I don't agree with you - but that is beside the point!
Nothing you have said makes it OK to MURDER a civilian population! NOTHING!
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I'm not going to go into the minds of the millions of people who suffered during WWII and saw the mass murder by the Axis upon civilians and responded with total war against civilians working for the military complex of those nations in order to protect the lives of their own people.
It's so easily and quite frankly morally juvenile to just state that "nothing you have said makes it OK to MURDER a civilian population! NOTHING!" I don't possess the moral high ground in order to make a backwards proclamation among people who saw their own innocent civilians murders by a nation complex and their resultant retaliation in self defense.
Maybe one day I could enter that fantasy land. But none of the drugs I've taken in my lifetime have ever led me to that delusional world to retroactively make such a simplistic proclamation.
It must be nice to live in such a fantasy that overrides the military experience of the numerous logisticians and military leaders who lived through those experiences and pushed so many innocent civilians who became soldiers to their death in taking island after island that the Japanese conquered and enslaved to make such a proclamation. The numerous blood baths they witnessed along with the factual accounts of the abhorrent conditions the enslaved populations endured, that captured soldiers endured in Southeast Asia and never mind the fact that by the time the U.S. was pushing back the Japanese occupation in the Pacific and China the fact of what their ally in Germany had achieved against the native Jewish population among other native populations in mass genocide......
That they decided to drop two bombs to end the war forgoing an ongoing conflict which the best military minds determined would have resulted in far more allied casualties against a nation industrial complex that exhibited the same atrocities their allies had done.
I wish I could be that much of a moron to retroactively damn after the fact based upon no legitimate argument anyone has presented in this thread such a condemnation of murder.
Go ask the Koreans. Go ask the Chinese. Go ask the many peoples of the Pacific. Go ask the Jews. Go ask the Roma. Go superimpose your idealistic world view upon the actual human beings who lived through that tragedy of mass warfare with your enlightened sense of armchair morality.
The actions of the U.S. and her allies were an act of total war that the Axis nations presented against the rest of the world. The firebombing of Japan was as devastating as what the atomic bombs presented but no one brings that up in the uber moralistic standards of what they think warfare should comprise. That peoples of a nation would react in kind to the extreme destruction aggressor nations presented among them or their allies.
Whenever people try to make absolute proclamations of morality in regards to what transpired in World War II most reasonable people must take a grain of salt. But the absolute condemnation of the accusation of outright murder by people who have obviously not presented an interest in the history of the war only leads to once conclusion.................
yawn.
I'm sorry. The absolute campaign conducted against Korea, Manchuria, China, Southeast Asia and the numerous Pacific Islands by the Japanese is not in question. Never have I read anyone complaining the outright enslavement, genocide and rape of the peoples of those numerous nations but the ultimate response by the U.S. and it's Allies to put an end to that campaign......suddenly they mount a moral high ground of ignorant proportion.
It's boring.
Any intelligent argument someone wants to add to counteract mine I would welcome. Screaming banshees of retroactive moralistic notions......boring.
I'm sorry. But the best estimates place the casualties at 200,000. These numbers pale in comparison to what the Japanese campaigns in Korea, Manchuria, China, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, etc. came to. The loss of civilian life in those arenas while the Japanese civilians were engaged in carrying out the military industrial machine of the Japanese Army and Navy that led to the loss of life in those areas I mention.
I don't adhere to a simplistic minded view of immediate snapshots of war. There is a totality that must be remembered. The bombing of Nagasaki alone doesn't compare to what the Japanese military with it's civilian backing did in Nanking and the rest of China. The mass loss of life and rape that occurred there. Never mind the culture of not surrendering which I mentioned in my previous post about the Allied invasion of Okinawa and the casualties sustained there compared to what the Allies believed they would sustain in invading Japan to bring an end to the war.
But I'm sure you have jumped on forums denouncing such claims about the disallowance against civilian murder against what the Japanese and German military machines achieved against civilians knowing full well that those machines, as our all military machines, backed by a civilian population.
edit: Please don't bore me and say something intelligent other than "war is wrong". Of course it is. But let's not retroactively place our own moral superiority among people we know nothing of without at least a decent argument.