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‘There wasn’t enough about the horror’: Hiroshima survivors react to Oppenheimer
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2024
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That's probably why the movie was titled Oppenheimer and not Hiroshima & Nagasaki, because the movie was focused on the man and his work and the regrets that came from that work, while nations celebrated the end of a second World War.
This movie was the type of movie that was always going to upset someone, and while it sucks that Japanese citizens were killed, their Emperor's military might was a brutally murderous raping scourge set loose on that section of the world, while also working with some of the other worst regimes of the world. Overall Japan fucked around and attacked first, did a lot of horrible shit to many different peoples, made some truly horrible friends, and then found out in one of the most devastating ways possible, I feel bad for the innocent civilians, but it was always ever going to end the way it did, if not a lot worse.
I'm just glad Japan grew to be what it is now and that it chose better ways to engage with the world than more attempts at domination, even though Anime, Manga, video games, and more have dominated the world's hearts.
NPR played an interview with a survivor.
He said that he hoped people in Japan would watch Oppenheimer and see the excitement when the nuclear bomb testing succeeded. He felt that it showed the American point of view and that a bomb was their ticket out of a terrible war with Japan.
He also said we should discuss these things now because by the time the century anniversary comes there will be none of "us" left.
It's interesting how differently survivors of an event feel when compared to people who only ever learned about the event through history.
I heard there was a plot to stop the emperor from surrendering, despite the massive devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It would've taken 10x as many losses from air raids and ground battles for them to concede.
Few people know about the barbaric shit the Japanese did during WW2. Some really... Really fucked up shit.
Bruh, Unit 731 is a meme at this point.
Lions lead by donkeys podcast has an episode about that, it and a few other episodes has the following trigger warning:
"Everything"
Which is apt.
Unit 731 - It is worse than you think, and keeps getting worse.
And yet...
https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/1238533/abe-training-jet-photo-sparks-outrage-south-korean-media
I've never had to stop reading a Wikipedia page before I read about that shit.
Switched strats to focus on a culture victory.
Yeah.
And the whole horror of the bombs devastation wasn't truly realised until much later, and acknowledged, in the US? Quite a lot later, probably.
We're watching it from Oppenheimer's pov essentially, it's not a documentary.
This takeaway is mythologization of America's most reprehensible act.
We murdered 210,000 civilians because of a perceived threat to capitalism.
Every Purple Heart that has been given out since WW2 all come from a surplus we made in preparation for a land invasion of Japan. Think about that. Had the bombs not worked, our own estimates put the casualties at hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Just US soldiers. Not even counting Japanese soldiers or civilian lives. I don't think the Soviets would have had a magical method to invade without similar casualties.
Were the bombs the right move? I don't know. It was almost 80 years ago in a complicated time that none of us discussing it now can fully understand. I think it's telling that Japan surrendered shortly after. I also think it's telling that no nuclear weapon has been used in combat since then. But based solely on our estimates of what a land invasion, either by the US or the Soviets, would cost in terms of lives lost, I do think it's a fair argument to say the bombs wound up costing less.
The USSR could invade Japan from the less populated and lightly defended north and northwest, while the US would have to invade from the heavily populated and well-defended south and east. This might have helped, but of course we can't say anything for sure.
It's like you didn't read either of the articles I linked to.
Also saying they were used in combat, when the targets were specifically none military, is a gross misuse of the word.
While I'm not defending the use of the bombs as bargaining chips, Japan would have suffered the same fate as Germany under Soviet rule. North Japan and South Japan, alongside a Tokyo Wall, would have not been just a "threat to capitalism".
So it's better to melt the faces off of hundreds of thousands of innocent people than to risk a two state solution?
They weren't innocent, they were willing and eager subjects of a fascist state that had killed over 20 million Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos amongst others, and there was never a chance of it being two state solution.
If there's a reason Truman dropped the bomb as an "anti-communist" measure it was to just to irredeemably prove we had them and it wasn't propaganda.
In the real world, however, Imperial Japan was an irrational state that was trying to force a conditional surrender in a war the leaders never thought they could win in the first place.
The USA waited three days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a surrender. It didn't happen. That alone proves there wasn't one coming from other circumstances.
Just no. Tens of thousands of those killed were children and babies.
Massacring civillians using the excuse that they "all" are collectively responsible for their leadership is a war crime. You're in very bad company. Osama Bin Laden explicitly used that same excuse for 9/11. Israel is using it now for Gaza.
In the documentary Fog of War McNamara admits that him and Curtis May were essentially behaving as war criminals.
There's absolutely no reason to try to carve out this weird moral exception for the US in its slaughter of hundreds of thousands of civillians at Hiroshima and Nagisaki.
There is no shame in learning from the mistakes of the past.
Are you a willing and eager subject to the current genocide being funded with your taxpayer dollars?
So you acknowledge that public dissent had violent repercussions, but that somehow equates that all civilians were willing supporters and valid targets? That's an amazing display of doublethink. Paired with the ad hominem, you've shown yourself completely impotent.
Something tells me you spend a lot less of your time worrying about what the Red Army did marching through Poland than what a bomb did to fascist collaborators.
Strawman to finish things off nice!
Are you under the impression you've been making logically rigorous arguments?
Your comment in "‘There wasn’t enough about the horror’: Hiroshima survivors react to Oppenheimer" was removed from [email protected].
Reason: Rule 3 - Respectful Communication.
"They" were civilians. You may have had a point if they nuked strictly military targets, but they didn't, they nuked two major civilian centers and they placed the epicenter of the blast in such a position so as to cause maximum carnage.
Any argument that it was anti Soviet (and that that makes it acceptable somehow) or that it was necessary is just atrocity apologia.
It’s true. We could have proven the existence of the bombs without killing anyone.
Perhaps what we were proving was our own brutality though.
What do you think the 20 million victims of Imperial Japan were?
Who do you think invented the concept of total war?
Who do you think initially agreed to abide by the Geneva Conventions and then immediately betrayed them?
How many civilians do you think would have died in a ground invasion?
Don't want to get your people bombed, don't start bombing people. You want to feel sad for the loss of people trapped by environmental circumstance in more than one way, knock yourself out, but their blood was on Hirohito and his government's hands the moment their dumbasses decided to invade their "subhuman" neighbors.
So they deserved it, because their government did terrible things.
You understand that they lived under immense propaganda. Right? They deserved it just as much as the people of East Asia deserved the atrocities committed against them by the Japanese Imperial military.
Would you support nuking Moscow, Jerusalem, or DC? Why not?
Well, the most serious reason not to use any nukes today is because more than one army has them, so they can’t be used in a finite way.