AndyDufresne wrote:War makes people justify all sorts of weird things. Like the justification the USA generals made for interning Japanese-American citizens in jail-camps essentially.
And using nuclear weapons against civilian targets. Americans loove that shit. I hear there are still fools who think it was right to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. The usual justification goes something like this:
"If we wouldn't have nuked them we would never have defeated Japan on their home soil."
More like: "If we wouldn't have nuked them, then we would have to suffer greater casualties (estimated: 500k) fighting Japan on its home soil."
Gillipig wrote:That whole viewpoint is pretty fucked up.
Your strawman is, but the argument I've heard is more difficult to deal with.
Gillipig wrote:To argue that what the U.S did was okay and "fair because it was necessary to win" is like arguing it's okay for a boxer to kick the other boxer in the balls if he thinks he can't win the fight.
Suppose you're in a fight with a boxer who keeps kicking you in the balls, and there is no referee. Do you continue getting kicked in the balls? Or do you do something outside of the rules, which weren't agreed upon, in order to win?
The Japanese attacked the US with no official declaration of war, and the US chose to win by nuking them, controlling the country via MacArthur for roughly a decade, reinstating the Emperor, and cutting deals with the major businesses to get their cooperation. We should remember that the US didn't 'leave them for dead.'
Gillipig wrote:Weird sense of logic that can only come about if the violator wins the war. If the Nazi's would've won, historians 60 years later would've argued how it was necessary for the Jews to die.
Who is the violator? The US? Even after Japan attacked? Hmm...
Also, some historians to this day still argue that, but their arguments lack merit. Even if the Nazis won and whatever string of "what-ifs" occurred, we can still rely on sources other than one strain of historians in order to counter their anti-Semite arguments...