But just because I don’t always cover that, Pal, that doesn’t mean I’m unaware of your connection.

For me, I’m rent free. For you, there’s an additional surcharge and sacrifice involved.

Admit it. I’m in your head. Your psyche is mine. Not only am I a feature in your nightmares, but also your dreams, and daydreams and comments. Obsession.

That was during FDR. FDR generally didn’t let Truman know much of anything, including secret deals with Stalin. Keeping the war going with Japan would allow the Russians to come in and split the difference, which I suspect was a secret deal. More flexibility once the Euro front was over.

The conditions for surrender would have changed later on.

The different factions in Japan had issues. After conditioning the civilian population to fight to the death, the leaders themselves may have started believing in the military faction’s propaganda.

There’s a big difference between unconditional surrender and conditional surrender.

The Brits were talking about executing and trying the Emperor of Japan for war crimes, after the unconditional surrender, which was only stopped because MacArthur was in charge. If FDR had still been in charge, MacArthur might have been fired way sooner than Korea. Then Japan would have revolved and Russia would have occupied some islands there. New history under Democrats.

A lot of things are possible with American power if Democrats are in charge.

A vote for the Nazi Party was a vote for Hitler.

If you try to apply that logic to Parliamentary systems you will run into a dead end. Such as, is voting for SDP a vote for Angela Merkel? Because Grand Coalition, that’s how parliaments can work and that’s in fact what the Germans decided to do, a grand coalition. Shades of the ominous past.

Since by that logic, parliamentary systems having to hold majority seats, a vote for any party in the coalition would be a vote for the PM or leader.

They thought Hitler was playing the political game, like Americans think Hussein and Democrats were political entities first, foremost, always. Didn’t work out as people expected.

I and many other baby boomer Americans are here because our fathers weren’t there, so I am not exactly unbiased on the ending of the war with Japan.

Neither are Southerners unbiased about Sherman and Lincoln, or what people call the “War of Northern Aggression” back when the South fired on Union forts immediately after they lost an election to Lincoln. The South needed a short victorious war to prop up their agit prop propaganda keeping their white workers and black slaves in line. Far from being afraid of Northerners or abolition Republicans, Southern Democrats were scornful of the weakness of non slave owners. Southern Democrats were much more afraid of their slaves getting armed and then rebelling, so they needed a foreign enemy to prop up the agit prop.

The point is that this generational experience had consequences lasting far more than a century. WWII is not so far back as that.
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Pal would have left the situation as it was, with no fly zones, hoping that future leaders would recover the shot down pilots. That’s what happens when people like to talk but can’t do anything to uphold their word. They aren’t really participating, they’re more like paid agent provocateurs.

I did look it up and stand by my original comment. If you want to split hairs, it was the NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers Party – AKA Nazi) which was voted into power by 43% of the voters, but Adolph Hitler was the leader of the NSDAP and had just been appointed Chancellor by von Hindenburg. A vote for the Nazi Party was a vote for Hitler.

“You must revise your assertion: Korea was a real horror show.”
Every war is a real horror show. I say it ended luckily in a stalemate because the communists hadn’t as yet invented the Vietnam formula. Hang in long enough and the West will pack up. Korea is also the first “wrong” war, that is declared by the left to be “wrong”. It is also the first war where leftist traitors could openly help the enemy, like visiting North-Korean prison camps and acting there like agents of the communist regime.

“Atomic bomb”
“Was Hiroshima Necessary?”

In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan’s article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
;
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 — that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. …
…
Is this memorandum authentic? …
“The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.”
…

Now I don’t know the site I took the quote from, that is, whether it is tin-foil territory or not. I just found it by googling “japanese peace overtures”. But unless everything in it is a lie, especially the part of MacArthur (who wasn’t a softy I believe) then the logic would indicate that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unnecessary.
Also, from the wiki article on the Nuremberg Trial;

In an editorial at the time The Economist, a British weekly newspaper, criticised the hypocrisy of both Britain and France for supporting the expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations over its unprovoked attack against Finland in 1939 and for six years later cooperating with the USSR as a respected equal at Nuremberg. It also criticised the allies for their own double-standard at the Nuremberg Trials: “nor should the Western world console itself that the Russians alone stand condemned at the bar of the Allies’ own justice. … Among crimes against humanity stands the offence of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations. Can the Americans who dropped the atom bomb and the British who destroyed the cities of western Germany plead ‘not guilty’ on this count? Crimes against humanity also include the mass expulsion of populations. Can the Anglo-Saxon leaders who at Potsdam condoned the expulsion of millions of Germans from their homes hold themselves completely innocent? … The nations sitting in judgement have so clearly proclaimed themselves exempt from the law which they have administered.”

I can understand American soldiers to be “glad”. That however doesn’t enter into the definition of “war crime” (but to repeat myself “but then in war sh*t happens”).

Ps. “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” The difference between being ruthless and being criminal.

http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/