It most certainly is debatable. Japan was on the ropes from the destruction that had been inflicted due to aerial bombardment. The Japanese had sent people to seek peace through Russia. MacArthur even said that if the US had included the offer for the Japanese to keep the emperor, they probably would have surrendered in a couple of weeks without an invasion or without a fission bomb.
Most counterfactual history is debatable. Theoretically there is a world in which Harry Turtledoves' imagined alien invasion halted WWII and redirected it into a global effort against large lizards. That does not make it
plausibile. Japan sustained not one, but
two nuclear bombings without being willing to surrender, only coming to a
tied vote on the matter when
more were threatened. They were certainly not about to surrender under the vague threat of a single new bomb whose effects they had not seen.
To advise means to give advice. Anyone who has had a teenager knows that you advise them even though you know that they have already made a decision.
Eisenhower said he expressed doubts because he thought Japan was beaten. It turns out that inasmuch as that meant they were ready to surrender, that was incorrect.
I didn't ask you to give me a precise measurement as I doubt you could even tell me what was the difference between precision and accuracy without referring to some reference. And as far as usage goes, again, people use different points of reference. There is no doubt that the fire bombing of Tokyo was part of the nuclear era because indeed nuclear weapons were being developed at the time. There is no "by your own precision you are wrong."
You are the one who insisted that the nuclear era began with the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings. It's not my fault you don't know your history. However, as to the actual matter under discussion it is irrelevant for the simple enough fact that violence has been declining for
centuries.
What is shocking is that you are so desperate that you will use any lame excuse to try to score some points. It wasn't a racist remark. The usage connoted the notion that there is a bias in vision due to background, specifically that of a white male who wants to whitewash the sins of the wars the US and it's allies have waged. By contrast, a racist remark would have been to say that what you said what typical of stupid white people. That would be racist. Get it?
Racism is to impugn characteristics on an individual because of his ethnicity. So, for example, your decree that historians and social scientists who point out that violence has been relatively declining among humans both in peace and in wartime for centuries must be attempting to white-wash American history because he is white is a racist declaration that
because the guy is white he is trying to whitewash our nations sins. In reality, his race, my race, your race, none of them have any bearing on whether or not violence has, in fact, declined over the past few centuries - but you tried to
make it about that, indicating that you are, in fact, a racist.
It's also ridiculous, and indicates (again) that you have no idea what you are talking about. Steven Pinker is a
leftist. Hint:
He does interviews for Al-Jazeera. He does
TED talks, he's featured on
NPR. Furthermore, he's not exactly a WASP - he's Jewish.
War has become more gruesome due to the types of weapons that modern armies have at their disposal. When you consider that with one bomb, one third of the population of Hiroshima was killed, that is more gruesome that anything in history. When you consider that two thirds of Hiroshima was destroyed with one bomb by the US, that is more gruesome than anything in history. When you consider the effects that poisonous radiation had on the people that survived Hiroshima, that is more gruesome than anything in history. You tell those people who suffered from such an atrocity that war is less gruesome and see what they say. Yeah, again some white guy who wants to believe such nonsense will engage in self deception and put that notion forward.
That an interesting claim. "More Gruesome Than Anything in History". More gruesome than the Holocaust? More gruesome than the firebombings of Dresden or Tokyo? More gruesome than the genocides and ethnic cleansings that marked warfare for millennia? The Aztec temples reached an industrial rate of human sacrifice that outpaced
Auschwitz, ripping the beating hearts from their screaming victims while their families looked on in helpless, terrified horror at what was about to happen to them - now that's gruesome. A flash of light that instantly incinerates you before you even know what has happened? That's less gruesome. Being tied between two boats and painted with honey so that you could be eaten alive by insects? More gruesome. Being executed by bullet or electric chair? Less gruesome.
Genghis Khan would be laugh at your claim that the U.S. or the a-bombs were uniquely gruesome. Then he would kill everyone in a hundred miles and have his lieutenants built a pyramid from the skulls. Hell -
we dropped leaflets warning the Japanese civilians what was about to happen and warning them to leave the cities. In the annals of military bastardlyness, we're weak sauce.
In reality, the technological advances that have brought us greater weapons have coincided with an increase in human empathy that have demanded - over time - more conscientious rules governing their use. Today, for example, we talk about "collateral damage" and try to avoid it. For most of human history, raping massacring civilians was just what you did to blow off steam after winning the battle. The ancient stories in the Bible that horrify us now about killing every man, woman, child, and animal of an entire enemy tribe or ethnicity was just how you made a statement. The Romans were masters of that sort of public statement - we don't get the phrase sow the earth with salt because that was their fertilizer technique, after all. Even in the horrors of WWII, sides fed and took care of prisoners of war and helped the surviving populaces rebuild. But the ability to end an individual or factory without killing the entire city it is in has come to necessitate doing so.
As for talking to people including those in Japan about actual warfare - I have. I lived in Japan for three years, and served alongside their military. I have actually experienced the modern face of warfare (having fought it, and advised others in the fighting of it), and professionally studied warfare of the past. So I wouldn't claim to be John Keegan, but I come to this debate actually having an idea what I am talking about.
