[Hubris Boy]

This is pure bullsh*t, but what would you expect from the International Socialist Review? Sheesh. The lunatic fantasies that some people try to pass off as historical fact are simply staggering.

Originally posted by Nic Name
can you clue us in as to the proof you have that has given you this entrenched belief that dropping the bomb on Japan saved lives?

Well... it certainly saved a lot of American lives. Some War Department planners (including MacArthur & Nimitz's staff planners and the US Strategic Bombing Survey) estimated that American casualties from Operation Olympic (the proposed invasion of Kyushu) in November, 1945, would exceed 250,000. Casualty estimates for Operation Coronet, the invasion of Honshu proposed for March, 1946, were even worse: 750,000 was the number that was usually kicked around. So, if we accept these numbers, almost 1,000,000 human beings had longer, happier lives because we dropped two atomic bombs on some other human beings. I'll sleep well tonight.

Originally posted by Nic Name
The Japanese were no more allies of the Nazis than the Koreans are of the Iraqis, or they of the Iranians.

Other than the fact that Japan signed the Tri-Partite Agreement with Italy and Germany on September 27, 1940, you mean?

Originally posted by Xugumad
It's an established basic fact of elementary College history education that the US systematically provoked Japan into action.

*gales of derisive laughter*

If by "provoked" you mean that the United States failed to acquiesce in Japan's invasion of (and subsequent brutalization of) China, Korea, French Indonesia and the Malay peninsula, then yes, I suppose you're right. How provocative of us to refuse to trade (aviation fuel, high-grade scrap iron, machine tools, munitions, finished capital goods, etc.) with the peace-loving Japanese government! What could we have been thinking?

Now, I'm willing to concede that that's a vast oversimplification of the events leading to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. But in return, I expect YOU to concede that the Japanese are every bit as responsible for the pasting they received at the hands of the Americans as the Americans are for dishing it out. For some inexplicable reason, the Japanese, who live on an archipelago with virtually no natural resources, got it into their collective minds that they could go toe-to-toe with the United States in a contest for naval supremacy in the western Pacific. What could they have been thinking?

Personally, I think Japan's collective guilt is FAR greater than any that accrues to the United States, and is compounded by the fact that most of the Japanese government KNEW they couldn't win a war with the United States, but they chose to start one anyway. What kind of government deliberately leads their nation into destruction? Isoroku Yamamoto certainly believed they couldn't win such a war. He said as much in a conversation with Prince Konoye more than a year before Pearl Harbor:

If I am told to fight [the United States] regardless of the consequences, I will run wild for the first six months or a year, but I have utterly no confidence for the second or third year... Now that the situation has come to this pass, I hope you will endeavor to avoid a Japanese-American war."
From the memoirs of Prince Fumimaro Konoye, Japanese premier, September, 1940