[quote]angry chicken wrote:
“Western idealism, universal freedom, is such that all lives are to be respected on a
basic, fundamental level” is some SIXTIES hippie bullshit.[/quote]
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This is where I get that sense of idealism from, not the hippie movement.
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
The commanders in charge during WWII certainly didn’t have that bullshit holding them back when we nuked the shit out of Japan. And HOLY SHIT… IT WORKED! Took the will to fight right out of those imperialist bastards to the point where they GAVE UP THEIR ARMY… [/quote]
Current historical thought holds that the U.S. destroying the shit out of the Japanese forces, to the point that the homelands themselves were threatened, essentially removed any legitimacy that militarist had. The Japanese people saw that their armies were not, after all, invincible. This paved the way for the more moderate factions to speak out.
On top of this came the fact that the Russians invaded Manchuria, and the U.S. dropped the atom bombs and claimed that they had more and would continue dropping them until the Japanese surrendered. Since the atom bombs clearly invalidated whatever strategy the Japanese had, along with the fact that they couldn’t draw forces out of Manchuria to reinforce mainland Japan, meant that they had absolutely no way to win at this point. Combine this with the fact that the militarists, who were quite literally suicidal, were out of power, and we have the Japanese suing for peace.
Keep in mind though, this still wouldn’t have happened if the U.S. didn’t back down from their unconditional victory claim. The Japanese WOULD have continued to fight on if the U.S. didn’t allow the Emperor to hold his status. This is something that people forget. The Germans surrendered unconditionally. The Japanese did not.
Furthermore, we hung a lot of German war criminals. We didn’t touch any of the Japanese war criminals, and I will personally go and hunt you down if you claim the Japanese didn’t commit worse war crimes than the Germans did. Why did we do this? Because we determined the Japanese were assets in the Cold War and we couldn’t aggravate them.
In short… You’re wrong. You are speaking out of your ass.
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
But I’m just talking out of my ass. We should just pretend that shit didn’t happen and that the Japanese DIDN’T completely and utterly STOP all aggressive activities when we wiped out two of their cities. I’m not saying it’s NICE. I’m saying it would WORK. And that it’s a strategy that we should consider.
You apparently had a problem with a country HANGING two convicted terrorists in response to their group BURNING A MAN ALIVE… [/quote]
No, I have a problem with responding to brutality with brutality. Declaring war and beating a country to submission after they attacked us is fine. What the U.S. did to Japan is perfectly fine, and in my honest opinion the U.S. should have destroyed Japan and completely rewritten them in the manner we did with Germany. The Japanese should have been humbled to the point that they are forever apologetic to the East Asian countries they brutalized as does the Germans to the Jews. None of this happened, and it still pisses me off.
As I mentioned to Aragorn, I was responding more to this “These ISIS terrorists are scum and should be treated as such.” portion of Gkhan’s posts. Fighting and killing people is fine, but when we descend to being as brutal as they are, then what moral ground do we have? It becomes a pointless exercise and we lose any justification we had in destroying them.
[quote]angry chicken wrote:
We aren’t dealing with a Western democracy. We are dealing with a pack of sub-human animals who are brainwashed by an evil religion. And that religion is spreading and putting ALL Western democracy in grave danger.[/quote]
BULLSHIT. The Germans killing off 6 million people and forcibly murdering and sterilizing anyone they don’t like doesn’t qualify them as “sub-human animals?” What of the Japanese murdering tens of millions of East Asian peoples? Doesn’t that qualify them as “sub-human animals”?
