this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2026
48 points (100.0% liked)
The Deprogram
1919 readers
59 users here now
"As revolutionaries, we don't have the right to say that we're tired of explaining. We must never stop explaining. We also know that when the people understand, they cannot but follow us. In any case, we, the people, have no enemies when it comes to peoples. Our only enemies are the imperialist regimes and organizations." Thomas Sankara, 1985
International Anti-Capitalist podcast run by an American, a Slav and an Arab.
Rules:
- No capitalist apologia / anti-communism.
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. This is a safe space where all comrades should feel welcome; this includes a warning against uncritical sectarianism.
- No porn or sexually explicit content (even if marked NSFW).
- No right-deviationists (patsocs, nazbols, Strasserists, Duginists, etc).
- Use c/mutual_aid for mutual aid requests.
Resources:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
japan remain a fascist ethno nationalist state, the ambition to annex their neighbor continue to be the core value of their largest political party.
additionally the fact japan is allowed to industrialize after all the war crime, before any of their victims is one of the worst injustice in the recorded history. Not to mention they are shielded by a deal with the empire to avoid paying reparation for all the genocide via the so called ruled base order. And just to add salt to the wound, they leverage their industrialization to force unequal exchange from their victim; which also help finance their media whitewashing of their reputation, promoting themself as culturally superior to their victims, who are not allowed to industrialize by the empire.
What would have massacring more starving civilians with nuclear weapons accomplished?
Did you get your history from grave of the fireflies?
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were heavily industrialized and wealthy cities. The victims weren’t starving. This was a society who imported slave labour from conquered territories to work those factories and left them to die after the bombing.
All of these resources extracted from their colonies were used to genocide the people within those colonies, including my great grandparents and the great grandparents of tens of millions of others.
China suffered the (second) greatest number of civilians deaths by country, with the total death count at 19.5 million (possibly an underestimate), exactly because the Japanese were trying to ethnically cleanse the Chinese. The atom bombs killed a maximum of 250k people. Even if 8 more atom bombs were dropped (1M deaths), it would be less than a 1/10 of what the Japanese did.
We’re seeing history repeat itself because two bombs obviously wasn’t enough. Their society had not even quantitatively changed from back then, just that WWII had imposed a pecking order in the west. Given the opportunity, they’d do it again with the majority of their population supporting it.
So yea, I can joke about nuking Japan (more), because nuking Japan 10 more times wouldn’t even be a proportional response.
The only reason Japan was struck by nuclear weapons was because they were going to surrender to the USSR which would invite them to the negotiating table and could very well have created a socialist Japan. Instead with the bombs the US was able to stave off a Red Army invasion that was set to happen days away and kept them away from the negotiations, ensuring a US-aligned puppet unopposed.
IIRC the emperor at the time literally admitted as much in his diary. I'm having trouble finding a Japanese version of his diary online but ill amend this post to have it once I do.
https://apjjf.org/tsuyoshi-hasegawa/2501/article
I went through the timeline once and it becomes instantly clear when you follow the calendar events. I wrote about it too: https://criticalresist.substack.com/p/south-korea-was-created-from-thin
Japan accepted the prior Potsdam Declaration once the bombs dropped which was not the best deal for the US but prevented the USSR from getting anything too big, since they were not part of Potsdam (it was UK, US and the Republic of China). The US was stuck fighting over atolls while the USSR had started the liberation of Manchuria, and were not needed to win the war unlike what the UK command said in 1942, that they would need Russia's pacific bases to invade Japan. US could have continued fighting as they were approaching their own invasion, but with USSR in the picture, it was better to just accept the deal.
Answering the genocide of a decrepit fascist empire with a nuclear Holocaust against civilians accomplishes absolutely nothing and is a demented, depraved, and reactionary revenge fantasy.
Nuclear bombardment would have had absolutely zero ideological effect, whether ten more were dropped, or a hundred.
Also I don't know what your sources are, but the cities were absolutely starving, with a maximum ration count of 1,000 a day for priority workers, and 800 calories for everyone else. Those were also hopeful estimates, and the estimated caloric intake of a Japanese civilian was 300-500 calories a day, no sodium intake, little to no protein, and no vitamin B sources. Yes, the cities were industrialized and wealthy, but all that wealth doesn't buy you any food when all the transportation infrastructure, both maritime and land-based is in utter ruin after incessant air bombardment. The cities were relatively unscathed as the military value of both was limited, but the rail lines, roads, depots, and port facilities were essentially gone. The destruction was so thorough that air attacks and submarines began targeting tiny sampams since there was quite literally nothing else to bomb.
None of that distracts from the fact that salivating for the deaths of civilians is disgusting. Too can play at that game with the personal anecdote too, because you know what? My entire family tree was killed in the Holocaust. Every other family thread is gone. I am the only member of my generation as the few survivors didn't have kids beyond my grandmother, who had one. You know what else? Dropping nukes on Berlin, Hamburg, Essen, Cologne, Dresden, Kiel, Munich, and every other German city wouldn't have brought them back even if sometimes I believe that that's what the Germans deserved. Instead, I'm happy that the Soviet's managed to reform a portion of the Germans into one of the best examples of a socialist state the world has seen to date, where even the descendants in the now annexed Eastern Germany still keep the flames of revolution alive.
Do some self-reflection comrade. Answering genocide with mindless slaughter is fools errand, unproductive, and a reactionary tendency.
You're correct in you're total assessment but I wanted to expand the bombardment would have zero ideological effect. The US has constantly resorted to bombardment over ground invasion and the reality is that in every war it practiced this strategy it has not succeeded. Especially if we believe the emperor's account that the USSR was cause for their eventual surrender.
The US is constantly bombarding civilian populations and failing to bring about victory and claiming it was because they hadn't violated enough rules of war. That they hadn't ye bombed enough hospitals, or children, or families, or historical sites. That if only they had been allowed to bomb a little more, they surely would have broken the spirit of the country. The reality is that none of these function as an extension of the military in any meaningful way. The targeting of the civilians is almost a punishment for a military that is able to secure themselves defensively. It can also result in the "Guerilla math" talked about in the Cuban, Vietnam, and Afghanistan conflict
A country with a fascist, liberal, or otherwise bourgeois controlled government in general will have little, if any impact from its proletariat dying in such numbers for a war. But the US's really shows it's severe weakness in these situations as a paper tiger. Huge displays of power that result in no meaningful progress towards their goals. Simply causing immense suffering.
I can grasp the anger even if I can't claim to understand it on the level of having ties to those who were victims of Japanese aggression. What I don't understand is the attempt to rationalize that bombing more civilians would accomplish defense of a homeland or deradicalize Japan.
The best I can gather is it's the control the US got over them after the end of the war—like it violently did to so many parts of the world in post-WWII—that ensured the failure of any attempts to deradicalize.
Mind you, I'm not saying that fighting back in a war is invalid. Far from it. But nuking two civilian cities (no matter what you want to say about the kind of people living in them) is a war crime. Let's remember that this was not something carried out by liberation forces of the victims of Japan. It was something carried out by a stronger colonial/imperial force who has easily been far more brutal than Japan in its history. We're not talking about a people struggling for liberation and trying to judge their actions after the fact when they're under existential threat. We're talking about a head of empire who had essentially already won and still did it anyway. The same empire that in today's world has destroyed hospitals in Iran.
Why carry water for the kind of brutality an empire like that does? Because it's convenient for revenge?