[delinka]

I'm disappointed that what could have been a review of an excellent film contained so much anti-"US Warmongering." War is terrible. Sanctions have negative effects. How would this author propose convincing leaders who commit human rights violations to stop those violations? Asking nicely?

"Thus, the starvation of little Setsuko/Keiko was not 'collateral damage,' but a premeditated murder. [...] Of course elite war-bringers [...] do not themselves pay the 'prices' they decide are acceptable."

This author needs to remember that Japan was the war-bringer in WW2. Brought it right to Pearl Harbor.

[ameza]

If the label, "US Warmongering", upsets you so much, please consider joining anti-war efforts. There's a reason why we have that label. Since WW2, our military has been active throughout the world to protect our interests from Latin America to the Middle East and of course, even Europe with the Cold War. Our current president promised an end to the war in the Middle East but it has yet to materialize. The Republican Party wants to launch a full-on campaign against ISIS. That label will remain with us unless we, as citizens, get involved with our government.

With regards to your point into human rights violations, I'd strongly suggest you look deeper into the conflict itself as "human right violations" is smoke and mirrors. If "human right violations" were a reason to start a conflict, Russia and/or China should have invaded us by now for all the human rights violations our police force are committing against our citizens, for all human right violations at Guantanamo Bay, etc.

[happyscrappy]

ISIS makes the Nazis seem reasonable but for some people anyone that opposes the West is good.

[tinco]

If you think that you haven't seen/read enough about the Nazis. Not that I would recommend doing that, just letting you know.

[hajile]

There is much more to the story. The history of the United States is full of wilful violence against others. Everything from theft of the south-west from Mexico (a war the US instigated and started) because "God has given us a 'manifest destiny'" to the barbaric atrocities we unleashed during the Spanish-American and later Philippine-American wars (the US has tried very hard to whitewash the concentration camps, rape, and wholesale butchering of men, women, and children).

America forced Japan to open it's borders (because the US wanted to use their lower islands to establish a more efficient trans-Pacific trade route). At that point, Japan realized that the game in Asia and the South Pacific was colonize or be colonized. Had we not invaded Japan for US trade route profits, had we not been demonstrating that colonial imperialism was the way forward, then Japan would have been far less likely to be pressured to behave similarly (the actions of all sides leading to an inevitable war no matter who fired the first shot).

I have no rose-colored view of Japan's actions (my adoptive grandmother and her parents spent most of the war being terribly mistreated and starved in a Japanese concentration camp). At the end of the war, most of these men were executed for their crimes, but despite all the well-known American war crimes, not even one American soldier was charged for crimes committed and everything was hidden behind the American flag.

In 'Grave of the Fireflies' a war is occurring, but is not the focus. It didn't matter to those children who the 'enemy' was and it didn't matter who the 'friendlies' were (neither side was willing to help them when they were incapable of helping themselves). It didn't even matter that the war ended exactly one week before Setsuko died.

I agree with the author that it was premeditated murder, but the murderer was not the US or even Japan. It is every one of us who are unwilling to stop this from happening in the here and now. WW2 is a fading memory, but the innocent casualties of war are not.

[throwaway12309]

FUCKING SPOILER ALERT next time

[scott_karana]

Is the knowing, willful firebombing of solely civilian targets ever justifiable, regardless of who brings the fire against whom?

From TFA:

  “Is it the enemy’s or one of ours?”

  “What difference does it make? Stupid murderers.”

[3pt14159]

I'm extremely pro-peace, but in total war elimination of civilians is necessary to reduce production capacity.

[scott_karana]

Check out the conquests of Caesar and Alexander the Great.

They preferred settling among the local populace, including forced marriages/rape. It's harder to rebel when the invaders are your neighbours or even your fathers.

Cynically speaking, that's better than just evaporating innocents.

[3pt14159]

This is completely inane view.

1. The Japanese would not have capitulated until much more suffering would have taken place.

2. Negotiations with Russia were going on over the division of Germany and the atomic weapon blasts tempered Stalin's resolve that he had the more effective fighting force.

3. Innocents die in war. Whether from gas chambers or fire bombings or atomic bombs. If we want to stop this from happening then we need to reduce the frequency of war. Especially total war. Or do you really expect the US to send in it's bachelors to rape defenceless Japanese prisoners for decades? In the time of Alexander the great less than 3% of the population was used in fighting forces because manpower was required to keep up the food supply. It was a completely different era with a completely different set of circumstances that we don't even fully understand because we don't have the same level of records about it.

[scott_karana]

It was an answer to a ludicrous question... I certainly don't endorse the approach of Alexander the Great :)

Mainly, I feel the phrase "total war" is a hyperbolic, "binary" phrase that doesn't allow for meaningful, nuanced debate. That's all I was trying to counteract.

Your points are all correct, of course.

[panic]

I don't think the parent comment should be downvoted. It makes some good points, even if you disagree with them.

I think you're misunderstanding what "war-bringer" means in this case. It's not America vs. Japan: it's the governments vs. the people. Both the American government and the Japanese government brought war, but the people of the countries (especially Japan) were forced to suffer for their governments' decisions.

[AdeptusAquinas]

It should be down voted because it seems obvious the poster didn't read the whole article. There are later sections, for example those covering Jiro Horikoshi, that address how Japan brought much of their pain on themselves.

Also, the comment missed the entire point of the article, as you established. Just because Japan attacked Pearl harbour doesn't mean an unnamed mother deserved to burn to death, nor that her child deserved to starve to death.

Neither victim, nor many of the other civilians in WW2 or Iraq, had a say in the politicking that led to their destruction, which is the true horror of war.

[timr]

I read the whole article, and I thought the same thing as the parent. I appreciate a pacifist sentiment, but outside of the critical analysis of the films, this essay was fairly insipid.

There's such a thing as "pacifism", where you believe that violence should always be the final alternative. Then there's the sophomoric thinking of defining "pacifism" as "we should never go to war, ever". Sometimes, you have to fight.

[happyscrappy]

The Japanese were in many ways more brutal and ruthless than the Nazis but have done a great job whitewashing their despicable past. Wiped away with mushroom clouds that they invited.

[aeturnum]

The Japanese civilians who are depicted in Fireflies bear no more responsibility for the actions of unit 731 or the rape of nanking than you do for LeMay's fire bombing of Japanese cities. If you can do nothing else, reject the lumping-together of a people into a collective 'they.' No matter what punishment Japanese war criminals deserve, we must also strive to protect civilians on all sides.

[tsotha]

I disagree. In post 19th century war is there are no civilians. All excess labor capacity goes to the war effort.

And wars are started by civilians, for the most part. Why should young men be the ones to feel all the pain?

[aeturnum]

I very much disagree that there are no civilians after the 19th century. Not all wars are total wars (the term used to describe WW1 and WW2). The American / Iraq war of 2003 had civilians on both sides.

I agree that all members of American and Japanese society share some level of responsibility for participating in total war, but I also think your "no civilians" statement goes too far. It is obvious that some members of a country have more direct effect on the war than others and that once you get far enough away (children are civilians, adults who do not work are civilians, workers who deliver mail are civilians, workers who make vehicle parts are probably civilians, workers who make tanks might be civilians, etc). To argue otherwise is to view war as some kind of 'original sin,' where the level of your contribution is immaterial and any association is sufficient to make one a combatant. If that's the case, then you and I and everyone alive today is certainly indicted in the many wars we are not working to stop. Even people working to stop one war are helping others to continue by not working to stop them. It's absurd.

Civilians do start wars and, in the modern era, they are often held to account for the wars they start. War crimes tribunals indict military and civilian personnel alike. I also agree that young men bear an unequal and unjust burden in war - but the suggestion you make is silly. The solution is not to extend that unequal burden by allowing more people to be killed, but instead to give young men more options to avoid being killed and killing others.

[bionsuba]

Your comment was going so well until that last sentence. Yes, the Japanese government committed atrocities. But I have a hard time seeing how that somehow justifies the US killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians that had nothing to do with it when Japan was basically begging to surrender. Yes begging to surrender, but the US only wanted unconditional surrender, which they knew to a society based on pride and honor was a huge slap in the face and they knew it would be turned down.

[Nadya]

The only hint of surrender was the Japanese approaching the Soviets to broke a negotiation of surrender, to which the Soviets essentially ignored. That's hardly "begging".

They wanted to keep all the land they had gained imperially (Taiwan and some other land, I forget offhand). Which was essentially an "OK, we lose. But we get to keep everything we took before we lost." which was denied by the Soviets and would have been denied by the US.

The issue being glossed over is that anyone speaking against the war or saying Japan would lose would be murdered by fanatical military leaders. If you were against the war, you were against the Emperor and Japan. A traitor.

Civilian deaths are not justified by political military conquest. Especially when any civilians who speak out against the political military conquest are killed. That's a lose:lose scenario for the civilians and I don't see how anyone could morally justify such a choice.

"Die going against your country or die because of it." is hardly a choice...

[happyscrappy]

"Those little sweethearts will face German bullets or they'll face French ones!"

[AnimalMuppet]

> Yes begging to surrender, but the US only wanted unconditional surrender, which they knew to a society based on pride and honor was a huge slap in the face and they knew it would be turned down.

Arguably, the US was right. If I understand correctly, the US was determined to break Japan's militaristic social organization, to prevent another war. They needed unconditional surrender to do so. And, in fact, Japan has not been aggressive after World War II. They didn't re-arm and start another war, with hundreds of thousands of more (at least) casualties.

So the moral calculus is really not as simple as what you say.

[marcosdumay]

> How would this author propose convincing leaders who commit human rights violations to stop those violations?

You kill several of those victims, of course, and make sure the rest won't ever escape from poverty. I'm pretty sure that'll teach a dictator to not victimize them.

Or, just maybe, a dictator oppressing its own people isn't good enough reason to start a war. But I'll not insist on such radical ideas.

[DanSanchezV]

More along the lines of your excellent point: https://medium.com/dan-sanchez/a-foreign-enemy-is-a-tyrant-s...

[rosser]

This author needs to remember that Japan was the war-bringer in WW2. Brought it right to Pearl Harbor.

And that justifies the murder — yes, murder — of hundreds of thousands of non-combatants ... how, again?

[smegel]

When an entire nation becomes a support system for a war machine ravaging an entire region and killing tens of millions of innocent people, the notion of "innocent civilians" becomes a bit tenuous.

Japan was in the wrong. It was a criminal aggressor. The idea that the Japanese people should be able to sit back in their admittedly lovely gardens and sip sencha tea while their armies were committing massive crimes against humanity is a grotesque notion. The best way to show the Japanese people the horrific nature of war and occupation was to bring it to their doorstep. If they want to portray themselves of victims, it should be of their own leadership, not the countries that needed to defeat them.

[rosser]

"Sipping tea in the garden" ⊕ "getting firebombed" is one hell of a false dichotomy.

[ectoplasm]

So like 9/11 was awesome then?

[vezzy-fnord]

This is ultimately the harmful conclusion of any absolutist idea that ascribes guilt to the citizenry for the actions of the state it is subordinate to. You will notice similar ideas spread in ostensibly democratic countries. If you vote and the nominee ends up going berserk, it's your fault for picking them. If you don't vote, it's your fault for not stopping them. The idea that the voting system used might be inefficient is completely discounted. Further, the idea that maybe most people have no real agency over the actions of their government is treated as a rather foreign one.

[smegel]

Sadly, and somewhat paradoxically, many of those who lament the bombing of Japan probably feel that way. For example, quoting the article, how do you think the author of this passage would respond to your question?

> the Israeli blockade of Gaza, US sanctions on Iran, and the new Saudi blockade of Yemen, as the infanticidal atrocities they are.

[DanSanchezV]

>how do you think the author of this passage would respond to your question?

I am the author, and I would respond that 9/11 was a despicable act of mass murder committed under the same terrorist rationale and collective guilt fallacies under which the above listed crimes are also committed. Two wrongs do not make a right, and neither do two atrocities. For more along these lines, see this other essay of mine: https://medium.com/dan-sanchez/the-symbiosis-of-savagery-68d...

[smegel]

> the same terrorist rationale and collective guilt fallacies

Collateral impacts on civilians is not the same as collective guilt. When did the US or Israel say they wanted to punish ordinary Gazans or Iranians for the crimes committing by their leaders? The unfortunate reality is that dealing with difficult international problems like this often lead to actions that impact the innocent - be it through bombs or sanctions. Yet the guilt should be attributed to those who create the problem, not those forced to take action. Or are you actually siding with Hamas and the Mullahs?

It's easy to point the finger of blame at those trying to resolve some of the most tricky and difficult problems in the world, coming up with solutions that work is an entirely different matter.