#firebombing of tokyo
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“Firestorm”
This is ... somewhat well-researched. Less than for an academic paper, but I am trying to be historically accurate.
Author’s note one: This is really f*cking heavy. Even by my standards. Also, I am intentionally not using Rudolf’s name. It is supposed to be a bit confusing as to who is Rudolf and who is Tod. It is also supposed to be a bit confusing between the angels and the bombers.
Q: I wonder, sometimes. What was the deadliest day of the Second World War?
A: You could make esoteric arguments for any number of days. You could argue planning or intent or latent deaths or some such. But ultimately the simplest answer - the 24-hour period in which the most human beings lost their lives - is on March 10, 1945. And it isn’t really close.
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He had been watching Italians execute other Italians when Tod arrives. The angel doing the kissing had just departed, leaving him alone with two dozen bodies.
“My prince.” Tod greets him with a kiss.
“My friend.” He returns the kiss.
Tod holds out his hand and he takes it. Tod pulls them through space.
The city they land in is so clean compared to the shattered cities that are Rudolf’s usual haunt. Unblemished. He can smell the paper, see the wood.
Tod sits them in the shade of a cherry blossom tree and looks to the sky. Dusk is approaching. They don’t have long the wait.
A few of Tod’s angels are the first arrivals, curling up in his lap, in Tod’s. They will need their rest.
He looks around - the area is familiar enough. They were here before, amidst fire and rubble. But that had been of the earth’s doing. This would not be.
He thinks back to the little models - to the men who had planned this. How best to burn a city? Perhaps long ago he would have felt sick at the prospect. Now he accepts more and more angels as they tuck in around him and Tod. Preparing.
The clock strikes midnight. They are close.
The first angels of death appear overhead. Pathfinders, after a fashion. His eye is high above in that moment.
He snorts, a flicker of humor still remaining. X does indeed mark the spot.
A few angels begin to depart from their vast flock. Their duties have begun.
He can feel the panic already permeating the city. The gunners are shooting high. The gunners are shooting low.
The rest of the angels arrive, high overhead.
And fire reigns. Their flock, grown even larger in the meantime, disperses. He takes the last angel’s place across Tod’s lap, letting his thoughts take it all in.
Men screaming in panic. Fight! Fight! They cried. He turned toward the fire. It was warm, even from the distance. Their efforts were futile.
The people flee to little holes in the ground. They are safe from the flaming tongues, but fate is cruel. The flames draw the very air to them. The people in the little holes suffocate.
He thinks of other peaceful bodies, hidden in their shelters below the ground. Fire is an insidious foe. She kills in many ways, not only with her flames.
Others jump into the canals. The flames cannot reach them, but the air is stripped from them as well.
Tod finally rises, offering his arm. He takes it and they stroll through the inferno. The angels are working faster then Rudolf has ever seen them before.
Tod halts them by a bridge, full of people, and tilts his head up. There is a an angel, high above. He watches as its gifts fall to earth, spellbound.
The screams come as the bombs hit the bridge full of people. They both finally spring into action, passing out kisses left and right. He kisses and kisses and kisses. There are always more.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he notes a few of the angels high above do fall to earth, their guides taken by Tod’s angels. It is nothing compared to the flames.
He departs briefly, when dawn finally breaks. To see the angels as they return. Their undersides are streaked black by the evidence of hellfire.
He returns to the city - still aflame. There is more work to be done.
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A: (Continued) More than 90,000 - 100,000 Japanese people were killed .... 14 American aircraft and 96 airmen were lost. That’s four times as many as Dresden. Two and a half times as many as Hamburg. More than the first day at Hiroshima. More than the first day at Nagasaki. More than six times the daily average of the worst three months of the holocaust. Three times as many as Babi Yar. It isn’t close.
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Author’s note two: I meant it when I said this one would be heavy. I am not trying to diminish the horror of any of the other events, merely to make comparisons to events that are better known for the unfamiliar. I’ve been to Dresden. You can still see the scars in the city today. If Chimes has a message then it is war is hell. I won’t ever sugarcoat that.
The worst affected part of the city had seen catastrophic fire damage during the great Kanto earthquake of 1923. The worst single incident of the entire night occurred when a full bomb-load landed on the Kototoi Bridge over the Sumida River, burning many to death. The first bombs fell at 12:08 am. The firefighters were overwhelmed within half an hour. The fire burned itself out by midmorning on 10 March after reaching large open areas. Thousands more of the injured died in the following days. Most of the bodies which were recovered were buried in mass graves without being identified. Many bodies of people who had died while attempting to shelter in rivers were swept into the sea and never recovered. Most historians agree that Japanese casualties were between 90000-100000, though some have suggested much higher numbers. As of 2011, the Tokyo Memorial Hall honored 105,400 people killed in the raid, the number of people whose ashes are interred in the building or were claimed by their family. As many bodies were not recovered, the number of fatalities is higher than this number.
#tw war#tw death#chimes#firebombing of tokyo#this is really f*cking heavy#like really#todolf#but Rudolf isn't really Rudolf anymore#He's Tod now#but also Tod is Tod#my fic
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there's a fun type of category error i see a lot where the premise is "because this person/institution did a good thing one time, they are definitionally good" no matter what they've done since then. you see the opposite- "because this person/institution did a bad thing one time, they are definitionally bad"- fairly often, and people have developed defenses against it, but i think that people have a difficult time with both still and that's why you get things like "JKR has always been exactly as much of a virulent transphobe and antisemite as she is currently and it's obvious to anyone who reads the books" for a negative example or "the only reason why anyone on earth is free is because of the U.S. military" (courtesy of prager u).
the common sense way to go about analyzing both of these things is "well JKR is funding hate groups right now, but at the time she wrote her books she was not and donating much of her money to actually positive institutions. we don't need to say that she always had the power and did the harm that she currently does in order to mitigate the harm she is causing right now." and "the U.S. military (or at minimum U.S. government bonds and military production donating to the soviets through lend-lease) won wwii, and things would have been quite bad for the residents of the majority of western countries for a while had they not done that, but before and after that event they did a lot of war crimes (and even during that event they did a lot of war crimes, though i'd argue on net the least crimes against humanity of any of the major powers of that war) and they generally aren't a force for peace right now, so their past helpful deeds are not something we need to address at the moment."
but there's a missing mood for both of these things! that's weird! it's like acknowledging that someone can do both good and bad things and that we need to address the things, not the person, is a common sense concept we all accept in psychology class, but once we go out into the world we all forget it. i also don't think that this is an internet culture thing- it's common among irl social groups too- so i have to wonder if it's just a quirk of human psychology that we can't grapple with
#i mostly wanted to make this post so i could use the dril tweet unironically#but i think it is funny nonetheless#Ampersand the Baby-Eater can have saved a cat from a tree once. the baby eating doesn't mean he didn't save that cat#but the cat saving also doesn't mean that he's a good person now#“what did britain and france do during wwii that was worse than what america did” you may ask#well ignoring the firebombing that they did about equally there was the whole vichy thing and The Entire Thing With India#firebombing tokyo and fission bombing are horrific. it speaks volumes that that is nowhere near the worst stuff that happened in wwii
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I've been saying this for a long time but there are definitely double standards when it comes to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and its absolutely westoid white guilt about the atomic bombs. And that's not to say the bombings were justified- it's just that there wouldn't be so much modern-day controversy in the first place had it been Germany that were nuked instead, and there's a concerning overlap of people who think nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one of the greatest crimes in human history and people who defend Soviet war crimes against German civilians.
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Firebombing of Tokyo 10th March 1945
Bombing of Tokyo in 1945. is given far less attention than some objectively less deadly attacks (London Blitz, attack on Pearl Harbor, or bombing of Hiroshima or Nagasaki). Yet it is important to understand why it happened, how it was so deadly, and why the memory of the attack is so negligible.
While conventional bombardment of Japan is given far less attention than the atomic bombs that…
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As we approach the 77th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it’s good to remind ourselves that both sides of the debate over the necessity of the bombing present nonsensical arguments based on ignoring the fact that burning as many Japanese civilians as possible to death from the air had already been longstanding American policy, and the use of nuclear weapons on urban centers was merely a more effective way of accomplishing it.
#Obviously setting target policy for a new weapon was more complicated than I'm making it out to be#but so much of it just came down to the above#More people died in the firebombing of Tokyo than did during the atomic bombings
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Can't get over how The Boy and the Heron is haunted by napalm. Of course in the way that it haunts Mahito's trauma and dreams, but also in the fantastical imagery. The vision of his mother melting into a pool of liquid, the story of the fiery rock that dried up an entire lake upon contact, Himi entirely. The fact that the fantastical world, far from the touch of war, has an abundance of water.
References to graphic violence ahead. Firebombing wrecked Tokyo. The firebombing attacks,iirc, actually killed more civilians than the atomic bombs did. There are anecdotes from survivors about crowds of people running and trampling each other to try to escape the napalm. About people running to local swimming pools just to try to douse out the fires or escape only to find that the water of the pools completely dried up because of the heat. Of people bursting into flames in the middle of running. Of people's organs/bodies, quite frankly, melting into liquid. An account of a survivor's mother, for years after the war, pouring cups of water over her deceased daughter's grave and saying "little one, you must have been so hot."
It's subtle and I am not even sure that it was intentional, or if this was on Miyazaki's mind as he directed the art, but I can't shake off the echoes of history when I watched it.
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“FIRE-BOMBING TOKYO WON'T WIN, CLUB TOLD,” Toronto Star. April 1, 1942. Page 37.
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Rev. S. Allbright Sees Long Struggle Ahead Ere Victory
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"There is a long and costly struggle ahead, for downtown Tokyo can stand a bombing as, easily as downtown Toronto. Of course, if the residential section were bombed by incendiaries, it would make a frightful holocaust," Rev. S. L. Allbright told the Young Men's Canadian club at its supper meeting in the Royal York last night.
Mr. Allbright, who was formerly assistant pastor at Sherbourne St. United church, went to Kobe, Japan, in 1926, and with the exception of a brief furlough in 1933, has spent the rest of his life in Japan. until his return to Canada last year. "We are wondering what Japan's next step will be-whether it will be to carry the fight to Australia, Siberia or India. To keep on going. she must tackle all of them and it
will be our opportunity if we are not too slow in grasping it," he declared.
In offering a solution of the world's economic problems. he asserted that all nations should have equal access to raw materials, but that access to markets would have to be regulated. "I do not believe that long range bombing of Japan is feasible at the present time, for although the bombers could make the trip with ease, it is much too great for a fighter escort. In my opinion. Japan has a two years' stock of reserve material on hand. but when the tide turns it will turn fast," he concluded.
The speaker was introduced by Clint Ellis. At a short business session officers for the coming year were nominated. The election will take place on April 14..
#canadian club#toronto#world war ii#pacific war#firebombing#air raids on Japan#air raids#strategic bombing#tokyo#christian missionaries#war aims#empire of japan#fire bombing of japan#aerial bombardment#canada during world war 2
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If you’re not aware, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were deliberately not bombed with the firebombs that destroyed most of Tokyo and other Japanese cities in 1945 because they were two of a number of cities deliberately selected as locations for atomic bombings.
They wanted a “pristine” test of their new weapon on a previously undamaged city.
The US knew those cities were full of civilian refugees when they bombed them. They had herded them there.
Parallels, huh?
#historical parallels#atomic bombs#hiroshima#nagasaki#palestine#free palestine#gaza under attack#gaza ceasefire now#war crimes#genocide
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A glorious and stunning movie, well worth going to see. Miyazaki has not shied away from talking about the war before: The Wind Rises, albeit at it’s core a love story is still about the problem of creating the kamikaze planes and how life continues even in war time. As Miyazaki’s work has matured and his son has taken over more and more of the production, I find that his stories have become darker and his story-lines more complex. As such, I am delighted to see him make something so unsettling and mature as a (extremely loose) Dante’s Inferno. This is a far, far, FAR cry from something like Kiki and Totoro.
The details in which the shadow of the ongoing Pacific War color this film lend to Miyazaki’s style of talking about calamity in the softest way possible. Barring the opening sequence in which the main character witnesses the firebombing in Tokyo, there is no other “war violence”. However, at one point, his father stores something his factory is making in their house: the cockpits of the kamikaze planes. A character in the other world mentions off hand “soon, your world will be enveloped in fire”, which is clearly in reference to the bomb. Background details show wartime propaganda posters, nationalistic symbols, and children and adults performing the volunteer work usual for late stage war time. Much like Nausicaä, these are all details of the setting and are almost never overtly mentioned or pointed out.
This is a story about grief, just as Dante’s Inferno is, but also about the processing of war time trauma by a country besieged. Mihito, the main character, means “sincere one” and, when looking at this piece through the understanding that many Japanese perceive themselves as victims of World War II, he is a symbol of the victim mind-set of Japanese war time. He takes things as they come, never having a strong reaction either way. He isn’t bitter or angry, neither is he sad or grieving. He is numb. He goes through the motions of politeness, the motions of nationalistic fervor, the motions of life; but he is numb. It is only when the promise of retrieving his mother from death comes to him that he begins to break through his numbness, but it is the retrieval of his aunt that makes him a little boy again — a symbol of processing the loss of his old way of life, pre-war Japan, by embracing the new, post-war Japan.
I need to do more research into the symbolism of particular birds, because the usage feels too specific for me, but frankly, I haven’t yet. I loved the movie. I can’t wait to watch it again. Its a movie about sitting with your emotions, however, so, much like Miyazaki’s other more mature works, it is almost painfully slow. But that is what makes him a master storyteller; as an artist he reminds us to sit down and wait. The world is too fast now, and he has stated in interviews that his works is supposed to instill nostalgia for a time when we were younger and the world wasn’t so fast nor demanding. He wants us to sit: with the whimsical, with the painful, with the romantic, and in this case with the unsettling. And he does it again.
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Memo to the 'Experts': Stop Comparing Israel's War in Gaza to Anything. It Has No Precedent | by John Spencer
Israel's war against Hamas in Gaza has inevitably drawn comparisons to other battles or wars, both modern and from the past. These comparisons are mostly used to make the case that Israel's operations in Gaza are the most destructive in history, or the deadliest in history.
Yet while the use of historical analogy may be tempting for armchair pundits, in the case of Israel's current war, the comparisons are often poorly cited, the data used inaccurate, and crucial context left out. Given the scale and context of an enemy purposely entrenched in densely populated urban areas, as well as the presence of tunnels, hostages, rockets, attackers that follow the laws of war while defenders purposely do not, and proximity between the frontlines and the home front, there is basically no historical comparison for this war.
Let's start with the context: After Hamas crossed into Israel on Oct. 7, murdering over 1,200 Israelis in brutal ways that included mutilation and sexual assaults as well as taking over 200 hostages back into Gaza, Israel formally declared a defensive war against Hamas in Gaza in accordance with international law and the United Nations charter. Since, the IDF estimates it has killed 10,000 Hamas operatives, while Hamas claims that the total number of casualties is 24,000 (Hamas does not distinguish civilian deaths from militant deaths).
Hamas' strategy is to use Palestinian civilians as human shields, because their goal is not to defeat Israel's military or to hold terrain; it is far more sinister and medieval—to use the death and suffering of Palestinian civilians to rally international support to their cause and demand that Israel halt their war.
Meanwhile, Israel's war aims were more traditional: returning Israeli hostages, dismantling Hamas military capability, and securing their border to prevent another October 7 attack.
These goals required not one major urban battle but multiple. While Gaza is not the densest populated urban region on earth as many claim, it features over 20 densely-populated cities. And while the Israeli Defense Forces are engaged in fighting, Hamas has continued to launch over 12,000 rockets on nearly every day of the war from the combat area toward civilian-populated areas in Israel, literally over the heads of the attacking IDF, who it bears mentioning are fighting just a few miles from their homeland and the homes of their soldiers.
Put all of this together, this war is simply without precedent. Certainly, it cannot be compared to the host of other wars that have been used for comparison sake to paint Israel in an unflattering light.
Some have compared Israel to Russia, yet there is simply no comparison. In the 2022 Battle of Mariupol, estimates of the number of civilians killed range up to 25,000, including 600 civilians killed in a single bombing of a theater with the word "children" written in giant letters around it. This is the same Russia that killed over 50,000 civilians (5 percent) of a 1.1 million pre-war population of Chechnya in 20 months of combat in the late 1990s in multiple major urban battles such as Grozny.
Or take Syria. Over 300,00 civilians have been killed in the Syrian war; an average of 84 civilians were killed every day from 2013 to 2023.
Others have compared the battles in Gaza to World War II air campaigns like the UK bombing of the German city of Dresden in 1945 that killed an estimated 25,000 civilians. But here, too, memory is selective: These same people discount air campaign cases such as the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo the same year that killed over 300,000 civilians, to include 80,000 to 100,000 civilians in a single night, causing more death and destruction than Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagaski.
A battle that does bear a resemblance to Israel's war against Hamas is the 1945 Battle of Manila—the largest urban struggle of World War II, with more civilian casualties incurred than even the Battle of Stalingrad. The city had a population of 1.1 million residents as well as over 1,000 American prisoners of war being held in the city. It took the U.S. military 35,000 forces and a whole month to defeat 17,000 Japanese Navy defenders in and around the city.
Like in Gaza, the defenders used the city's sewer and tunnel systems for offensive and defensive purposes. And there were over 100,000 civilian deaths from the battle—one of the major factors of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which stipulated the laws of armed conflict to further protect civilians and prevent civilian deaths.
Most experts compare the Gaza war to the recent urban battles against ISIS involving United States forces, including the 2016-17 Battle of Mosul. In that battle, over 100,000 Iraqi Security Forces, backed by American advisors and U.S. and coalition air power, took nine months to clear a city of 3,000 to 5,000 lightly armed ISIS fighters. The battle resulted in over 10,000 civilian deaths, 138,000 houses destroyed or damaged and 58,000 damaged with 40,000 homes destroyed outright in just Western Mosul. Iraqi Security Forces suffered 10,000 casualties. There were very limited, shallow, house-to-house tunnels, but no tunnel networks, no hostages, no rockets.
In April of 2004, the U.S. military was directed to arrest the perpetrators of an attack that caused the death of four American civilians and deny insurgents sanctuary in the densely populated city of Fallujah, Iraq, a city of 300,000 residents. The battle that ensued was later dubbed the First Battle of Fallujah. Because of international condemnation and political instability fueled by international media over a perceived indiscriminate use of force and civilian casualties, the U.S. forces were ordered by the U.S. Central Command Commander to stop the battle six days into it.
Estimates of the total civilian deaths from the battle range from 220 to 600. Six months later, in November 2004, the U.S. military initiated the Second Battle of Fallujah. It took 13,000-15,000 U.S., UK, and Iraqi forces six weeks to clear the city of 3,000 insurgents. There were some 800 civilian deaths even though the city's residents had largely evacuated before the battle. Over sixty percent the city's buildings were damaged or destroyed. But there, too, the enemy defenders did not have access to tunnels.
Ultimately, comparisons with both past and modern cases highlight the fact that there is almost no way to defeat an entrenched enemy defender without destruction, even while implementing all feasible precautions and limits on the use of force required by the laws of war.
Let's put away our military history books. There is no comparison to what Israel has faced in Gaza—certainly none by which Israel comes out looking the worse.
John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, codirector of MWI's Urban Warfare Project and host of the "Urban Warfare Project Podcast." He served for 25 years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connection in Modern War and co-author of Understanding Urban Warfare.
#israel#antisemitism#israeli#israel news#israel under attack#israel under fire#terrorism#anti terrorism#hamas#antisemitic#antisemites#jews#jew#judaism#jumblr#frumblr#jewish#israelunderattack#resources#civilian casualties
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Have you finally gotten to watch Godzilla Minus One? I remember you didn't care for A Boy And His Heron because the character's father was related to the imperial Japanese war effort. I was curious how you would feel about GMO's stance on the war, its cost to the ordinary Japanese citizens, and the government that led them there.
Sorry if this is rude. I don't mind if you delete this without answering.
Disclaimer that I'm Filipino and my own family on both sides were victimized by Imperial Japan in the 1940's, so I'm not coming at this topic unbiased, but I'd like to believe I'm already more generous about it than I should be.
I didn't care for the Boy and the Heron because it sucked, the boy's father turning out to be a wealthy factory owner producing the fighter planes of the imperial army was just the nail in the coffin of a protagonist I already thought was pretty hard to care about.
That being said, Minus One was a little different. Koichi was a kamikaze pilot that deserted because he didn't want to kill himself, and the movie repeatedly stated that killing yourself for honor and for the country was stupid. People deserve to live out their small lives, and the war was a mistake. Koichi hears the kid joke that "if only the war lasted longer" and he freaks out at them.
There's a reason why the operation to defeat Godzilla was a civilian effort (made up of ex-navy but still) rather than a military/government one. Minus One blames the Americans for mutating Godzilla sure, but it was also about how Japan repeatedly failed its own people. "The only thing the country is good at is controlling information". The citizens ended up having to save themselves from Godzilla. There might have been thematic undertones I missed while marveling at how fucking good the chase scene in the sea was, but I don't think I missed anything big.
Honestly I came into this movie expecting the imperial apologia to be a lot worse, ala "look at our glorious underdog soldiers defending our beloved Tokyo from being firebombed by the technologically superior Americans in a war where we totally didn't do anything wrong and were just defending our homeland" ala 13 Sentinels, but instead it was about how Japan cursed its own people to the point where Koichi was told he was a coward for wanting to live instead of killing himself for the glory of Japan.
Not exactly fully anti-imperialist but nowhere near what I was afraid of, like FGO announcing Gudaguda 3 to take place in Tokyo 1945 and instead of getting defensive about WW2 Nobu invaded Tokyo with an army of mecha nobus. It's not acknowledging their war crimes against countries like mine, but it could have been much worse you know.
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Not enough people on here talking about The Boy and the Heron doing for Imperial Japan what Pan’s Labrynth did for Spanish Fascism huh.
So they are both movies about a kid going into a fantasy world while fascism and violence is devastating our world around them. Del Toro makes the connection explicit by making the fascism of the real world extremely explicit and directly hostile to our protagonist. In The Boy and the Heron the war, militarism and it’s horrors are very much present - labor volunteers among elementary schoolers, patriotic parades of aging soldiers, the mention of the fall of Saipan (which brought down the government and made clear to those in power that Japan was doomed) those Zero cockpits and of course the ever present and unspoken horror of the firebombing of Tokyo, which runs through the film from the second you hear that air raid siren and see those embers falling through all the fire in the film.
But within the fantasy world we also have a cockatiel (?) “Duch” whose rallies looks like Mussolini and who acts like a Japanese militarist. Which is sinister and absurd and very funny. To say nothing of our protagonists war profiteer father charging in with a samurai sword and discovering that his antagonists are parakeets (and getting covered in bird shit). Indeed the Parakeets transforming into harmless birbs almost seems to be about the absurdity of fascism and militarism. In Pan’s Labrynth the fascists and militarists were the real monsters. In the Boy and the Heron they are ridiculous.
And then can we talk about how the tower that was built at the time of Meiji falls in 1944!?
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凄い事に気づいてしまった！
2024年3月10日 米国アカデミー賞で「ゴジラ・マイナスワン」が視覚効果賞を受賞！
3月10日は79年前1945年に東京大空襲があった日
そして1954年の「ゴジラ」第一作ではゴジラの関東侵入路は東京大空襲の爆撃機と同じルート（「シン・ゴジラ」でも）
79年経って記憶が薄らいだ証拠か日米のわだかまりが解消された証拠か。
亡き母は千葉で庭に落ちて来た不発の焼夷弾をバケツの水で消した、と良く自慢していた
合掌
I realized something amazing!
March 10, 2024: Yamazaki Takashi's "Godzilla Minus One" won the Best Visual Effects Award at the U.S. Academy Awards!
March 10 was the day of the Tokyo Air Raid 79 years ago in 1945.
And in the first Godzilla movie of 1954, Godzilla's entry route into Kanto was the same route as the bombers of the Tokyo Air Raid (also in "Shin Godzilla").
Whether it's evidence that the memory has faded after 79 years, or that the hard feelings between Japan and the United States have been resolved,
my late mother used to boast that she had wiped out an unexploded firebomb that had fallen into her garden in Chiba with a bucket of water.
RIP
https://note.com/takigawa/n/nd45b2816ef77
#東京大空襲#takashiyamazaki#academy#academyawards#アカデミー賞#アカデミー🏆#山崎貴#ゴジラマイナスワン#ゴジラ#3月10日#tokyoairraids#godzillaminusone#godzilla#march10
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Now and then I circle back around to thinking about this podcast I once listened to, comparing modern chemical weapons and air power as two relatively new military technologies that saw widespread use during the world wars. For a while there it was standard if never fully accepted practice (all the asphyxiating gas attacks of WWI were war crimes under preexisting international law) to drop phosgene or mustard gas on soldiers and while it would ofc be deeply absurd to say that chemical warfare ever stopped, there was a concerted effort to walk some of it back.
On the other hand in the space of about thirty years we went from guys with handguns leaning out the window of a biplane to take potshots at each other while doing aerial reconnaissance to...firebombing Dresden. And firebombing Tokyo. And using atomic weapons.
And somehow dropping bombs on a city became a standard, accepted part of warfare in a way that dropping sarin on a city is not.
#humanity really fucked up when we decided that murdering one kid with a gun is unforgivable#but murdering hundreds of kids with a bomb is fine#and by ''humanity'' i mean ofc ''the powers that be and benefit from this state of affairs'' but like. god.#no more war#my posts
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Ok honestly the necessity of Hiroshima is at least debatable as far as I know (yeah it was incredibly overkill and there was probably other ways to show off the power of the bombs without actually, using them on civilians. But I don’t think the long term effects of radiation were well understood yet.) However Nagasaki was absolutely not necessary. Iirc there was even info that Japan was already going to surrender before the second bomb dropped.
What really makes me horrified about things is, there was a third bomb prepared. Even without knowing the long term effects of radiation exposure we definitely knew the massive destructive potential of the bombs and yet for some reason it was thought 3 might be needed.
Neither one of those bombings were necessary. Nor was the firebombing of Tokyo. The US targeted civilians intentionally to “lower morale” of the Japanese government and military because they viewed the Japanese people as subhuman and simply did not care if they were killing innocent people in their homes.
It was unnecessary brutality out of a want for revenge on a grandiose scale to show what happens to anyone who dare threaten the US in any way. The military wanted to make Japan the metaphorical head on a spike to show what would happen if the axis threatened them again.
It was disgusting, barbaric, and since it happened alongside the Japanese internment camps I have a hard time believing this wasn’t an outright threat to commit genocide.
There is no justification for any of the bombs to have been dropped on Japan. That ranks alongside the genocide of Natives and chattel slavery as one of the worst acts in American history.
#The one right after those three would probably be transorbital lobotomies and the eugenics movement
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so yeah I referred to the Japanese right wing protests and the Chinese anti-Japan protests as dickheads with flags, but it would have been kinder to describe them as two groups who have sadly fallen prey to the initial grift of nationalism ("that a country is a being that has some kind of fundamental character or natural tendency").
starting with the Japanese right wing as they're more obviously assholes, they've hitched their personal identity and sense of self worth to Japan Being Strong, which is dumb and stupid given that they should be well aware of what happened the last time people did that and the awful cost it had for them and all of their neighbours.
so they talk up the military and downplay previous atrocities and make everyone very angry in the process, and point to that anger as a justification for their militarism, and it's all very annoying.
but if you wanted to make things awkward you'd say hang on, Japan may have wreaked havoc across Asia back in the 1930s and '40s, capturing French Indochina and British Malaya, but what was France doing in Indochina in the first place? and why were the British in Malaya??
you quickly realise that the European powers have been busy carving off juicy chunks of Asia this whole time, but now Japan wants to get in on the game oh no they're the bad guys, time to firebomb Tokyo, while Churchill and De Gaulle are the heroes of WWII.
now of course the solution here is to recognise that the European powers were assholes too rather than giving Japan a free pass, but most people say okay there was an Age of Colonisation yes and it was bad yes and Japan got in late yes but that's just how it goes, and anyway it was all over by 1945, so you can't do it again.
...except the French took Vietnam back after the war and then fought against the Vietnamese independence movement for ten more years, after which the US joined in to kill another million people or so and the war didn't end until 1975.
well that's really awkward! as is the British suppression of Malaysia over the decades following WWII, with the concentration camps and massacres and you know, war crimes and stuff.
so at this point if you were a Japanese right wing asshole you would be thinking that actually invading other countries and establishing colonies is absolutely fine as long you don't get defeated by a rival superpower that will inflict victor's justice on you and hang your generals for perpetrating atrocities while their own generals get to perpetrate atrocities with complete impunity.
meanwhile if you were an aggrieved Chinese nationalist you'd be thinking sheesh, these Japanese dogs are inherently terrible people with a racial history of violence and aggression and we always need to be vigilant against their future military expansionism based on the atrocities they have committed in the past.
and that sounds, you know, slightly more sympathetic? arguably more defensive in character, anyway, but it's still wrong!
the main reason that it's wrong is because if you start from the nationalist viewpoint then Japanese atrocities against China simply loom larger in the imagination than Chinese atrocities against China, not the least because the former are commemorated annually while the latter are not talked about in polite company.
after the last Japanese soldier was kicked out of China there was still a civil war on! cities under siege! terrible casualties! almost as many civilians died of starvation in the siege of Changchun in 1948 as were massacred by the Japanese in Nanjing in 1937, but since history is written by the winners and injuries between nations are the only ones that count the former is a censored footnote while the latter still makes people mad today.
nationalism uses people, it's for suckers, it begets atrocities and it excuses atrocities and it remembers atrocities only to justify fresh atrocities.
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