General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Japan marks 76th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings [View all]Leith
(7,809 posts)The closest comparison would be to imagine if North Korea had 4 times the population, invaded China, Manchuria, the Philippines, all of SE Asia mainland, and seriously threatened Australia, and had already attacked Hawaii.
North Koreans are already starving and performing mandatory slave labor. They have a fanatical cult in their emperor. They have an irrational fear of being invaded by the rest of the world. The country puts more importance in their weapons of war than the wellbeing of their own people. And they would fight an invasion with to the last man, woman, and child. THAT was Japan of the 1930s and 1940s.
In the 1980s, one could still see old women, survivors of the horrors of the war, bent over from malnutrition in a way that would make Groucho Marx complain about back trouble. I felt bad for them because their own country did that to them.
At the same time, being hibakusha (victims of an atomic bomb) has made them completely oblivious to the horrors their fathers and grandfathers committed on the rest of Asia. To this very day, the Japanese have never faced their own culpability and actions during the war.
I won't second guess Truman. He did the right thing at the right time.