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Pa-Lease.

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I know. You see my lips moving but all you can hear is "i blame zee americains!"

Look, the point is this: if it is morally reprehensible to take an innocent life, then it is morally reprehensible to use nuclear weapons to wipe out entire cities. But people (and nations) are often faced with a choice between a morally reprehensible act and extinction. Sometimes people choose extinction, more often they choose the morally reprehensible act. I'm glad we, as a nation (hi, Hank!) didn't choose extinction. But let's not pretend that incinerating innocent people isn't morally reprehensible -- no matter who does it or for what reason.

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What are you doing here? I thought you were leading troops in the Congo.

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There is a reason why most civilized people frown on the slaughter of civilians during wartime. Think back to 9/11, and think about whether you see anything particularly heinous about the attack on the World Trade Center as opposed to, say, a U.S. military installation.

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If you're going to pretend to believe in individual rights, then you've got to pretend to believe in them all the time.

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Commie bastard. Go back to Mockba, comrade!

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Look, I'm not saying that we were bad and the Japanese were good. It went both ways. Americans believed, not without reason, that the Japanese wouldn't take prisoners. The Japanese likewise. It went both ways. Consider, e.g., the account in the second half of this post.

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FWIW, I always picture you in a beret. But in an Irish bar. So my confusion is at least partially explained . . .

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this whole ivory tower crap outlook shows why you guys can't be given the keys anymore-

we blew them up to try and make Americans safer- in your perfect hindsight world was there a better way? You and your boys can study that shit in your classes up at Ivy. I frankly could give a crap.

Or are you saying Pearl Harbor was just a petty crime?

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No, he just makes his guests wear the beret. And sing "Boys of the Old Brigade."

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Then what? Firebombing Tokyo? Nuking Nagasaki? Or bilmore's hypothetical killing of Japanese civilians because they asked for it at Pearl Harbor?

Yes, no, and yes, I'm inclined to think.

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Why confused?

http://www.shamrock.internetdsl.pl/h...a/IRA/ira3.jpg

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I hear you. Not to be tiresome, though, I would note that (a) Japanese soldiers were indoctrinated with the belief that surrender was a cowardly act, and they would have been reluctant to attempt to surrender even if they thought that it would have been accepted, and (b) we tended not to torture, starve, mistreat, etc. those Japanese prisoners who survived making it past the front lines.

I'm not excusing the shooting of those Japanese soldiers who did attempt to surrender. But simply saying "it went both ways" is absurd.

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Because now you're showing me a picture of Sylvia, Rebel Leader of the Shining Path.

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It's not absurd at all. Read War Without Mercy, by John Dower. It takes two to tango. You can talk about differential treatment of prisoners, but the fact remains that very few prisoners were taken, because both sides were convinced, with good reason, that the other side wouldn't take prisoners. We didn't often get the chance, and we didn't. Naturally, you didn't read about the latter part much in Life or The Bestest Generation.

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The infamous "Sylvia Path"?

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Yes but there was no evidence that we were killing Japanese civilians. We did take a lot of prisoners and they were treated much better than our prisoners taken by the Japanese.

I think it is much easier to justify the Atomic Bombs than the Fire bombing of Tokyo (which killed a hell of a lot more people). I don't think anyone believe that the firebombing was going to get Japan to surrender. The focus of it also was on the wood and rice paper structures, which generally did not house manufacturing. When I was living in Japan I never felt ashamed of the Atomic Bombs, but I didn't feel ashamed about the Firebombing.

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Okay, that was good.

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As opposed to our boys, who were taught that discretion is the better part of valor.

"You maggots! Let me see your surrender face! Is that the best you can do? I want to see fear, goddammit! I want to see groveling! You beg for mercy like old people fuck, do you know that private?"

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2. As I said yesterday, there were battles on the islands in which not one Japanese soldier surrendered. Think about that. Even after massive bombing, an invasion by overwhelming force, and use of weapons like flamethrowing tanks, people didn't surrender. They fought to the death.

And let's remember, also, that during the war the Emperor was not merely infallible, but divine. People tend to fight pretty hard for a god, whether they be nominally soldiers or civilians.

In sum, while in hindsight I'm sure you could pick attacks that were not warranted in any strategic or national morale sense, I would say this in very, very few instances. This excludes individuals shooting prisoners or surrendering soldiers, but that wasn't what we were discussing.

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A great many allied prisoners were taken at the beginning of the war in the Phillipines and Singapore. Around twenty five percent of the Allied prisoners held in captivity by the Japanese died, where less than 1% of the Japanese prisoners held by the the Allies dies in captivity.

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It takes two to tango? If they are shooting our soldiers when they surrender, that means ipso facto we are shooting theirs? That's some interesting logic.

Read Freedom from Fear. It paints a very different picture, and indicates pretty strongly that the reason so few Japanese prisoners were taken is because they were so unwilling to surrender.

And when did this become the Politics Sixty Years Ago Board?

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Fucking lazy Americans.

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Under the code of the Bushido, surrender was dishonorable. That is why all the suicide Banzai attacks (instead of surrending when it was hopeless, the Japanese did bayonet charges. The Americans knew it was coming and we simply mowed them down). That is also why the Japanese treated Allied prisoners so badly. They thought that these "prisoners" had dishonored themsevles by surrrendering, so they did not need to be treated respectively. When Americans saw things were hopeless, the surrendered.

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Obviously, we're bored with Iraq.

We're also working our way backwards in time. Come back in a couple of weeks -- we'll be working on the Peloponnesian War, in a calculated attempt to bring Atticus back with something particularly scathing to say about Thucydides.

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The point is it is facile to say "oh, no one took prisoners" and leave it at that. That's like suggesting that "oh, both sides killed civillians" without discussing the differences

War, even a just war, is a bad thing. People do bad stuff, mostly because there is no good alternative, but not always. The Allies admittedly did some things that have no real justification.

But there is a very significant difference between Marines at the front lines choosing to shoot individuals first and ask questions later (and Japanese soldiers doing the same thing to us) and the systematic torture, starvation, and mistreatment that faced the tens of thousands of Allied troops who surrendered when Singapore and the Phillipenes fell.

Was the war in the Pacific more brutal than the one in Western Europe? Absolutely. Can one honestly compare the way the Allies acted to the way the Japanese acted, and conclude that they were similar? No fricken way.

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You, Ironweed, are our Big Toe.

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Hey, Ironweed is a wild man. You remember the time that he and his friends took that cow, and his friends tried to make it with the cow?

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As it happens, we were shooting them when they tried to surrender. The story from the obituary I linked to was typical, if not something that the popular press talked about much at all. The pictures of the war also tend not to show decapitations, disembowellments, severe burns, or other sorts of really ugly death. And yet it happened lots. Self-censorship during a popular war.

I'm sure the Japanese were unwilling to surrender. My point is, they had good reasons.

Re Freedom From Fear, assuming you mean this, and not one of these:

http://content.powells.com/cgi-bin/i...sbn=0893892297 http://content.powells.com/cgi-bin/i...sbn=0736900721

Or maybe Swami Rama is your kind of thing, NTTAWWT.

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Look, without getting too far into it, there were all sorts of things said about the Japanese during the war to explain why they were better or worse fighters than us, etc., and much of it was about the quality of information you would expect from wartime propaganda.

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I want to party with you Cowboy

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Um, Ty -- the Bushido code is not something that the OSS invented.

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We're all very different people. We're not Watusi, we're not Spartans, we're Americans. With a capital "A", huh? And you know what that means? Do you? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. We are the wretched refuse. We're the underdog. We're mutts.

See - his nose is cold.

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My point is, one of the reasons that the Japanese didn't surrender is that they correctly did not expect to be taken prisoner. I can't tell whether you're trying to tell me that American soldiers didn't routinely kill Japanese soldiers instead of taking them prisoner -- they did -- or whether you're trying to tell me that the Japanese did awful things -- e.g., the Bataan Death March -- that we didn't do. On the latter, I'm with you.

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Sure, but it turns out that the Japanese military, like ours, conscripted a lot of people who were not Bushido samurai and who would have been just as happy to be fishing off Osaka, or something. This business of turning the average Japanese soldier into a mythic warrior is the sort of thing that propaganda does.

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I had the Bushido code explained to me when I lived in Japan. So I guess I was being fed Japanese propaganda.

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The average Japanese soldier was still Japanese, living in a culture that was informed very heavily by the Bushido code, and believing that the Emperor who directed the fighting was a god.

This is the basic reason that they refused to surrender, in a way that is unprecedented. I can't see how you can ascribe that to anything else -- Americans certainly were not tremendously nicer to Germans, yet they surrendered in droves. Japanese, virtually not at all.

This is also the basic reason why even average soldiers participated in Banzai attacks and Kamikaze attacks. I've read some of the writings of Kamikaze pilots from the night before they flew. Many were average soldiers, did not see themselves as samurai, but still saw themselves as obligated to throw their lives away in service of the emperor.

I guess that's all propaganda too, huh?

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And you trusted them? They're conniving, you know.

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Yeah, whatever. A whole country of brainwashed religious zealots ready to sacrifice their life for their emperor. You start to wonder how we beat them.