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The term massacre always seem like a single act to me. That single battle and its outcome. Taking the city and killing all the civilian males and raping the women. And executing prisoners of war.
Under that definition I would nominate the US giving up trying to bomb war industries and attempting to kill Tokyo by fire in 1945.
Quote:
Originally Posted by arr430
Hiroshima?
Irish potato famine?
Hiroshima yes. Irish potato famine no, unless you think it is the result of an affirmative act of a god.
I wonder why people don't acknowledge this much? I find it interesting. I would have assumed it would be Hitler or Stalin, but neither killed as many as Mao Zedong with his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people There are people alive today that lived this. I never hear of it. Why is that?
This case shows censorship and bully tactics, if someone talks about this subject, can successfully cover up big events like this. Lets learn from these lessons history has taught us, Free speech and transparency are key to growth and maturation of civilizations
Hiroshima yes. Irish potato famine no, unless you think it is the result of an affirmative act of a god.
Hiroshima was an action taken by the non-aggressor in fighting a war. The war featured suicide (kamikaze) attacks, grotesque abuse of prisoners and the Rape on Nanking, itself a massacre.
Hiroshima was an action taken by the non-aggressor in fighting a war. The war featured suicide (kamikaze) attacks, grotesque abuse of prisoners and the Rape on Nanking, itself a massacre.
All true, but I guess it was still a massacre. Unfortunately it took two such massacres before Japan acknowledged the message, thus preventing a third.
All true, but I guess it was still a massacre. Unfortunately it took two such massacres before Japan acknowledged the message, thus preventing a third.
The term massacre always seem like a single act to me. That single battle and its outcome. Taking the city and killing all the civilian males and raping the women. And executing prisoners of war.
Under that definition I would nominate the US giving up trying to bomb war industries and attempting to kill Tokyo by fire in 1945.
Hiroshima yes. Irish potato famine no, unless you think it is the result of an affirmative act of a god.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jbgusa
Hiroshima was an action taken by the non-aggressor in fighting a war. The war featured suicide (kamikaze) attacks, grotesque abuse of prisoners and the Rape on Nanking, itself a massacre.
Robert S. McNamara discusses the firebombing of Tokyo in the film Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara.
I should note that McNamara worked in what was called "statistical control" in the United States Air Force during much of World War II. Essentially, McNamara's job was to try to use statistics to increase the effectiveness of attacks by American bombers in air raids.
There were military reasons for using fire bombs and for attacking cities instead of perhaps using high explosives and limiting attacks to factories. The attacks undoubtedly created great terror, but there was a military purpose behind the strategy that was used. It must be understood that many Japanese factories were deliberately concentrated in civilian areas of cities. Second, many were quite primitive compared to American standards. A "factory" might consist of a dozen machines clumped together under a bamboo roof. The Air Force attempted raids with high explosives against Japanese factories. These were judged to be largely ineffective for a series of reasons. The high altitude that planes flew made accuracy difficult to achieve dropping bombs. Further, high explosives work well against brick and concrete. They are not particularly effective against bamboo buildings.
It was the air force commander, Curtis LeMay who decided to abandon the strategy of using high explosives and instead use fire bombs dropped from a low level. There was no need for accuracy in dropping the bombs if the bombs created a firestorm that burned down a whole city including the factories and industries within it. What was necessary was to accept the huge loss of civilian non-combatants that such attacks caused. It was out of this sort of thing we first began coining phrases like "collateral damage".
McNamara deals in the film with the attack on Tokyo and states that "in one night we burned 100,000 people to death". What he chooses to do is to suggest that when a country is fighting a war it ought to ask certain moral questions. One of the questions is that of "proportionality". Is an attack like the one which was made on Tokyo "proportional" to things that the enemy did to us? We must not forget that this is the same country that killed 2,000 Americans in a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor which was made before a declaration of war was delivered to our government. Its the same country that allowed thousands of Americans and other allied prisoners to die in POW camps for want of decent food and medical treatment. Finally, it is the same country that dealt ruthlessly with any group it perceived as its enemy.
I will not say it never has bothered me that so American air raids killed so many women, children, and non-combatants. Yet, I believe America was left with no real alternative other than to conduct these air raids if we wanted to force a surrender.
Ultimately, it is Japan, not the USA that is responsible for what happened.
Hiroshima was an action taken by the non-aggressor in fighting a war. The war featured suicide (kamikaze) attacks, grotesque abuse of prisoners and the Rape on Nanking, itself a massacre.
The US intentionally targeted innocent civilians. The excuse that it quickened the end of war doesn't negate it being a massacre.
I wonder why people don't acknowledge this much? I find it interesting. I would have assumed it would be Hitler or Stalin, but neither killed as many as Mao Zedong with his Great Leap Forward policy led to the deaths of up to 45 million people There are people alive today that lived this. I never hear of it. Why is that?
Julius Caesar (when he was in Gaul) eliminated an entire tribe, and I mean the ENTIRE tribe of what is believed to be over six million people (yeh, men, women, and children) NOT COUNTING all the other tribes he dominated taking back NE France and NW Germany today.
But since those tribes didn't keep written records, we're only finding out NOW with new techniques in Archeology, geology, and putting things together. It's becoming clearer with each excavation and discovery that those numbers may have been underestimated.
Gaul was made up of many tribes. The largest one is estimated to have had about 250,000 people. The entire area of Gaul had between 6-9 million total. To say the Romans eliminated (killed) 6 million people in Gaul is absurd. Many were killed for certain to be made examples of but many more were sold into slavery and many eventually became Roman citizens. Their descendants today are the French of course. https://periklisdeligiannis.wordpres...000%20sq.%20km.
Rome had a tendency to incorporate conquered people into Roman society as slaves and citizens not kill them all off. There are of course exceptions such as Carthage but even there it's estimated 50,000 Carthaginians survived to become slaves and Carthage was Rome's biggest enemy.
Robert S. McNamara discusses the firebombing of Tokyo in the film Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara.
I will not say it never has bothered me that so American air raids killed so many women, children, and non-combatants. Yet, I believe America was left with no real alternative other than to conduct these air raids if we wanted to force a surrender.
Ultimately, it is Japan, not the USA that is responsible for what happened.
There's a great podcast series by Dan Carlin on Japan called Supernova in the East and he goes to great lengths to articulate the mindset of the Japanese, and how it was continually molded all the way back to the days of the Shogun. Given the Japanese psyche, the fire bombs and nuclear bombs were felt to be justified by our leaders at that time, and in retrospect, probably saved Japan from having to be completely destroyed as a people. It's difficult to fathom, but when you consider the mindset required to make Hiroo Onoda continue fighting 30 years after the war ended, you get the feeling that they were not going to be approaching a problem from a traditional, rational, western frame of reference.
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