On this historic day (exactly 75 years to the day since the August 9 1945 atomic bombing of Nagasaki) we should take a moment to understand more about our shared history.
> But he was also behind the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans because, as Mr Stimson put it, "their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese".
The internment of Japanese-Americans is a blight on United States history [1], as is the gold rush era Chinese Exclusion Act [2] ("the first law implemented to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating" to the United States), as was the 1950s "Red Scare" [3] (where accusations of being Communist spies were made without evidence.)
As the United States enters into a (likely multi-decade long) second Cold War and potential painful economic decoupling, it's worth knowing this history so that the real problems the United States has identified with the Chinese Communist Party can be addressed in accordance to the values the United States exposes.
Especially with the presumption of innocence (innocent until proven guilty) when it comes to individual people's lives, and the principle that everybody is created equal.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's recent "Distrust and Verify" [4] reformulation (of a famous Russian proverb) should definitely be applied widely to counter the Chinese Communist Party threat, but great care must be taken to ensure America's core values are always respected. Cold Wars are very dangerous and vastly increase the risk of nuclear escalation, so it's vital we all understand what's at stake.
You write like there are dangers that the US might forget or lose their values, like innocent until proven guilty or that everybody is created equal.
The US has never lived up to those. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (I hope no one forgot about that one) or all the tragic events that ignited the BLM movement are just current examples.
I am afraid that what happens in the upcoming election will be a referendum on what kind of country the US will become, and what kind of reaction it will have to the urgent existential problems the world faces today. If the current administration persists, I do not see any genuine way that the country could tackle these problems. Just look at the completely botched non-response to the current pandemic at the Federal level; not to mention the constant racism in calling the coronavirus "Kung Flu". All the political appointees lie constantly and seem to be terrible at their jobs. I do not personally believe that the country can handle the upcoming crises in a reasonable manner if that happens.
On the other hand, even with a change in the Presidency, it is almost guaranteed that the GOP will do everything in its power to obstruct the new Administration, if it holds any power at all.
I am not sure what will happen. I share your hope but not your optimism.
Yeah, the Japanese interment sucks, but I wonder what would have happened if there was no internment. Could US wartime industry on the West coast have operated successfully under constant sabotage? Would it be better for America to lose the war to Japan (or at least reach a deal and let Japan keep all of the Pacific islands and Chinese land holdings) if it meant that the internment didn't happen?
It's impossible to figure out what percentage of Japanese people in the US would have sided with Japan over America. But it might be telling that during the Niihau incident, literally every Japanese person the pilot ran across decided to help him, in contrast to helping the native Hawaiians they had been living with for decades. I wonder at what point the internment becomes acceptable. If 99% of the Japanese people in America would have supported Japan in the war, would the internment have been okay?
I grew up with a cold war era US-centric understanding of why Hiroshima and Nagasaki had to happen. I get those arguments, Later I was taught a very different, also compelling, rationale for Nagazaki from a Japanese perspective. I get that argument, too.
I'm USian, so of course I like any argument that puts the US on the right side of history. But as that moment gets more and more into the past, and we lose the context of culture, etc of that time, what is left is that the US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition.
I've been taught the nuances. I've accepted them and perhaps even clung to them. As time passes, even USians might feel less need to keep the memory of those nuances alive. But the horror of that action doesn't go away.
I grew up learning about Christopher Columbus, and Pocahontas and Thomas Jefferson, and all the narrative we learned decades ago. Especially lately there has been a lot different version of much of those stories. Some see people and actions of the past as heroic, others see them as hideous.
I do not personally condemn decision makers of WWII. I am grateful for the sacrifices of past generations. But the fact remains that the US is the only country in the history of the world that has ever used a nuclear weapon in anger. That is extremely humbling.
> US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition.
One particular nuance you are passing over is that the US (and all other major combatants in the war) had already been engaged in the killing of thousands of civilians through total war and "conventional" carpet bombing. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unique in that they were leveled from a single, nuclear bomb, but they absolutely were not unique in that they were leveled. Dozens of other Japanese cities experience the same level of destruction (literally 90+% of all structures destroyed) using firebombing (as in Napalm, used intentionally as most Japanese structures at the time were wooden) as the US pushed towards the Japanese mainland. And the US wasn't alone: the bombing of entire cities was a feature of the the Western German front and the German-Russian front, by both the Allies and the Axis.
So while you aren't wrong that dropping the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially the US flexing its technological muscles, I am curious as to why it is considered abhorrent to kill thousands of civilians using a single "nuclear weapon in anger", but the killing of just as many civilians using many bombs seems to be accepted as just a part of the war?
I, like you, learned all the rationalizations that got to be written in history by the victor.
The point at which most of it started to unravel for me was when I learned that the United States had a whole spate of atomic bombs they were scheduling to drop if Imperial Japan didn't surrender. We think of it as two because that's all the further we got, but if things had gone a little differently it would have been six, eight, etc.
A willingness to cause that kind of unprecedented basically indiscriminate devastation, well it forced me to look at the events that actually did happen through a very different lens.
I'd suggest that using the bomb against Japan was not the real sin. The real sin, and the real idiotic blunder, was not to immediately renounce the use of nuclear weapons and institute an international order to safeguard that renunciation. From 1945 to 1949, Stalin did not have the bomb, and until the very last he had no good reason to believe he would have it anytime soon. USSR would have been very open to negotiations on that topic in 1946. The rest of the world would have fallen in line. Humanity would have been so much safer. It's possible FDR would have been wise enough to do this, and Henry Wallace probably would have been. Truman, though, was over his head. The evil bastards led him around by the nose. We've never had an actual representative government since then.
One less known fact is that one of the advisors to US army back in WWII is Dr Liang Sicheng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liang_Sicheng. He is the father of modern Chinese architecture. He recommended that the Americans military authorities spare the ancient Japanese cities of Kyoto and Nara.
He married with another legend Lin Huiyin, whose niece Maya Lin later designed Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Lin
The fact this claim has been at the top of this Hacker News thread for hours piqued my interest. So I did some research.
I read the New York Times "Overlooked" obituary for Dr Liang Sicheng but found no reference to this event. [1]. The closest thing I could find was [2] which writes the following (and links to a currently-unavailable article hosted on the government of China mouthpiece China Daily):
> During World War II, as Japan occupied Beijing and most of coastal China, Liang Sicheng was working in Sichuan. According to Luo Zhewen, a former student who frequently assisted Liang Sicheng in his research, Liang heard that the Allied forces were planning on bombing Japan and Japanese-controlled areas in China. Liang began drawing up a map of the major Chinese cities occupied by Japan as well as Japan’s former capitals, Nara and Kyoto to help American military planners avoid destroying important historic sites and buildings. Liang then traveled to Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Republic of China, and passed the maps to the US Army liaison stationed there.
The NYT article suggests Dr. Liang Sicheng was later in life sent to re-education as a counterrevolutionary of Maoist China, but that he has had his reputation revived by the CCP which turn him into a folk hero. I don't doubt that he passed on maps and messages to the US Army in the hope of sparing culturally important sites from bombing, but without further evidence the claim that he was an advisor to the US military that convinced them to spare Kyoto and Nara appears overblown.
I am happy to be convinced if independent historians believe Liang Sicheng had a part to play in the decision, but right now this claim feels like highly-upvoted CCP propaganda.
An interesting fact that you may not know about is that Von Neumann was involved in the decision :
"Von Neumann, four other scientists, and various military personnel were included in the target selection committee that was responsible for choosing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the first targets of the atomic bomb. Von Neumann oversaw computations related to the expected size of the bomb blasts, estimated death tolls, and the distance above the ground at which the bombs should be detonated for optimum shock wave propagation and thus maximum effect. The cultural capital Kyoto, which had been spared the bombing inflicted upon militarily significant cities, was von Neumann's first choice,[131] a selection seconded by Manhattan Project leader General Leslie Groves. However, this target was dismissed by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.[132]"
I see how hard we are still trying to rationalize such a despicable act as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"We choose not to destroy cultural value" seems a compassion argument until one realizes that the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed. To try to justify the attack, to talk about the process, the decisions, removes a very important part of the discussion. And that is the consequences on the civil population.
I accept that talking about strategies and politics make sense. But, to remove any human consideration from the discussion only makes us one step closer to repeat the horrific acts of the past.
As we have seen so recently, facts do not change people's minds, but feelings do. To talk about the effects on the population, to talk about the suffering will help people to change their minds about using atomic bombs.
The USA, the only country to ever use a nuclear bomb, has a population that has disturbingly not reckoned with this history.
From a recent study into USA attitudes to the usage of nuclear weapons in warfare:
> Sagan noted, “The most shocking finding of our study is that 60 percent of Americans would approve of killing 2 million Iranian civilians to prevent an invasion of Iran that might kill 20,000 U. S. soldiers. ”
I think it's pretty hard to overstate how concerning that study result is. The nuclear bombing of Japan killed 120,000 people. Here, 60% say they'd approve of killing 2,000,000 _civilians_ to save 20,000 U.S combatants.
I'd hazard a guess that more Americans are proud of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than are ashamed of it. To not reckon with the horror and the pain of those bombing is to be open to doing the same and worse in the future.
With Fascism whipping up in the USA, that survey result becomes even more ominous.
> until one realizes that the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed.
Says who? The firebombing of Tokyo killed just as many civilians as the atom bomb over Hiroshima did (100k+), and is still considered the single most destructive air raid in human history[0]. And that was just Tokyo. Dozens of similar air raids were conducted throughout Japan, to say nothing of the European/Russian fronts.
It is not those defending the atom bombs that are removing "any human consideration from the discussion". It is people like yourself who, presumably because you don't know the relevant history, are removing the human consideration by ignoring the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were already being slaughtered. But for some reason killing someone with a napalm filled "conventional" bomb is more acceptable than killing them with an atomic bomb.
Japanese did their fair share of disgusting things during WWII and occupation of China, Korea, but the article sounds like and old joke about a mugger who says he saved a girl today. He didn't mug her, so that counts as a save.
Even overflowing with tourists Kyoto is a magical place. I'm not religious at all but standing in those beautiful temples and shrines I can't help but be moved by them. Destroying them would have been a tragic mistake.
[+] [-] someperson|5 years ago|reply
> But he was also behind the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans because, as Mr Stimson put it, "their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese".
The internment of Japanese-Americans is a blight on United States history [1], as is the gold rush era Chinese Exclusion Act [2] ("the first law implemented to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating" to the United States), as was the 1950s "Red Scare" [3] (where accusations of being Communist spies were made without evidence.)
As the United States enters into a (likely multi-decade long) second Cold War and potential painful economic decoupling, it's worth knowing this history so that the real problems the United States has identified with the Chinese Communist Party can be addressed in accordance to the values the United States exposes.
Especially with the presumption of innocence (innocent until proven guilty) when it comes to individual people's lives, and the principle that everybody is created equal.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's recent "Distrust and Verify" [4] reformulation (of a famous Russian proverb) should definitely be applied widely to counter the Chinese Communist Party threat, but great care must be taken to ensure America's core values are always respected. Cold Wars are very dangerous and vastly increase the risk of nuclear escalation, so it's vital we all understand what's at stake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust,_but_verify
[+] [-] Ma8ee|5 years ago|reply
The US has never lived up to those. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (I hope no one forgot about that one) or all the tragic events that ignited the BLM movement are just current examples.
[+] [-] googthrowaway42|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pm90|5 years ago|reply
On the other hand, even with a change in the Presidency, it is almost guaranteed that the GOP will do everything in its power to obstruct the new Administration, if it holds any power at all.
I am not sure what will happen. I share your hope but not your optimism.
[+] [-] oh_sigh|5 years ago|reply
It's impossible to figure out what percentage of Japanese people in the US would have sided with Japan over America. But it might be telling that during the Niihau incident, literally every Japanese person the pilot ran across decided to help him, in contrast to helping the native Hawaiians they had been living with for decades. I wonder at what point the internment becomes acceptable. If 99% of the Japanese people in America would have supported Japan in the war, would the internment have been okay?
[+] [-] freeopinion|5 years ago|reply
I'm USian, so of course I like any argument that puts the US on the right side of history. But as that moment gets more and more into the past, and we lose the context of culture, etc of that time, what is left is that the US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition.
I've been taught the nuances. I've accepted them and perhaps even clung to them. As time passes, even USians might feel less need to keep the memory of those nuances alive. But the horror of that action doesn't go away.
I grew up learning about Christopher Columbus, and Pocahontas and Thomas Jefferson, and all the narrative we learned decades ago. Especially lately there has been a lot different version of much of those stories. Some see people and actions of the past as heroic, others see them as hideous.
I do not personally condemn decision makers of WWII. I am grateful for the sacrifices of past generations. But the fact remains that the US is the only country in the history of the world that has ever used a nuclear weapon in anger. That is extremely humbling.
[+] [-] bart_spoon|5 years ago|reply
One particular nuance you are passing over is that the US (and all other major combatants in the war) had already been engaged in the killing of thousands of civilians through total war and "conventional" carpet bombing. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unique in that they were leveled from a single, nuclear bomb, but they absolutely were not unique in that they were leveled. Dozens of other Japanese cities experience the same level of destruction (literally 90+% of all structures destroyed) using firebombing (as in Napalm, used intentionally as most Japanese structures at the time were wooden) as the US pushed towards the Japanese mainland. And the US wasn't alone: the bombing of entire cities was a feature of the the Western German front and the German-Russian front, by both the Allies and the Axis.
So while you aren't wrong that dropping the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially the US flexing its technological muscles, I am curious as to why it is considered abhorrent to kill thousands of civilians using a single "nuclear weapon in anger", but the killing of just as many civilians using many bombs seems to be accepted as just a part of the war?
[+] [-] im_down_w_otp|5 years ago|reply
The point at which most of it started to unravel for me was when I learned that the United States had a whole spate of atomic bombs they were scheduling to drop if Imperial Japan didn't surrender. We think of it as two because that's all the further we got, but if things had gone a little differently it would have been six, eight, etc.
A willingness to cause that kind of unprecedented basically indiscriminate devastation, well it forced me to look at the events that actually did happen through a very different lens.
[+] [-] MangoCoffee|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jessaustin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hhua_|5 years ago|reply
He married with another legend Lin Huiyin, whose niece Maya Lin later designed Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Lin
[+] [-] someperson|5 years ago|reply
I read the New York Times "Overlooked" obituary for Dr Liang Sicheng but found no reference to this event. [1]. The closest thing I could find was [2] which writes the following (and links to a currently-unavailable article hosted on the government of China mouthpiece China Daily):
> During World War II, as Japan occupied Beijing and most of coastal China, Liang Sicheng was working in Sichuan. According to Luo Zhewen, a former student who frequently assisted Liang Sicheng in his research, Liang heard that the Allied forces were planning on bombing Japan and Japanese-controlled areas in China. Liang began drawing up a map of the major Chinese cities occupied by Japan as well as Japan’s former capitals, Nara and Kyoto to help American military planners avoid destroying important historic sites and buildings. Liang then traveled to Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Republic of China, and passed the maps to the US Army liaison stationed there.
The NYT article suggests Dr. Liang Sicheng was later in life sent to re-education as a counterrevolutionary of Maoist China, but that he has had his reputation revived by the CCP which turn him into a folk hero. I don't doubt that he passed on maps and messages to the US Army in the hope of sparing culturally important sites from bombing, but without further evidence the claim that he was an advisor to the US military that convinced them to spare Kyoto and Nara appears overblown.
I am happy to be convinced if independent historians believe Liang Sicheng had a part to play in the decision, but right now this claim feels like highly-upvoted CCP propaganda.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/obituaries/overlooked-lin...
[2] https://radiichina.com/did-chinese-architect-liang-sicheng-s...
[+] [-] toto444|5 years ago|reply
"Von Neumann, four other scientists, and various military personnel were included in the target selection committee that was responsible for choosing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the first targets of the atomic bomb. Von Neumann oversaw computations related to the expected size of the bomb blasts, estimated death tolls, and the distance above the ground at which the bombs should be detonated for optimum shock wave propagation and thus maximum effect. The cultural capital Kyoto, which had been spared the bombing inflicted upon militarily significant cities, was von Neumann's first choice,[131] a selection seconded by Manhattan Project leader General Leslie Groves. However, this target was dismissed by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.[132]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann
[+] [-] Hokusai|5 years ago|reply
"We choose not to destroy cultural value" seems a compassion argument until one realizes that the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed. To try to justify the attack, to talk about the process, the decisions, removes a very important part of the discussion. And that is the consequences on the civil population.
I accept that talking about strategies and politics make sense. But, to remove any human consideration from the discussion only makes us one step closer to repeat the horrific acts of the past.
As we have seen so recently, facts do not change people's minds, but feelings do. To talk about the effects on the population, to talk about the suffering will help people to change their minds about using atomic bombs.
[+] [-] thundergolfer|5 years ago|reply
From a recent study into USA attitudes to the usage of nuclear weapons in warfare:
> Sagan noted, “The most shocking finding of our study is that 60 percent of Americans would approve of killing 2 million Iranian civilians to prevent an invasion of Iran that might kill 20,000 U. S. soldiers. ”
I think it's pretty hard to overstate how concerning that study result is. The nuclear bombing of Japan killed 120,000 people. Here, 60% say they'd approve of killing 2,000,000 _civilians_ to save 20,000 U.S combatants.
I'd hazard a guess that more Americans are proud of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than are ashamed of it. To not reckon with the horror and the pain of those bombing is to be open to doing the same and worse in the future.
With Fascism whipping up in the USA, that survey result becomes even more ominous.
1. https://news.stanford.edu/2017/08/08/americans-weigh-nuclear...
[+] [-] bart_spoon|5 years ago|reply
Says who? The firebombing of Tokyo killed just as many civilians as the atom bomb over Hiroshima did (100k+), and is still considered the single most destructive air raid in human history[0]. And that was just Tokyo. Dozens of similar air raids were conducted throughout Japan, to say nothing of the European/Russian fronts.
It is not those defending the atom bombs that are removing "any human consideration from the discussion". It is people like yourself who, presumably because you don't know the relevant history, are removing the human consideration by ignoring the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were already being slaughtered. But for some reason killing someone with a napalm filled "conventional" bomb is more acceptable than killing them with an atomic bomb.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo
[+] [-] slightwinder|5 years ago|reply
The conventional bombings on Tokyo killed more people than any atomic bomb.
[+] [-] redis_mlc|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] pmoriarty|5 years ago|reply
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/08/08/kyoto-misconceptio...
[+] [-] brzezmac|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cageface|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 082349872349872|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] postit|5 years ago|reply