Eran wrote:What I believe Truman should have explored was a conditional surrender.
I find this to be profoundly foolish, even morally reprehensible. The war must be concluded decisively, without conditions, or you risk wasting the great sacrifices that have already been made.
Eran wrote:My argument is that it is entirely plausible that the Japanese government would have agreed, in July 1945, to accept the very same terms (and thus with precisely the same subsequent history) as were eventually imposed on them.
The Potsdam Declaration was issued on July 26, 1945. They were quite free to accept these terms at any time before August 6 and 9, when the US struck their cities with atomic weapons. They decided to hold out for better terms. Who knows how long that would have taken? Why let them dictate terms to us in the first place? They must not be allowed to imagine that they forced our hand, even on the smallest condition. Whatever conditions are granted should be due only to our benevolence, and not in any sense to their own strength. They have to be made to accept this without conditions. That is complete psychological defeat.
Eran wrote:The German nation was under no illusion that it wasn't defeated in the war. Rearming wasn't a result of the terms under which WW I ended.
How do you know? You can't even tell the difference between the armistice signed on November 11, 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles, which was not completed for six months, and was not registered with the League of Nations until October of the next year:
Eran wrote:So while technically an armistice, Versailles, for all intents and purposes, was equivalent to an unconditional surrender.
You quote an article on the armistice, and then you start talking about Versailles. We all make mistakes, but I think this demonstrates your strange attitude toward the historical record. A historical fact seems to have less importance to you than it does to me:
Eran wrote:And one can just as easily paint an opposite scenario. Having been bombed using atomic weapons, the Japanese retain a grudge against Americans, awaiting their day of revenge, secretly building nuclear weapons of their own, whereas being allowed a conditional surrender enables them to accept the peace without the sense that the loss of face requires revenge.
But that is not what happened, is it? You do not retain the privilege of using hypothetical scenarios here. We do not have to speculate about what would have happened if the US had forced an unconditional surrender on the Japanese command through the use of atomic weapons, because the US did these things,
in reality.
Your argument is based on the idea that, if the US had not used not used A-bombs (which they did), and if the US war effort had not been directed towards unconditional surrender of the enemy (which it was), then we would still have the same peaceful and US-friendly Japan of the modern era. In other words, your whole argument is a hypothetical scenario. My argument, on the other hand, is based on
the indisputable historical fact that the US did drop the bomb, and they did insist on unconditional surrender, and today we have a friendly and peaceful Japan. I would rather not travel back in time to do anything to threaten this outcome, even though it was purchased at such great cost. You would be willing to do this, it seems. The risk mean nothing to you. What about the potential damage that might have been caused by a rearmed Japan? But you refuse to even entertain the idea:
Eran wrote:Because it would cause hundreds of thousands of innocent lives.
But a rearmed Japan could cause
millions of deaths. That means absolutely nothing to you, apparently. It is as if place no value on the great sacrifices that were made. You play with history as if it is a game. I can't believe you would place a hypothetical scenario on the same footing as a historical fact!
Different hypothetical scenarios can be put on the same footing. Therefore, I can ask you to consider a scenario opposed to your own, in which a rearmed Japan causes more death and destruction later down the road, because we did not seek unconditional surrender, and I can make arguments that my scenario has more verisimilitude than yours. But you cannot make the argument that a hypothetical scenario has more verisimilitude than the actual historical reality, can you?
To top it all off, although you coolly dismiss the risk that an unrepentant, rearmed Japan could have posed to the world, you accuse me of being some kind of bloodthirsty monster:
Eran wrote:Your later assertions seem to suggest that you would have opposed the Potsdam Declaration which did promise a much more lenient treatment for the Japanese people than the potential one you described...
Where do you get that? My position is that Truman was right to force the Japanese command to accept the Potsdam Declaration, without conditions. This seems like the safest course for preventing another catastrophe. You irresponsibly dismiss all of the risks of a different course of action. You are the one, it seems to me, who casually ignores the risks here.
I am all for being generous and magnanimous to our defeated enemy. In fact, that seems like the wisest way to handle things,
after the war has been concluded. There is less room for magnanimity and generosity while the war is actually going on, however. How can you fail to grasp this simple point: Sometimes, in war, when one employs half-measures, out of compassion, out of nobility, or for any other "virtuous" motive, what you end up doing is causing more pain and suffering to all sides in the conflict, when, if only you had employed the full-measures, then you might have greatly mitigated this suffering? Do you not recognize the principle as valid? If a child is bitten by squirrel, the only way to safely prevent a possible attack of rabies is a lengthy regiment of painful abdominal injections (I don't know if this is still the medical procedure, but just bear with me). I urge the absolute necessity of this preventative treatment, but you seem to be to upset by the manifestations of your child's distress. After only the first round of injections, you storm out of the doctor's office with the screaming infant in your arms and promise never to return. I implore you to reconsider: If we can avoid a painful death by rabies, why shouldn't we? You answer, because it causes the child pain, and besides, she probably won't contract the disease anyway. You know what - you are absolutely right. The child probably won't get rabies. But why risk it?
Your position is morally irresponsible. And instead of dealing with the risks that I mention, you would rather play word games with the terms "armistice" and "surrender."
Eran wrote:Deploying your logic, one could just as easily have demanded the complete annihilation of every single person of Japanese descent.
That's like saying, instead of a painful medical procedure to prevent disaster in the case of a child bitten by a rodent, what I am actually saying is that we should beat the child to death with a baseball bat - that's the only sure way to prevent rabies. It is as if you have reasoned: it hurts the child to receive injections to the abdomen, it also hurts the child to be beaten to death; therefore, if we are to follow through with the rabies treatment, that is just as bad as subjecting the child to a fatal beating.
I will admit that the complete extermination of the Japanese would have ended the war. But that was impossible. Look at all the difficulties the Nazis had with exterminating a few million Jews, and they barely fought back at all. No, the only real way to subjugate this proud and combative people, well accustomed to the use of arms, was to win them over. They have shown over and over again through the course of the war that they respect nothing but force. If that is what it takes to make them respect us, so be it.
The author(s) of the Wikipedia article, "Surrender of Japan", wrote:Japanese leaders had always envisioned a negotiated settlement to the war.
In other words, the policy you propose Truman should have followed, by allowing the Japanese to dictate to the US the terms of surrender, would have rewarded the Japanese for their imperialistic aggression, at least in part. I am willing to make concessions,
up to a point. I see nothing wrong with allowing them to keep their emperor, at least as a symbolic figurehead. But they should not be allowed to expect this as a right or privilege, won through their bravery, their toughness, or through any superiority which they imagine they have over the US - here are the seeds of potential future conflict. They can trust in our benevolence in allowing them to preserve their emperor, but that is it. They should not be allowed to demand anything at all.
It is possible that this specific concession (preservation of the emperor) could have been explicitly stated in the Potsdam Declaration, and that may have compelled the Japanese command to accept it with enough promptness to avert the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Let us say that this would have worked, and that it could have produced an indistinguishable result (a peaceful and friendly Japan), with 95% probability. Still, one time out of twenty, a rearmed Japan propels the world into death and destruction once more, but this time, at a much higher cost. Are you willing to risk a hundred million lives on a 95% probability? What if a few hundred thousand lives can end it all right now, with much greater certainty? Your refusal to even consider these calculations demonstrates a certain callousness when it comes to human life. To make it even worse, you mask this insensitivity to suffering with a great concern for human rights and outrage at the "war crime" of dropping the A-bomb. If I did not know you better, I would call this hypocrisy. But, you are not consciously hypocritical, I don't think. The problem is that you use deductive reasoning to judge historical events, when you ought to suspend judgment according to your preconceived ideological principles, and try to judge the facts themselves, on a case by case basis (if there are principles to be found, they can only be arrived at through this inductive method).
The one thing that proves the wisdom of Truman's policy is the concrete result: a Japan that is still peaceful and friendly almost 70 years after the fact (I pray that they are recovering well from that terrible disaster last year). You would be threatening that outcome, with your ill-advised and unethical thought-experiments, in my opinion (thank God no one ever invented a time machine, or the libertarians would have destroyed the world ten times over, by this point).
The one thing that proves the foolishness of Versailles is that within 15 years the Nazis took over Germany, and before 20 years had passed, the most destructive war in the history of Europe had been triggered. That is the definition of failure, in my book. Your understanding seems to break down utterly at this point:
Germany following WW I, while technically not having unconditionally surrendered, was psychologically defeated.
20 years later, and the continent descended once more into destructive conflict. I don't want to be too condescending, but you are aware that Hitler was a distinguished veteran of the Great War, right? Does Hitler strike you as a man who was "psychologically defeated"?
Many Germans, just like Hitler, nurtured the fantasy that they had
not been defeated on the field in a military sense, and that the defeat was actually caused by the politicians in the rear, who deceitfully betrayed the troops on the front with their armistice, which they considered equivalent to being "stabbed in the back." In other words, in their own estimation, they had
not really been beaten. I can't help thinking that if the Allies had insisted on an unconditional surrender (probably impossible, after 4 years of conflict, since French and British forces were so exhausted), they could have disabused the resentful German people of this dangerous fantasy.
I know you can construct better arguments than this. Why don't you make more of an effort?