Always worth mentioning: Allied victory was already essentially assured by the time they dropped those nukes. They did not turn the course of the war, they ended it marginally sooner.
And the US basically admitted-but-not-actually-admitted that they really just wanted to scare the USSR with those nukes.
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Let us not forget too, that VM Molotov caused a major incident in the USA when he was “informed” of the atomic bomb, and he, off the cuff, informed his American counterpart that the USSR had such bombs and other weapons of a similarly destructive scale. There was a general panic in anti-communist circles in the American government for a good long time.
I fucking love Molotov
He did a little trolling.
Wow that guy was such a genius to troll those anti-communist circles
Strategic bombings of cities overall was unnecessary and just a waste of resources. It is pure terror tactics. It’s all clear when you remember the reaction on a bombing of Guernica in 1937 - except fash lackeys pretty much everyone condemned it, and the same was about nazi bombings of UK, but when strategic bombings became the callsign of UK and especially USA, almost all criticism immediately vanished from the west.
One thing to keep in mind here though is (at the time) for various reasons, casualty reports relating to bombing civilian targets were massively overstated. Obviously, the victim wants to portray their opponent as monstrous, but particularly in the early phases of World War 2 (especially in Poland) you had major news media carrying reports of aerial bombardment killing tens of thousands of people a day. Ultimately, many military planners came to really believe that such things were occurring/possible. A good example in the WW2 context is Oslo surrendering after being threatened with aerial bombardment. Our hindsight lets us know that bombing civilian targets isn’t that useful militarily (and is generally counterproductive), but at the time plenty of people thought it was super effective, not least the voting public.
Yes, it’s not only a crime against humanity but a waste of resources too. This still did not stopped US from perpetrating literal aerial genocide campaigns in Korea, Vietnam, Laos etc.
he is right with the downplaying but IDK how he got to that from the absolute shit he was spewing
You don’t get to pick and choose what you consider war crimes, especially when you wrote the book on what’s a war crime!
Probably due to being an absolute dipshit
Who scratched the lib?
… Sowwy
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“destroying innocent lives is actually pretty fun if you think about it”
I mean it’s the best thing you can do in this world right?
Trabslation: ‘Don’t mind that war crime. I want to justify another warcrime by justifying that warcrime so I can justify my new warcrime.’
“so that I can gather support for my war crime after which I can wage another war crime”
Beyond the bombings not being justifiable, I think I always find it to be a massive red flag when I meet someone who for whatever weird reason just brings this argument up and decides "yup this is the hill I’m gonna die on today". It’s a belief that I think reeks of racism and a sort of “their lives don’t matter as much” attitude. It’s in the same vein as what we see today between how liberals care about Ukranian lives versus Palestinian lives. When Palestinians die, liberals focus on their "both sides" garbage. When Ukranians die, liberals act like they stand for justice in the face of adversity and all this noble sounding, highly-selective but ultimately hollow nonsense support. Even with Ukraine, NATO allies are dragging their feet because there’s a sort of dehumanization of Eastern Europeans by Western Europe.
Guys, don’t worry, he’s woke about how US wanted to ally with Japan against Korea and downplayed war crimes, he’s totally not supporting other war crimes in the process of being woke about it tho. /s
I know this isn’t a particularly rare take with Americans, but damn if it doesn’t still wrinkle my brain to think that there are people out there who think dropping atomic bombs is no big deal. Like I can usually squint hard enough to understand where pretty much anyone is coming from, but that I just do not get even a little bit. They know what an atom bomb does, right? Right???
Least jingoistic American.
I’m American😕. Not gonna lie, most of us are pretty bad though.
