bomb

[stormsewer]

Yesterday was the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the Bomb on Nagasaki. I was at the preschool yesterday. It was interesting to see how the teacher chose to try and explain that to a pack of four year olds. I think some of the kids didn't quite understand the concept of an "anniversary" and thought they were going to drop a bomb on Nagasaki that day. This thing is such a huge part of the soul of modern Japan, especially for those who actually live in Nagasaki or Hiroshima, so it was interesting to watch these little Japanese kids getting their first injection of it.

Most Japanese people, of course, tend to be of the opinion that it was wrong for us to nuke them. I tend to think that hindsight is 20/20; it's easy to say that now, maybe, but it wasn't so clear at the time. There was (and is) a lot of reason to believe that an actual invasion of Japan would have been worse all around. But, it's fallacious to say that B or C would or wouldn't have happened if A hadn't happened. All we can be sure of is what DID happen (and even that tends to get hazy).

Comments

[margrietta.livejournal.com]

Also, they committed some major atrocities in China, let's not forget.

[stormsewer]

That they did. I don't know that that validates nuking a couple cities, killing around 500,000 civilians in the process, but it IS true that Japan was hardly an innocent victim.

[margrietta.livejournal.com]

Of course - I don't want to get into the "my [national] pain and suffering is greater than your pain and suffering" - but 20 million Chinese civilians died from 1937 to 1945 during Japan's invasion. About 200,000 Chinese civilians were killed during the Nanking massacre.

I'm just saying, let's not forget. Unlike Japan when it comes to Nanking, the US doesn't pretend that Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't happen, or wasn't "real". It's in our textbooks. It's on our national conscience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_nanking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War#Attacks_on_civilians

[stormsewer]

I'm not forgetting. Neither are most of the Japanese. The only people in Japan who are forgetting are right wing wackos. (But, as in the United States, right wing wackos do have a slightly unbalanced say in the government right now.) These textbooks that are always in the news only represent one or two percent of the total number of textbooks out there, and virtually no schools actually use them. You might also point out that Japan has been steadfastly pacifist since World War II, which you certainly couldn't say is true for us. And as for pretending that atrocities didn't actually happen, Americans are in no position to be pointing fingers.

[margrietta.livejournal.com]

I guess it's just that all this browbeating about the bomb ("then it's the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together") that just makes me think about the way these things are memorialized. And I understand that when happen to you in your home, it takes on more weight. I had never personally comprehended buildings exploding until September 11th, though I've never cared for American's collective self pity over it either.

But still, Japan and the US came out of WWII with very different pasts behind them. If we had been responsible for 20-30 million deaths in Asia, maybe it would have smacked some pacifistic sense into us. But that's now how things turned out.

I am curious what you mean by Americans pretending that our atrocities don't/didn't happen. I don't mean this in a confrontational way, I'm just curious what you mean. Abu Ghraib? Mountain Meadows? My Lai? Slavery? Haymarket? We celebrate Columbus day a little cluelessly, but we also celebrate Martin Luther King day with quite a bit of reverence. I dunno, it's complicated.

[margrietta.livejournal.com]

Also, I am both not as un-ignorant as I'd like to be ('cause the funny thing about ignorance is you can never really know what it is you're ignorant about) and am a very poor judge of what Average American thinks and feels about stuff like history.

Until very embarrassingly recently, I didn't know that the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie.

[stormsewer]

Abu Graib is a good recent example of what I'm talking about. Bush and his supporters would have you believe that it was an isolated incident, not representative of the way things are done over there, but obviously it's just the tip of the iceberg. Read the news (the stuff that doesn't make the front page), read Iraqi blogs, read Red Cross reports... Whether it's a policy or not, such abuses are widespread.

Guantanamo Bay is another lovely example. "Yeah, we've set it up so we can keep these prisoners without having to worry about useless international laws like the Geneva Conventions, sure, but we aren't actually doing anything BAD there! Heaven forbid the American government do something bad!" And no one seems to care, at least not enough to have any political repercussions for the people responsible.

And then there's all the shady dealings in Southeast Asia, South America, (and probably the Middle East and Africa) that the CIA et al has been involved in the last several decades, you know? Clandestine bombing campaigns, supplying arms to ruthlessly cruel dictatorships... Most Americans aren't even aware of that stuff (it's still vague to me, and most of the stuff I encountered when reading about recent Cambodian and Laotian history was new to me), and I betcha most of the really patriotic ones would deny it even happened if you told them about it. And the government likes it that way. The illusion of moral high ground is an important part of their pre-emptive war thing.

[stormsewer]

Oh yeah, one more thing. I'm pretty sure that if we could sweep our use of the Bomb under the rug, and if we thought it was in our best interests to do so, we probably would do our damnedest to do so. But whereas it's relatively easy to question the extent and severity of the wrongdoings of individual soldiers in the middle of a war (like in the case of Nanking), wiping two entire cities clean off the map with one big explosion each is not the kind of thing you can pretend didn't happen. And for better or worse, we didn't (and don't) even want to pretend it didn't happen, because it sent (and still sends) a clear message to the rest of the world: Don't fuck with us!

[stormsewer]

Though I gotta say, ignoring bad things or pretending they didn't happen is one of the more annoying aspects of Japanese culture.

[doctor-wombat.livejournal.com]

I'm not discounting Japanese war atrocities, but I'm of the firm belief that nuclear weapons should never be used. Not 60 years ago, not now, and not in the future. Maybe that makes me a hopeless hippie, but it's how I feel.

[stormsewer]

It's a thorny issue. I tend to be of the opinion that they should never be used again.