why 6 aug 8.15am deserves silence

[Q Classic]

They were not silent.

Also, a helluva lot of Allied POWs were delighted with the A-bomb. "Serve the buggers right" was the sentiment.

And before you diss that... try chaining yourself to a log in a tropical climate for 3 years, eat nothing but cockroaches, and whip yourself daily.

Oh, and watch your friends die of gangrene at the same time.

cruddy wrote this in the other thread.

i can understand why he might feel that way. after all, if you look at the flag to the left of this post, you could say that my family knows firsthand some of the things that empire did.

nanjing was brutalized for four months. korea was brutalized for forty years.

my italian godfather was in the navy, about to be shipped off to fight in the pacific theatre. his first thought was that he could go home. personally, i'm glad he didn't have to fight.

so cruddy, please, don't presume to think that i'm unaware as to what the empire did to its conquered peoples.

that said, why do this incidents deserve a moment of silence?

plain and simple: even though japan committed a series of wrongs, having a city blinked out of existence does not somehow make anything better. it does not erase what happened prior, and its horror is not mitigated because of what preceded it.

was it, in a way, karmic? i think so. does that make the bombing any less terrible? no.

sure, bring up olympic. bring up the firebombings of tokyo and dresden. bring up bataan, the rape of nanking, the systematic pillaging and destruction of korea for profit. bring up the biological warfare used in manchuria. bring up anything you want, because it doesn't change the fact that in one blinding flash, thousands perished and we learned just how far we could pervert our science and our technology.

that's why it deserves a moment of silence.

besides, if you don't want to give hiroshima a moment of silence, then give nagasaki one three days from now. in hiroshima it hit japanese who weren't outcasts. in nagasaki, it affected mostly catholics japanese, who didn't exactly like the government policies because they were on the outside, and it hit the burakumin, who were treated like blacks were in the us.

hiroshima rages, nagasaki prays.

[MichaeltheGreat]

So?

Instead of 300 bombers dropping incendiaries for 4 hours and creating a firestorm that sucked the oxygen out of people's lungs 20 miles away, we had one bomb from one bomber. That's efficiency. Human beings have been searching for efficiency in warfare since the first Neanderthal. Better spears, bows, longbows, yadda yadda.

Why does getting killed by one method mean so much more than getting killed by another? For that matter, why is getting killed by a bomb worse than starving, or dying of pneumonia, TB, typhus, or any of a number of other diseases that were starting into outbreaks in Japan, due to poor health and housing conditions and shortages of basic medical care and treatment?

All war is immoral, and the a-bombs were instrumental in ending that war much faster than it would have otherwise.

Sorry to spoil most everybody's happy, first-world liberal angst, but if you have the choice between two nasty, evil decisions, opt for the one that gets the job finished first.

[Verto]

^^

I don't see this as being deserving of another moment of silence.

[Snowflake]

The fact that one nation had done wrong toward others does not justify the fact that the same wrong was done to it.

Why can't human race be freed of war?

[Imran Siddiqui]

Instead of 300 bombers dropping incendiaries for 4 hours and creating a firestorm that sucked the oxygen out of people's lungs 20 miles away, we had one bomb from one bomber.

Indeed! You think less people would have died if the bomb not been dropped? Please.

[Verto]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

Instead of 300 bombers dropping incendiaries for 4 hours and creating a firestorm that sucked the oxygen out of people's lungs 20 miles away, we had one bomb from one bomber.

Indeed! You think less people would have died if the bomb not been dropped? Please.

Sadly, many do. Some have come to believe the Japanese were on the doorstep of surrender and the US needlessly used the bombs to scare off Russia, get revenge for the Japanese atrocities, etc.

[Q Classic]

you know, i don't have an argument for you, mtg. it's not first-world liberal angst here that makes me pause and want to give this a moment of silence. it's the fact that ever life is sacred, and when so many can be killed in an instant with a primitive device... it's shocking.

that's why i think it rates one. do nanking, korea, dresden, and tokyo deserve one? sure. but why are the twin bombings remembered and the others often only mentioned in conjunction with the atomics? because the atomics, like it or not, have become literally and figuratively, flash points. they're the things that everybody comes back and references. they're the ones that everyone links to. it's become the big thing that frames and shapes the argument.

===

we could argue all day as to whether the second bomb was necessary. i personally don't think it was, because it seemed to have missed anyone who actually mattered to the japanese (catholics and burakumin rated just a little higher than the koreans during that time). the second bomb is never the one that's remembered.

personally, i think the second one deserves a moment of silence more, simply because nobody gives it one.

[Verto]

Originally posted by Snowflake
The fact that one nation had done wrong toward others does not justify the fact that the same wrong was done to it.

Why can't human race be freed of war?

The fact that Japan was preparing to arm every citizen with whatever they could get their hands on against an American invasion during a war started by Japan and her allies, justifies the use of whatever weapons necessary to save as many American lives as possible.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Verto


The fact that Japan was preparing to arm every citizen with whatever they could get their hands on against an American invasion during a war started by Japan and her allies, justifies the use of whatever weapons necessary to save as many American lives as possible.

Would you feel the same way if it was Germany that droped a nuke on New York or London?

[Solly]

You want silence for Nazis?

[Snowflake]

Originally posted by Verto


The fact that Japan was preparing to arm every citizen with whatever they could get their hands on against an American invasion during a war started by Japan and her allies, justifies the use of whatever weapons necessary to save as many American lives as possible.

In this you have assumed the American lives are more valuable than the Japanese lives.

[Sava]

MtG

Truman

dropping the bomb

General Ludd

Stop ignoring the fact that an invasion of the home islands would have cost more lives on both sides. The bombs brought an end to the war. Japan has since built itself into a thriving nation. How can you be unhappy with how things turned out?

[alva]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

Instead of 300 bombers dropping incendiaries for 4 hours and creating a firestorm that sucked the oxygen out of people's lungs 20 miles away, we had one bomb from one bomber.

Indeed! You think less people would have died if the bomb not been dropped? Please.

Thats not the point imo.
After all the rethoric, the fact remains that thousands of lives were wasted in a matter of seconds.

[MikeH]

Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat All war is immoral, and the a-bombs were instrumental in ending that war much faster than it would have otherwise.

Nothing wrong with that.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't still take a minute to remember how bad war is and remember the effects and the dead when it's the anniversary of a terrible thing like this.

[Verto]

Originally posted by alva


Thats not the point imo.
After all the rethoric, the fact remains that thousands of lives were wasted in a matter of seconds.

As opposed to having hundreds of thousands of lives wasted in a matter of weeks and months.