gipper
Diamond Member
- Jan 8, 2011
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Okay...but my point is he knew it was immoral and chose to lie in an effort to justify it and dupe Americans.So if Truman did not think it immoral, well then it can't be immoral. Is that your position?.AGAIN...the USA did not need to invade. Why did our government want to occupy Japan? Do you have any answer to this question?
Again- the United States didn't need to do anything. We could have just walked away from the entire Pacific and just defended Hawaii and just left the rest to Japan.
Why did our government want to occupy Japan? Because if we did not, the military government that had ruled Japan would have stayed in power. Remember- Japan had been strongly and absolutely military for at least 40 years. That culture had to go.
Instead- we demanded surrender- got the surrender- occupied Japan, instilled a representative government that is a strong ally and is not the expansionist military government it was before.
Did we need to drop the bomb? Certainly we didn't have to- but since from the beginning the government- and the American people were committed to complete surrender by the Japanese government- and our government did not believe that surrender would happen without an invasion- or dropping the bomb.
You said yourself that the projected casualties from an invasion would have been at least 50,000 dead(a very, very low projection)- and yes- I think dropping the bombs to prevent that made sense- and they accomplished that.
I never said that. I did state that the US military projected US deaths at 46k, if we invaded. Truman made up the lie about 500k casualties and you bought the lie, but after he incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in an effort to justify the immoral act..
I don't think Truman ever thought of the bombing as an immoral act. After all those bombings were just the culmination of destroying Japanese cities by conventional bombs.
I was responding to your claim:
Truman made up the lie about 500k casualties ....., in an effort to justify the immoral act..
You claimed that Truman was attempting to justify an 'immoral act'- my point is that I do not believe that Truman thought it was an immoral act- and therefore had no reason to justify it.