Should Nuclear Terrorism denial be a crime, just like Holocaust denial?

Holocaust denial is not a crime here in the U.S., and it should most definitely not be. Same goes for the nuclear terrorism stuff.

But of course I’ll join you in contemplation of the horror of the annihiliation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I am not stating a position on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it was not terrorism.

It was an act of war taking place in during a war. That is not terrorism, any more than the V2 bombing of London.

The winners are never saddled with the petty irritation of war crimes, other than those of the losers.

Neither should be a crime.

I don’t think that it was an act of terrorism, as @zenvelo says, it was an act of war during wartime. A stronger argument can be made for a war crime. Too much collateral damage and civilian casualties, plus there were other options to either destroy any military targets with conventional bombs, or to demonstrate the atomic bomb without targeting a city.

@zenvelo You realize that the city of Hiroshima was mostly filled with women/children when they dropped the bomb on it? There was very little military significance there except it was a pristine town so they could assess the bomb’s power. I think it was pretty conclusively terrorism: “We’ll keep murdering your civilians unless you surrender.”

@gorillapaws And the Rape of Nanking was only committed upon the Chinese Army?

It was a war. War is filled with terror.

@zenvelo

Does one atrocity during a war justify other atrocities?

@Darth_Algar No. But that it doesn’t make it terrorism.

I dunno. Seems like the word “terrorism” is used so broadly that it could fit. But honestly, I think arguing over whether or not it was terrorism is kinda haggling over triviality.

@Darth_Algar: “I think arguing over whether or not it was terrorism is kinda haggling over triviality.”

This. While I have always heard it described as “state terrorism”, I don’t think it matters what it’s called. We can all agree it was horrible.

I still can’t believe that the U.S. is more progressive and correct re: free speech and thought control than Europe. At least the U.S. gets something right. It looks like the holocaust denial laws are fairly widespread in Europe. Yikes.

War is not a game. It is not a gentlemanly wager. It is a terrible, horrific thing, though sometimes necessary. If you are going to wage war, then you wage total war: you eliminate the enemy’s capacity to fight back as swiftly, efficiently, and ruthlessly as possible. It is ultimately kinder for everyone on every side of a military conflict if it is waged such that there is absolutely no confusion about who won and who didn’t, and the capacity for the losing side to fight back is utterly and totally annihilated. Would a land war in Japan have been kinder or more compassionate?

That aside, to address the question you ask directly, I support total and absolute freedom of speech. No restrictions. When notorious shit-disturber Abbie Hoffman was asked by a reporter if it was true that he supported total freedom of expression, Abbie agreed this was so. When the reporter asked him about the classic problem of someone shouting “fire” in a crowded theatre, Abbie’s response was: “FIRE! FIRE!”

The problem is not “denial,” the problem is the size of the megaphone of the people doing the denying. I think Fox News has a total right to disseminate blatant lies in support of fascist billionaire oppression over all living things. The problem is that Fox News has the power to shout much, much louder than I do. I don’t want to take away Fox News’ ability to lie, I want to take away Fox News’ ability to lie louder than others can contradict them.

Don’t attack the symptom, address the cause.

Something to keep in mind when asking whether or not dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that the military leadership was mostly against it, that many of them were willing to call the attacks unnecessary on the record, and that the going theory of why the bombs were dropped anyway is that was a “diplomatic” move meant to impress/intimidate Russia.

@JeSuisRickSpringfield

Pretty much. Japan was already defeated. Even if they had not formally surrendered they had no longer had the capacity to wage war. Dropping the atomic bombs was about the US saying to the world (especially the Soviet Union) “look what we can do, don’t fuck with us!”.

They are both crimes against humanity on a nightmarish scale. They are worse than terrorism. Terrorism just tries to terrify not to wipe everyone out.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a necessary evil. I for one am glad that it took place.

“Necessary evil” is a term people invent to try to justify the unjustifiable. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in no way necessary.

No one denies the US bombed those cities. In fact, most Americans feel it was a justified act to end the war, so those people see no need to deny it, and the people who believe it was a mistake to bomb still agree we did drop the bombs. America warned Japan if they didn’t stop the war they would drop the bomb.

What war were the Jews and crippled waging in Germany and other parts of Europe that justified slaughtering them? There is denial of the holocaust primarily by people who are antisemitic. There isn’t a way to compare that to bombing Japan during the war. It wasn’t about hating a group of people, it was about self defense.

Is dropping an atomic bomb terrorism? I’d say yes. The entire arms race, and having a strong military, is about scaring other countries enough that they would not dare to screw with us. If we can blow you up you won’t even try to rattle us. I would guess that other countries see America as the country that was willing to drop a nuclear bomb that not only destroys things in it’s path in an instant, but leaves behind cancer and mutagenic changes that alter the people for generations, maybe forever.

@JLeslie “There isn’t a way to compare that to bombing Japan during the war. It wasn’t about hating a group of people, it was about self defense.”

It was not about self-defense. Not even remotely. I don’t think even the most die-hard supporters of the bombing claim it was in self-defense. As for hating a group of people – it might be hard to realize or understand now, 70 years after the fact, but there was a definite climate in this country of hate towards the Japanese. A climate nurtured by our government, military and our media. Americans polled at the time tended to view the Japanese as “sub-human vermin”. We rounded up our own citizens of Japanese ancestry into our own concentration camps. And far from being about self-defense or avoiding larger Japanese casualties in a ground invasion (as the popular myth goes now) Truman was prepared to drop an a-bomb on Japan every couple of days until Japan surrendered or until the Japanese people were utterly exterminated.

@Darth_Algar The Japanese started the war. What war did the Jews start in Germany?

Even when I lived in MI in the late 80’s they weren’t find of the Japanese. It was something I didn’t expect, because being Jewish from the northeast, growing up the Nazis were the focus whenever we talked about the war. Move to Michigan and their in the middle of losing market share to the Japanese in the auto industry and that kind of keeps the bad feelings at a higher level. My family (parents and grandparents) had sworn off ever buying a German car, while we were saying in the next sentence how reliable the Japanese cars are and we might never buy an American one again.

I know about the camps in America, our distrust of our own Japanese citizens, and I think it’s horrible what we did. Those citizens of ours paid a price for Japan attacking us and starting a war.

@JLeslie

Yes, Japan attacked us first. How does that make the atomic bombings “self defense”? What do the Jews in Germany have to do with the particular topic here? What is the relevance of the upset of people in the late 1980s to the subject of people of the 1940s viewing the Japanese as “sub-human vermin”?

To me the Holocaust is about murdering 6 million Jews and 3 million who either helped the Jews, were disabled, or somehow deemed unworthy. The Q is about Holocaust.

No, the Q is about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not the Holocaust. Now what about the rest of my post there?

@JLeslie “No one denies the US bombed those cities”

As far as I understand the question, “nuclear terrorism denial” does not refer to denying that the bombings happened. It refers to denying that they were acts of (state) terrorism. So anyone who says “the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not acts of terrorism” is engaging in nuclear terrorism denial as far as the OP is concerned.

Aren’t all bombs terrorizing?

@JLeslie Seriously? Terrorism is more than just scaring people. Otherwise, haunted houses would be terrorism.

Is the haunted house really trying to kill you? I assume you mean the Halloween kind. Does it even imply in any way it wants to really kill you? Is there an example in history of haunted houses killing people?

I think the Swastika and the Confederate flag are terrorizing.

If we look at the legal definition of terrorists and government military forces or soldiers, I would guess dropping the a-bombs are not viewed as terrorism, but it was to scare the shit out of the country so it would stop.

@JLeslie Of course the haunted house is not trying to kill you. But you suggested that all bombs are terrorizing—which would include the bombs that don’t kill people (they can and have been used just for effect). So your question is absurd and ignores the reason I made the comparison.

As for the legal definition of terrorism, there isn’t one in international law (which is what’s relevant for military conflicts). In any case, the article I posted argues that the point of the bomb was not to scare the shit out of Japan so it would stop. That was more or less a fait accompli by that point. Instead, it was to impress the Russians—who were officially allies of the US—in advance of the coming Cold War.

So while there may not be an agreed upon definition of “terrorism” in international law, it seems to me that this account—if accurate—is in line with the most common general defintion of terrorism:” the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.” Russia was a military ally, and only an opponent politically. Japan was certainly an enemy, but one that the US military leadership considered defeated. So if the bombs were dropped for political reasons, there’s a strong case to be made that doing so was state terrorism.

So, we agree? Dropping bombs is terrorism. Should it be a crime if someone doesn’t think so? My answer is no. I don’t think Holocaust denial should be a crime either.

@JLeslie Are you even trying to understand anything people are writing here? No, dropping bombs is not always terrorism. Sometimes dropping a bomb is just an act of war. But when it is completely unnecessary as an act of war and is done for political purposes—especially as a diplomatic move aimed at a country other than the one the bomb is dropped on—then it starts looking a lot like terrorism.

@Darth_Algar It’s so easy to take the moral high ground when you’re this far removed from the situation. But in real life, sometimes you need to make a choice when none of the options are “good” ones.

Wars primarily end in two ways. Either there are no enemy combatants remaining, or a political solution is reached. The first option has generally not applied since the Napoleonic Wars though. Consider Peru’s battle against Shining Path. They have been militarily defeated for 23 years, but the small band of survivors continue to be an asymmetric nuisance because some are still alive, and there is no political solution.

Now consider that Japan had pilots that were prepared to fly their planes directly and intentionally into the Allied ships in kamikaze attacks. Interviews with kamikaze pilots who survived show them to have been dedicated to their task with quasi-religious fervour. You only need to look at the various hotspots of Islamic violence around the world to see what an enemy can do with this type of belief. Maybe we could have destroyed their industry, all heavy military hardware, and all means of waging conventional war. But it would not have been over. Their spirit had to be broken, in order to achieve a political solution.

You’ve also mentioned that the purpose of the attacks was as a deterrent to the USSR. I don’t disagree, but again I think this was necessary. Considering the way the Cold War unfolded, do you really think it would’ve ended without a single nuclear attack if the devastation of nuclear weapons had never been seen first hand? The knowledge gained from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks provided a greater incentive to the nuclear powers to avoid nuclear war. If they didn’t understand what the weapons were capable of beyond a handful of scientific diagrams, the headstrong leaders of the nuclear countries would’ve been far more likely to use their weapons at the most dangerous points of the Cold War. And by then the destructive power of the newer weapons would’ve caused far more death, destruction, and pain than Hiroshima and Nagasaki suffered. Again, these two attacks provided a political solution that prevented total destruction.

@BlackSwanEffect

- Japan was already defeated. This was agreed upon by pretty much every one of the US’s top military commanders at the time. No bombing or ground invasion would have been necessary. Even if Japan did not surrender they simply had no capacity to wage war by that point.

- Do you seriously believe they didn’t know the destructive capabilities of nuclear weapons? They they had to drop two on major metropolitan areas to know what the bombs could do? Yeah, right. The destructive capacity of the bombs was well understood, expertly calculated, even before the Trinity test. That’s why such weapons were developed in the first place. Even still I do not believe that genocidal acts can be justified on the supposition that they maybe, could be, might have prevented some unrelated hypothetical future scenario.

@Darth_Algar

- See my comment regarding Shining Path. Defeating the Japanese military and defeating Japan are two different things. Also refer to Iraq. Defeating and disbanding the Iraqi army didn’t exactly end the violence.

- They knew in an academic sense, but the real world knowledge is a far more powerful deterrent than any physics presentation ever could be.

@BlackSwanEffect I agree that defeating the Japanese military and defeating Japan are two different things. But the historical record shows us that the US military leadership was not thinking in those terms and that they believed both to be defeated (insofar as they made the distinction at all). They might have been wrong, and so a person in our position in history might argue that all of the military experts of the time were wrong and that dropping the bombs was actually necessary. But notice that this changes nothing about the question of nuclear terrorism. Crimes are defined in part by intention. Therefore, if the US leadership believed—correctly or incorrectly—that Japan was defeated, and if they dropped the bombs for political reasons concerning Russia rather than military reasons concerning Japan, then the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are still strong candidates for the label of “state terrorism.” Reasons matter.

@BlackSwanEffect

Yes, even if some in Japan held out what of it? They had no capacity left to wage war, so what, exactly, were they going to do?