60 Years Ago This Week

[wolf]

Originally Posted by richlevy

Well here in Philadelphia some people called the police to complain about their neighbors and they ended up burning down the neighborhood.

Most neighbors don't store incendiaries on their rooves and empty human waste into the backyard.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by wolf

Most neighbors don't store incendiaries on their rooves and empty human waste into the backyard.

I think a 'scorched earth' policy was a little extreme, though. Followed by a corruption-plagued rebuilding.....

Hey! I'm seeing some parallels here.

[Undertoad]

An Anniversary to Forget (NY Times, reg. reqd)

Since reg is reqd, here is most of the article. By Joichi Ito from Chiba, Japan.

At bottom, the bombings don't really matter to me or, for that matter, to most Japanese of my generation. My peers and I have little hatred or blame in our hearts for the Americans; the horrors of that war and its nuclear evils feel distant, even foreign. Instead, the bombs are simply the flashpoint marking the discontinuity that characterized the cultural world we grew up in.
...
My grandmother often spoke about the defeated voice of the emperor over the radio and how this shook the foundations of their beliefs, but signaled the end of a traumatic era. With the fall of the emperor, the Shinto religion also collapsed, since it had been co-opted from the decentralized animism of its roots into a state-sponsored war religion.

My mother used to talk about the American occupation of our hometown in northern Japan when she was a child. Our house, the largest in the area, was designated to be the Americans' local headquarters. When the soldiers arrived, my great-grandmother, nearly blind at the time, was head of the household, my grandfather having died during the war.

My great-grandmother and my grandmother faced the occupiers alone, having ordered the children to hide. The Japanese had been warned that the invading barbarians would rape and pillage. My great-grandmother, a battle-scarred early feminist, hissed, "Get your filthy barbarian shoes off of my floor!" The interpreter refused to interpret. The officer in command insisted. Upon hearing the translation from the red-faced interpreter, the officer sat on the floor and removed his boots, instructing his men to do the same. He apologized to my great-grandmother and grandmother.

It was a startling tipping-point experience for them, as the last bit of brainwashing that began with "we won't lose the war" and ended with "the barbarians will rape and kill you" collapsed.

Just one year later my uncle sailed to the United States to live in a Japanese ghetto in Chicago and work in a Y.M.C.A. Eventually his strivings led him to become the dean of the University of Detroit Business School. My mother followed my uncle, making the United States her base.

Postwar Japan followed a similar trajectory of renewal. The economy experienced an explosion of growth from the rubble of flattened cities, led by motivated entrepreneurs and a government focused on rebuilding Japan. The United States, in its struggle to keep communism in check, became a strong supporter of Japan and opened its markets to Japanese products. The Liberal Democratic Party thrived under the protection of the United States and pushed its simple party line of "growth, growth, growth," stomping out opposition, including efforts to educate Japanese about the war. No one had the opportunity to look back at the past, and by the time I can remember anything, Japan was about the bullet train, the 1970 Expo in Osaka, world-class electronics and automobiles, and even a vibrant Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My grandparents' generation remembers the suffering, but tries to forget it. My parents' generation still does not trust the military. The pacifist stance of that generation comes in great part from the mistrust of the Japanese military.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

And that was the kind of thing the Bomb trumped: the Japanese were going to try and defeat Operation Olympic with war emergency production fixed-sight Arisaka boltaction rifles, bamboo spears in phalanx, and smoothbore matchlocks. This up against the most experienced large amphibious forces in the world.

Southern Honshu and all of Shikoku would have been depopulated. Not merely decimated: empty. Then defeat still would have come to the Japanese. They knew full well that the only off switch to the world war was their unconditional surrender. Who lives, who dies? It's only a matter of timing. Hirohito, whatever his sins may have been, certainly had timing.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Rich, rest assured that here I am using democracy in its general sense, rather than pedantically lumbering my sentences with carefully parsed distinctions between the shades of representative governments, from tribal organization through bicameral legislatures and constitutional monarchies.

Representative governments with checks and balances incorporated beat all alternatives hands down. They are usually richer than all the alternatives, owing mainly to that one thing.

An aside to your aside: hardly anyone who isn't African is paying attention to Africa -- though I bet the Darfur's problems will end the day the Khartoum régime is hanged from lampposts or run into exile with all the bank accounts it can close.

[mrnoodle]

We always feel like we're supposed to apologize for winning conflicts. Bollocks. We saved millions of lives and years of hell by ending the war with two strikes. The weapon was horrific, and as with all war, the innocent suffered as well. But we ended it as cleanly as we could, and what's more, we rebuilt them. To steal from an unknown quotable, the U.S. is the only nation on earth that, by conquering in war, rebuilds and revitalizes the losing side to a better standard of living. They should've dropped them on December 7, 1942, and saved that many more lives and years.

I'd be for dropping one each in Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, except that it wouldn't really alter the landscape that much, and the targets would be strapping on firecrackers and hitching planes to New York before the mushroom cloud had cleared.

[wolf]

1. They weren't trying to go for the rapid version of urban renewal.

2. It's Philadelphia. of course it was corruption plagued. There would have been something wrong had that not been the case.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Or by Philly standards, something very very weird.

[Guyute]

After treating the Allied POW's the way they did, (or any others that were caught, i.e. most of China), Japan deserved everything they got and more. People can argue that "that was their way of thinking" all they want, but it was still barbaric. another 2 or 3 bombs would have REALLY taught them a lesson. I don't think any apology is necessary, nor shame. Allied soldiers were already on the home islands performing slave labour, so a prolonged military assault would have reduced their chance of recovery to nil.

[Undertoad]

Today Belmont Club points out the forgotten event of 100,000 Filipino civilians killed by retreating Japanese troops in Manila.

"The 100,000 civilians who died in the largest urban battle of the Pacific War -- more than at Hiroshima -- are not remembered in beautiful candles floating down darkened rivers or in flights of doves soaring into the blue sky; there is no anti-American significance to their deaths."

[Elspode]

I can't really stomach all of this second-guessing. As our vetereans of the conflict die off, so do our memories, apparently.

Japan was no Iraq. We were *attacked* without provocation. There was no ambiguity, no oil to be had. Whatever they got was whatever they got. An apology would be completely out of line, unless it was something like "We're sorry your leaders were stupid enough to attack us, so we had to kick your asses."

[xoxoxoBruce]

Right on Elspode. I talked and listened to literally hundreds of those vets coming back from WWII and they weren't the least bit sorry.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

We were *attacked* without provocation.

That we were attacked again without provocation (despite the fact that the attacking parties can in either case point to something they will call a provocation) puts us in the identical moral position in the War On Terror as in WW2. Iraq is but one campaign in the WOT, and inseparable from it if we want Islamoterrorism to go extinct. I certainly do, but I do wonder about some of those who take exception to my views. Now why is it that I should be obliged to wonder, eh?? Terror's breeding ground is extremist social orders, and what are nondemocracies but extremist societies? Democracies never feel like they need terrorists to push out the bad and bring in the good; they aren't that rigidly structured. This is why democracies tend to view terrorist cells as criminal gangs and treat them so -- and there is much justice in that view.

It's when the cells metastasize into mass movements that one has to shift to the war paradigm. Even more so when they get used as a means of proxy war.

[richlevy]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

That we were attacked again without provocation (despite the fact that the attacking parties can in either case point to something they will call a provocation) puts us in the identical moral position in the War On Terror as in WW2.

Which is why we felt the need to attack Iraq without provocation, or, more correctly, with fictitious provocation.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

BS, Rich. It's quite like the North African Campaign, right down to being sandy and the locals speaking Arabic and some of them being less than sympathetic.

You should remember just how harsh I am on anti-American viewpoints, and how much I believe America should win her wars. The we-shouldn't-win-this view is incomprehensible and reprehensible.