And then we can largely agree. Can we agree even further though that listing only one combatants crimes can become misleading?

America dropped nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Prior to that they fire bombed virtually every other Japanese city, killing 100 thousand in Tokyo alone.

The fighting on the ground on the islands reads like one long list of horrific war crimes against dehumanized Japanese victims again and again...

I know the illustration shouldn't be necessary, but presenting a single sided selection of choice facts can be extremely misleading, and the video here, like many on Israel today, does exactly the same thing.

Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To release all the energy you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you abuse it
Or use it for good?

They've armed the weapon
Countdown clock is set and
J. Robert Oppenheimer is sweatin'
Eyes are red and he's nervous
Cause on the surface this is armageddon
The shock bomb, but we're set upon and threatened
And with no sound the whole Alamogordo ground
Is glowing and cowed under one smouldering cloud
He's choked and wowed, everybody's open-mouthed
And over the ground the shock front blows, kapow!
Snap back to the alchemy
Hope before tragedy
Showed with bold math that we broke the whole atom
We choked; controlled action with poles of cold cadmium coat
To go capture neutrons and slow fracture
We broke, postponed that and we chose to go fashion
A most radioactive plutonium gadget then
Fat Man and Boy and Enola goes laughin'
As Nagasaki is blown and Hiroshima's blasted

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

Neutrons escaping from a source radiating
Merge and start atoms shaking; they begin
To unglue toward a decreased order
Entropic force distorts em
And supercharged with loads of protons they can only go farther
Cold war grows hotter--exothermal--Colorado to Joe Stalin
Coast to coast holes; silos but there's no farmer
Toe-to-toe drama
NATO and Warszawa in co-assured trauma
The globe groans everyone knows there's no calming
So show your foes and implode your core column
Quid pro quo Castle Bravo for Tsar Bomba
And move on and leave atolls exposed to gross doses of old fallout;
Slow-to-go toxins in shoals and so though we explode them no longer
Still the proof lives on in the blue lagoon water, father

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

When war games hit the stage of a gluon's rage
There's a military boot on the new doc's page
We were playing in the beginning, but grew up strange
Making radar and missiles, and new bombs blazed
And we kept grinding the lensed sights for the next sniper
Best believe son it'll pay to design fighters
All the gains of science analyzed by the
Man provide plans for sarin and cyanide
And our hands are blighted by crying
Eyes when dying lands are slammed if our grants expand the fire brighter
And there's no jury there's no sublime righter
This is our fight
And these minds are all ours so protect your pia mater
Try to feed and water good, seed trust, flee dishonour
Gotta be clean being Apollo stead of Vietnam and
Lay the armour down and be the one to stand up
And lead us on the trail of Spock
We'll elevate these motley progeny
To a future in a safer spot, an irrigated plot
Homicide a way forgot
Success is a lack of military options
Failure's not
Become a lover of a great and cosmic goal
We cannot condone these terror plots
So here we go it's our shot
Feel frail or not
This is the only world and humanity that we got

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

You gotta make your own mind up, man.

You're kidding, right?
Do I have to make a list? On every continent white people visited (if you can call showing up and not really leaving a visit) we fucked up the lives of a good portion of the people living there.
Sure, mankind has always been cruel, in every corner of the earth. However, white people are to murder, theft and slavery what Coca Cola is to refreshing diabeeetus (yes, that's how it's spelled). A fucking international enterprise whose traces can be found everywhere. On every fucking continent.
I hope we can agree on that. Otherwise, here's a short list: Gippsland Massacres, Nagasaki, Opium Wars, My Lai Massacre, fucking Iraq, Crusades, Apartheid, Herero and Namaqua genocide, that whole Columbus mess, Trail Of Tears and transatlantic slave trade (because why the fuck not?). Oh, my bad, I forgot the freaking Holocaust and starting 2 World Wars.
Who does this? Who? White people, that's who. Europeans and their descendants.
Would you like to argue that level of evil is genetic? I won't.
It's cultural. We europeans (and later our emigrated offspring) always thought we're better than everybody else, we had god on our side (and the Pope agreed!). Probably a leftover from the Roman Empire. And that's why everywhere we go, we steal, murder or occupy the shit out of every place. No other collection of ethnic groups has so much blood on their hands and it's not because we're worse DNA constructs than the others. All humans are capable of evil, it just takes a certain way of thinking to go that far.
Thankfully, we wrecked our own continent so badly during WW2, that we finally started to improve our ways. But here's the problem: we just started. We're far from being done.
Orban, LePen, Farage, Putin, Petry and last but not least Trump.

Built in Nagasaki Japan by Mitsubishi fyi

@newtboy and @Dragen_Jager

My main point is just in agreement with Hayden, that given a grossly illegal and unpalatable order like targeting women and children just because of who they are related to is something that America's current top brass would say no to.

That said, in existential wars there is no such things as a war crime any more. Or at the least, the definition will be written by the victors(Fire bombing Dresden and Tokyo, or nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Furthermore, what is approved in a 'black ops' sense has IMO always been something that America and every other nation has done, and again with the only meaningful rule being that it be effective and secret and/or deniable. Hence my ask the CIA quip,

Hmm, let's see... Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a quarter of a million people murdered (to no end, the war was already effectively over).

Americans have killed more than that in subsequent years (in fact, some estimates place a higher death toll of Iraqi civilians alone at American feet). I remember during the invasion of Iraq, American forces shot heavy ordinance (M1 Tank main gun, I believe) at a hotel full of journalists.

As the man says, "I'm afraid of Americans...."

Yeah... it's Muslims who blow shit up around the world.

There comes a point where you just need to swallow your pride and accept defeat. Hamas is never going to win a war against Israel. Their continued efforts have achieved nothing but the destruction of their own country and the people within. Politics and religion are not worth the death toll.

Now, someone is inevitably going to rant about sovereignty and freedom and all that. Tell me... should Germany have continued fighting after the fall of Berlin? Should Japan have continued fighting after Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Should Native Americans be launching rockets and bombing government buildings? No. You accept defeat and start taking the road to recovery.

Yeah I gotta agree. I can see why Reza is pissed. I agree that Bill is painting with broad strokes here. But still. It's religion. Doesn't matter which religion you're talking about. Deal with it. This is what happens when you believe in imaginary friends. people take shit too far, they take "holy" writings too literal.

Americans may want to try and pat themselves on the back but there are plenty of Christian extremists out there Hitler was Christian, Timothy McVeigh was Christian. The moderates immediately go to the "no true scottsman" fallacy.

Im reminded again of the analogy I made earlier. Comparing religions is like comparing the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One may have technically caused more death and destruction than the other, but they're BOTH pretty fucking horrible.

There is this phenomenon where you have all these people who claim to be of a certain religion yet have radically different views. so they are simultaneously able to claim they're all right and all wrong at the same time, whichever is most convenient to them at any given moment.

Of course there are peaceful and extreme of every religion, but yet they all claim to be of that religion just because they don't share your particular flavor of that religion doesn't mean you get to casually dismiss them at will.

again we have the issue of religion cherry picking what it likes and ignoring what it doesn't.

Nah there ARE worse religions out there to be fair, but that's like saying the bombing Hiroshima was worse than the bombing of Nagasaki. One may have technically killed more people, but they were both pretty horrible in terms of loss of life and destruction

The first person to cry 'racist' is usually the racist him/herself-
Japan
Ethnicity
Race?
Fuck Racism.

*edit-Another question? If I had written, 'Fuck Australia' after bashing her culture's shortcomings would you have been as quick to use the the 'cry racism' model so easily considering her peoples are a compendium of a mixed-bag similar to the America you expatriated from, equally as complicit in crimes against humanity at large and isolationism? You got yer crazy bag of fucks there as well expat, check a mirror.

I hold no racist views towards the Japanese, I am trashing a culture's savage and mundane aspects Mr. Official warning, and whom or what did I offend I would ask? YOUR sensibilities sir?

The Japanese suffer as a peoples because of the backlog of baggage they carry into the future-I do not discount their contributions to the planet, the shining aspects of their culture, HOWEVER. I do recognize their dysfunction and regret and lament their dwindling numbers, the erosion of families, their skewed sense of sexuality and their treatment of the female within their culture. Ask any Japanese woman of the age of 20 and not one will tell you that she has not been sexually exploited or violated in a public place. Sure, it's fun to watch and giggle at their television, their obsessions and odd social practices but form whence does the spectacle arise, from what psychological mindfuck that reaches much further back than Hiroshima or Nagasaki?

Oh the IRONY of someone so self-important and all-powerful as to pass judgement on intent or meaning without first inquiring as to the motivation for the word.

Fuck em I suppose, is what set you off Dagmar-Pretty strong a statement I suppose but not so much in the context of the motivation behind my problem with their culture-on-the-skids.

Evolution IN Action

Tags for this video have been changed from 'Cruel Bombs, nuclear weapons, tests, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Bikini, Feynman, vsauce' to 'Cruel Bombs, nuclear weapons, tests, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Bikini, Feynman, vsauce, ww2' - edited by xxovercastxx

The controlling group of men who made the decisions on Vietnam thru to Iraq, with all the bombing, drug running, kidnapping, sponsoring of death squads, torture and mass slaughter of civilians (not to mention spraying toxins on poor ghettos at home, shooting student protestors etc etc.) are in the same league. Start with the 'terror bombing' of Hiroshima and Nagasaki if you like (Curtis LeMay's words not mine). The Bush family were in from the start.

If you take this as a 'Regime', then the numbers are right up there and, as stated, operating from a dramatically more comfortable position. The historical villains mentioned all had backgrounds that any psychiatrist would ring alarm bells about and their societies were in tatters when they came to power.
But Dubya for example? Privileged draft dodging frat boy living in the most comfortable place and time in all of human history.. how many did he kill in a deceptive money grab? Oh yeah, they 'don't count dead babies'. Even the hawks are conceding its in the millions now, and that's just the last 10 years of near 70..

@MilkmanDan if you'd have been Truman you'd most-likely have picked at least one of these two targets as both were of military industrial significance and Nagasaki was such as well as a major port. Another criteria with regards to studying the blast effects was that the city chosen must not have been heavily bombed previously-They wanted a clean pallet for this little masterpiece of destructive power...can't recall now but there was a list of about 10-12 targets to choose from.

Another sad thought is that tens of thousands of innocent lives in Nagasaki would have been saved if Japan had surrendered after the first bomb was dropped.

The difference with Cuba was that neither side wanted to go to war, whereas it does seem war was Japan's preference.

I can't downvote, but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd go with "monarchs just as bad if not worse as Hitler" as the bit of your comment that would be most likely to draw a "challenge" as you put it. You kinda godwin'd the whole thread right out of the gate which is a bit ... trollish.

I suppose one could maybe make a reasonable attempt at justifying that statement with regards to a few specific past monarchs, but even though I couldn't care less about the British monarchy I think it would be rather unfair to hold the current Queen accountable for what some of her predecessors may have done many, many years before she was born.

I'm an American citizen with ancestors originally from Germany, so by those standards I should personally be held to blame for slavery, Little Bighorn and smallpox blankets, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, AND the holocaust.