So today in my American Foreign Policy class a "self-enlightened" girl said the United States dropped the bomb on Japan due to racist tendencies and that white people were largely upset that an "inferior race" could fight so well. Despite me pointing out that Germany and Italy had surrendered by May 2nd 1945, and the first atomic bomb wasn't ready for testing until 1945, she insisted that it was racism that "had been prevalent" (which is true). I also pointed out that Japan was largely unchecked by other nation then American forces and poised the largest threat to the American mainland, along with several classmates, yet she insisted race was the reason that we dropped the bomb. Do you believe this is true?



To all idiots, this is not a debate about whether or not the bomb should have been dropped right now, only if race was involved in the decision to drop it on Japan or not.

It didn't help the Japanese that they were non-white. However, no one minded killing hundreds of thousands of Germans in conventional bombing, either.

Race was the issue in throwing all the Japanese into concentration camps.

War was the issue on glassing 2 of their cities.

Was Dresden racism as well?

A great point! I shall use this in the future if you do not mind.

Race was a factor in using the bomb. Although the Manhatten Project was originally set up as a counterweight to the German project, the first target was supposed to be Japan. But then, we can't ignore all the things about showing the Soviets who's boss, the potential casualties if there was a direct invasion, letting the world know the potential power of the nuclear bomb, etc.



One thing is for sure: To say that race was not a factor is false. I remember when my grandfather used to talk about shooting "all those yellow monkeys(yes, that's the term he used)" when he was in the Pacific.

Hmm, its certainly the case that Roosevelt was a racist - you can't argue that one, particularly with his line about how yellow men should be in Asia, white men in Europe and America, and Blacks in Africa.

However, i wouldn't say that it was a racist motivation. Consider this - if the Germans had caused such a threat level, it would most likely have been dropped on Berlin, or at least one of the bombs. You have to bear in mind, the intel about the number of fighters the Japenese had was rather... sketchy, and changed from month to month - 100-500K, i think were some of them.

Articles that support what i'm saying:

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/...rt/1990/HML.htm

(Can't find the other, unfortunately.)

Also, it has to be noted that at the time, not even Robert Oppenheimer knew about the radiation levels, and radiation sickness - he believed that there wouldn't be any after the blast, and denied that the aftermath of radiation sickness was nothing to do with the bomb, in his mind, it couldn't have been anything to do with it.

Its an interesting subject, but I doubt it's based on racism, even with Roosevelt's racist background.

Not to state the obvious, but Roosevelt was dead when the decision to drop the bomb was made.


As to the OP, I think no. Racism was clearly involved in our decision to throw Japanese-looking Americans into concentration camps (as noted above); it certainly played a huge role in the wartime propaganda. But the bombing? That's just the way the war was being fought against all sides.

Bombing the Huns/Krauts/Paper-hangers?

For some, probably. I would probably say the entire war effort abroad and at home was tainted by racism against the Japanese, the Italians, and the Germans, and German-Americans & Japanese-Americans.

Buuuuuut I'm a bit biased, given my family records (and presumably, a lot of family) were largely destroyed at Dresden.

It was a holocaust.



Racist? Hell no. War crime? Maybe. Strategic thing to do in a war? Yes.

It was no more racist that any other strategic military action.



Racist would have dropped the bomb on Kyoto, when there was more people and less military-industrial targets.

Well... I doubt they dropped it because of race. Actually, that's a pretty dumb assertion.

However, if it was England who we were at war with, (or any other western nation) I suspect the decision to bomb would have been much harder.

If it was racist, not because of the willingness to exterminate tens of thousands of women and children in an eyeblink ... we were perfectly willing to do that to Germans too, as previously pointed out.

The racism would be in the belief that the "fanatical" devotion to the Emperor rendered the Japanese incapable of making judgments based on reality, so they would never surrender on terms acceptable to us. Was that devotion any more fanatical than the British promise to "fight them on the beaches, fight them on the seas and oceans" with their backs against the wall? No. When it's an ally making that promise, they're plucky and courageous. When it's an enemy, they're fanatics.

Not to get off topic, but the unwillingness to surrender was less racial and more cultural and nationalistic...and the fact that the Allies had a stupid unconditional surrender policy (which, strategically, is a horrible idea).

Cultural: The Japanese didn't have a big problem with surrendering to each other during the civil wars (all fifty gajillion of them), but WWII was the first time they had ever surrendered to an outside power. It wasn't about perception of reality, or judgments, it was about saving face. Being publicly disgraced is considered one of the worst things you can do to a person in Japanese culture. Take "public" and shoot that up to "global", and then the Japanese would consider surrendering the same as the entire empire putting on a collar and calling itself the Allies' !@#$%*.

And the fact that the Allied leaders didn't want a conditional surrender didn't help anyway, although when the Japanese did surrender, it was conditional anyway. (What was the point?)

...Let's see if I can get back on topic.

Racism was a lesser motivator, but most of the literature I've read mentions that the original target was Germany, not the Japanese. It's just that by the time the bomb was ready, Germany had already fell, and there were no other targets. And really, that's the only concrete reason Japan was chosen: because there was no one else to drop it on.

Besides, it's difficult to gauge racism in a case like this. Practically everyone in Japan was Japanese (I wonder why...) so any attack against the Japanese could be speculated as racist, since it was mainly Japanese being killed. And that, of course, is ridiculous.

Race definitely was a factor. Not because the bombs were dropped on the Japanese for being Japanese, but because Japanese culture of bushido made many people believe that a conventional war against the Japanese (whether it be invasion or conventional bombing) would cost many American lives.

So in short, I don't believe race was the driving factor to drop the bombs on Japan...but it was certainly a contributing factor.

"And the fact that the Allied leaders didn't want a conditional surrender didn't help anyway, although when the Japanese did surrender, it was conditional anyway. (What was the point?)"

Very much agree here. As MacArthur understood, as long as you promised the Japanese that they would not have to actually renounce the Emperor, you could come to terms with them. You'd marginalize him later, after occupation.

She's right in that racism was involved, atleast in so far as the propaganda and fighting the "Japs". Racism wasn't the reason the bomb was dropped though. Methinks someone dropped a bomb on her head.

Well, i guess the Japanese were racists for declaring war on a multicultural nation. I guess they didnt like the idea of a "multicultural" nation. You see what I'm saying? There was no racism involved in WW2 that sticks out with the Pacific war.

Are you in a Special Ed class? Because that girl may be retarded.

They dropped the bomb because:

1. It was ready at that time, not much before
2. The geographic difficulties of an invasion
3. The estimated the loss of 250,000 + US soldiers lives
4. The estimated 2.5 more years it would take to win
5. More Japanese civilians would actually die from an invasion than the bomb

I am somewhat of a WWII buff. I've never seen anything legitimate that pointed to race being a factor.

pssh no, this is ridiculous and so is she.

but it was interesting though seeing the picture of MacArthur and Hirohito together...



I don't think the Japanese liked being shorter

Those are terrible pants. For shame, McArthur..... for shame....

and he's putting his hands on his butt.

Cryptonomicon is worth reading for the first scene with MacArthur alone .... soooo funny.

Damn, I can't believe I didn't think about that.

My bad. Interesting though - both him and Truman did have some interesting backgrounds which would reinforce the racist idea, but its hardly good enough reason here for the bombing.

It wasn't racism. It was a smart military move, because it made the Japanese surrender, and we didn't have to lose a million troops taking the stinking islands. If the Soviets hadn't conquered Berlin before the bomb was tested, I bet we would have dropped one on Ol' Adolf as well.

Uh... The Japanese in WWII were ridiculously racist. They had a racial supremacy complex that made the Nazis look reasonable by comparison. They just committed their own atrocities on the spot rather than rounding people up and gassing them.

Seriously, the entirety of WWII was mired in racism. The one thing you can say about the allies is that they were less racist than the Axis by and large, and the Allies were horribly racist by modern standards.

If the allies were racist, they would have never rebuilt the nations they were at war with.

Thats not why the Japanese were racist, and it really played no part in declaring war. The Japanese were plenty racist, yes, but the decision to go to war with the United States was not.

And yeah, there was a lot of racism involved in both theaters of WWII, even for the Allied side. The Hun, the Jap, Slanteyes, Tojo, Fritz, Paper-hangers, etc. were all racial caricatures of ethnic Germans & ethnic Japanese people.

As was pointed out earlier, the Allies were horrible racists, but they were less racist than the Axis powers.



You can still be racist and realize what's good for your country, and building those nations up was good for the United States. There still is a lot of anti-German sentiment where I live.

The allies were most definitely racist, denying such is like denying the holocaust-- it simply happened.

I don't think racism is involved there, race doesn't really matter when you're trying to save fellow American lives during a war.

Wow, I remember that argument from high school. We had a mock court in which there was a trial regarding the decision to drop the bomb. The Attorney for the Defense used the Bushido Code for nearly every single one of his examinations, claiming that because of the existence of the Bushido Code every Japanese citizen, whether man, woman, or child, would have fought to the death and refused to surrender.


Its root is probably based more in ignorance, really. The Bushido Code applies to the warrior caste, but it was extrapolated that it applied to and would be followed by all Japanese. I suppose there could be an argument that racism caused people to not look too hard at the foreign culture and see if that was a valid concern.

Over those of the inferior slanty-eyed scum?

Yup. It's war. The object of war is not to die for your country, it's to make the other guy die for his.

I don't personally believe it. I'm referring to the factors that led to the dropping of the bombs. The argument must have been that because they're Japanese, they must follow Bushido and if they follow Bushido, they must be like the Japanese forces we've faced so far, who are tenacious and refuse to surrender. Therefore, the people of Japan will never surrender, and as such, we'll lose hundreds of thousands of men. Let's just avoid all that and drop these bombs on their heads...

Missing my point, you go on to state the obvious.

And quoting an abusive, arrogant, !@#$%^&.

You don't like Patton?

Oh don't make this about Patton. You missed the racism, not the nationalism and tried to move the point to me being some sheltered dainty who doesn't know war is hell. Or something, instead of picking up on what I was trying to say.

And no, not particularly.

No worries, I realized that. Just reminded me of that class is all.

I know war is hell. That's why they had to do things like this. In any situation where you have to kill hundreds of thousands of other people, including civilians, you need to dehumanize them as much as possible, otherwise you'll go insane. They had to only think of them as the enemy, otherwise they couldn't do their jobs.

Yeah, they probably could. If the Germans could massacre 6 million Jews in non-combat situations, I'm fairly certain you can kill a person.

And again, you aren't helping your point. The allies WERE racist, there's no denying this. So I don't see what you're trying to prove, except maybe tell me something I don't already know.

If that's the case:

Cool story, bro.

Again, through Hitler's propaganda, Jews and Slavs were stripped of their humanity and placed lower than Germans. That is how they were able to commit the massacres. However, the reason the Einsatsgruben were stopped was because the soldiers went insane from killing all the people. However, going back to the reason the topic was started, dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not racism, it was a way of ending a bloody war against an enemy that simply didn't quit.

Bit hard to ignore someone's humanity when they stare you in the face. Easier to be prejudiced 10kft up in the air.
But the point is, the entire effort of the Allies was built upon racism.

I'm not saying it's good or bad-- that's irrelevant to me (personally, I think our leaders were scumbags, fighting worse scumbags). I'm still right, and it's still true.

Not really true. I get your point that there was racism on the allied side. Sure there was. But, as we're talking of degrees here, the allied side was entirely not motivated by racism and by proxy not racist when stacked up to the axis powers.

I would never want to be compared to the Axis powers, I would rather try to shine through my own actions, not my actions... in comparison to Nazis & people who perform vivisections on Chinese women.

By degree, the Allied forces were certainly less racist, no one is disputing this.

What? What kind of circular logic BS is that? Prove your point or don't say it.

I don't know if the fact that the enemies were human (and that the Allies knew they were human) means that they had to be racist. I'm not saying there wasn't racism, because that's silly, but your justification why seems more complicated that the reality to me. Racism just happens in war, when one of the parties is mostly mono-racial. To a lot of people, the Allies were not fighting German citizens, they were fighting Germans. Same with Italy, and Japan.

Even then, people can kill people. Throughout history, since Cain and Abel, people have been killing people. Not dehumanized animals. Not demonized fanatics. People. When a mafia enforcer kill someone who owes money, he (or she, I guess >_>) probably doesn't think of it as killing a dog. He probably knows what he's doing.

That said, it does create some psychological problems. That's why snipers and other soldiers with high kill counts who see their enemies faces for relatively long periods of time tend to develop more severe cases of PTSD.

>.> The point had already been conceded, they were just attempting to justify it.

No circular logic involved when the point's already been made with examples and accepted as true.
What I said:
The Allied war effort was based on anti-German/anti-Japanese/anti-Italian racism.
What they said: Yeah, but it was to help them fight the war with less of an emotional impact, by dehumanizing them.
What I said:
I disagree with the last bit, but I won't argue with it because it is irrelevant, because all I needed to know was just confirmed by what you said.

Well that line of reasoning turned out to be pretty accurate considering elements of the military attempted to coup the emperor when they found out he planned to surrender.

Yeah, Japanese nationalism was pretty nasty back then...

Well, what I quoted was kind of circular. You know, the "I'm right and it's true." Taken out of context it raised that flag. My bad. I still wouldn't say it was built on it. Dehumanizing terms and propaganda were used to further support of the war, but that in no way qualifies as "built upon it."

While no doubt the US government was, and remains, deeply racist, the reason they dropped the atomic bombs on Japan was as a threat to the USSR.

And you forgot to add, America, the caveat that you incorrectly pointed out that Japan was a threat to the US mainland. What a joke that is. The USSR was far more geographically important to Japan than the USA.