan insist that everything would have just magically worked out. Japan would have just surrendered and everything would have ended without bloodshed.
Of course, back in the real world, Japan was putting all of its resources into fending off an invasion and refused to surrender even AFTER the first nuclear weapon was dropped. After the second nuclear weapon hit Nagasaki, there was an attempted coup designed to prevent that nation’s leaders from giving in. Happily it failed, but it gives you a sense of how determined the Japanese were to keep fighting.
The Japanese weren’t the victims in WWII; they were the bad guys. They were perfectly willing to create a Hell on earth as long as their Emperor got to share time with Hitler in the infernal palace and they were allowed to be his little worker demons torturing the rest of the planet. Don’t feel sorry for Japan because it got nuked; feel sorry for the all the innocent lives that were lost because of that nation’s murderous lust for power.
It’s one thing to plead military necessity. It’s one thing to say, “Under the contingent circumstances of 8/5/45, I would have done the same”.
It’s quite another to say that dropping a nuclear weapon, twice, on civilian populations was pleasing to Almighty God, or that we should thank Him for the bomb, or that the women, children, and Christian missionaries at Nagasaki deserved it, and so on and so on.
And the reciprocal - if all those innocents DESERVED it, what do WE deserve - is very concerning.
F them. They were the bad guys and got their asses kicked proper
Any student of the war in the Pacific will tell you that the bomb was the most humane way to put an end to the war with Japan that they started.
So long as they deny their war crimes especially Nanking, China.
If they could look ahead 70 years and see what this nation has become, I wonder how many Americans who fought in World War II would have considered it a worthwhile military campaign.
What's going to happen after our culture is (justifiably) eradicated?
There was a time when our enemies feared us.
Obama has intentionally emasculated the American persona on the world stage, inviting every manner of adventurism against America.
If we actually elect a man President who has the spine to make America great once more, someone (probably North Korea) is going to make a misstep and have their head handed to them.
There seems to be a steady drip drip drip of posts on Facebook trying to elicit white guilt. All are unattributed and some are easily refuted. Two days ago one was posted claiming that white Christian Europeans had committed genocide against the “indigenous” peoples and slaughtered 100 million. I checked. In all the western hemisphere when Columbus landed the estimate is that there were between 50-100 million people in the new world. I had a long debate with the woman who had shared it. She had a pretty conservative wall. She couldn’t support her position so she banned me whatever that means. I guess Facebook now has me on their list. Sigh. I just want to see the cute cat videos and my great nephews pix.
I have heard that some American school kids believe that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, in retaliation for the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's pretty sick too.
"But Pearl Harbor was a naval base."
In a way, I believe that's Freudian...
That's not because this is what they were taught. It's because most American school kids are dumb as bags of rocks.
Japan brought this on themselves when they bombed Pearl Harbor... No American should feel guilty about ending the war early against Japan - saving thousands of lives on all sides.
You mean, they’re as stupid as our publically schooled students?
What do you think Truman and the leaders back then would have done had they been in charge when Muslims attacked the United States and murdered almost 3,000 innocent Americans? on 9/11?
Nuked Kandahar.
The high death toll in the battle of Okinawa is what made his decision. I believe the only other battle in history where there was more loss of American lives was Gettysburg
Japan surrendered because they believed that we would keep nuking them until they did.
Yet the whiners make a big deal out of the a-blasts even though the death tolls between those and the conventional raids were roughly equal. Why do they not shed as many tears for the enemy civilians killed in the non a-bomb blasts? They ended up just as dead. Selective outrage.
And as Hawkins points out the Japanese murdered many millions of enemy civilians...much of the killings just for the heck of it. It's difficult to feel too sorry for the dead Japanese civilians when you read accounts of the slaughter of the Chinese, Filipino, and other civilians by the sons of Nippon.
The same as the military value of killing hundreds of thousands of German civilians; among other things, it kept them from getting up in the morning and going to work making weapons that would be used to kill our soldiers.
That, and it provided a powerful example that their existing course of action would lead only to more death and destruction.
Predictions are difficult but my best guess is Sharia law. Along the way there we might have some sort of multicultural free-for-all. I don't think anyone will nuke us but I could be wrong.
They just sentenced a truck driver to 16 years in prison in La Crosse Wi. (close to where I live) for smashing into another car on I-90 while checking his Facebook page and killing a person in the car. The truck driver was going 55 mph when he crashed into the car ahead of him that was moving slowly due to heavy traffic.
Sorry about post 79...wrong thread.
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