Thread by @Cataphrak

I feel like I'm going to be posting this once a week until Oppenheimer leaves theatres and the discourse founded on the constant racist erasure of Imperial Japan's victims goes away.

@AWOAMM I'd definitely recommend looking more into (for example) SE Asian takes on the occupation, since they get even less attention than China does.

@AWOAMM On a tangential note, Isabel Hull's "Absolute Destruction" is about the Imperial German Army, but it touches on a lot of institutional trends which also have a lot of bearing on why the IJA behaved the way it did.

@twitchell_adam Same as Eamon de Valera denying the Holocaust, because if he'd accepted it'd happened, he would have had to accept that the course of action most abhorrent to him - allying Ireland with the British in WW2, would have been the morally correct one.

@BrandtBrickell @AlexMLeo Imperial Japanese atrocities in Asia hadn't stopped by August 1945. They were ongoing, and equivalent in murderous scale to what the Nazis were doing in Europe.

@BrandtBrickell @AlexMLeo That's what I'm getting at. Any discussion about the atomic bombings without the consideration that they *stopped* these crimes against humanity is one that transparently gives the lives of the imperialists value, and their victims none.

@BrandtBrickell @AlexMLeo Half a million German civilians died during the Soviet campaign that liberated the death camps in the east. Do you wring your hands about them too, or is it different when it comes to liberating white people?

@twitchell_adam imo, things can be bad and necessary, if only to prevent worse - the entire Second World War, for instance.

@BrandtBrickell @AlexMLeo The Soviet campaign in Germany was vicious. It involved levelling cities and mass rapes and clearing out apartment blocks with flamethrowers.

And if certain white people talked about that campaign the way they talked about the atomic bombings, they'd be classed as neonazis.

@BrandtBrickell @largeicedcawfee @AlexMLeo And would have set a precedent for the use of nukes as tactical weapons, rather than strategic ones.

@Edge23875099 What the Nazis did to a country of 170 million, Imperial Japan did to a country with a population three times larger, and then again to other countries which had hundreds of millions more people in them.

You can say that incinerating 200 000 people in atomic fire was bad - that's true. You can say that it was a war crime - under the 1977 Geneva Protocol, that's categorically correct.

But don't you dare claim that letting Japan keep its empire was a superior alternative.

@smarzeli @L8zyboy108 And that's not mentioning the fact that Poland is also a foreign country to North Americans. France and Germany too.

If people who commit genocide on Asian foreigners get more sympathy than people who commit genocide on White foreigners, there's a word for that.

@MechFrog12 Same with the occupation of Taiwan.

@kebabcrusher69 @Mr3byfive Japanese ultranationalists are a relatively small minority, but they're far outnumbered by people in the west who boost the same talking points.

@Sniffy2 More German civilians died in WW2 than Japanese ones, and the only people who use the former to morally equate the Allies with the people they were fighting are rabid anticommunists and Neo-Nazis. "Normal" people admit it was ugly, and then accept that it needed to be done.

@Sniffy2 Almost nobody argues that a conditional surrender where Germany kept its conquered territories would have been acceptable, even to spare half a million German lives.

People argue that the Allies should have accepted such a surrender from Japan all the time.

@Sniffy2 If someone thinks that every means necessary should have been taken to end the Holocaust ASAP, and doesn't say the same for Imperial Japan's multiple ongoing genocides, then I feel justified in assuming they value one set of victims less than the other.

@smarzeli @AlexMLeo @BrandtBrickell Then you post a thread about the Holocaust and get inundated with people going "Okay, the Holocaust was bad, BUT..."

Because that's what the discourse is.

@HopSkip9 @tek_sauce For one thing, they could probably start by taking the imperial-era war flag off the ships-they-are-constitutionally-required-not-to-call-warships.

Because that's how low the bar is. It'd be like the Bundeswehr still flying the swastika.

@cher1lly And it could probably be argued that any end of the war where Korea becomes independent would have led to a Korean War.

@UncleFishbits @tschu_22 I think Japanese society is still in the "Clean Wehrmacht" phase of dealing with the war - and so long as it still flies the Imperial battle flag from JMSDF ships and has its PMs visit the graves of war criminals, it'll still have a long way to go.

@UncleFishbits @tschu_22 Only I suspect they'll have a harder time of it, because of the way the Americans mishandled the postwar. Say what you will about the halfassed nature of German denazification, but the grandsons of senior Nazis never ended up Chancellor of the Federal Republic.

When you think about Imperial Japan, think Nazi Germany. When you think about its crimes, think the Holocaust. When you think about the Atomic Bombings, think the Soviet invasion of Germany, - and the way it gets used as a talking point by the far-right.

And if you find yourself judging the people who ended Imperial Japan more harshly than the people who ended Nazi Germany, ask yourself why that is.

@UncleFishbits @Professortrl If you think Imperial Japan could have been brought to unconditional surrender without the Atomic Bombs for fewer deaths, that's entirely more defensible than saying the Allies should have accepted Imperial Japan's conditional "surrender" and let it keep its empire, imo.

@UncleFishbits @Professortrl Which is what the "Japan was about to surrender" branch of "the bombs were unnecessary" argument is based on.

@JarekWanczewski It'd be as if I said condemning Nazi Germany was "racist against white people".

@smarzeli @L8zyboy108 Poles and French people are "more foreign" to me, I don't see that as an excuse to judge the Red Army and the Western Allies in Europe more harshly.

@Sp00kyname @theoneWillParry The war faction insisted on fighting on because they thought inflicting losses on the Allies would eventually force them to accept a conditional surrender - and the atomic bombings proved the allies could destroy Japan at minimal risk to themselves.

@Sp00kyname @theoneWillParry It's absolutely the same breed of delusion the Nazi inner circle had, thinking they could talk the Allies into a conditional surrender if they just fought on hard enough.

@Sniffy2 Would you be okay with the Holocaust and Generalplan Ost reaching its full conclusion because stopping it would have meant doing bad things to "innocent German civilians"?

@Sniffy2 "Normal Human Beings" agree that Nazi Germany needed to be destroyed, even if it meant killing German civilians in the process.

The only people who disagree are Nazis.

@Sp00kyname @theoneWillParry Chongqing was bombed for far longer and had far feebler defences and the Nationalists still held out.

Conventional strategic bombing doesn't break morale, and the atomic bombings only "worked" because of a confluence of factors which didn't exist at any other point.

@Sp00kyname @theoneWillParry Eventually, the naval blockade would have forced Japan to surrender even without landings, but that would have almost certainly cost more lives in both Japan and in territories under Japanese occupation.

@Sp00kyname @theoneWillParry We *do* have historical precedent that starvation will eventually break a country's will to fight (see: Germany, 1918), but that "eventually" means hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians starving to death and that IJA having months more to rampage through Asia.