Slutty Monarch explains Anarchy (with rebuttals)

[nockermensch]

Well I guess you are just a dumbfuck. The Japanese had already offered to surrender. They just wanted to keep their dumbass figurehead Emperor. The US nuked them instead.

http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm

I also think it's hilarious that Kaelik thinks killing 100,000+ innocent people is better than killing three innocent people. What a fucking loser.

Japan kept their dumbass figurehead emperor, so it's clear your version of the facts isn't complete.

I also find pretty much amazing how you got the opinion of one (1) armchair expert that's obviously passionated about the theme and that overruled the conventional knowledge about what happened. That's the stuff of conspiracy theorists, you know.

[Username17]

A staple of Hiroshima Revisionism has been the contention that the government of Japan was prepared to surrender during the summer of 1945, with the sole proviso that its sacred emperor be retained. President Harry S. Truman and those around him knew this through intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, the story goes, but refused to extend such an assurance because they wanted the war to continue until atomic bombs became available. The real purpose of using the bombs was not to defeat an already-defeated Japan, but to give the United States a club to use against the Soviet Union. Thus Truman purposely slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese, not to mention untold thousands of other Asians and Allied servicemen who would perish as the war needlessly ground on, primarily to gain diplomatic advantage.

One might think that compelling substantiation would be necessary to support such a monstrous charge, but the revisionists have been unable to provide a single example from Japanese sources. What they have done instead amounts to a variation on the old shell game. They state in their own prose that the Japanese were trying to surrender without citing any evidence and, to show that Truman was aware of their efforts, cite his diary entry of July 18 [1945] referring to a "telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace."

There it is! The smoking gun! But it is nothing of the sort. The message Truman cited did not refer to anything even remotely resembling surrender. It referred instead to the Japanese foreign office's attempt (under the suspicious eyes of the military) to persuade the Soviet Union to broker a negotiated peace that would have permitted the Japanese to retain their prewar empire and their imperial system (not just the emperor) intact. No American president could have accepted such a settlement, as it would have meant abandoning the United States' most basic war aims.

The Japanese request to keep their empire is real. Their request to keep their emperor is bullshit. They requested only the retention of their emperor on August 10th, and the United States immediately agreed. Asking to keep the Empire is a hoax offer. That's just asking the US to stop fighting in exchange for nothing.

-Username17

[Morat]

The Japanese request to keep their empire is real. Their request to keep their emperor is bullshit. They requested only the retention of their emperor on August 10th, and the United States immediately agreed. Asking to keep the Empire is a hoax offer. That's just asking the US to stop fighting in exchange for nothing.

-Username17

Yeah, here's the actual smoking gun. Some context: This is the summary of Japanese diplomatic traffic in their (broken) codes, in this case between Foreign Minister Tōgō and Ambassador (to the USSR) Satō. Tōgō was by far the most dovish member of the Supreme War Council (aka the Big Six, the other five being the PM, the Army and Navy Ministers, and the chiefs of staff for the Army and Navy) that was running the place.

Now, Tōgō wanted the Soviets to broker a peace deal, and tried first the Soviet Ambassador to Japan and then his Japanese counterpart. Tōgō didn't have much success, partly because the Soviets were looking at Japanese territory with hungry eyes, and partly because he wouldn't commit to any actual conditions. And there was no way he could, since he hadn't bothered to inform the military that he was doing this. Satō regularly asked if he had, like, actual negotiating authority (i.e. whether the military was on board), and regularly got noncommittal replies.

On the 13th of July, Satō finally told his boss that the best Japan could get was "virtually the equivalent of unconditional surrender". On the 17th Tōgō replied that they were not interested in getting the USSR to broker a deal that was "anything like unconditional surrender". On the 18th, Satō tried to clarify that when he said "unconditional surrender" he of course meant that the emperor would remain so. On the 21st, Tōgō's reply was not "Sure!" or even "That doesn't go far enough, but it's a step in the right direction", it was "we are unable to consent to it under any circumstances whatever," and Japan is totally going to fight to the death.

And the American decision makers were reading this in effectively real time. They knew that these half-assed peace feelers didn't have the military's OK. They knew that offering to preserve the Emperor as a figurehead couldn't even get one vote of the Big Six. They were also reading the military traffic that showed how energetically Japan was preparing for the final battle and that the invasion had to be called off.

[Voss]

Not sure why you guys are are chasing the strawman as it runs for further goalposts. By responding to it at all you're giving weight to his crazy assertion that any sort of shit that anarchists do is justified because false moral equivalence.

The unabomber doesn't get judged in light of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The unabomber gets judged because he was a demented fuck that murdered people.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Morat, do you mind if I wikify that and paste that on Rationalwiki?

If what you say is true, that's a game-changer on the level of, well, intentional statistics of blood-lead level in youth v. crime rates over decades.

[Morat]

Morat, do you mind if I wikify that and paste that on Rationalwiki?

If what you say is true, that's a game-changer on the level of, well, intentional statistics of blood-lead level in youth v. crime rates over decades.

It's not, though, the Magic summaries were declassified in the 70s.

I was always pretty skeptical of the claim that if only the US had acquiesced to a powerless emperor that Japan would have surrendered before Hiroshima (the militarists in charge not being quite that sentimental), but it wasn't until I read Downfall (summarized here) that I had a more concrete reason.

Nope, the member of the Big Six most interested in peace was explicitly told that that was the best offer Japan could get and he rejected it out of hand. And not only do we know that now, Truman knew it at the time. We can read the same decrypts that Truman was. If Tōgō wasn't even remotely interested, there's no way War Minister Anami could be persuaded. Of course, even Nagasaki didn't persuade Anami. He was just ordered to change his vote by the Emperor and did so. Then he (probably) joined the attempted coup and killed himself when it failed.

It's funny, as Richard Frank puts it in the essay, "Satō’s dispatches read like a cross examination on behalf of the American government." Over and over he asks pointed questions, criticizes policy, and urges surrender on the basis that the US does not want to exterminate the Japanese or reduce them to indefinite servitude, but continuing the war sure as shit will.

They're right in the primary sources. As are the accompanying death tolls of continued war (~200,000 monthly in Asian civilians outside Japan, 400,000 non-combat dead Japanese out of the 2.7 million the Soviets captured, etc.) that often get overlooked.

If you want to post it wherever, go nuts.