@JTT,
JTT wrote:
It's true that there is ample evidence of Japan's atrocities, Izzy, but Japan's atrocities are not the atrocities that can be laid at the feet of the civilians of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nor are they atrocities that can be laid at the feet of the dead civilians who were firebombed by the US.
There is also ample evidence of US atrocities. In fact there is ample evidence that Japan followed the lead of the US and the UK and other European countries in setting up their own SE Asian exclusion zone similar to the exclusion zone set up by the US, with the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, I believe it was.
The US committed atrocities equal to the Japanese in the Philippines. The US committed atrocities in Latin American countries equal to the atrocities of Japan.
Japan's atrocities did NOT give the US a green light to commit its own war crimes. Firebombing Japanese cities was a series of horrific war crimes just as Nagasaki and Hiroshima were horrific war crimes.
There is no difference between the Holocaust and the war crimes committed by the US in Japan, against Japanese citizens. Both are war crimes of epic proportions.
The only difference, the major difference, the huge difference that everyone is avoiding [except maybe for JLNobody] is that Japan has paid its debt. The US has paid no debt, that's zero debt for its myriad war crimes that are hardly limited to WWII.
Are you suggesting that the Japanese people, including the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were doing all they possibly could to stop their government from commiting atrocities across Asia (and at the same time throwing their young men into the meat grinder of war)?
Whether or not ordinary Japanese could put a stop to their government's clear intent to establish a Japanese Empire over, at least, half the planet (through whatever heinous methods possible) what evidence is there that they even tried?
To the extent that any of your claims about a consistent pattern of US war crimes is true, US citizens should not be considered, as a whole, innocent.
Obviously a government can go rogue and, intitally, its citizens are not responsible, and if that government brutally crushes any and all objection by its citizens, the citizens remain innocent, but when a people accept such actions by their government, they share responsibility for those actions.
Their acceptance may be an intellectual affinity for the government's actions or it may be simply apathy, but either way there is responsibility.
There was a legitimate reason for why the US was loath to invade Japan, and it was based on the accurate belief that the average Japanese citizen would have fought to the death to repel invaders. After repetitive blood baths in island rocks leading up to the mainland, it was certainly reasonable for the US to expect that an invasion of Japan would have been far more horrendous in terms of casualties.
If one believes that the US was the "bad guy" in its war against Japan, then all of it's considerations are, at least, suspect, but if one accepts that the US was ritghteous or even neutral in it's war against imperialistic Japan, defeat of Japan was a goal that could not be compromised.
Sherman said that war is hell and most people nod their head in agreement with the sentiment but have no concept of the depth of his comment.
War is hell and Hiroshima and Nagasaki were special levels of the region. It's hideous that such events might ever be considered acceptable, but that is the nature of humanity. We have, clearly, not reached a stage wherein such actions or the preceding actions that rationalized them are impossible to imagine.
The argument that the US should not have used the A-Bomb and instead of invaded Japan and watched hundreds of thousands of American GIs die is, at best, specious. An argument that the US should have done nothing is idiotic.
Irrespective of any argument about whether or not Hiroshima and Nagasaki (BTW let's acknowledge that Japan didn't surrender after Hirohima) was reasonable, let alone "legal", there is absolutely no rational comparison to the Nazis systematic extermination of 6 million Jews.
It really boggles the mind that anyone could suggest the two events are morally equivalent, but it is, sadly, explainable by generations far removed from the facts of WWII, sorely uneducated in terms of history, and convinced that it is "cool" to "like" the Palestinians.
