Wow, this is sounding terrifyingly similar to how suicide bombers justify their targeting of civilians. It's sad to see how easy it is for people who didn't grow up under the dogma of fundamentalist religion can still come to this way of thinking.

My friend, I implore you to think really hard about what you said, and take the time to recalibrate your moral compass. I can only hope that at some point in the future, you'll come to think that, war or not, enemy or not, killing civilians is bad. There is no shade of grey. It's only bad.

(Hint: its not banks..)

Governments and societies aren't 1-1 mappings of each other. You shouldn't mistake one as the other. And even if you do, it still doesn't take much thinking to ask: What about children?

Wow, Its fascinating, the mental gymnastics people perform to rationalise the atrocities their side perpetrates while in the same breath deploring the atrocities committed by the other side.

You better not take that away, because what defines you if you do?

If they didn't they wouldn't paint with such a broad brush.

Absolutely yes, I'll say that. ISIS was created by the US bumbling about in Iraq, just like al Queda before it was created by the US intriguing in Afghanistan. But I don't expect the US will ever learn that bombs are the clumsiest of tools for shaping human history.

As someone who isn't from America (and actually was born in a country which was subsequently bombed by America during peace time) I've never understood this idea that America is somehow justified in the belief that they are the moral arbiters of the world.

Who put you in charge? If the answer involves "we have a big military" it's interesting that a country obsessed with the concept of freedom is so willing fall back on "empire" when it's convenient. I guess Americans are still British at heart.

> Japanese civilians at the time weren't really innocent.

This sentence made my blood boil. How fucking dare you. America bombing civilian residences in order to handle other country's civil wars is not helping anyone. Fuck you.

> The whole country was working for the war effort, mainly to kill other Asian people.

Interesting rhetoric, given that America spends half a fucking TRILLION dollars a year on the military.

It's odd how this is portrayed as a negative aspect of Japan's militarism, when the Allies were fighting the same war with the same attitude.

The US insisted on unconditional surrender, prolonging the fighting and resulting in the atom bomb attacks, then ended up accepting the Japanese condition anyway.

What?? Japan was forced to accept Allies' condition.

After rejecting that, thus prolonging the war and using the atom bombs, the US ended up keeping the Emperor in place (ie accepting the previous Japanese condition) anyway.

Personally, I tend to believe that the nukes, the potential cost of defending against an invasion of the mainland by the US, and Russia's invasion made surrender look like the obvious choice, but remember that the initial plan for Pearl Harbor assumed a negotiated surrender with the US which, Japan hoped, would let them keep certain territories necessary to maintain supply lines for their colonial wars, which was what they really cared about.

Fanatical resistance by the military, both due to their own racist ideals and out of the fear for self-preservation (the Japanese people, the Western world and the rest of Asia basically hated Japan's government by the end,) drew the war and the surrender out longer than it needed to be.

Although, I also believe the main reason the US dropped the atomic bombs is that we had them, and therefore needed to justify the expense of making them by using them. It's likely that, without Japan's surrender, the US would have used nuclear weapons and invaded Japan at the same time.

That doesn't seem to be what you were originally arguing:

> It's odd how [Japan "fighting and fighting and fighting"] is portrayed as a negative aspect of Japan's militarism, when the Allies were fighting the same war with the same attitude.

How is this a myth if nukes were mentioned in emperor's address as a reason to surrender?

Because, as I've said, at least twice, they were already considering surrender even before the atomic bombs were dropped.

After that, please read some basic WWII history before stringing this thread out any longer, if you're seriously unaware of anything but the atom bomb that didn't go Japan's way in 1945.

That's not the point, obviously. The point is Japan's militarism combined with their utter over-the-top brutality and expansionist agenda.

Everything Japan learned about Imperialism it learned from the West, though. The Empire of Japan may have been brutal, but the Allies were hardly angels in comparison, or lacking in their own expansionist ideals.

Well quite. How was Japan able to attack "the USA" (itself established by over-the-top brutality and expansionism) in the first place? Because the US had earlier overthrown, occupied, suppressed and militarised territories that are actually closer to Tokyo than Washington DC.

How dare some Asian country think it could colonise Asia, when Asia belongs to the US and Europe.