Atomic bombing of Japan was NOT necessary to end WWII. US gov't documents admit it
‘US government documents admit that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington's Cold War on the Soviet Union. Ben Norton reviews the historical record.’
The level of propaganda to not only justify turning innocent civilians into dust and basically fuck the land for the next life, but to also convince your population that it was necessary is something else
Honestly it doesn't take any convincing to make Americans support atrocities. The US can just do them and Americans will invent justifications all on their own.
Lol this really is true. I remember in high school I came up with the conclusion “Japan needed to be nuked because they weren’t going to surrender” on my own since I’ve never looked into it prior
They went as far as intentionally not bombing certain cities, to encourage refugees, industries and military offices to relocate there, so when they did bomb them later they'd inflict greater casualties and damage. They didn't do this explicitly to drop nukes, but the list of targets largely contained these cities.
there is a famous youtube video on this that go through all the military personnel memoirs and other documents about the lead up to the bombing. https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go
also watch oliver stone docuseries on american history (first 2 episodes)
Japan's Holocaust was as bad as the Nazi's. They were killing, raping, mutilating, and enslaving millions of Chinese, Burmese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other peoples on a daily basis. Every extra day the Japanese empire was in power was another day of hell for millions of innocent people. Japan's rulers know the War was lost after Germany fell. They were happy to keep the killing going.
Please explain, in detail, why the lives of the Japanese civilians in Hiroshima were more important then the lives of the Korean/Burmese/Chinese people being killed every day?
Your description of the conditions is correct but your conclusion is a non-sequitur. It does not follow logically that the only or best option to stop those atrocities was to mass murder civilians. Despite what the propaganda about the bombings that has since been inculcated into the western public claims, they were not in fact necessary for compelling Japan's surrender. There were already internal disputes about this in the Japanese leadership for some time, but after their decisive defeat in Manchuria at the hands of the Red Army the decision to surrender as soon as possible became pretty much unanimous. Every day that went by was another day that the Soviets took more territory and came closer and closer - through the Kurils - to the Japanese home islands. The Japanese imperialists knew just as well as the Nazis that they stood a much better chance of avoiding punishment for their crimes (and some of them even being allowed to retain some power in the post war state) if they surrendered to the US rather than the USSR. Moreover we now know that the US leaders knew this. Their primary motivations were to have a live weapons test and to intimidate the Soviet Union.
you probably know this but for the sake of clarity, the atomic bombs were dropped on August 6th, and a few days later on the 9th. Soviets invaded on the 7th. their plans for Hokkaido were for the 24th, and cancelled by the surrender.
post war assessments make clear that soviets' comprehensive destruction of the Kwantung army was perceived by parts of the japanese and us governments as sufficient on its own to force the surrender, but your comment sort of reads like the americans dropped the bombs after the soviet's success to force the japanese to surrender to them instead, which is chronologically unsound.
Remember two things. First were the Asian peoples who were being slaughtered by the Empire. Why should they go on suffering one extra day? The other is that Truman had an obligation to protect American lives; that was his sworn duty. Why should he allow any US service men to die to protect the lives fo Japaense?