The moral differences between the holocaust and bombing Japan

Babble on David, you're a nasty piece of work in your own right,
and it's typical of your hypocrisy that you make accusations against me.

You are conveniently ignoring this post:

Babble on David, you're a nasty piece of work in your own right, and it's typical of your hypocrisy that you make accusations against me.

First, although initially American leaders sought Soviet entry into the war, once the atomic bomb was proven their views changed dramatically: The bomb now seemed a way to end the war before the Red Army (and Soviet political influence) got very far into Manchuria. This is precisely the argument Truman used in private the day after the Nagasaki bombing in explaining to the Cabinet his modification of the demand for unconditional surrender.

Setanta wrote:

The Japanese would not surrender.

The Japanese would not surrender unconditionally, i.e. risk losing the institution of the Emperor.
And they did not, even after the two atomic bombs.

Martin Zuberi in Strategic Analysis (2001)
Stalin's armies were racing across Manchuria; there was no time to lose. Truman asked Byrnes to draft a reply to the Japanese surrender offer. The carefully drafted reply contained the sentence: "From the moment of surrender the authority of the Emperor and the Japanese Government to rule the state shall be subject to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers who will take such steps as he deems proper to effectuate the surrender terms." This assurance implied the retention of the emperor. Through deliberate ambiguity, Japan's conditional surrender was being accepted; but, at the same time, the fiction of unconditional surrender could be maintained.

The only substantive change was in the American position.

Hanson Baldwin rightly pointed out, "We demanded unconditional surrender, then dropped the bomb and accepted conditional surrender."

Modification of the terms of surrender, guaranteeing the future of the imperial dynasty, would have terminated the war much earlier.

Japan was not being asked to surrender unconditionally. The Potsdam Proclamation was a list of generous surrender terms, and it had been issued weeks before.

(13) We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction.

Quote:

Modification of the terms of surrender, guaranteeing the future of the imperial dynasty, would have terminated the war much earlier.

Not very likely. Japan was dead set on trying to end the war in a draw with the aid of the Soviets.
That did not change until the Soviets declared war on them.

Offering Japan better surrender terms would not have changed their desire to end the war in a draw.

Robert Messer in A HISTORY OF OUR TIME, 1995:
"The recent discovery of this evidence [Truman's private journal and letters written at the time he gave the bombing order] [...] reveals, for example that,contrary to his public justification of the bombings as the only way to end the war without a costly invasion of Japan, Truman had already concluded that Japan was about to capitulate.
[...]
The declassification of government documents and presidential papers, and the release of privately held manuscript sources such as Stimson's private diary forced a revision if not a total refutation of accepted orthodoxy.
[...]
In the 1970s the work of Martin Sherwin, Barton Bernstein, Gregg Herken, and others revealed the early and continuing connection U.S. leaders made between the bomb and diplomacy.
[...]
Referring to the Soviet commitment to declare war on Japan three months after the defeat of Germany, Truman noted Stalin's reaffirmation of the agreement he had made with Roosevelt at Yalta: "He'll [Stalin] be in Jap War on August 15th." To this Truman added: "Fini Japs when that comes about." In these two brief sentences Truman set forth his understanding of how the war would end: Soviet entry into the war would finish the Japanese.
[...]
In writing to his wife the following day (July 18), the president underscored the importance of Soviet entry and its impact upon the timing of the war's end. "I've gotten what I came for—Stalin goes to war on August 15 with no strings on it.... I'll say that we'll end the war a year sooner now, and think of the kids who won't be killed! That is the important thing."
The implications of these passages from Truman's diary and letters for the orthodox defense of the bomb's use are devastating: if Soviet entry alone would end the war before an invasion of Japan, the use of atomic bombs cannot be justified as the only alternative to that invasion.
[...]
the issue was no longer when the war would end, but how and on whose terms. If he believed that the war would end with Soviet entry in mid-August, then he must have realized that if the bombs were not used before that date they might well not be used at all. This relationship between the Soviet entry, the bomb, and the end of the war is set forth in Truman's diary account for July 18.
[...]
Truman apparently believed that by using the bomb the war could be ended even before the Soviet entry. The bomb would shorten the war by days rather than months. Its use would not save hundreds of thousands of lives—but it could save victory for the Americans. The race with the Germans had been won. It was now a race with Soviets.
[...]
It is in this light that the new evidence, in both the Potsdam diary and letters to his wife, calls for a reevaluation of the old issue: why were the only two bombs available used in rapid succession so soon after testing, and on the eve of the planned Soviet entry into the war?

Gar Alperovitz, Robert L. Messer, Barton J. Bernstein in International Security, Vol. 16, No. 3

in the late summer of 1945 President Truman and his top advisers were aware that use of the atomic bomb was no longer necessary to avoid an invasion. In his recent survey of the literature on the bomb decision, J. Samuel Walker, chief historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, concludes:
"Careful scholarly treatment of the records and manuscripts opened over the past few years has greatly enhanced our understanding of why the Truman administration used atomic weapons against Japan. Experts continue to disagree on some issues, but critical questions have been answered. The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan.... It is clear that alternatives to the bomb existed and that Truman and his advisers knew it."

The Japanese leaders had decided to surrender and were merely looking for sufficient pretext to convince the die-hard Army Group that Japan had lost the war and must capitulate to the Allies. The entry of Russia into the war would almost certainly have furnished this pretext, and would have been sufficient to convince all responsible leaders that surrender was unavoidable.

as Japan's condition worsened American leaders understood in advance-well before use of the atomic bomb was authorized- that an invasion was increasingly unlikely.

As early as April 18, 1945, the Joint Intelligence Staff put the crucial issue thus: "If at any time the U.S.S.R. should enter the war, practically all Japanese will realize that absolute defeat is inevitable."
[...]
Marshall's advice to the President on June 18, 1945, was presented seven weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima. During the ensuing period, Japan's condition deteriorated even further, with the result that a Soviet attack appeared likely to have even greater shock impact. On July 6, 1945, for instance, the Combined Intelligence Committee offered this assessment to the Combined Chiefs of Staff: "An entry of the Soviet Union into the war would finally convince the Japanese of the inevitability of complete defeat."

It is important to note that these "estimates of the situation" preceded the most important indication that the Japanese recognized their situation was impossible: the direct personal intervention of the Emperor beginning in late June.

The history he is reporting is accepted as accurate by a lot more than just Americans.

That was not implied by my statement at all. Did you miss the point intentionally or did you really just miss it.

When I think of the fire bombing of japan and the Holocaust I think of genocide.

Genocide is "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, Caste, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars.

While a precise definition varies among genocide scholars, a legal definition is found in the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG). Article 2 of this convention defines genocide as "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; [and] forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide

In the case of the atomic bombings, the victims were residents of cities in a country involved in active warfare. The cities, and the victims, were not targeted for reasons other than their location in an enemy country during a time of war.

I think that's because you are not using the term "genocide" accurately.

International prosecution of genocide
By ad hoc tribunals
Nuon Chea, the Khmer Rouge's chief ideologist, before the Cambodian Genocide Tribunal on 5 December 2011.

All signatories to the CPPCG are required to prevent and punish acts of genocide, both in peace and wartime, though some barriers make this enforcement difficult. In particular, some of the signatories—namely, Bahrain, Bangladesh, India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, the United States, Vietnam, Yemen, and Yugoslavia—signed with the proviso that no claim of genocide could be brought against them at the International Court of Justice without their consent.[43] Despite official protests from other signatories (notably Cyprus and Norway) on the ethics and legal standing of these reservations, the immunity from prosecution they grant has been invoked from time to time, as when the United States refused to allow a charge of genocide brought against it by Yugoslavia following the 1999 Kosovo War.[44]

It is commonly accepted[citation needed] that, at least since World War II, genocide has been illegal under customary international law as a peremptory norm, as well as under conventional international law. Acts of genocide are generally difficult to establish for prosecution, because a chain of accountability must be established. International criminal courts and tribunals function primarily because the states involved are incapable or unwilling to prosecute crimes of this magnitude themselves.

Kinda the way the citizens in the world trade center died? I wonder if the Germans seen the Jews the same way. The Jews were the Nazi enemies and if they had not been in their country they would have not been targeted

Why do you think that the US wanted to be exempt from ever being charged with genocide if a world court ever found them guilty?

Babi Yar

Babi Yar (Russian: Бабий Яр; Ukrainian: Бабин Яр, Babyn Yar) is a ravine in the Ukrainian capital Kiev and a site of a series of massacres carried out by the Nazis during their campaign against the Soviet Union.

The most notorious and the best documented of these massacres took place on September 29–30, 1941, wherein 33,771 Jews were killed in a single operation. The decision to kill all the Jews in Kiev was made by the military governor, Major-General Kurt Eberhard, the Police Commander for Army Group South, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Jeckeln, and the Einsatzgruppe C Commander Otto Rasch. It was carried out by Sonderkommando 4a soldiers, along with the aid of the SD and SS Police Battalions backed by the local police.

The massacre was the largest single mass killing for which the Nazi regime and its collaborators were responsible during its campaign against the Soviet Union and is considered to be "the largest single massacre in the history of the Holocaust" to that particular date, surpassed only by the Aktion Erntefest of November 1943 with 42,000–43,000 victims, and the 1941 Odessa massacre of more than 50,000 Jews in October 1941, committed by the Romanian troops.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar

So now you want to equate all terrorist actions with acts of war, and instances of genocide? What's your basis for doing that--body counts?

People at the WTC died as the result of terrorist actions, on the part of individuals, not as the result of active warfare between the U.S. and the government of another country.

There are legal definitions of genocide--I posted one. There are also legal definitions of war crimes. And the United States could be charged under either of those.

That's genocide, not an act of war, reasoning logic.