Serious War & Morality

[Classical]

Myzozoa & Shiruba

I don't feel that the questions are on topic, the question intended to ask what are the standards that are capable of justifying war. (subjectively) Questioning the assumption of the question, while healthy, isn't standard debate practice.


I wasn't intending to debate the validity of objective truth, and I don't think this is thread is the proper one to do so. However, Just PM me and Ill offer a stance on the idea of absolute truth and where I stand on it, or specifically the absolute truth that I hold to.

 

[Cresselia~~]

Pwnemon and everyone else bugging her, this pretty much shows that jynx would be willing for a country to go to war if it reduced the loss of life or suffering felt by a group of people. Please read the posts of people you are responding to in future :)

true. But they could have narrowed it down to putting the bombs near to the right wing military officials, ie: the core pro war people, instead of those 2 places that are filled with regular commoners.
I mean, it would have been better if they bombed Tokyo and Kyoto rather than Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

If so, they could take a huge chuck of pro war rightists out. Sadly they did not and these people actually want to promote Japanese supremacy, nationalism and colonization. Same people who want to resurrect Japan's army and have war again, clearly intended to exploit and to colonize.
Even the current prime minister is doing this.

 

[Stratos]

Im sorry but what? If you're trying to reduce loss of life tokyo is certainly not the way to go. Hiroshima's population at the time of the bombing was about 250k, and Nagasaki's was around the same. They were both important military targets—the former being the military's comm hq and the latter japan's largest port. Meanwhile tokyo had 3.5 million and was a far more political target than military. Even if dropping one bomb on tokyo managed to end the war, it would be far more deadly than the two dropped on nagasaki and hiroshima

 

[Cresselia~~]

Im sorry but what? If you're trying to reduce loss of life tokyo is certainly not the way to go. Hiroshima's population at the time of the bombing was about 250k, and Nagasaki's was around the same. They were both important military targets—the former being the military's comm hq and the latter japan's largest port. Meanwhile tokyo had 3.5 million and was a far more political target than military. Even if dropping one bomb on tokyo managed to end the war, it would be far more deadly than the two dropped on nagasaki and hiroshima

I'm not talking about reducing loss of life.
I'm talking about whose life to take in order to reduce more lives in the long term.
What if the government did not pay attention to Nagasaki/ Hiroshima commoners? If the same bombs were dropped in North Korea, they aren't going to care.
If say, they did not care what happened in Nagasaki/ Hiroshima, they would have to do what? Drop even more bombs? They were only lucky that they cared.

Tokyo was the political centre and the most important people lived there. ie: People who had more say-- which basically were the ones who were pro-war.
If they bombed there, it would have been more critical.

Put it another way, I actually would prefer they did something other than bombing.
But I would guess technology then was limited.

 

[Codraroll]

Wasn't Tokyo pretty much bombed to cinders already? I seem to recall reading that by the time the nukes were ready, bombs and firestorms had reduced Tokyo so much that dropping atom bombs there would simply be a waste - anything of importance was long gone, and over a hundred thousand people dead - more than the separate death toll of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

 

[Cresselia~~]

Wasn't Tokyo pretty much bombed to cinders already? I seem to recall reading that by the time the nukes were ready, bombs and firestorms had reduced Tokyo so much that dropping atom bombs there would simply be a waste - anything of importance was long gone, and over a hundred thousand people dead - more than the separate death toll of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

Not that I know of.

All those political rightists propagated like yeast and are becoming increasingly influential in the parliament of Japan.
Actually, they had always been influential, but they are exceptionally influential in recent years.

 

[elcheeso]

Uh yeah... the firebombing of Tokyo during one of the (many) air raids that happened was the single most deadly bombing in history, it killed more people immediately than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined (ofc nuclear fallout has long term effects so Nagasaki and Hiroshima probably would've been more deadly overall). It left over a million people homeless, as well (and that was just over 1-2 days). Japan as a whole had basically been on fire from the time the US developed their long range bombers (sometime during 1944) and it stayed on fire until Japan surrendered. Just off the top of my head I believe the majority of larger Japanese cities (barring Kyoto) had at least 25% of their urban areas burnt to the ground, with some extreme carpet bombing putting cities at 90% destroyed.

 

[Cresselia~~]

Proves that I'm no historian, then. *shrugs*
Sorry if it was all stupid, but I have never ever sat in any world history class and never studied world history.

Anyway, what I believe is, war is wrong, but a war to prevent more wars is somewhat a flawed type of justice, which is slightly better than the greed based war. In which, the latter is malicious and unforgivable.

 

[Stratos]

Wasn't Tokyo pretty much bombed to cinders already? I seem to recall reading that by the time the nukes were ready, bombs and firestorms had reduced Tokyo so much that dropping atom bombs there would simply be a waste - anything of importance was long gone, and over a hundred thousand people dead - more than the separate death toll of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.

Yes, and I accounted for that in my statistics (well, Google did)—the prewar population of tokyo was about 7 million, though most of those losses were evacuations instead of deaths.

 

[TSchmelz1994]

Ok, so this is going to be my opinion. Will there be a time when war is erased? I highly doubt it. As a whole, while humans are generally decent people, I believe that we have a dark side that will never fully go away. As society progresses, it will become less common, but it will still come around. In certain cases I believe it is justified. Going into World War 2 and stopping Nazi Germany was better then allowing Hitler to (in all probability) dominate Europe and commit more of the genocide then they did. Same reasons for Japan (weapons testing on Chinese citizens and such.) More modern wars (such as Iraq and Afghanistan,) are a much more grey area due to the fact that we went into Iraq on faulty information (and took out the dictator we installed. Irony at its finest.) Afghanistan did have a lot of training camps that needed to be taken care of, but we could have done it in a much better way than a full scale invasion like we did. Maybe use special forces and have precision strikes against the highest value targets? I don't know for sure. But take a war like the Crusades for example. Completely unjustified. Instead of "waging war to retake the holy land!", a better choice would have been to follow the teachings of their Christ and ask for a way that everybody could have used the holy land. Anyways, war is always a difficult subject, due to the fact that it can be an area of moral grayness. And religion is never a justification by itself. Take the Human-Covenant war from Halo as a fictional example. Religion was manipulated to inspire an entire group of races into genocide against a race they knew nothing about.

 

[Chompjil]

I am a pacifist at heart, there's definitely a lot of wars, when you look back, that had many regrettable moments by both the "good and bad" sides
Let's look at the two big Middle East actions
Gulf War:Lasted a short time, we got oil and kuwait safe
War on terror(+)Iraq War:Lasted forever, nothing accomplished
Some of the major things that I think we have to look on these is our obsession with the middle east area, and it's shown, Wars are usually started by an obsession to conquer,destroy, or rebuild/recapture something
Heck even the more physiological and not war-wars like Cold War and War on Drugs have the same obsession thing too
What it comes down to me is, there's things that are justified but dont go balls deep into things
yes I talked about mostly American things as that is my current residence

 

[Lord Apex]

Lol no were humans were destructive by nature! As long as there is religion and differences in our cultures, people are gonna die.