Exceptionally well done vid, thanks for posting this.

You're welcome!

That was a truly great video about a terrible subject.

Thanks for the post.

You're welcome.

If you go to the interactive one, when it zooms in on the time its your current date and time on your pc, pretty slick.

well done. although, he was wrong that the us targeted civilian areas with the firebombing attacks. The japanese built war manufacturering plants in civilian areas, a lot of times in peoples homes. So really it was self inflicted by the japanese.

The Japanese did not firebomb themselves.. so no.

Stop it.

Stop blaming the victims of shit, people!

The japanese government made a conscience decision to move these factories into the civilian areas knowing full well what the result would be... So yes. They essentially fire bombed their own citizens.

Put it on the Japaneses for Americas intentional slaughter of civilians. Seriously?
http://videosift.com/video/US-killing-of-50-90-of-civillians-in-67-cities-in-Japan

Yep, putting it on Japanese leadership. If you dont want your civilians targeted, dont put military targets among the houses. You can look at the European side of the war to see that we didnt target civilians, only the military targets. Not saying there wasnt civilian casualties, but we didnt specifically target them.

Uh... WTF? Have you seriously never heard of the Dresden and Hamburg firebombings? In the Hamburg case the U.S. actually set up a fake German village as a test run just to see how many houses they could burn down. The fact that entire mock village was destroyed was seen as a massive success, not a reason to go back and figure out a more humane way to do it.

As far as Japan goes, even today a large part of Japan's economy depends upon small to mid-sized businesses that often double as people's homes. The government didn't "place" them there, these were people's day-jobs. Just like in the U.S., factories that once produced consumer goods were forced to make military materials to support the war effort.

The U.S. used firebombs for two reasons: first, firebombing meant precision bombing wasn't needed so the planes could fly at a high altitude out of shot of anti-aircraft fire and second, they knew damn well they'd be roasting Japanese people alive. Nobody cared. The war had gone on for so long that the U.S. was willing to do anything to end it quickly, particularly when they saw Russian swooping in to consolidate Eastern Europe. After Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, the bitter island fighting in the Pacific, the kamikaze attacks, and the stories of escaped or freed POWs, it's pretty safe to say the American military wasn't looking at the Japanese people as humans anymore, just enemies to be defeated by any means necessary--including nuclear weapons.

Dan Savage was right. It does get better.