It's really sad how misinformed you are and I do suggest that you take sometime to research the topic at hand "Native American Casinos" and come to the side of logic/truth.
1. With your own words you claimed that a "majority of casinos are owned by Native Americans", that's false.
2. You then said that those majority of the casinos owned by Native Americans in America "earn billions of dollars in revenue a year", I then stated that those supposed Billions of dollars aren't helping the 35% of Native American's in poverty because those dollars don't belong to the Native Americans who allude to owning those Casino's. Example below..
The Apache Gold Casino declares the $40 million hotel, golf and gambling resort has “helped enable the San Carlos Apache Tribeto give a better quality of life to its tribal members.” But seven years after the casino opened — and four years after the debut of a glittering new complex — many Apache families still crowd in small apartments or mobile homes. The reservation’s unemployment rate has climbed from 42 percent in 1991 to 58 percent in 1997, the latest year available. The number of tribal members receiving welfare has jumped 20 percent. And the tribal government still grants home sites without water and sewer connections. Pauline Randall an elder of the tribe went on record and said: “We get no help from the casino, no money, nothing,” said Pauline Randall, 75, a lifelong resident of San Carlos. That casino went on to make $8 Billion dollars before tax. That Same area today is now deemed a low income area or in simple terms "projects"..
3. And yes I have been to over a dozen of Reservations in Oklahoma/New Mexico and they are INPOVERISHED AREAS!
Anyone that had ancestors that were in a tribe ,etc around the world that owned land at one point in time but were taken from them due to wars,government,empires,etc should be payed.
@Bold
What America did saved millions of lives that could have been lost due to the constant fighting (to all sides)
The Japanese would never give up due to their ideal (Retreating is worse than death so dying in battle is seen as the best way to die in honor for your country) Not only that but they were allied with Nazi's (i'm sure you what they did)
Extra months of fighting would mean more money wasted, more deaths, etc
You know what else caused nightmares kamikazes flying into warships.
Thanks to Hiroshima and Nagasaki WWll ended pretty quick which was fantastic news.
WW2 was over when those bombs where dropped, Japan was the only country still really fighting and they where considering surrender they just didn't want to surrender unconditionally but they would have in the coming weeks, they were collapsing internally. Instead of military battle or military targets it was dropped on school children, doctors, tailors, housewives.
America didn't end the war, they didn't win it and they dropped those bombs to see what they could do, which is they they picked a city instead of an army target because they wanted to see the devastation.
During the war "annihilationist and exterminationalist rhetoric" was tolerated at all levels of U.S. society; according to the British embassy in Washington the Americans regarded the Japanese as "a nameless mass of vermin".[217] Caricatures depicting Japanese as less than human, e.g. monkeys, were common.[217] A 1944 opinion poll that asked what should be done with Japan found that 13% of the U.S. public were in favor of "killing off" all Japanese men, women, and children
This is what the Americans where thinking when they dropped those bombs, not stopping the war. I understand that they were angry at this time, only they didn't kill the people doing the killing. They were planning more drops before the surrender, what they were trying to commit was genocide
People were vaporised. The river in Hiroshima evaporated and instead of water there were hundreds of bloated and red bodies, some still alive. People died slowly of radiation poisoning. Then there was the little girl whose school was destroyed. She was unharmed, she got up out of the rubble and everything was silent, when she turned around there where creatures standing there, creatures with there flesh hanging from there bones, then suddenly they started to scream.
Anyone being killed in war is awful but a soldier fighting a soldier and defending his country and getting shot, though horrific cannot compare to what they did.
All that, we did it to end the war, is propaganda used to hold up a guilty conscience.
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That picture is Sumiteru Taniguchi, I watched his story on the Japanese news channel, that picture was taken in January 1946 but the Nagasaki bomb that he was hurt in was dropped in April 1945, he was still in that state a year later, to this day the scars on his back have to be treated and he was lucky.
I don't blame Americans now, its not there fault, they were not involved but the Japanese have apologised for what there military did in WW2 which was horrific the fact that America is not big enough to do the same is pure arrogance.
Is it wrong for a group of people to ask for reparations? Let's give some examples.
Native Americans. Is it wrong for them to ask for reparations? They were forced out of their land and murdered near extinction by the earlier European settlers and later US Government. This lasted several hundred years. Is it okay that they ask to be reimbursed for the hardships of their ancestors?
African Americans. Is it wrong for them to ask for reparations? They were sold and bought from countries in Africa and sent to the Americas and West Indies for slave labor. This form of slavery lasted about 245 years(Estimated 1620-1865). Is it okay that they ask to be reimbursed for the hardships of their ancestors?
Japanese Americans. Is it wrong for them to ask for reparations? Now obviously this wasn't as horrific as the former two, however in its own right it was a horrible thing that happened. For about 2.5 years during WW2, Japanese people were sent internment camps due to what happened at Pearl Harbor. The US government assumed that all Japanese Americans or simply Japanese people were spies to their motherland Japan. Do they deserve any form of reimbursement for this treatment?
What are your thoughts on this. Defend your points.
@Bold
What America did saved millions of lives that could have been lost due to the constant fighting (to all sides)
The Japanese would never give up due to their ideal (Retreating is worse than death so dying in battle is seen as the best way to die in honor for your country) Not only that but they were allied with Nazi's (i'm sure you what they did)
Extra months of fighting would mean more money wasted, more deaths, etc
You know what else caused nightmares kamikazes flying into warships.
Thanks to Hiroshima and Nagasaki WWll ended pretty quick which was fantastic news.
hitler killed himself, mussolini was a total pansy who couldn't fight without the nazis, so i dont see how the war might've kept on going. the japs were a minuscle force compared to the entirety of the allies. so hiroshima + nagasaki =/= fantastic news, the bombs probably took more lives than those that would've been lost in the time after that in ww2.
also, the radiations emitted due to the 2 bombings continued to haunt the local people for decades after the actual bombing itself.
hitler killed himself, mussolini was a total pansy who couldn't fight without the nazis, so i dont see how the war might've kept on going. the japs were a minuscle force compared to the entirety of the allies. so hiroshima + nagasaki =/= fantastic news, the bombs probably took more lives than those that would've been lost in the time after that in ww2.
also, the radiations emitted due to the 2 bombings continued to haunt the local people for decades after the actual bombing itself.
135000 lives in those two bombs, most of the following weeks if the bomb had not been dropped would have been mostly posturing and negotiations and when the Soviat Union declared war on Japan it would have all been over, in fact it was that which played more of a role in their surrender than the bombs
Not really when it comes to Native Americans, just living in America means you are living on stolen land that's loss and near genocide is still causing misery to Native Americans today. I think they are truly owed. If you are going to move into a house, pay the land lord rent.
135000 lives in those two bombs, most of the following weeks if the bomb had not been dropped would have been mostly posturing and negotiations and when the Soviat Union declared war on Japan it would have all been over, in fact it was that which played more of a role in their surrender than the bombs
Not really when it comes to Native Americans, just living in America means you are living on stolen land that's loss and near genocide is still causing misery to Native Americans today. I think they are truly owed. If you are going to move into a house, pay the land lord rent.
After crossing the Bering Strait into the Americas, humans hunted many animals to extinction. American Indians owe reparations to the world for eradicating species of animals.
After crossing the Bering Strait into the Americas, humans hunted many animals to extinction. American Indians owe reparations to the world for eradicating species of animals.
Yes. It was actually hyperbole. I was poking fun at your logic of paying rent to landlords metaphor (The animals they killed being the landlords). Here is a more serious counter argument to your logic.
1. You are denying human nature. Wars happen, lands change, territories change, people die. Just ask Iraq, Sudan, Iran, Kuwait, the Ottoman Empire, Pakistan, India, Israel, Babylon, Syria, The Holy Roman Empire, Prussia, USSR, People's Republic of China, Mongolia...you get the picture. Do Italians owe Europeans reparations for seven hundred years of enslavement, oppression, and territory theft during the Roman Empire? The US is already changing as the Latino population exponentially grows. If many are coming illegally, that would mean they are illegally taking the land. Would they owe reparations in two hundred years?
2. Cro-Magnon man stole the land from Neanderthals through breeding and genocide. An entire species of humanoid was removed from the planet fighting for land and resources. If there was a pocket of Neanderthal still extant, would money fix their problem?
3. Reparations don't make people feel better, they make people feel entitled. Entitlement is damaging to a stable ego and creates unhealthy dependence on unreasonable expectations. Contrary to the typical American/European mindset, money doesn't fix hurt feelings. If your boyfriend dumped you should he owe you money for causing you emotional distress?
So while I want to see 17 year old, Dancing River, graduate from school and find a fulfilling life on or outside his reservation (as it is his choice now). I know America has many social programs to assist him and many other underprivileged peoples. If their US government needs to do more education on social assistance programs than so be it, but I don't think that Dancing River is Joe the 3rd generation Irish American's land lord.
WW2 was over when those bombs where dropped, Japan was the only country still really fighting and they where considering surrender they just didn't want to surrender unconditionally but they would have in the coming weeks, they were collapsing internally. Instead of military battle or military targets it was dropped on school children, doctors, tailors, housewives.
America didn't end the war, they didn't win it and they dropped those bombs to see what they could do, which is they they picked a city instead of an army target because they wanted to see the devastation.
America wanted an unconditional surrender from the Japanese - that meant a yielding of all territories and a forfeiture of government control. Why? The Cold War had already started - Stalin was seizing large swaths of Asia (what would eventually lead to the 38th parallel agreement in Korea). Japan occupied many of these lands and an unconditional surrender to the U.S. would mean that further Russian incursion into Asia would qualify as a direct attack on U.S. territory.
The bomb drop was to further drive home the point of an unconditional surrender and also to stand as a warning to the Russians.
That is why the bombs were dropped.
Further, the argument that the targets were cities and not military is just silly. Ask London or Stalingrad about German bombing practices. Ask Bremen about Allied bombing policies. Industrial centers within cities are the targets of bombing missions - the factories that produce war fighting equipment are the targets of strategic bombing campaigns.
Which is what strategic warfare is about - it is about destroying key resources necessary for fighting a war.
"Little Boy" was dropped over the bridge at Hiroshima.
"Fat Man" was supposed to drop on an industrial sector of Nagasaki, but fell behind a ridge line due to the fact that Nagasaki was a tertiary target and most of Japan was under heavy cloud cover. Ironically, where the bomb was to be dropped was less ideal than where it fell (intel was faulty) - where it did more damage to industrial sectors that Allied intelligence had categorized as being unimportant.
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"It was Secretaary of War Henry Stimson (right) who formally suggested employing the Bomb. The body-count would be Japanese, but it was the effect on the Russians that counted on him and other statesmen now.
As early as May 14, 1945, after talking over this "hot potato" with General Marshall, he had dictated into his files an opinion that the way to deal with Russia now was to "let our actions speak for words."
The Russians, he felt, would understand actions better than anything else. "We (Americans) have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way.""
This is what the Americans where thinking when they dropped those bombs, not stopping the war. I understand that they were angry at this time, only they didn't kill the people doing the killing. They were planning more drops before the surrender, what they were trying to commit was genocide
Derogatory caricatures of 'the enemy' are common in any war in any society.
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Notice the difference between the depiction of the Balkans (despite the fact "balkanization" has long been a derogatory term throughout Western Europe and America) and the Nazis?
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Compare that depiction of Russians as an Anti-Hitler Bear
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To that depiction of Russia (and Nato... which I can agree with).
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To that one (personally... my favorite is the Yugoslavia bear - "Hey... can someone get me the **** out of here? This was not part of the deal.")
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You have those types of depictions of Hitler and the Nazis.
You must be registered for see links
And these types of depictions of events back home during World War II.
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Here's some depicting domestic issues regarding the coal mine strikes during the war.
Yes, there was some special attention paid to Japanese (who, by that time, we knew had invaded Korea and turned schools into brothels for the soldiers among the politically inclined), but animalistic depictions of people is the norm in caricatures. Hell - both Bush and Obama have been regularly depicted as apes/monkeys.
People were vaporised. The river in Hiroshima evaporated and instead of water there were hundreds of bloated and red bodies, some still alive. People died slowly of radiation poisoning. Then there was the little girl whose school was destroyed. She was unharmed, she got up out of the rubble and everything was silent, when she turned around there where creatures standing there, creatures with there flesh hanging from there bones, then suddenly they started to scream.
While these things are horrible - it's ironic that the Japanese would take exception to these things as they deliberately inflicted similar states upon their prisoners as a matter of course.
The Asian cultures are ****ing brutal and have been doing unthinkable things to each other for time eternal.
Then when a bomb we drop on them does the same thing they lose their damned minds over the horror.
Well no shit... why did they think they were doing these things to their prisoners?
I mean - if it taught them that such treatment is horrible and not to be repeated - then I suppose it's the cost of a lesson learned... but it just strikes me as kind of funny that a culture that would use children as suicidal killers gets all bent out of shape over what a bomb does to people.
Anyone being killed in war is awful but a soldier fighting a soldier and defending his country and getting shot, though horrific cannot compare to what they did.
Yeah, sure, in a perfect world - you have "soldiers" and you have "civilians."
Who makes the food for the soldiers? Who makes their tanks? Their planes? Who replaces the soldiers that die on the battlefield? WHO IS THE COUNTRY THAT DECIDED TO COMMIT SOLDIERS TO WAR IN THE FIRST PLACE?!
The notion of rigidly defined "targets" is fanciful in and of itself. If you, as a civilian, are part of a country that has sent its soldiers off to war - why do you get to feed, clothe, supply, and reinforce those soldiers and claim some kind of ethical immunity to combat?
The Japanese understood this and did not conform to the Geneva conventions. They knew that if they killed a medic, that took ten guys out of commission, permanently, who that medic would be able to return to the battlefield in a week. They launched a few failed attempts to strike at the American west coast population and tried (without success) to recruit Japanese Americans to "fight for the empire" from within America (of course, most Japanese-Americans were like "Uh... yeah... **** you... not like I could do anything, anyway - oversensitive yanks threw us all into a detention center").
All that, we did it to end the war, is propaganda used to hold up a guilty conscience.
The propaganda has no point if there was a guilty conscience. The propaganda was to avoid there being reason to have a conflict of conscience over the decision in the first place.
There was nothing unique about the propaganda supporting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when compared with similar decisions to strike at Yemen or to conduct operations against Noriega.
Politicians are used to saying whatever it takes to generate support for an action that has the effect of something else entirely and letting the population try to figure out why it didn't add up (usually it is just assumed the politician was stupid).
That picture is Sumiteru Taniguchi, I watched his story on the Japanese news channel, that picture was taken in January 1946 but the Nagasaki bomb that he was hurt in was dropped in April 1945, he was still in that state a year later, to this day the scars on his back have to be treated and he was lucky.
And the Germans peeled the skin off of people to see how long they would live without it.
Bonus points if you had a twin to use as a control.
The man's injuries are consistent with 3rd degree burns and treatment in the years before skin grafting was to let scar tissue take over (although treating an injury like that would require more advanced grafting techniques involving growth outside the human body and suppression of scar tissue development - stuff not available until relatively recently). The fire bombings we conducted (that killed more people, by the way) left far more people just as, if not more horribly disfigured.
Frankly, the outrage over the atomic bomb is manufactured propaganda as much as anything else. Far worse things happened in war time. The fire bombings we did killed more people (as I said) and did far more damage. Hardly anyone mentions those unless it buried amongst a list of things.
From a strategic standpoint - both atomic bombs were failures. The bridge stood at Hiroshima and Nagasaki illustrated that atomic weaponry was severely limited its effectiveness by terrain.
Part of the reason why we never used atomic bombs in the future was because they were not all that great of a weapon and we developed much better ways of destroying strategic targets. Sure - Nuclear weapons are a threat to cities - but even then, there are better methods of attacking cities.
I don't blame Americans now, its not there fault, they were not involved but the Japanese have apologised for what there military did in WW2 which was horrific the fact that America is not big enough to do the same is pure arrogance.
"There are reasons to doubt the traditional story that the Emperor
was horrified by the bombing of Hiroshima. The documentary evidence
is thin,
5
and if the Emperor was so moved, it begs the question: why was
he moved by secondhand reports of a city destroyed in August when
he was not moved by driving through Tokyo and personally witnessing
the devastation of that city in March? Would it not be sensible to expect
that firsthand experience would have a stronger emotional impact than
a secondhand report?
6"
Why would the loss of two more cities make a difference? It is clear that
the Soviet entry into the war decisively changed the strategic calculus,
while the dropping of atomic bombs, no matter how horrifying, did not.
And the scale of the nuclear bombings was not that different from
the conventional attacks that had been going on all summer long. If we
graph the fatalities in all 68 city attacks that summer, Hiroshima ranks
second after Tokyo (a conventional attack). If we graph the square miles
destroyed, Hiroshima is sixth. If we graph the percentage of the city
destroyed, Hiroshima is 17th. Clearly, the end result of the attacks was
not outside the parameters of previous attacks."
"Sorry we did a better job at bombing your country than you did at bombing us?"
What, exactly, are we supposed to say? It's war.
I don't expect the Japanese to apologize for Pearl Harbor nor do I really care if they do. War happens between nations for reasons that are always a good idea at the time.
I don't expect them to apologize for Korea.
There is nothing to apologize for. The two of our nations decided to go to war with each other and continued doing what nations at war do until both of us decided enough is enough. The fact that one may or may not have reached that point ahead of the other is one of the risks assumed with going to war.
The idea that there is something to apologize for in war is just ridiculous. The point of war is to kill people until societies are willing to conform to your will. Saying "I'm sorry" is basically saying: "I'm sorry for not winning" - as the conversation would not be had if Japan were the victor (although it should be observed that Japan didn't have much in the way of ambitions to invade the U.S. to claim as territory).
If someone you are at war with is doing things you consider intolerable - then the only thing to do is kill them even harder. Telling the person who is -winning- that it is wrong to torture prisoners is insanity. Expecting them to recognize that it was a flaw and apologize is beyond insane.
I would even go so far as to argue that Japan, as it made the decision to attack Pearl Harbor, had few moral quandaries with such a strategy (as I said - the Asian cultures are brutal). If they had won - it would have been celebrated as strategic genius and the superiority of the Empire. The idea that it had been "underhanded" or "inappropriate" or "undeserved" would not be a part of the discussion outside of small philosophical groups. The notion that Japan saw fit to apologize illustrates the degree to which the U.S. victory impacted Japan's self-image and the totality of that victory - it indicates a fundamental shift in Japanese world perspective that would have been unaltered in the wake of yet another Japanese victory.
Call me arrogant, or whatever - but I always find the issue of Hiroshima/Nagasaki to be a lot of hot air about an event that was not at all unprecedented. We firebombed Tokyo with a far more devastating effect.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ordinary aside from the fact that it was one plane dropping one bomb to accomplish much the same thing as any other bombing campaign would do except with a brighter flash at the beginning.
Was it necessary?
Probably not.
Was it politically motivated?
What isn't?
Was it done out of hatred for the Japanese?
The Japanese were not necessarily popular at dinner parties in America at the time. I doubt that Americans would have been approving of continuing the bombing campaigns after a surrender proposal was on the table from Japan - but this was not known at the time by the public (nor by many within the military chains of command).
As far as I'm concerned, the greatest injustice we've done to Japan is insist that they can't be trusted to defend themselves and persist lording over their lack of a military. By the time we hit the 70s, it was quite unnecessary and Japan should not be reliant upon the U.S. and its policies to defend itself as a nation (and we shouldn't be requiring them to be reliant upon us).
That is something I can't really apologize for because we're still doing it. We need to let Japan start looking after Japan.
Not really when it comes to Native Americans, just living in America means you are living on stolen land that's loss and near genocide is still causing misery to Native Americans today. I think they are truly owed. If you are going to move into a house, pay the land lord rent.
If you want to be technical - the land was purchased in accordance with contracts.
That said - even if we were to run with the premise that there was no purchase:
My maternal lineage has some Native American roots. Exactly how much, I don't know - but I was noted as being "very red" while overseas - more so than my Germanic paternal lineage would suggest.
Do I qualify for these payments?
Or... do I just get to live rent free?
And who do I pay this rent to? What claim do they realistically have to land they've never seen, much less taken care of? Who did they purchase it from? Who owned the land before them? How many countless tribal wars were fought to establish those boundaries?
If, for whatever random reason, China were to invade and begin setting up "Reservations" for the Native Americans - why in the hell should I expect them to pay my great grandchildren (assuming I survive to procreate) "reparations" for something that was never theirs to begin with?
I lost my claim to my land and property when the Chinese were able to force me off of it. It now belongs to whomever the Chinese authorities recognize as owning that land.
The only possible reason China would arrive at a conclusion to pay me (or my children) anything is to bribe us into not killing our Chinese overlords any time we get the opportunity - and even then, why not use the money they give us to buy chemicals to turn into explosives to be a more effective PITA for them?
Why would I have a reason not to kill Chinese? Because, obviously, if they can force me onto a reservation, they can probably use a few area-effect weapons to eliminate any and all of us who stand as a threat to Chinese security.
So do they really have to bribe me?
The only reason for China to pay reparations is out of a sense of guilt.
Which returns me to the original point:
Why would a South African moving to Chi-Merica need to have their pay confiscated and handed to the group of people whose only reason for being paid is: "We feel guilty because they used to live here?" That South African legally paid under Chinese systems for the property he now owns. He was not around to cause the displacement of these indigenous peoples - so why should he be required to pay people who have absolutely no means of enforcing a claim to land over an issue of Chinese guilt?
America wanted an unconditional surrender from the Japanese - that meant a yielding of all territories and a forfeiture of government control. Why? The Cold War had already started - Stalin was seizing large swaths of Asia (what would eventually lead to the 38th parallel agreement in Korea). Japan occupied many of these lands and an unconditional surrender to the U.S. would mean that further Russian incursion into Asia would qualify as a direct attack on U.S. territory.
The bomb drop was to further drive home the point of an unconditional surrender and also to stand as a warning to the Russians.
That is why the bombs were dropped.
Further, the argument that the targets were cities and not military is just silly. Ask London or Stalingrad about German bombing practices. Ask Bremen about Allied bombing policies. Industrial centers within cities are the targets of bombing missions - the factories that produce war fighting equipment are the targets of strategic bombing campaigns.
Which is what strategic warfare is about - it is about destroying key resources necessary for fighting a war.
"Little Boy" was dropped over the bridge at Hiroshima.
"Fat Man" was supposed to drop on an industrial sector of Nagasaki, but fell behind a ridge line due to the fact that Nagasaki was a tertiary target and most of Japan was under heavy cloud cover. Ironically, where the bomb was to be dropped was less ideal than where it fell (intel was faulty) - where it did more damage to industrial sectors that Allied intelligence had categorized as being unimportant.
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"It was Secretaary of War Henry Stimson (right) who formally suggested employing the Bomb. The body-count would be Japanese, but it was the effect on the Russians that counted on him and other statesmen now.
As early as May 14, 1945, after talking over this "hot potato" with General Marshall, he had dictated into his files an opinion that the way to deal with Russia now was to "let our actions speak for words."
The Russians, he felt, would understand actions better than anything else. "We (Americans) have got to regain the lead and perhaps do it in a pretty rough and realistic way.""
This is a contrived argument.
Derogatory caricatures of 'the enemy' are common in any war in any society.
You must be registered for see links
Notice the difference between the depiction of the Balkans (despite the fact "balkanization" has long been a derogatory term throughout Western Europe and America) and the Nazis?
You must be registered for see links
Compare that depiction of Russians as an Anti-Hitler Bear
You must be registered for see images
To that depiction of Russia (and Nato... which I can agree with).
You must be registered for see images
To that one (personally... my favorite is the Yugoslavia bear - "Hey... can someone get me the **** out of here? This was not part of the deal.")
You must be registered for see images
You have those types of depictions of Hitler and the Nazis.
You must be registered for see links
And these types of depictions of events back home during World War II.
You must be registered for see links
Here's some depicting domestic issues regarding the coal mine strikes during the war.
Yes, there was some special attention paid to Japanese (who, by that time, we knew had invaded Korea and turned schools into brothels for the soldiers among the politically inclined), but animalistic depictions of people is the norm in caricatures. Hell - both Bush and Obama have been regularly depicted as apes/monkeys.
While these things are horrible - it's ironic that the Japanese would take exception to these things as they deliberately inflicted similar states upon their prisoners as a matter of course.
The Asian cultures are ****ing brutal and have been doing unthinkable things to each other for time eternal.
Then when a bomb we drop on them does the same thing they lose their damned minds over the horror.
Well no shit... why did they think they were doing these things to their prisoners?
I mean - if it taught them that such treatment is horrible and not to be repeated - then I suppose it's the cost of a lesson learned... but it just strikes me as kind of funny that a culture that would use children as suicidal killers gets all bent out of shape over what a bomb does to people.
This betrays a general ignorance of war.
Yeah, sure, in a perfect world - you have "soldiers" and you have "civilians."
Who makes the food for the soldiers? Who makes their tanks? Their planes? Who replaces the soldiers that die on the battlefield? WHO IS THE COUNTRY THAT DECIDED TO COMMIT SOLDIERS TO WAR IN THE FIRST PLACE?!
The notion of rigidly defined "targets" is fanciful in and of itself. If you, as a civilian, are part of a country that has sent its soldiers off to war - why do you get to feed, clothe, supply, and reinforce those soldiers and claim some kind of ethical immunity to combat?
The Japanese understood this and did not conform to the Geneva conventions. They knew that if they killed a medic, that took ten guys out of commission, permanently, who that medic would be able to return to the battlefield in a week. They launched a few failed attempts to strike at the American west coast population and tried (without success) to recruit Japanese Americans to "fight for the empire" from within America (of course, most Japanese-Americans were like "Uh... yeah... **** you... not like I could do anything, anyway - oversensitive yanks threw us all into a detention center").
The propaganda has no point if there was a guilty conscience. The propaganda was to avoid there being reason to have a conflict of conscience over the decision in the first place.
There was nothing unique about the propaganda supporting the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when compared with similar decisions to strike at Yemen or to conduct operations against Noriega.
Politicians are used to saying whatever it takes to generate support for an action that has the effect of something else entirely and letting the population try to figure out why it didn't add up (usually it is just assumed the politician was stupid).
And the Germans peeled the skin off of people to see how long they would live without it.
Bonus points if you had a twin to use as a control.
The man's injuries are consistent with 3rd degree burns and treatment in the years before skin grafting was to let scar tissue take over (although treating an injury like that would require more advanced grafting techniques involving growth outside the human body and suppression of scar tissue development - stuff not available until relatively recently). The fire bombings we conducted (that killed more people, by the way) left far more people just as, if not more horribly disfigured.
Frankly, the outrage over the atomic bomb is manufactured propaganda as much as anything else. Far worse things happened in war time. The fire bombings we did killed more people (as I said) and did far more damage. Hardly anyone mentions those unless it buried amongst a list of things.
From a strategic standpoint - both atomic bombs were failures. The bridge stood at Hiroshima and Nagasaki illustrated that atomic weaponry was severely limited its effectiveness by terrain.
Part of the reason why we never used atomic bombs in the future was because they were not all that great of a weapon and we developed much better ways of destroying strategic targets. Sure - Nuclear weapons are a threat to cities - but even then, there are better methods of attacking cities.
You must be registered for see links
"There are reasons to doubt the traditional story that the Emperor
was horrified by the bombing of Hiroshima. The documentary evidence
is thin,
5
and if the Emperor was so moved, it begs the question: why was
he moved by secondhand reports of a city destroyed in August when
he was not moved by driving through Tokyo and personally witnessing
the devastation of that city in March? Would it not be sensible to expect
that firsthand experience would have a stronger emotional impact than
a secondhand report?
6"
Why would the loss of two more cities make a difference? It is clear that
the Soviet entry into the war decisively changed the strategic calculus,
while the dropping of atomic bombs, no matter how horrifying, did not.
And the scale of the nuclear bombings was not that different from
the conventional attacks that had been going on all summer long. If we
graph the fatalities in all 68 city attacks that summer, Hiroshima ranks
second after Tokyo (a conventional attack). If we graph the square miles
destroyed, Hiroshima is sixth. If we graph the percentage of the city
destroyed, Hiroshima is 17th. Clearly, the end result of the attacks was
not outside the parameters of previous attacks."
"Sorry we did a better job at bombing your country than you did at bombing us?"
What, exactly, are we supposed to say? It's war.
I don't expect the Japanese to apologize for Pearl Harbor nor do I really care if they do. War happens between nations for reasons that are always a good idea at the time.
I don't expect them to apologize for Korea.
There is nothing to apologize for. The two of our nations decided to go to war with each other and continued doing what nations at war do until both of us decided enough is enough. The fact that one may or may not have reached that point ahead of the other is one of the risks assumed with going to war.
The idea that there is something to apologize for in war is just ridiculous. The point of war is to kill people until societies are willing to conform to your will. Saying "I'm sorry" is basically saying: "I'm sorry for not winning" - as the conversation would not be had if Japan were the victor (although it should be observed that Japan didn't have much in the way of ambitions to invade the U.S. to claim as territory).
If someone you are at war with is doing things you consider intolerable - then the only thing to do is kill them even harder. Telling the person who is -winning- that it is wrong to torture prisoners is insanity. Expecting them to recognize that it was a flaw and apologize is beyond insane.
I would even go so far as to argue that Japan, as it made the decision to attack Pearl Harbor, had few moral quandaries with such a strategy (as I said - the Asian cultures are brutal). If they had won - it would have been celebrated as strategic genius and the superiority of the Empire. The idea that it had been "underhanded" or "inappropriate" or "undeserved" would not be a part of the discussion outside of small philosophical groups. The notion that Japan saw fit to apologize illustrates the degree to which the U.S. victory impacted Japan's self-image and the totality of that victory - it indicates a fundamental shift in Japanese world perspective that would have been unaltered in the wake of yet another Japanese victory.
Call me arrogant, or whatever - but I always find the issue of Hiroshima/Nagasaki to be a lot of hot air about an event that was not at all unprecedented. We firebombed Tokyo with a far more devastating effect.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were ordinary aside from the fact that it was one plane dropping one bomb to accomplish much the same thing as any other bombing campaign would do except with a brighter flash at the beginning.
Was it necessary?
Probably not.
Was it politically motivated?
What isn't?
Was it done out of hatred for the Japanese?
The Japanese were not necessarily popular at dinner parties in America at the time. I doubt that Americans would have been approving of continuing the bombing campaigns after a surrender proposal was on the table from Japan - but this was not known at the time by the public (nor by many within the military chains of command).
As far as I'm concerned, the greatest injustice we've done to Japan is insist that they can't be trusted to defend themselves and persist lording over their lack of a military. By the time we hit the 70s, it was quite unnecessary and Japan should not be reliant upon the U.S. and its policies to defend itself as a nation (and we shouldn't be requiring them to be reliant upon us).
That is something I can't really apologize for because we're still doing it. We need to let Japan start looking after Japan.
This is mostly conjecture, point of view and minor historical points, which I suppose mine is to.
But you cannot justify evil with evil. America where supposed to have the moral high ground, Nagasaki and Hiroshima were test sites. And at least Japan and Germany acknowledge what they did was horrific, OK Japan had to have there arm seriously twisted but still. My main point which may have been lost in passion, is that at least they admitted there atrocities and Japan has apologized and I believe Germany too but don't hold me to it.
America still prop up there ego by saying it was necessary, when it was a act befitting the evil of the enemy and yet America keep taking the WW2 high ground and they have no right to.
I get just as passionate over German and Japanese atrocities but they weren't on discussion.
The problem is that its taking money from taxpayers (who had nothing to do with what happened) to pay people entitlements that they aren't entitled to (their ancestors may have been). American Indians aren't the only ones who live in poverty. Many blacks, Latinos, and whites live in ghettos, trailer parks, etc., without adequate living amenities (i.e., running water).
The problem is that its taking money from taxpayers (who had nothing to do with what happened) to pay people entitlements that they aren't entitled to (their ancestors may have been). American Indians aren't the only ones who live in poverty. Many blacks, Latinos, and whites live in ghettos, trailer parks, etc., without adequate living amenities (i.e., running water).
The difference is that the only reason native Americans live that way is because there land was stolen, hoodwinked and taken from them. Meaning that everyone living in America who is not Native American is living on stolen land while they live in the gutter. Latin Americans and such are immigrants, not indigenous people.
