this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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Never on the right side of history.
We were that one time, and we’ve been milking it ever since.
WW2, we only joined because Japan attacked. Otherwise, there were elements of the US population that were cheering for Hitler.
We also nuked two cities, for reasons much less honorable or necessary than the one we are told.
Don´t tell that to the average US American though, they really hate hearing this truth.
I’m super-fun at parties 😐
Any respected historian on the subject will tell you that it's way more complicated and nuanced than your average social media user is aware of. If, like Truman, you honestly believed that using atomic bombs on Japan would ultimately result in less loss of life, on a purely mathematical basis it was the only moral decision.
The idea of using the most powerful weapon in existence, a weapon with destructive powers never seen before, that of all weapons can kill the most people in one hit - 140.000 people in Hiroshima alone - to "reduce loss of life" and then telling yourself that it was the moral thing to do, must require some serious mental gymnastics, lmao.
You'd think one would have been enough
What's the reason then?
Two reasons, I think:
Close. What they were worried about was a hot war with the Soviets. There was also a great deal of uncertainty about Japanese willingness to continue to fight. It's simply not the case that they had clear unambiguous intelligence on Japanese leadership's intentions, which makes sense since there were several schools of thought among the Japanese.
Japan was not closer to conditionally surrendering to the USSR instead of the US. Even if they were that doesn't magically make their war with the US end.
The reason for the bombs being dropped is very clear and you're free to read countless books, articles, papers on it.
Yes but not every choice during WW2 was about countering communism. We supplied them with an absolute ton of weapons and cutting edge vehicles, planes during the war. The threat of the axis/fascism far outweighed the threat of communism spreading at the time.
I’ve read the same arguments & documents as every other red-blooded American, but unlike most I’ve also read the counterarguments.
Weren't the nukes also dropped because Japan's highest-level commanders were dead-set on fighting more or less to the end, which would have caused horrific loss of life on both sides?
Also, I don't remember reading this theory, but I would guess some of those commanders also felt like something 'magical' might happen to save the motherland, hearkening back to Kame Kaze's taifuns that saved Nippon from Mongol invasion on two occasions, centuries earlier.
@davel@lemmy.ml
That is the standard argument we’re given, yes: that it would ultimately save lives compared to a conventional war. You can find dissenting views from Noam Chomsky & Michael Parenti & Howard Zinn & others, including the US government’s own analysis, if you care to.
There's also the 'Ask Historians' analysis, which posits that there were at least three major ideas about how to handle a nuclear bombing entertained between the principles deciding.
While it's tempting to look at the situation in retrospect and agree with the report that 'yes obviously there wasn't a need to bomb to elicit a surrender' that nevertheless doesn't mean that the majority of the deciders were fully on board with that understanding & approach, unlike Ike.
Without doing a deep dive, the AH approach makes about the most sense to me and seems consistent with history, in which there was a level of uncertainty and multiple players & arguments going in to the final decision.
Btw, that first link barely mentions the matter, and the second link is far too subjective to be of much use, far as I can tell.
The US has never opposed fascism - Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were colonialist rivals threatening US hegemony and influence and nothing more.
People don't realize that the US used to see fascism as a sort of white utopia. It was really popular up until WW2 when they hard turned on it. Kind of like what happened with communism, actually. It was seen as a revolutionary form of democracy up until the cold war, now people only know it for all the propaganda that came out of the era. (most of which was flat out lies made up on the spot by actual nazis)
It's a lot of the reason why the modern day liberal is so staunchly both-sides when it comes to anything geopolitics.
Prior to Pearl Harbour, the US funded the Japanese as the Japanese committed countless war crimes and genocide in China.
Well, that and Japan was actively murdering massive amounts of people in China.
It was a calculated strategy to stop supporting the Japanese genocide machine.
The Rape of Nanjing made international news. That turned the average US voter against Japan, but the embargo (not a blockade) started after Japan invaded French Indochina (Vietnam) in 1940.
The Embargo was just the US saying that no US owned oil would be sold to Japan.
Well that and the fact that there was a huge Irish-American population that was hostile towards the UK in ways that I think a lot of younger people and non-historians have really lost sight of because it's not really a thing anymore. The idea of taking sides with the British Empire was a very tough pill for a lot of Irish-Americans, most of whom, unlike today, still had direct connections to Ireland. The famine was no longer really in living memory, but the children of the famine survivors were definitely still alive and influential and they absolutely despised the British for understandable reasons.
History is always way more complex and nuanced than some half-baked one-liner trope on social media.
Yeah, but look how it started. You need to look at the WW1, when both USA and Japan were among the victors and had the same area in their expansion view. For example Lenin predicted in 1918 that the Pacific war will eventually happen, though it ultimately started later than he thought because invasion of China occupied Japan attention.
Interestingly enough for the same reason US-Japan war could be avoided for more time, but it's actually the US who decided the time, note how they established the embargo on Japan in late june to 1st august 1941, in the exact moment when Japanese military was occupied, their nazi ally pour all effort into invading USSR and Japan even refused to join that war basically breaking that alliance. Said embargo was absolutely devastating for Japan, it would force them to grind their entire empire to sudden halt in half year, so they have a choice between collapse and war on USA. The only thing US was mistaken about was how competent the Japanese military actually was (not weird considering the racism in US) which led to their their initial string of victories in 1942.
So yeah, that was the one time US was on the correct side of history but the motivation was to gobble up the Pacific for their empire, and they pushed up pretty cold bloodedly for it.
In ww2 the Russians did most of he dirty work anyway. When the USA joined the war it was already clear the axis had lost.
Hollywood war reenactments are a psyop.
While I agree that that it was the Soviet and Chinese people that absorbed the greatest part of the Axis' powers warmaking ability (which western historians are apt to ignore), it's not true that the Axis had already lost the war by 1941. It's accurate to say that the US joined the war at a moment when the Axis forces had hopelessly overstretched themselves.
Typical oversimplified tripe. Soviet bodies played a huge role, but US and British mechanized force projection, naval power and industrial capacity were at least as important.
It's also just bullshit that the Axis had already lost. That's the worst kind of historical revisionism. It might be obvious to us looking back, but it wasn't even remotely obvious to anyone alive then.
Lol no it wasn't clear. And you're forgetting about the entire Pacific.
Russians trying to rewrite history, forgetting who supplied half their army while also joining a war against their enemy on another front (at great cost to western lives), overall saving lives as the Germans had to divert resources and ending the war in Europe sooner.
Neither of you are wrong, but Americans should understand that the USSR suffered over twenty million deaths vs ~117,000 Americans on the Western Front. They had their own western cities & infrastructure invaded/destroyed. The undertaking & sacrifices are hard to compare.
Okay my bad: you actually are wrong.
It's been a very common thing recently with Russian to claim the West basically did nothing in WW2.
They are quite literally rewriting history in their classrooms.
Now I won't deny they took the brunt of the force and paid an absolutely huge price in lives.
But op is trying to use WW2 as a way to say the US is bad. That we did nothing and only joined when it was basically over. It's a super common Russian nationalist talking point right now.
Common perception in France right after WW2 was that the Soviets made the single largest contribution against the Germans out of any country. That perspective has been progressively rewritten.
And I'm not trying to argue that they didn't. I do believe Russia paid the biggest price and contributed the most. Especially in regard to the lives given to defeat the Axis. And I don't really want to down play that.
But op is using WW2 to attack the US which is dumb. They also paid a large price in the war on both fronts, contributed a ton to allies through lend lease / material goods and were on the correct side of history in this instance.
Not to mention post WW2 was the one time we got nation building done correctly.
Why did Roosevelt wait so long until launching a Western Front? By the time the US had troops in mainland Europe, the Soviets were tearing the Germans apart and outmaneuvering them on the battlefield.
The US' contributions to the Japanese war machine prior to Pearl Harbour are a big factor when evaluating American influence on WW2. American resources single-handedly sustained the Japanese invasion of China.
Operation Barbarossa had stalled by the time the US entered the war. German logistics were overextended, they were out of oil, and they were against a larger, rapidly industrializing power defending their homeland.
By the time D-Day rolled around, Army Group North and Army Group South were taking loss after loss and the USSR had reclaimed a significant chunk of the land lost during Barbarossa. The Germans were in collapse. Roosevelt had promised a second front in 1942 but couldn't deliver until 1944 (when it was clear that the Soviets had a clear shot at Berlin and had the momentum to keep going).
The Dnieper-Carpathian Offensive put Army Group Center in an increasingly precarious position even as Russia continually gained ground in Byelorussia.
And don't forget that during this time the ubermensch were also losing control over the Balkans...
It’s been argued that Churchill & Roosevelt wanted Germany and the USSR to grind each other down, saving the them the trouble, because, being capitalists, they had no love for the Soviet State.
It's telling that the Allies only opened the Western Front after the Soviets had thoroughly defeated the Germans multiple times and were at a real risk of reaching Berlin and then sweeping past it.
TIL... western historians deliberately glorifying the US and Britain's role in WW2 = "Russians trying to rewrite history."
That has nothing to do with the post I replied to and I even agree with western historians / hollywood greatly downplaying the eastern front.
@davel
Only until 2006 which is when the UK finally managed to pay the US back the "lend lease" debt it racked up in WWII
Wonder how long it will take for Ukraine to pay back theirs, they're on a Lend Lease from the US right now.
You & I are the only people who seem to know this. Everyone else is busy arguing whether we can “afford” to give Ukraine “free stuff”, when in reality none of it is free, and whatever few Ukrainians are left alive after this war will be paying onerous debt for generations. They’re already auctioning off many public assets to mostly foreign buyers at fire sale prices, up to and including seaports.
Yeah it's crazy. Ukraine is a fire sale and the debt will be on the US govt books as an asset.
Makes me realise, a lot of things we read in history books that seem cut and dried, were probably not at all obvious to the people who lived at the time because their perception of facts was probably as skewed as our societies' perceptions are now.