this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
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WW2, we only joined because Japan attacked. Otherwise, there were elements of the US population that were cheering for Hitler.
We also nuked two cities, for reasons much less honorable or necessary than the one we are told.
I’m super-fun at parties 😐
Any respected historian on the subject will tell you that it's way more complicated and nuanced than your average social media user is aware of. If, like Truman, you honestly believed that using atomic bombs on Japan would ultimately result in less loss of life, on a purely mathematical basis it was the only moral decision.
You'd think one would have been enough
The US has never opposed fascism - Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were colonialist rivals threatening US hegemony and influence and nothing more.
Prior to Pearl Harbour, the US funded the Japanese as the Japanese committed countless war crimes and genocide in China.
Well, that and Japan was actively murdering massive amounts of people in China.
It was a calculated strategy to stop supporting the Japanese genocide machine.
The Rape of Nanjing made international news. That turned the average US voter against Japan, but the embargo (not a blockade) started after Japan invaded French Indochina (Vietnam) in 1940.
The Embargo was just the US saying that no US owned oil would be sold to Japan.
Well that and the fact that there was a huge Irish-American population that was hostile towards the UK in ways that I think a lot of younger people and non-historians have really lost sight of because it's not really a thing anymore. The idea of taking sides with the British Empire was a very tough pill for a lot of Irish-Americans, most of whom, unlike today, still had direct connections to Ireland. The famine was no longer really in living memory, but the children of the famine survivors were definitely still alive and influential and they absolutely despised the British for understandable reasons.
History is always way more complex and nuanced than some half-baked one-liner trope on social media.
Yeah, but look how it started. You need to look at the WW1, when both USA and Japan were among the victors and had the same area in their expansion view. For example Lenin predicted in 1918 that the Pacific war will eventually happen, though it ultimately started later than he thought because invasion of China occupied Japan attention.
Interestingly enough for the same reason US-Japan war could be avoided for more time, but it's actually the US who decided the time, note how they established the embargo on Japan in late june to 1st august 1941, in the exact moment when Japanese military was occupied, their nazi ally pour all effort into invading USSR and Japan even refused to join that war basically breaking that alliance. Said embargo was absolutely devastating for Japan, it would force them to grind their entire empire to sudden halt in half year, so they have a choice between collapse and war on USA. The only thing US was mistaken about was how competent the Japanese military actually was (not weird considering the racism in US) which led to their their initial string of victories in 1942.
So yeah, that was the one time US was on the correct side of history but the motivation was to gobble up the Pacific for their empire, and they pushed up pretty cold bloodedly for it.