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Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

It wouldn't surprise me if some Japanese viewed the atomic bombings as an unwarranted act of unprovoked aggression - and they may not be entirely unjustified if they do.

From their point of view, it probably seemed as if the US had already won and just decided to spike the football.

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Yeah, unprovoked? That belies a lack of historical perspective.

Japan killed tens of millions of Chinese and intended to occupy the entire western Pacific, killing or enslaving all the people who lived there. The entire nation, all of its labor and industry, was bent toward this goal. It was a nation of profound evil.

It's not like China didn't do that in its past either, probably as recently as qianlong. But they don't go around calling China a nation of profound evil at the time.

Right, the historical anomaly of Japan and Nazi Germany was they tried to kill everybody and take all of their land well after that kind of thing had passed out of style.

I don't think war and conquering has gone out of style so much as it has become way too costly to pursue. We haven't actually become more righteous.

>It was a nation of profound evil.

That's one perspective. Another is that Japan was merely doing what it felt was necessary to protect itself from interference by aggressive Western Imperial powers, and weren't necessarily more "evil" than any other empire at the time. A third is that the country that dropped two atomic bombs on civilian cities and firebombed Tokyo to the ground was no less evil than the empire they were fighting.

I don't necessarily agree or disagree with this, but "evil" seems more often than not to be matter of cultural relativism and propaganda. It wasn't long after World War 2 that the US was begging Japan for help in their other Asian conflicts and burning whole villages to the ground in the name of fighting the "profound evil" of communism.

It boggles the mind to hear 10+ million civilian deaths and wartime atrocities in Asia described as being "merely one perspective".

One can only assume that this individual believes Germany's concentration camps and what occurred therein were just "cultural relativism" and "propaganda" too and that Germany was "doing what it felt was necessary to protect itself".

>One can only assume that this individual believes Germany's concentration camps and what occurred therein were just "cultural relativism" and "propaganda" too and that Germany was "doing what it felt was necessary to protect itself".

One can only assume this individual didn't bother to read all the words I wrote before deciding they knew what I believe.

I specifically said I didn't subscribe to the views I enumerated, but those views certainly do exist. Personally, I think Imperial Japan was incredibly evil. I also think the atomic bombings were evil. Hell, many Japanese feel the atomic bombings were justified - and Japanese legislators contributed to the very peace constitution that "emasculated" them, because they felt (justifiably) betrayed by the Emperor's ambitions.

But since we're discussing the way Japan may view the atomic bombings and how that event affected Japan's culture, reducing that culture to the thought-terminating cliche of "profound evil" adds nothing to the discussion.

When you hit the point where you're dropping plague-ridden fleas in bombs, you've lost even the semblance of a moral or practical argument.

> From their point of view, it probably seemed as if the US had already won and just decided to spike the football.

That wouldn't be far from the truth? If I remember, and it was reported correctly, the US govt deemed the nuclear bomb to be the lesser of two evils; the other being a long drawn out deescalation due to Japanese pride.

Yes, that's what's taught in US schools, but there's significant controversy among historians over whether the Japanese may have been about to surrender in the late summer of 1945 anyway.

It's mentioned in the (rather "left") book and Showtime series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Stone%27s_Untold_Histor...

I don't think it's a stretch at all to believe that the US did not need to drop the second bomb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan

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