Close to the end of the war, Japan – which had made pretty extensive use of biological weapons against China – was working on also hitting the US with biological weapons. We were far enough away that it would have been difficult, but where they had been able to employ biologicals, in Asia, they did.
Operation PX, also known as Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night, was a planned Japanese military attack on civilians in the United States using biological weapons, devised during World War II. The proposal was for Imperial Japanese Navy submarines to launch seaplanes that would deliver weaponized bubonic plague, developed by Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army, to the West Coast of the United States.
That being said, Japan wasn’t even the expected target of the Manhattan Project. Germany would have been, but was defeated via conventional force prior to the project reaching completion.
I wonder why they didn’t drop the bombs in more remote locations first to minimize victims and send a message… Estimates are that 130k to 225k people died, the vast majority were civilians that had no influence over their country being at war…
Because it would have been less-effective, I expect. The targets were chosen because they had military industry and had not yet been destroyed via conventional firebombing, which had already been done at mass scale in other places.
I think that it’s important to understand that the atomic bombs were simply seen as something of a significant multiplier in the existing bombing campaign. One bomber with an atomic bomb could maybe do what a thousand bombers with conventional weapons might…but there were, in fact, thousand-bomber raids happening. That is, cities were already being set afire. The Manhattan Project simply permitted doing so with a significantly-lower resource expenditure.
EDIT: Also, to be clear, the US fully intended to ramp up to mass production and employment of atomic bombs, dozens a month, once production could be brought up, and would have done so had the surrender not occurred.
Today, partly because of (significantly more powerful) thermonuclear weapons and because we know that the first two bombs did result in a surrender, the first two atomic bombs maybe look like something of a clear bookend to the war, but that’s for us in 2023; in 1946, they would have been another step – if a significant one – of World War II’s large-scale bombing campaigns, something that had been growing for years.
The atomic bombings were war crimes, but so were the many previous fire-bombings of Japanese and German cities. The US was doing everything it could at that point to end the war.
Honestly, I’m of the opinion that the atomic bombings were legitimate, but the firebombings in Japan were mostly terror bombing and war crimes. The atomic bombs were indiscriminate in their destruction, but pointed towards legitimate military/infrastructure targets.
I’m of the opinion that fascists don’t get to cry about the consequences of their actions, even if their former victims have become monsters themselves.
Arthur “Bomber” Harrington has an immortal quote to the effect:
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and no one was going to bomb them.”
You can see echoes of this mentality in Russia today, as they cry and moan about Ukraine having the sheer GALL to drone strike military targets in Russia. If one wanted to get particularly spicy, you might even note the actions of America in the Middle East prior to 9/11 and the reactions afterwards.
Ultimately, the great evil of the atom bombs wasn’t their use to ensure a total surrender, it was throwing away that total capitulation by allowing the continued existence of the Imperial family and not executing every Imperial Army officer above the rank of lieutenant for their crimes in their conquered territories and against American POWs.
That’s an odd take, the atomic bombings were fire bombings intended to destroy cities, unless you think the US didn’t realize that would happen? The US was quite capable of destroying individual facilities. Is it legitimate to destroy a facility and everyone who works there? And their homes? And their families, and their kid’s schools and everyone who goes to those schools and their doctors, and the guy who sells them snacks on the way home and his family and all his in laws and their houses and their doctors.
That’s an odd take, the atomic bombings were fire bombings intended to destroy cities, unless you think the US didn’t realize that would happen?
The atomic bombings were not fire bombings. Fire bombings, as the name suggests, use incendiaries.
The US was quite capable of destroying individual facilities. Is it legitimate to destroy a facility and everyone who works there? And their homes? And their families, and their kid’s schools and everyone who goes to those schools and their doctors, and the guy who sells them snacks on the way home and his family and all his in laws and their houses and their doctors.
Seems a bit excessive.
You know what the accuracy was for daytime bombing in WW2, even with fancy American bomb sights?
A mile.
A. Mile.
In Europe, British and American approaches differed because British bomber command put a greater emphasis on terror bombing against the Germans, while the American bomber command in Europe put a greater emphasis on industrial targets. You know what both approaches shared? Absolutely blanketing wide swathes of an area with ordnance because there was no guarantee of hitting a target otherwise.
Given that low level of accuracy available, I don’t find arguments regarding collateral damage to be particularly compelling. No, what made US firebombing in Japan horrid was that American bomber command in Asia oriented quite explicitly towards attacking civilian targets. Incendiary testing in US trials was done against mock-ups of Japanese civilian housing, not industrial targets, even.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima were chosen as targets because of their military and industrial importance. However cruel and indiscriminate an atomic bombing may be, it was not simply pointed at civilians in the hopes of murdering as many as possible, unlike the fire bombings.
The Kyūjō incident (宮城事件, Kyūjō Jiken) was an attempted military coup d’état in the Empire of Japan at the end of the Second World War. It happened on the night of 14–15 August 1945, just before the announcement of Japan’s surrender to the Allies. The coup was attempted by the Staff Office of the Ministry of War of Japan and many from the Imperial Guard to stop the move to surrender.
The officers murdered Lieutenant General Takeshi Mori of the First Imperial Guards Division and attempted to counterfeit an order to the effect of permitting their occupation of the Tokyo Imperial Palace (Kyūjō). They attempted to place Emperor Hirohito under house arrest, using the 2nd Brigade Imperial Guard Infantry. They failed to persuade the Eastern District Army and the high command of the Imperial Japanese Army to move forward with the action. Due to their failure to convince the remaining army to oust the Imperial House of Japan, they performed ritual suicide. As a result, the communiqué of the intent for a Japanese surrender continued as planned.
They tried to seize the recording of Emperor Hirohito’s surrender speech before it could go out:
The rebels, led by Hatanaka, spent the next several hours fruitlessly searching for Imperial Household Minister Sōtarō Ishiwata [ja], Lord of the Privy Seal Kōichi Kido, and the recordings of the surrender speech. The two men were hiding in the “bank vault”, a large chamber underneath the Imperial Palace.[15][16] The search was made more difficult by a blackout in response to Allied bombings, and by the archaic organization and layout of the Imperial House Ministry. Many of the names of the rooms were unrecognizable to the rebels. The rebels did find the chamberlain Yoshihiro Tokugawa. Although Hatanaka threatened to disembowel him with a samurai sword, Tokugawa lied and told them he did not know where the recordings or men were.[12][17] During their search, the rebels cut nearly all of the telephone wires, severing communications between their prisoners on the palace grounds and the outside world.
The morning the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, another thing happened: Russia declared war on Japan, invaded, and had made huge progress in the night. There’s some evidence the guys at the meeting who decided on surrender had not heard of the Nagasaki bomb yet, though the bombs are the official reason Japan gives for surrender.
Now imagine how the japanese are seen by the people of China, Korea, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Sumatra, Singapore, Indonesia and Papua who were still living under japanese occupation and terror in August 1945. Who died in droves far greater than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki victims, with up to 25 million casualities. Whose death rates increased towards the end of the war, and for whom a delay of the capitulation of the japanese by a few weeks or, god forbid, months would have meant millions of deaths.
Who, mind you, did not support the japanese government, did not support the japanese war, had no way of stopping it except for fighting for their lives, yet still had to suffer from it. Unlike the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who could have prevented the japanese government from taking power, who could have striked and fought against their militaristic government, who could have sabotaged the war efforts of their government in a war that was lost anyways - yet they never did.
“Unlike the people” and their school-aged kids, and their babies, and the old grandmas. Don’t let them off they hook, they could have taken down a military dictatorship that dominated East Asia if they felt like it.
Like, there are still people alive today who wouldn’t have been without the atomic bombs. And I’m not even talking about american soldiers here, I’m talking about civilians. Not dropping those bombs would have meant their death. Go on, tell them they should’ve died because the japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were innocently living their life and it totally wasn’t their government, their labor and their devotion to the emperor that kept the war going.
After all, the real victims of the japanese imperial war were the japanese. Totally! You know, those who until today have not accepted their crimes and instead openly deny it.
At the same time you can turn that around and say that there are thousands of regular people (that didn’t have any power over what their country was doing and didn’t participate in it) who would be alive today and that aren’t because of two bombs… So it’s not that strong of an argument when you think about it…
Because the fucking Imperial government was trash. You think I’m defending Japan? Fuck no. But it’s a historical fact that the ONLY thing stopping them from surrendering at that point was their worry that surrendering would mean the US forcing them to remove the emperor. What they didn’t know, and what the US refused to tell them, was that they didn’t give two shits about the emperor. In fact, their demand for Japan’s surrender included a statement that the Emperor would retain his place. That little note was only removed when the nuclear tests came back to the President, letting him know that the bombs would work.
that didn’t have any power over what their country was doing and didn’t participate in it
It’s funny how the people in the war fighting countries don’t have “any power” over what their country is doing. Nope. None at all. Nope. Can’t oppose your government, can’t fight your government, can’t oppose the war, can’t strike, can’t sabotage, can’t leave. Nope, nothing they can do. Poor, poor victims of war.
And that the people who actually lived innocently have to die in 10-fold numbers because those poor Japanese can’t be held accountable.
And the italians revolted against their facist handlers. And hung Mussolini upside down in Milano. That’s why italy got a rather okay end to the second world war.
And the poles managed to stage an uprising against the germans while fully under their control in a ghetto. But yeah, the poor japanese victims were powerless.
You’re saying with the point of view of someone in 2023. The Army would have shot people fighting against their government and that would have been the end of it. Japan (especially at the time) is also culturally very different from Western countries.
Japan (especially at the time) is also culturally very different from Western countries.
Yeah that excuses the 25 Million dead people and damn the US for stopping them. They just wanted to murder in peace!
But hey, thanks for confirming that only the nuclear bombs could have pushed them into surrendering. After all, anything else was culturally too different for them.
I never said it’s not dramatic, I said that your argument that “people are alive today because X” doesn’t hold much water because others died so they’re alive. Go tell the family of those who died that their brother/sister/parent had to die to save people in another country.
I always find it fascinating that people even ignore the simple fact that American soldiers were more than capable of war crimes themselves.
Disregarding their conquered nations, disregarding the millions of soldiers that would die, far, far more civilians would have died in the invasion under equally horrible conditions.
Starvation, gangrape, summary execution, dying trapped in rubble from an artillery strike, deaths due to extreme shortages of all kinds, all these horrors and more awaited the Japanese citizenry if the Allies invaded. It is just incontrovertible fact that the bombs lessened human suffering by an incomprehensible degree.
Tbf, they were ready to surrender after the first bomb but it wasn’t unconditional. They wanted protection for their emperor. The US wanted to drop the second bomb to make Russia think we had more. This is an open secret. The second bombing has nothing to do with stopping Japan.
And pretending like everyone has the power to end a war is horrifyingly childish. It’s actually scary how naive and simple your viewpoint is when taken into context the monstrosity you’re defending.
I wrote an actual rebuttal to everything you wrote. But I realize that all of this is meaningless because you are one of the people who just love to lie to protect imperial japan. I only need to focus on this one thing:
Tbf, they were ready to surrender after the first bomb but it wasn’t unconditional. They wanted protection for their emperor.
And here we see the lengths you go to defend the japanese monstrosities. The Potsdam declaration didn’t mention the emperor at all. But you know what the japanese mentioned? That they would fight to the bitter end:
I consider the Joint Proclamation a rehash of the Declaration at the Cairo Conference. As for the Government, it does not attach any important value to it at all. The only thing to do is just kill it with silence (mokusatsu). We will do nothing but press on to the bitter end to bring about a successful completion of the war.
And this was their stance even after the first bomb, when they still demanded their four conditions
that the emperor’s rule would be left untouched
that Japan handle their own disarmament
that Japan deal with any Japanese war criminals
that there be no occupation of Japan
Those were their demands. This is what they wanted. That is why a second bomb was necessary. Not because of “the emperor”. Because they wanted to keep running their country and never face consequences for their actions.
This is how dishonest people like you brush away all the shit Japan has done, turn everything upside down and turn victim into aggressor and aggressor into victim. You need to make things up to justify the fucked up decisions of imperial japan because you can not allow the idea that japan was at fault.
I’m not condoning the Japanese. I’m just saying there was likely not a need to drop a second nuclear bomb in this world. You seem insistent that not condoning countless deaths of Japanese people seems to be apologizing for them. You aren’t actually arguing for necessity of the actions in your posts but the necessity of believing in punishment of them. Just as I don’t think random murders of US Americans would be a justified if it stopped the wars in Afghanistan which is exactly what your logic dictates would make it ok. You basically justified terrorism and events like 9/11 dumbass.
I’ll try to take solace in thinking “at least I held the moral high ground” in defeat. Oh wait, thankfully we don’t have to, because the japanese vastly overestimated the number of people who think like you.
Sadly, they are Thanos for people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
That’s one of the risks of kicking off a war.
Close to the end of the war, Japan – which had made pretty extensive use of biological weapons against China – was working on also hitting the US with biological weapons. We were far enough away that it would have been difficult, but where they had been able to employ biologicals, in Asia, they did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_PX
That being said, Japan wasn’t even the expected target of the Manhattan Project. Germany would have been, but was defeated via conventional force prior to the project reaching completion.
I wonder why they didn’t drop the bombs in more remote locations first to minimize victims and send a message… Estimates are that 130k to 225k people died, the vast majority were civilians that had no influence over their country being at war…
Because it would have been less-effective, I expect. The targets were chosen because they had military industry and had not yet been destroyed via conventional firebombing, which had already been done at mass scale in other places.
I think that it’s important to understand that the atomic bombs were simply seen as something of a significant multiplier in the existing bombing campaign. One bomber with an atomic bomb could maybe do what a thousand bombers with conventional weapons might…but there were, in fact, thousand-bomber raids happening. That is, cities were already being set afire. The Manhattan Project simply permitted doing so with a significantly-lower resource expenditure.
EDIT: Also, to be clear, the US fully intended to ramp up to mass production and employment of atomic bombs, dozens a month, once production could be brought up, and would have done so had the surrender not occurred.
Today, partly because of (significantly more powerful) thermonuclear weapons and because we know that the first two bombs did result in a surrender, the first two atomic bombs maybe look like something of a clear bookend to the war, but that’s for us in 2023; in 1946, they would have been another step – if a significant one – of World War II’s large-scale bombing campaigns, something that had been growing for years.
The atomic bombings were war crimes, but so were the many previous fire-bombings of Japanese and German cities. The US was doing everything it could at that point to end the war.
Honestly, I’m of the opinion that the atomic bombings were legitimate, but the firebombings in Japan were mostly terror bombing and war crimes. The atomic bombs were indiscriminate in their destruction, but pointed towards legitimate military/infrastructure targets.
I’m of the opinion that fascists don’t get to cry about the consequences of their actions, even if their former victims have become monsters themselves.
Arthur “Bomber” Harrington has an immortal quote to the effect:
“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else and no one was going to bomb them.”
You can see echoes of this mentality in Russia today, as they cry and moan about Ukraine having the sheer GALL to drone strike military targets in Russia. If one wanted to get particularly spicy, you might even note the actions of America in the Middle East prior to 9/11 and the reactions afterwards.
Ultimately, the great evil of the atom bombs wasn’t their use to ensure a total surrender, it was throwing away that total capitulation by allowing the continued existence of the Imperial family and not executing every Imperial Army officer above the rank of lieutenant for their crimes in their conquered territories and against American POWs.
That’s an odd take, the atomic bombings were fire bombings intended to destroy cities, unless you think the US didn’t realize that would happen? The US was quite capable of destroying individual facilities. Is it legitimate to destroy a facility and everyone who works there? And their homes? And their families, and their kid’s schools and everyone who goes to those schools and their doctors, and the guy who sells them snacks on the way home and his family and all his in laws and their houses and their doctors.
Seems a bit excessive.
The atomic bombings were not fire bombings. Fire bombings, as the name suggests, use incendiaries.
You know what the accuracy was for daytime bombing in WW2, even with fancy American bomb sights?
A mile.
A. Mile.
In Europe, British and American approaches differed because British bomber command put a greater emphasis on terror bombing against the Germans, while the American bomber command in Europe put a greater emphasis on industrial targets. You know what both approaches shared? Absolutely blanketing wide swathes of an area with ordnance because there was no guarantee of hitting a target otherwise.
Given that low level of accuracy available, I don’t find arguments regarding collateral damage to be particularly compelling. No, what made US firebombing in Japan horrid was that American bomber command in Asia oriented quite explicitly towards attacking civilian targets. Incendiary testing in US trials was done against mock-ups of Japanese civilian housing, not industrial targets, even.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima were chosen as targets because of their military and industrial importance. However cruel and indiscriminate an atomic bombing may be, it was not simply pointed at civilians in the hopes of murdering as many as possible, unlike the fire bombings.
This is historically ignorant. The cities were chosen for their psychological effect.
Atomic bombs are incendiaries. Starting fire miles away is one of the key effects of the bomb. They can create firestorms.
You have limited supply of bombs, you go after targets. You don’t waste them.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets.
Still took two bombs as is
Came close to not being enough, even then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
They tried to seize the recording of Emperor Hirohito’s surrender speech before it could go out:
The morning the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, another thing happened: Russia declared war on Japan, invaded, and had made huge progress in the night. There’s some evidence the guys at the meeting who decided on surrender had not heard of the Nagasaki bomb yet, though the bombs are the official reason Japan gives for surrender.
Now imagine how the japanese are seen by the people of China, Korea, Burma, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Sumatra, Singapore, Indonesia and Papua who were still living under japanese occupation and terror in August 1945. Who died in droves far greater than the Hiroshima or Nagasaki victims, with up to 25 million casualities. Whose death rates increased towards the end of the war, and for whom a delay of the capitulation of the japanese by a few weeks or, god forbid, months would have meant millions of deaths.
Who, mind you, did not support the japanese government, did not support the japanese war, had no way of stopping it except for fighting for their lives, yet still had to suffer from it. Unlike the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who could have prevented the japanese government from taking power, who could have striked and fought against their militaristic government, who could have sabotaged the war efforts of their government in a war that was lost anyways - yet they never did.
“Unlike the people” and their school-aged kids, and their babies, and the old grandmas. Don’t let them off they hook, they could have taken down a military dictatorship that dominated East Asia if they felt like it.
Like, there are still people alive today who wouldn’t have been without the atomic bombs. And I’m not even talking about american soldiers here, I’m talking about civilians. Not dropping those bombs would have meant their death. Go on, tell them they should’ve died because the japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were innocently living their life and it totally wasn’t their government, their labor and their devotion to the emperor that kept the war going.
After all, the real victims of the japanese imperial war were the japanese. Totally! You know, those who until today have not accepted their crimes and instead openly deny it.
At the same time you can turn that around and say that there are thousands of regular people (that didn’t have any power over what their country was doing and didn’t participate in it) who would be alive today and that aren’t because of two bombs… So it’s not that strong of an argument when you think about it…
Oh and you know what Japan could have done to prvent the bombs? Fucking surrender.
Yes, because the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the ones deciding what the emperor was doing.
Yes, they actually were. By not doing any of the things I wrote.
They were ready to surrender, the US were fucking them around
Oh right, they were ready to surrender. You know what would’ve been nice? Fucking surrendering.
You know what would’ve been nice after the first nuclear bomb? Fucking surrendering.
You know what would’ve been nice after the second nuclear bomb? Fucking surrendering.
Instead, they tried a coup until the emperor finally grew some tiny balls.
Man people like you should have lived in the japanese occupied territories.
Because the fucking Imperial government was trash. You think I’m defending Japan? Fuck no. But it’s a historical fact that the ONLY thing stopping them from surrendering at that point was their worry that surrendering would mean the US forcing them to remove the emperor. What they didn’t know, and what the US refused to tell them, was that they didn’t give two shits about the emperor. In fact, their demand for Japan’s surrender included a statement that the Emperor would retain his place. That little note was only removed when the nuclear tests came back to the President, letting him know that the bombs would work.
It’s funny how the people in the war fighting countries don’t have “any power” over what their country is doing. Nope. None at all. Nope. Can’t oppose your government, can’t fight your government, can’t oppose the war, can’t strike, can’t sabotage, can’t leave. Nope, nothing they can do. Poor, poor victims of war.
And that the people who actually lived innocently have to die in 10-fold numbers because those poor Japanese can’t be held accountable.
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And the italians revolted against their facist handlers. And hung Mussolini upside down in Milano. That’s why italy got a rather okay end to the second world war.
And the poles managed to stage an uprising against the germans while fully under their control in a ghetto. But yeah, the poor japanese victims were powerless.
You’re saying with the point of view of someone in 2023. The Army would have shot people fighting against their government and that would have been the end of it. Japan (especially at the time) is also culturally very different from Western countries.
Yeah that excuses the 25 Million dead people and damn the US for stopping them. They just wanted to murder in peace!
But hey, thanks for confirming that only the nuclear bombs could have pushed them into surrendering. After all, anything else was culturally too different for them.
I never said it’s not dramatic, I said that your argument that “people are alive today because X” doesn’t hold much water because others died so they’re alive. Go tell the family of those who died that their brother/sister/parent had to die to save people in another country.
I’m german and an anti fascist. The fuck do you think I’d do?
I always find it fascinating that people even ignore the simple fact that American soldiers were more than capable of war crimes themselves.
Disregarding their conquered nations, disregarding the millions of soldiers that would die, far, far more civilians would have died in the invasion under equally horrible conditions.
Starvation, gangrape, summary execution, dying trapped in rubble from an artillery strike, deaths due to extreme shortages of all kinds, all these horrors and more awaited the Japanese citizenry if the Allies invaded. It is just incontrovertible fact that the bombs lessened human suffering by an incomprehensible degree.
Tbf, they were ready to surrender after the first bomb but it wasn’t unconditional. They wanted protection for their emperor. The US wanted to drop the second bomb to make Russia think we had more. This is an open secret. The second bombing has nothing to do with stopping Japan.
And pretending like everyone has the power to end a war is horrifyingly childish. It’s actually scary how naive and simple your viewpoint is when taken into context the monstrosity you’re defending.
I wrote an actual rebuttal to everything you wrote. But I realize that all of this is meaningless because you are one of the people who just love to lie to protect imperial japan. I only need to focus on this one thing:
And here we see the lengths you go to defend the japanese monstrosities. The Potsdam declaration didn’t mention the emperor at all. But you know what the japanese mentioned? That they would fight to the bitter end:
And this was their stance even after the first bomb, when they still demanded their four conditions
Those were their demands. This is what they wanted. That is why a second bomb was necessary. Not because of “the emperor”. Because they wanted to keep running their country and never face consequences for their actions.
This is how dishonest people like you brush away all the shit Japan has done, turn everything upside down and turn victim into aggressor and aggressor into victim. You need to make things up to justify the fucked up decisions of imperial japan because you can not allow the idea that japan was at fault.
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I’m not condoning the Japanese. I’m just saying there was likely not a need to drop a second nuclear bomb in this world. You seem insistent that not condoning countless deaths of Japanese people seems to be apologizing for them. You aren’t actually arguing for necessity of the actions in your posts but the necessity of believing in punishment of them. Just as I don’t think random murders of US Americans would be a justified if it stopped the wars in Afghanistan which is exactly what your logic dictates would make it ok. You basically justified terrorism and events like 9/11 dumbass.
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I’m just worried that instead of ending second waorld war, we started a new one.
*looks into the camera*
A cold war.
We firebombed the rest of japan for years doing far more damage and yet you numpties only parrot the same whiny talking points. Be more creative.
I mean, I just took it as a ‘snapping out of existence’ joke rather than a political statement.
lol the firebombings were wrong too
At least that’s a consistently bad take
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I’ll try to take solace in thinking “at least I held the moral high ground” in defeat. Oh wait, thankfully we don’t have to, because the japanese vastly overestimated the number of people who think like you.
“WhY DoEs nObOdY EvEr tHiNk oF ThE FaScIsTs???”