In Dutch culture, Prime Minsters are considered important figures and assassinating them is necessary in order to eat them.
In Brazilian culture, Presidents, even former ones, are considered important figures and watching their meeting planning a crime is a serious cultural comedy.
(for anyone out of the loop: Bolsonaro recorded an all-hands meeting with several ministers, sometime during the 2022 campaign, wanting a “solution” to his inevitable loss. One of the ministers even asked if it was being recorded, to which both bozo and the intelligence general gestured a “no”, because “everything we’re saying here could incriminate us”. Said recording was found on the Google Drive of one of his cronies and was openly displayed in local news)
Here in America murder is also really looked down upon. For example say you kill a guy then twenty years later on death row your turn finally comes up and the state fucks up and kills you badly or has to try a second time or change methods of killing. I mean that’s just terrible.
To be honest: I passively learned that Japanese commit Seppuku if they break their knightly code. The kamakazi pilots. And during WWII, they were non stop “I didn’t hear no bell” even after the first nuke.
This biased me into thinking Japanese values life a tidbit less than others.
But I’m pretty sure they just had a rampant conservative choo choo train with no brakes, no exits for the more sane Japanese.
Pretty sure the ones dropping nukes on entire cities have even less value for life.
We put a monetary value on their lives. The value is different, but it’s there nevertheless.
That’s almost more disgusting
Here in the states we have a long standing tradition of assassination of our elected officials.
The US also has a long standing tradition of overkill in warfare. It has little to do with our lack of respect for life, rather the assumption enemies might not me keen to surrender or may believe in the cause for which they’re engaged in hostilities enough to put up an honest fight.
Shaun on YouTube makes a pretty strong case the US didn’t need to drop atom bombs on Japan to secure its surrender, but the US has been really good about not resorting to nuclear attacks since then even when officials wanted to use them, as per Reagan and Trump. Human civilization continues to close on eighty years without a nuclear war.
Everyone forgets the Korean war, but MacArthur begged for the use of nukes when he fucked up and gave the Chinese an excuse to get directly involved. This is especially notable because while the USSR had tested a nuke at that point, they didn’t have many, and they didn’t have the ability to deploy them en masse against the US directly. The US still had an effective monopoly on deploying nukes, and it still didn’t use them.
Oh, and fuck MacArthur.
We literally nuked them to cow them into surrender rather than spend millions of American and japanese lives in a brutal and ultimately pointless land campaign. We took away their glorious last stand on the home islands and replaced it with instant annihilation, lingering death, and the taste of the sun. It might have spared more Japanese lives in the long run, but it definitely saved a whole mess of American lives in an immediate way. That’s what really matters. USA #1 baybeee
That’s a post facto justification. Reading over the notes of the people doing the strategic planning for it all, it’s quite clear they expected the war to continue. For example, there was a debate on if they should drop the nukes as they become available (which would have been a few a month), or if they should store them up and drop a whole lot on invasion day.
The Japanese had already fought on through the firebombing of Tokyo. That killed a comparable number of people to the atomic bombings. It just takes a lot more bombers to make it happen compared to dropping a nuke.
Just makes me think that the Japanese probably should’ve surrendered way earlier to save those lives
Honestly I feel like we really missed something when we passed on the bat bombs. Those things would have absolutely annihilated any significant concentrations of Japanese structures. I feel like weaponizing nature could be done a lot better
In his letter, Adams stated that the bat was the “lowest form of animal life”, and that, until now, “reasons for its creation have remained unexplained”.
In one incident, the Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base … near Carlsbad, New Mexico, was set on fire on May 15, 1943, when armed bats were accidentally released.
Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with over a thousand compartments, each containing a hibernating Mexican free-tailed bat with a small, timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats, which would then disperse and roost in eaves and attics in a 20–40-mile radius (32–64 km). The incendiaries, which were set on timers, would then ignite and start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper constructions of the Japanese cities that were the weapon’s intended target.
Thanks for this incredible bit of knowledge.
Complete bullshit and typical 'murican propaganda. Japan was already preparing to surrender.
There’s strong arguments to be made that we nuked them so that they’d surrender to us instead of the Russians.
Who told you Japan was planning to continue the war after Hiroshima?
They were planning to concede after the first bomb. The president didn’t even learn of Nagasaki until it was in the news.
There’s a lot more to it than that. Just for starters, there was a short lived coup in the military to try to keep it going. Tons going on in those last few days of the war on the Japanese side, and even if you had perfect knowledge of everything, it wasn’t obvious that they would surrender.
I could never claim to summarise even five minutes of WWII with a couple of sentences, but my point is that it’s hardly fair to characterise Japan as “ain’t heard no bell”
