Japan started the war. The USA ended it.
This week marks the 72nd year anniversary of the USA dropping ‘The Bomb’ onto Hiroshima and Nagasaiki, Japan. To refresh memories, Japan is the same nation that attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941—killing 2,403 and injuring 1,178 Americans—without formally declaring war. Yeah… those little bastards.
In eventual retaliation, the USA, under Democrat president Harry Truman, dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, securing Japanese defeat and ending the Pacific theater of World War II. Truman estimated that half a million American lives were saved by dropping the bomb.
But the left doesn’t want to focus on victories (especially American victories), or pesky details like who started the war, or what the Japanese were doing to American POWs or the Chinese. No, leftists are using this anniversary to point out what a horrible thing nuclear war is and how we shouldn’t blow stuff up or kill people with nukes. I disagree. You just need to be killing the right people with nukes.
Setsuko Thurlow, a Hiroshima survivor writes:
“Within that single flash of light, my beloved Hiroshima became a place of desolation, with heaps of skeletons and blackened corpses everywhere. Of a population of 360,000 — largely non-combatant women, children and elderly — most became victims of the indiscriminate massacre of the atomic bombing.”
Granted that’s scary as hell, but no one has ever said war was pretty.
The fact is, nations start wars and other nations fight back. The nation who kills the most people and blows up the most stuff is the winner of the war. In the case of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atomic bomb blew stuff up and killed people much faster than more traditional bombing runs or invasions.
And that’s what makes nuclear warfare so “wrong.” It wasn’t “fair” that the USA attacked Japan so efficiently, killed people that quickly, and blew stuff up in a flash of light. It doesn’t matter that it saved more lives than it killed, it doesn’t matter that it was pivotal in ending the expansion and eventual reign of one of the most evil regimes throughout history, all that matters, is that the USA was evilly efficient.
War isn’t about fairness people, it’s about winning and securing peace—which we’ve had with Japan for 70 years.
War ends, and it’s followed by peace. SHOCKER.
Post updated August 9, 2017
NOT SUBSCRIBED TO THE PODCAST? FIX THAT! IT’S COMPLETELY FREE ON BOTH ITUNES HERE AND SOUNDCLOUD HERE.
Well said, Steven! Sick of this historical illiteracy. Your buddy at howtheworldworks did a great video on this some years back.
Thank you, Steven. If only these whiners knew actual HISTORY, this wouldn’t even be an issue. I shudder to think how many more Jews would have died in ovens and how many more American servicemen and women would have perished in combat had we not acted decisively and ended things.
Sorry Leslie. The Bomb didn’t save one Jew. The Germans had been defeated three months earlier. And the Allies won WW2 not the USA. Check the Instruments of Surrender. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Instrument_of_Surrender
Leslie never said We used the bomb to stop the germans, What she said is that we prevented more deaths by acting decisively which we did in both campaigns. D-day and the battles that followed D-day were absolutely decisive. Also the bombings we did with conventional weapons on Berlin was decisive.
The absolute lack of knowledge you have on this issue is truly astounding. Nuclear bombs do not just kill everything in range in a big ball of light. A large number of people within the blast radius actually survive the blast, with their skin melted off, clothes burned into their skin, etc. They then die agonizing deaths from exposure (due to their lack of skin), radiation poisoning, multiple cancers, and other detrimental health effects. Their children, if they aren’t rendered impotent and are able to find suitable partners even with melted skin and multiple cancers, are often mutated and are almost universally viewed as carriers of contagion, thus making even their children suffer from the bomb. This wasn’t just a big boom which made all the bad guys go away in a big flash of American glory; not even our firebombing campaigns, which were designed specifically to attack civilian housing, could hold a candle to how brutally we killed innocent Japanese civilians. It was a big boom which caused incredible amounts of death and destruction in a *civilian area*, unlike the surprise Japanese bombing of a US *military port* years earlier. Using the bomb was the right decision, but glorifying such a brutal attack on hundreds of thousands of civilians and slave laborers is ridiculous, as is treating it as “revenge” for Pearl Harbor.
You got part of it right. I would argue that those noncombatants were cheering on, literally, the rape and murder of Chinese in Nanking, Philippines, koreans, and others elsewhere just a few years earlier. I have no sympathy for them. They got what they asked and cheered for, full scale war.
Wrong both cities had factories and ports for ships. Please learn about history before you spew
Puru, you’re as much a moron as your little rant there,maybe you think we should all be speaking Japanese or German.
What if we still bombed today like we did then? There would be no ISIS. Iraq would have been a desert. Bin Laden would have been vaporized. If we still carpet bombed we would have saved many more American lives at the cost of many more civilian casualties and destruction. People really should appreciate the precision of the bombs we use today as it could be much worse.
But then the military industrial complex would’ve not be making as much money.
Peace through strength….worked with Japan. Now we will never know peace with Iran because our POS is weak and a true coward. I suppose in his mind, when (not if) drops their first bomb, it will serve us right for being such baaaaaaadddddd people.
Leslie, the German war was over when the bombs were dropped on Japan. They had already surrendered. Dropping the bombs was still the right thing to do though. Not only did it save more lives than it took, the important thing is that the lives saved were American lives.
The headline on this article is absurd. Everyone in America was glad the war was over and relieved we did not have to engage in combat in Japan. That would have cost a lot more lives including many civilian lives. Whether we should have and use nuclear weapons in another issue and it is not exclusive to liberals. However, we are locked in to keeping this arsenal because other countries also have nuclear weapons including Russia, China, North Korea, India, Pakistan. Israel, European countries and perhaps Iran in the near future. Conservative publications and websites that use the National Enquirer model of journalism can’t be taken seriously by anyone who has a brain and uses it.
…..first….the author didn’t use the phrase “SNEAK ATTACK”..which is what it was…..the dresden fire bombing killed almost as many civilians in one day in germany……tell that to puru…also tell her that the atomic bombing not only saved thousands of american lives…. but it also saved probably a million japanese lives….the civilians would have committed to fighting to the death all across their country.. and they were preparing to do so ….yes the bombing was a terrible thing to do …BUT IT SAVED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF LIVES american AND JAPANESE!!!!!!!!!! they should almost be grateful ….it ended a war that they started …and we FINISHED it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.
I can’t believe what I’m hearing from liberals today. They would be okay with hundreds of thousands more dying from the invasion of Japan on both sides then killing a lot less people with a nuclear bomb they would be okay with hundreds of thousands more dying from the invasion of japan on both sides then killing a lot less people with a nuclear bomb
The Atomic bomb is the greatest weapon of peace that mankind has ever created.
By the time WWI ended, the British Empire had paid a high price in both blood and treasure. On the former side of the ledger, 930,785 soldiers had either died in combat or were declared missing in action. The empire’s civilian deaths due to military action or crimes against humanity totaled 18,829 while civilian deaths as a result of malnutrition and disease (excluding the influenza pandemic) hit 109,000. Breaking down the total of the empire’s soldiers killed in combat or declared missing in action, the United Kingdom itself accounted for 734,697, followed by India with 62,060; Canada, 56,638; Australia, 53,560; New Zealand, 16,710; and South Africa, 7,120.
The above is an excerpt from an article that was explaining the entry into WWI by the British empire. This brought me to my recurring thoughts regarding the atomic bomb and nuclear weapons. My contention is that nuclear weapons are the greatest weapon of peace that has ever been produced. A weapon so powerful that it has the potential to destroy us all. It is the actualization in theory and fact of the weapon that Alfred Nobel believed he had invented. The weapon that would end all war because of mutually assured destruction, therefore no one could conceive using it.,
I believe we’ve arrived at that point. If you’ll consider the average daily loss of life in the conflicts leading up to the invention of nuclear weapons and then examine the drastic reduction in losses after their invention and their 2 uses, I believe you’ll take my point.
Rejoice in this time of peace, Over 425,000 Allied and German troops were killed, wounded or went missing during the Battle of Normandy.June 6, 1944
How many people have died in a war in the 70 years since then? What is the reason?
I have a two-part question for the people that argue that the Bomb should not have been used: A) Did you have a father or grandfather in the armed services at the end of WWII? If your answer is yes: B) Considering that estimates for American dead were projected to be in the neighborhood of 400,000 to 800,000, what do you think the odds are that you wouldn’t even be around to question it?
This article is garbage. FDR needed Japan to bomb Pearl Harbor.
Japan had no intentions of surrendering. The bombs changed their mind, but they were defeated by then anyway as Italy and Germany were finished earlier. FRD buddying up with Stalin murdered and worse way more than Hitler came close to or what school history books have told. Sorry to burst bubbles.
There were between 90 and 146 thousand people living in those cities at the time, the majority of them civilians. While the actions of their government and military were truly terrible and dishonorable, that does not mean every civilian supported the actions of their government. I’m not saying that FDR made the wrong decision, because it did save the lives of many allied soldiers, I’m just saying it was a morally questionable decision. So maybe instead of cheering at the death of innocents and advocating for the death of more, we should be grateful for the soldiers that it saved, but be aware of the horrific consequences it has caused. Theres a reason no one else has ever dropped a nuclear weapon on a populated area after that. Nuclear war is very far from peace.
Remember, Governments start wars, not the common folk. There is profit in war that allows money and resources to be taken away from the private to the public sector. Government in it’s desire for control desires such actions. If society would get in in there minds to dissolve Government, then war should go away. I mean if natural rights would be a world wide thing and everyone who wanted to be armed would be armed and at best private armies would do but the age of massive Government ran military’s and weapons that would wipe out mankind has got to go. If a nation with minimal Government had a well sized armed populace no one would ever think to invade. Trade with other nations and war could fade away, at least one hopes. Adam Kokesh’s Freedom might have something to say there or one of Stefan Molyneux’s videos. However as a Christian Anarcho-Capitalist, I realize for one wanting to rid the state that the world would never live up to such unrealistic expectations. At least we can reduce the state as much as we can.
Also, forgot to mention… War is a racket. Major General Smedley Butler. Another historical interest, the Christmas Truce of 1914.