Topic: War Crimes of Imperial Japan: A Lesson In Moral Equivalence for Mr. Obama - page 2. (Read 1184 times)

The japanese historical inhumane atrocities should not be buried, nor forgotten either.

Don't you agree there?

Yes of course it wouldnt have been a cakewalk but reality was that imperial japan lost all offensive capacities and had nearly no defensive capacities left.
The US at that time had absolute air superiority and could just bomb the rest of japan as they did before.
There was no need to rush the unconditional surrender with 2 atomic bombs.

Dont you agree there?

No.  Unless maybe you refer to a couple of aircraft overflights as "starting the invasion."

I'm just thinking in terms of the massive numbers of ships, equipment and personnel movements required to "invade the mainland japan."  Just reduce it to numbers and you'll see what I mean.

Equipment has to be moved across mainland Europe and Russia to ports.  Ships have to be in those ports.  Men have to be moved. 

Just getting that kind of invasion fleet ready to sail would IMHO take at least three months.

That's simply not the historical timeline.  The Soviets had not wanted a two front war and had a non agression pact with Japan.  The decisions were made considerably in advance.  The Soviets were already in the process of invading Manchuria when the bombs dropped.  (Aug 6 and Aug 9 of 1945).

That the Soviets were moving in Manchuria does not mean that they had battle plans and or equipment movements in place for an attack on the Japanese homeland.  That would have been a huge military operation.  Since the only remaining combatant was Japan, such an operation would have been joint US and Soviet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War_%281945%29

On July 26, the US, UK and China made the Potsdam Declaration, an ultimatum calling for the Japanese surrender which if ignored would lead to their "prompt and utter destruction". The invasion began on August 8, 1945, precisely three months after the German surrender on May 8 (May 9, 0:43 Moscow time).

The commencement of the invasion fell between the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9. Although Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had not been told much detail of the Western Allies' atomic bomb program by Allied governments. However, by virtue of the timing of the agreements at Tehran and Yalta, and the long term buildup of Soviet forces in the Far East since Tehran, it is clear that news of the attacks on the two cities played no major role in the timing of the Soviet invasion; the date of the invasion was foreshadowed by the Yalta agreement, the date of the German surrender, and the fact that on August 3, Marshal Vasilevsky reported to Stalin that, if necessary, he could attack on the morning of August 5. Furthermore, while Stalin could reasonably have concluded that an atomic bombing of Japan was imminent, it does not appear he was overly impressed with the atomic bomb's potential.

The main purpose of nuking Japan was to prevent the Soviets invading that nation. Japan had some of the most advanced industries at that time, and the Americans wanted to keep them rather than ceding them to the USSR. I have to say that this strategy was successful. Look at Japan right now. It is full of American military bases.

Maybe wait and get 95% of what they wanted instead of unconditional surrender? Or like he said let the soviets invade. By the time the first bomb was used they were maybe less than two weeks away of starting the invasion of mainland japan. Americans weren't in danger. Japan was isolated, with shortages of resources and food. Nothing they could do. With time probably would have faced a coup too.

I'm not under the impression that invading Japan would have been a cakewalk.

The US was demanding unconditional surrender, and the Japanese had refused that.  It certainly did have to do with saving lives.  You might argue it was multifactorial, of course.

Letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about the possible construction of nuclear bombs.

Old Grove Rd.
Nassau Point
Peconic, Long Island

August 2nd, 1939

F.D. Roosevelt
President of the United States
White House
Washington, D.C.

Sir:
Some recent work by E. Fermi and L. Szilard, which has been communicated to me in manuscript, leads me to expect that the element uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy in the immediate future. Certain aspects of the situation which has arisen seem to call for watchfulness and, if necessary, quick action on the part of the administration. I believe therefore that it is my duty to bring to your attention the following facts and recommendations:

In the course of the last four months it has been made probable -- through the work of Joliot in France as well as Fermi and Szilard in America -- that it may become possible to set up a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium, by which vast amounts of power and large quantities of new radium like elements would be generated. Now it appears almost certain that this could be achieved in the immediate future.

This new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs, and it is conceivable -- though much less certain -- that extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed. A single bomb of this type, carried by boat and exploded in a port, might very well destroy the whole port together with some of the surrounding territory. However, such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air.

The United States has only very poor [illegible] of uranium in moderate quantities. There is some good ore in Canada and the former Czechoslovakia, while the most important source of Uranium is Belgian Congo.

In view of this situation you may think it desirable to have some permanent contact maintained between the Administration and the group of physicists working on chain reactions in America. One possible way of achieving this might be for you to entrust with this task a person who has your confidence and who could perhaps serve in an unofficial capacity. His task might comprise the following:

a) To approach Government Departments, keep them informed of the further development, and out forward recommendations for Government action, giving particular attention to the problem of uranium ore for the United States;

b) To speed up the experimental work, which is at present being carried on within the limits of the budgets of University laboratories, by providing funds, if such funds be required, through his contacts with private persons who are willing to make a contribution for this cause, and perhaps also by obtaining the co-operation of industrial laboratories which have the necessary equipment.

I understand that Germany has actually stopped the sale of uranium from the Czechoslovakian mines, which she has taken over. That she should have taken such early action might perhaps be understood on the ground that the son of the German Under-Secretary of State, Von Weishlicker [sic], is attached to the Kaiser Wilheim Institute in Berlin where some of the American work on uranium is now being repeated.

Yours very truly,

(Albert Einstein)

You said it yourself: Stalin was also looking for a demonstration of the atomic bomb and he got it.
Starving or not, they lost because they started first and were allied with adolf.

"Boom"

Sorry but i dont understand what you mean wilikon.

The US coulda have just watched the japs starving or trying to do an all out kamikaze attacks with bambooships from mainland asia with telescopes. There was really no war deciding reason to use the nukes.

What i want to explain is that imperial japan had no means to fight anymore since july 1945.

That is why China and SK are mad now. That was not a smart move from 0bama. Well, what is anyway.

So, being killed in a flash or slowly eaten alive? I take the flash.

Of course the atomic bomb was a demonstration for the ussr. That is part of history. As much as the atrocities committed by the imperial Japanese army. They are both true statements.

Far from me the illusion to defend the atrocities made under the umbrella of an emperor.
 

He made a bet. He lost.


Japan: Hirohito warned attack on Pearl Harbor would be 'self-destructive'
Official 12,000-page biography reveals emperor's thinking but fails to settle debate over his role in decisions leading to Hiroshima


http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/japan-emperor-hirohito-pearl-harbor-attack-biography

While I certainly don't agree with any idea that Hiroshima was the right thing to do, what I hate perhaps even more or equally is the fact that people think they can condemn entire generations of children for the actions of their forefathers. The best thing the next generation can do is make sure that type of massacre never happens again, this whole thing of trying to force people who had nothing to do with this to 'apologise' for what happened just creates more animosity.

Or maybe he isn't doing it because that would remind everyone that america benefited from some of those attrocities? Like the research from unit 731. Americans gave immunity to the researchers and said it was all russian propaganda against the japanese. Can't have it both ways.


How about they are both wrong? There was no need to use nuclear weapons against japan at that time.

Maybe you should fact check in some history books wilikion, seems you have no clue about the historical and military background of the pacific war.

I will give you a short introduction:

1. UDSSR was preparing the invasion of mainland japan - US intervention wasn't even needed.

2. The military-industrial complex of japan was nearly completely destroyed same as their overall industry.

3. Japan had nearly no war important resources left ( mainly fuel, food, arms and land/air/sea vehicles )

To summarize: they had nothing left.

Still the US decided to use one atomic bomb on 6. August 1945 and 3 days later a second atomic bomb.

Also the use of the atomic bomb by the US was decided before the Allies sent an ultimatum of surrender to imperial japan which imho is a good clue why the US used the atomic bomb:

As a real life test in a war and much more important as a display of power to the sowjets.

It has nothing to do with saving american or japanese lifes. A legend for the sheeples - like the vietnam war that was lost at home; just another "Dolchstoß-Legende".

Cannibalism and Medical Experiments

Imperial Japan was infamous for torturing and killing its prisoners, in defiance of all international laws. Sometimes execution was the best-case scenario for its prisoners.

In the 1990s, documents were uncovered that described widespread cannibalism by Japanese troops. The Japanese academic who collected these papers, Toshiyuki Tanaka, said the cannibalism was not primarily due to a shortage of food, but “to consolidate the group feeling of the troops.”

Tanaka documented at least 100 cases of cannibalism against Australian and Indian soldiers, and forced laborers in New Guinea, plus evidence of more such atrocities in the Philippines.

“A Pakistani, who was captured when Japan overran Singapore and taken to New Guinea, testified that in his area Japanese soldiers killed and ate one prisoner a day for ‘about 100’ days. The corporal said he saw flesh being cut from prisoners who were still alive,” reported the UK Telegraph in 1992.

A later Telegraph article cites research that suggests that four of the eight American airmen captured after bombing raids on Chichi Jima island, south of Tokyo, were cannibalized after all eight were tortured and executed with swords, bayonets, and bamboo stakes. A ninth pilot who had to bail out of his plane during the raids managed to evade capture by the Japanese. His name was Lt. George Bush.

Imperial Japan also conducted horrifying medical experiments on its prisoners, including the removal of their organs while they were still alive, without anesthesia. Some of these crimes were concealed with false claims by the Japanese government that American test subjects had been transferred to Hiroshima as POWs and vaporized in the atomic bomb blast.

The now-infamous Imperial Army Unit 731 conducted medical experiments on thousands of POWs and civilians, including chemical and biological warfare research. These weren’t just laboratory experiments – they field-tested “plague bombs” on Chinese towns. Plans were made to deploy these biological weapons against American cities with balloons and kamikaze attacks. Imperial Japan was very interested in developing and using weapons of mass destruction.

A veteran of Unit 731 recounted the story of vivisecting a live Chinese prisoner in 1995, as recounted by the New York Times:

    The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn’t struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. But when I picked up the scalpel, that’s when he began screaming.

    I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped. This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.

Unit 731’s headquarters was straight out of a horror movie, with pieces of POW displayed in jars labeled by their nationality.



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The article is about how 0bama is not reminding the world of the imperial atrocities, how China and South Korea are really mad about this. Maybe their sufferings count less because the way their victims died was less impressive, or more, shall say, conventional?

One atomic bomb did not stop the war. Two did. America was the first to use it, beating Japan and Germany, both hard at work trying to build one themselves...

Is it more humane to die in a flash among 400 000 citizens, or kill 400 000 citizens slowly, and even eating some of them?

You tell me.

This article is about History. The full history. 0bama was saying Japan was not responsible and he was sorry on the behalf of all the people killed, tortured or eaten alive by some of the imperial soldiers.

No one is safe from a dirty bomb. Although it is easier to carry one on a back of a donkey called "ba ta clan" across europe, than across an ocean all the way to the east or west coast I believe...

@OP

Do i understand correct that you are saying the use of nuclear bombs is fine because the empire of japan was evil? Like raping a rapist, torturing a torturer, killing a murderer?
(It is just a rhetorical question if you didnt realize)

Oh and btw. the USA has done much better with incendiary bombs in japan, korea and vietnam.


Imho apart from the fact that the USA always ignores what the quote says obamas whole vietnam speech was really good dont you think?

Edit

If you think about it a bit deeper it seems a nuclear strike against the US is inevitable x_+

If targeting the civilian population of an entire city with a nuclear bomb, and incinerating tens of thousands of men, women, and children in the process, is not worthy of an apology then ‘humanity’ has become a word without meaning.

https://www.rt.com/op-edge/344616-us-obama-war-hiroshima-japan/


And this following statement makes me want to puke.


https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/05/24/remarks-president-obama-address-people-vietnam

President Obama made a single, vague reference to “evil” during his prepared remarks in Hiroshima: “We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.”

He spoke at length about the horrors experienced by the populace of Hiroshima:

    We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the wars that came before and the wars that would follow.

    Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.

“Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil,” he said, when reading the inscription on a monument at the Peace Memorial Park.

He somehow forgot to mention the evils perpetrated by Imperial Japan or the unspeakable suffering it inflicted upon POWs and civilians who fell into its clutches.

Let’s correct that oversight, to help the President understand why moral equivalence is the dim refuge of lazy minds, and equating American troops with the Axis forces they defeated is an outrage.

Pearl Harbor

We can start with the one everybody knows about: the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. That was a war crime, Mr. Obama, as very clearly stated in the relevant international laws of the day. It was accompanied by equally illegal bombings against Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, as part of a very deliberate Japanese strategy. In Hiroshima, Obama’s sole criticism of the Empire of Japan was some mumbled mush about “mistakes of the past,” and that wasn’t even exclusively directed at the Japanese. Nothing they did was a mistake.


Mr. Obama, who claims to be a lawyer and devotee of international law, may be interested to know that every single one of the 3,581 casualties at Pearl Harbor (according to the National WWII Museum tally) were considered non-combatants, including the 2,403 military personnel who were killed, because Japan did not declare war before the attack. If it happened today, it would be rightly denounced as a terrorist attack.

The Bataan Death March

Here’s another one every American school kid should know about: the Bataan Death March. There was no swift death for the thousands of Americans and Filipinos under siege by Japanese forces in the Philippines. They were already sick and starving when they surrendered to the Japanese.

In an act of pure, deliberate sadism, because they were enraged by stiff American resistance during the siege, the Japanese forced their prisoners to march a hundred miles to a prison camp on foot. Many of the prisoners were killed out of hand, including anyone who dared to ask for water… and anyone who collapsed from dehydration. POWs reported Japanese soldiers taking away their meager supply of water and feeding it to horses while they watched. Starving men were tortured with false offers of food. Prisoners who accepted gifts of food from civilians along the route were murdered.

Some were murdered merely for possessing Japanese items, including currency. They were killed by beheading and run through with bayonets, as well as gunshots. Bayonet victims died from orgies of frenzied stabbing, not clean and swift impalement. Some of the captives were reportedly driven insane by exposure to the sun.  They were also crammed into barbed-wire pens were malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, and other diseases ran wild.

It has been estimated that between 5,000 and 11,000 of Japan’s prisoners were killed during the Bataan Death March. That wasn’t the only death march the Empire perpetrated, either. The prisoners of Sandakan were subjected to multiple forced marches, once the Japanese lost interest in using them as slave labor. By the time they were finished, only six of the original 2,390 prisoners were still alive.

One of the Japanese torture methods recounted by survivors of Sandakan involved pouring water down a prisoner’s throat until his stomach became distended, and then kicking him in the stomach.

About half of Japan’s captives in the Pacific died before the end of the war. Brave men who survived the experience spent the rest of their lives refusing to talk about what they went through.

The Rape of Nanking

Citizen of the World Barack Obama doesn’t much care for the idea of “American exceptionalism,” so he might want to consider the atrocities Imperial Japan perpetrated against the people of other countries, too. In Bataan and other POW atrocities, for example, the Japanese were even more brutal toward Filipinos than Americans. China, of course, still remembers the Rape of Nanking.

That was a literal rape, involving up to 80,000 sexual assaults. The once-prosperous city of Nanking, capital of Nationalist China at the time, was laid waste. Japanese conquerors murdered men, women, and children by the thousands, leaving bodies piled up along the streets. The Yangtze River turned red from all the blood.

The death toll ran into the hundreds of thousands, leaving some modern observers to speak of genocide. The exact body count remains a matter of political dispute between Japan and China to this day. The figure generally accepted at post-war trials was over 200,000, but some think the total number is closer to 400,000.

Imperial Japan approached its Chinese foes with the same strategy ISIS uses against its enemies today: maximum carnage and savagery, to terrorize the foe into submission. They used some of the exact same methods ISIS does, including burning captives alive, beheading them, and burying them alive in slaughter pits.


http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2016/05/27/war-crimes-imperial-japan-lesson-moral-equivalence-mr-obama/