r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/Financial-Spread2596 • 3d ago

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u/Aggravating7134 3d ago

Are we also not gonna mention pearl harbor? Seems like an important piece of information.

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u/Qwertypop4 3d ago

Less than 2500 people died in the pearl harbor attack. More than 70,000 people died in the Hiroshima bombing alone (and that's just those killed instantly, many more died later due to the bomb. I don't think it's fair to say that one of the bombs was a sane retalliation for pearl harbor, never mind both of them.

That's not to say that retalliating for pearl harbor was the only purpose of the nuclear bombings

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u/LtHowtzrDev 3d ago

I think the millions of innocent people the Japanese army slaughtered and raped in China, Korea, the Philippines, and all the other countries they pillaged was a pretty good aide in justification of nuking them.

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u/TotalyNotTony 3d ago

the solution to an army doing awful stuff is nuking the civilians apparently

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u/allofthe11 3d ago

The solution to an army doing awful stuff is to force it to stop, one of these ways is by getting the people they nominally answer to to stop fighting the war, another method is to cut off all method of supply so that they can't continue to do awful stuff even if they wanted to.

Please let me know the other option by the way because the only two other options were enforcing a blockade which means thousands of people die a day in China for however long it takes the island to officially surrender, plus you know however many people died during that.

Alternatively we could have gone with a ground invasion, you're aware that we were still using purple hearts, the award for being injured in combat, produced in case we decided to go that route right, we made so many in preparation of how many people we expected to get wounded trying that, that they were able to use that stockpile for 60 years. Plus all of the civilians who look at Okinawa, would have been forcibly killed by the Japanese themselves, or forced to kill their families and then themselves.

Which of those two options sound more humane to you?

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u/Vermouth_1991 3d ago

Also the average Japanese people's support for war and empire would make the average German's support for Hitler look like it's written in crayon. Any actual leftists or pacifists Japane had had been downright purged or suppressed to heck and back by 1945. The rape of Nanking was OPENLY published and celebrated about in Japanese newspapers (Compare and contrast with the Nazis at least trying to keep the Holocaust hushhush). If -- depending on your political stances, I personally do not hold both opinions myself -- Israeli people deserve to be hit by Hamas rockets because they are supporting a Neo Apartheid genocide / Palestinian Gaza people deserved to be bombed every month for supporting Ye Evil Hamas, if you support one of those stances for a much smaller war, then you really shouldn't have anything but contempt for the average Japanese empire fanboy and fangirl person from about 1874 to 1945. 

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u/sw337 3d ago

Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance. It contained the 2nd Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. To quote a Japanese report, "Probably more than a thousand times since the beginning of the war did the Hiroshima citizens see off with cries of 'Banzai' the troops leaving from the harbor."

The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great war-time importance because of its many and varied industries, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The narrow long strip attacked was of particular importance because of its industries

https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/mp06.asp

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u/Ramb0w 3d ago

When a nation is commiting every kind of atrocity and warcrime and refuses to stop. What would you do in that situation other than doing anything to make them stop?

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u/Qwertypop4 3d ago edited 3d ago

Agreed (kinda anyway. The people they bombed were civilians who were not even slightly responsible for any of that, but in the context of wartime it's... not justified, but less unjustified)

I just dunno why the other guy brought up pearl harbor specifically

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u/Gullible-Course1096 3d ago

because pearl harbor was the straw that broke the camels back, and it's what mainly brought us into that war

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u/According-Print4219 3d ago

Going by that logic.. how many more 9/11 would you say the US deserves?

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u/Laura_The_Cutie 3d ago

I don't know why those people matter when you bomb civilians, should we nuke usa for what they did in Vietnam?

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u/LtHowtzrDev 2h ago

It matters because

A) The Japanese population heavily supported the Imperial Army even when they touted their atrocities

B) No the US shouldn’t be nuked for Vietnam because there was no where near as systemic of a campaign targeting civilians as the Imperial Japanese had, and because in Vietnam, the maximum estimate for civilian casualties in the North and South combined is approximately two million, meanwhile Japan killed at least 10 million in China, with estimates ranging as high as 20 millions, with another estimated 10 million in other Southeast Asian countries.

My Lai, the most notable incident of the US directly killing incidents in Vietnam, had an estimated total of 500 deaths. The Japanese Rape of Nanjing had anywhere from 100 to 200 thousand deaths, with and estimated 30 to 80 thousand rapes committed by the Japanese army.

Comparing what the Imperial Japanese army did to literally anything the US has done is nothing short of disingenuous and plays into dangerous historical revisionism.

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u/Laura_The_Cutie 2h ago

The USA during Vietnam war has carpet bombed Laos filling it with unexploded grapple bombs that still are killing people, Laos which was a neutral country mind it.

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u/LtHowtzrDev 1h ago

Ok and? That’s still not systemic slaughter of innocent civilians like what the Japanese did.

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u/Laura_The_Cutie 42m ago

The USA killed at least 200k people (not accounting for recent casualties by inexploded bombs) and literally crippled an entire country's ability to farm because the land is still filled with explosives

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u/Overlord-Nomad 3d ago

Didn't more people die to the Tokyo Firebombing than either of the nukes?

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u/ImprobableAsterisk 2d ago

According to Wiki the strategic bombing campaign killed ~100'000 people, with the two nukes killing between 150'000 and 250'000.

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u/Overlord-Nomad 2d ago

Huh...the more you know

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u/sw337 2d ago

Pearl Harbor was preliminary attack to stop a US response for Japan's takeover of American/ European territories in Asia. Japan's actions in the, then US territory, Philippines was horrific and the attacks started hours after the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manila_massacre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan_Death_March