I'm curious. I guess this is political.

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MGMcAnick
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I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by MGMcAnick »

Has the USA ever flown flags at half-staff for another foreign dignitary's death, assassinated or not? It seems odd that American flags are lowered for Former Japanese PM Shinzo Abe.

I know we won that war, so why are we so friendly at this time?
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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by Bicycle Bill »

Short answer... yes. In 2013, the flag was flown at half-staff upon the death of Nelson Mandela.

According to the US Flag Code, the flag may be flown at half-staff during periods of national mourning as proclaimed by the POTUS.

The POTUS may also direct the flag to be flown at half-staff upon the death of government officials such as past Presidents, members of Congress or state governors, as well as other honored personages (e.g., Neil Armstrong) and foreign dignitaries as a sign of respect.

So while it is a rare occurence, I'm sure Mandela wasn't the only one and that there have been others.

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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by Jarlaxle »

I thought it was done for Thatcher, also...?

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BoSoxGal
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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by BoSoxGal »

It was already at half staff until sunset tonight for the victims of Highland Park.

There’s a huge American flag on the town green that I pass most days I’m out and about. It seems like it’s at half staff more often than not these days what with all the gun violence in America.

I found this online - short list of foreign leaders in addition to Shinzo Abe who have been honored by our flag at half staff:

Nelson Mandela, former president of South Africa (2013)
Pope John Paul II (2005)
King Hussein of Jordan (1999)
Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister of Israel (1995)
Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt (1981)
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (1965)
United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold (1961)

Thatcher apparently didn’t make the cut.
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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by MGMcAnick »

Thank you for your replies.
Did any of their countries ever declare war on the USA and kill over 111,000 Americans?
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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by BoSoxGal »

MGMcAnick wrote:
Sat Jul 09, 2022 12:13 pm
Thank you for your replies.
Did any of their countries ever declare war on the USA and kill over 111,000 Americans?
When President Trump dies he will get the mandatory 30 days of flag at half staff. He’s responsible for a very large percentage of the million plus Americans who died of covid19 and for an ongoing pandemic of the unvaccinated.

WWII ended 77 years ago. Shinzo Abe wasn’t even alive during it. America’s greatest success in winning WWII was in making friends of the Germans and Japanese, instead of persecuting them endlessly which is how we got WWII in the first place.

Way to hold a grudge though! Bully for you. Perhaps you should give some thought to the hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians killed immediately in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and who died terrible deaths by radiation poisoning and cancer over the years that followed those acts of American barbarity - which a consensus of historians and military experts now recognize as totally unnecessary to end the war with Japan.
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Big RR
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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by Big RR »

MGMcAnick wrote:
Sat Jul 09, 2022 12:13 pm
Thank you for your replies.
Did any of their countries ever declare war on the USA and kill over 111,000 Americans?
Well, not the same death toll, but England/Great Britain did declare war twice, once in the 18th century, and a second time in the 19th century.
Last edited by Big RR on Sat Jul 09, 2022 4:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by Burning Petard »

Well, our war on Covid 19 killed alot more. I guess we are gradually edging into the Vietnam solution with Covid--declare we won and move on.

By the way, the actual as code as passed by Congress is pretty interesting. For a couple ofexamples: No picnic equipment, designed for single use and throw away-with the flag on it, should ever exist. I saw lots of this in stores before 'the 4th'. The gazzilion people under the flag big enough to cover the NFL playing field is also banned--the flag should never be displayed flat.

And that flag at half-staff is to be raised all the way to the top before it is lowered and removed.

snailgate.

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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by MGMcAnick »

BoSoxGal wrote:
Sat Jul 09, 2022 12:30 pm
which a consensus of historians and military experts now recognize as totally unnecessary to end the war with Japan.
I don't think that statement is correct. What historians and military experts? How many does it take to be a concensus? Two? Three? History doesn't agree. Please supply evidence.

I know I'm related to two men who died in the Pacific theater. There may have been other unknown relatives who died. There were others who didn't come back whole. One spent the rest of his life in mental facilities. They used to call it shell shocked.

Are you familiar with Operation Downfall? Late in the war, not even those in charge of operations knew anything about the atomic bombs that were in the works. I have heard that President Truman himself didn't know until he became President. I wonder. They were in the process of building a massive army to "take" the home islands of Japan. It has been estimated that 1,000,000 American servicemen could quite possibly been killed during an invasion of Japan. That's why that army was being built. Fortunately they didn't have to make that attack because we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. About 66,000 were killed by the first bomb and 39,000 by the second.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelpec ... 69e3e42eb5

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall

Below is an excerpt from https://k1project.columbia.edu/news/hir ... d-nagasaki
"Within the first few months after the bombing, it is estimated by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation (a cooperative Japan-U.S. organization) that between 90,000 and 166,000 people died in Hiroshima, while another 60,000 to 80,000 died in Nagasaki. These deaths include those who died due to the force and excruciating heat of the explosions as well as deaths caused by acute radiation exposure."

I'd rather see a quarter million dead Japanese than a million dead Americans. You?
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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by Big RR »

Point taken, but then there is a difference between civilian and military deaths. Sure, any death is terrible, but targeting civilians is fairly brutal. Was it justified? You can draw your own conclusions, but it is not merely a case of the numbers.

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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by BoSoxGal »

Yes there is a growing consensus that the bombings were entirely unnecessary to end the war and also a growing consensus that they constituted one of the worst war crimes in human history. And guess what? Plenty of military and advisors felt that way at the time, too. I don’t need to work the Google for you, you can find all this information for yourself.

I’m frankly glad that the half staff flag for Shinzo Abe pisses you off so much - it very much reveals your prejudice and ignorance. Few political leaders in modern times have been as pro America as Abe was, and the Japanese people deserve our most sincere condolences since we unnecessarily slaughtered a few hundred thousand totally innocent civilians children and elderly included in abundance and they’ve forgiven us for that unforgivable act. No doubt because they’re mature enough to acknowledge their own country has engaged in historical atrocities and they don’t live with their heads up the ass of exceptionalism like some Americans do.
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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by datsunaholic »

It's easy to look back with all the information we know today and say it was unnecessary.

Reality is that not everyone had all that information in August 1945. Most military and government leaders at the time believed that Japan intended to fight to the last person. Japan's plan all along was to make the war so costly that the US would "sue for peace" and let Japan keep the territory it gained in 1931-1942. The US wasn't going to do that. And Japan kept fighting even when the leaders knew it was hopeless, and they knew that by 1944. But they kept fighting because they thought that the US would eventually grow tired of it.

The Allied plan all along was not to just win the war, but to ensure that the Axis powers could never again start another one. Without UNCONDITIONAL surrender, it was assumed that Japan, like Germany following WW1, would simply re-arm in the following decades and try again.

Backing off and letting Japan starve wasn't on the table. Never was. The US had 2 options and neither was pretty. Operation Downfall was the main plan. And that plan was written knowing that it would cost millions of lives. That plan also had the political risk of letting the USSR into the Pacific war, which the White House was hoping to avoid if at all possible. The second plan was one that very few knew about, and that's the one that got used. Was it horrific? Absolutely. Was it worse than if Operation Downfall had been used instead?

Because there was no third option. Wasn't on the table. Not with the leaders we had back then. The war was going to end either with a surrender or with there simply not being any more Japanese left to fight.
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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by Big RR »

Not only that, bu there wasn't really a broad understanding of the after effects of the atomic weapons. Sure, some of the scientists understood, and even protested dropping it on Japan (even though some of those same protesters would have celebrated dropping it on Germany (many were German and a number were Jewish). There was no real concept of a doomsday weapon, and the general though was you use the weapons you have to your advantage (that's why we make them). We were going to use the weapons, and there was very little dissent (except among some scientists). Sure, we realize what we unleashed now, but I don't think many thought it at the time.

As for targeting civilians, it was pretty common on both sides, and the firebombing of Tokyo a few months before claimed almost as many civilian lives and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was pretty much the way war was/is fought. So I doubt there was much discussion with that.

Was it justified? I'll leave that to the Monday morning quarterbacks looking at it many decades afterwards, but, at the time, we were going to do our best to end the war and use any weapon we had.

ETA: As for the Japanese "forgiving" us, my guess is that is the way most Americans have forgiven them for attacking Pearl Harbor--as time passes the outrage subsides and people cease holding grudges, but I doubt it is forgotten.

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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by BoSoxGal »

Big RR wrote:
Sun Jul 10, 2022 2:29 pm
ETA: As for the Japanese "forgiving" us, my guess is that is the way most Americans have forgiven them for attacking Pearl Harbor--as time passes the outrage subsides and people cease holding grudges, but I doubt it is forgotten.
Clearly not, hence this thread. Just like we have so many folks still fighting the civil war 150+ years on.

Wonder why so little conversation happens about the Japanese Americans we threw into concentration camps. And how we stole all their property and upended their lives irrevocably and gave them peanuts in reparations.

Americans so exceptional. Outrageous to fly our stars and stripes at half staff for that slanty eyed Nip.
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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by Big RR »

This thread? Except for MGMcAnick, no one really voiced an objection (other than a gEneral one, perhaps, top honor foreign leaders by lowering the flag to half staff).

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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

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datsunaholic wrote:
Sun Jul 10, 2022 8:37 am
It's easy to look back with all the information we know today and say it was unnecessary.

Reality is that not everyone had all that information in August 1945. Most military and government leaders at the time believed that Japan intended to fight to the last person. Japan's plan all along was to make the war so costly that the US would "sue for peace" and let Japan keep the territory it gained in 1931-1942. The US wasn't going to do that. And Japan kept fighting even when the leaders knew it was hopeless, and they knew that by 1944. But they kept fighting because they thought that the US would eventually grow tired of it.

The Allied plan all along was not to just win the war, but to ensure that the Axis powers could never again start another one. Without UNCONDITIONAL surrender, it was assumed that Japan, like Germany following WW1, would simply re-arm in the following decades and try again.

Backing off and letting Japan starve wasn't on the table. Never was. The US had 2 options and neither was pretty. Operation Downfall was the main plan. And that plan was written knowing that it would cost millions of lives. That plan also had the political risk of letting the USSR into the Pacific war, which the White House was hoping to avoid if at all possible. The second plan was one that very few knew about, and that's the one that got used. Was it horrific? Absolutely. Was it worse than if Operation Downfall had been used instead?

Because there was no third option. Wasn't on the table. Not with the leaders we had back then. The war was going to end either with a surrender or with there simply not being any more Japanese left to fight.
An invasion would have been a bloodbath that has never been seen and can barely be imagined. It would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of Americans dead...and quite possibly, the death of the majority of the population of Japan. Imagine combining the worst aspects of the battles of Okinawa and Stalingrad, with the addition of thousands of suicide plane attacks, concentrated on troop transports, and the use of chemical weapons and defoliants on the Japanese islands. The Army expected about 40,000 casualties per month, and that is ONLY Army, not including Marine or Navy casualties.

The Unites States military is STILL issuing Purple Hearts that were made in preparation for the invasion of Japan. They have issued about 3/4 of them in the last 73 years.

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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by ex-khobar Andy »

Hindsight is 20:20. I wish that the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had never happened. I wish that the Japanese, after starting the war and once it was obvious that they were losing, had accepted the Potsdam Declaration. Many Japanese politicos did accept it but the military did not.

The scientists made the bomb but once the Trinity test had demonstrated that it worked, the two bombs produced with the available U-235 and Pu-239 became military property and under civilian (political) control. Truman was faced with a choice between two unimaginable options: the anticipated 1,000,000 American deaths caused by a successful invasion and occupation of Japan, or the probable several hundred thousand Japanese deaths caused by one, or if necessary two, A bombs. The likely number of Japanese death by A bomb was, by many estimates, fewer than the likely number had they resisted a conventional invasion. There was no prospect of a third bomb within a few months.

The Potsdam Declaration was, in effect, give up now or we will throw everything we have against you and have no doubt, you will be destroyed. The American govt of course know about the Trinity test which surpassed all expectations and had told Churchill. I am not sure that the Chinese (Chiang Kai-Shek) co signatories of Potsdam knew. (Stalin although at Potsdam had agreed in 1941 to refuse to participate in hostilities against Japan.). That the Potsdam Declaration was apparently so casually refuted by Japan must have fueled the 'OK, let 'em have it' mood in Washington.

Had I been Truman with what he then knew, I think I would have, reluctantly, approved the bombing of Japan. There is certainly a school of thought that it was a war crime but it is hardly a consensus.

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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

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ex-khobar Andy wrote:
Sun Jul 10, 2022 6:42 pm
Hindsight is 20:20. I wish that the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had never happened. I wish that the Japanese, after starting the war and once it was obvious that they were losing, had accepted the Potsdam Declaration. Many Japanese politicos did accept it but the military did not.

The scientists made the bomb but once the Trinity test had demonstrated that it worked, the two bombs produced with the available U-235 and Pu-239 became military property and under civilian (political) control. Truman was faced with a choice between two unimaginable options: the anticipated 1,000,000 American deaths caused by a successful invasion and occupation of Japan, or the probable several hundred thousand Japanese deaths caused by one, or if necessary two, A bombs. The likely number of Japanese death by A bomb was, by many estimates, fewer than the likely number had they resisted a conventional invasion. There was no prospect of a third bomb within a few months.
The 4th bomb was actually ready about a week after the bombing of Nagasaki.

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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

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Don't let the victors define morality – Hiroshima was always indefensible

Image
The mushroom cloud after the bombing of Nagasaki on 09 August 1945, killing more than 73,000 people.

The decision 75 years ago to use atomic bombs was fuelled not by strategy but by sheer inhumanity

“If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” So said Curtis LeMay after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945.

LeMay was no bleeding-heart liberal. The US air force chief of staff who had directed the assault over Japan in the final days of the Second World War, he believed in the use of nuclear weapons and thought any action acceptable in the pursuit of victory. Two decades later, he would say of Vietnam that America should “bomb them back into the stone ages”. But he was also honest enough to recognise that the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not regarded as a war crime only because America had won the war.

Last week marked the 75th anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attacks. And while Hiroshima has become a byword for existential horror, the moral implications of the bombings have increasingly faded into the background. Seventy-five years ago, LeMay was not alone in his verdict. “We had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages,” Fleet Admiral William Leahy, chair of the chiefs of staff under both presidents Roosevelt and Truman, wrote in his autobiography, I Was There. Dwight Eisenhower, too, had, as he observed in the memoir The White House Years, “grave misgivings” about the morality of the bombings.

Almost as soon as the bombs had dropped, however, attempts began to justify the unjustifiable. On 9 August, the day of the Nagasaki bombing, the US president, Harry Truman, broadcast to the nation, claiming that “the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base… because we wished… to avoid the killing of civilians”. In fact, more than 300,000 people lived in Hiroshima, of whom up to 40% were killed, often in the most grotesque fashion.

Many commentators, including Truman, have also argued that without the bombings, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of US troops would have been killed in any invasion of Japan. What the casualty figures may have been is in the realm of speculation and estimates vary widely.

Most Allied military leaders did not, however, see the necessity for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Chester W Nimitz, the commander in chief of the US Pacific fleet, insisted that they were “of no material assistance in our war against Japan”. Eisenhower agreed that they were “completely unnecessary” and “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives”. General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the southwest Pacific area, saw “no military justification for the dropping of the bomb”. The official Strategic Bombing Surveys in 1946 concluded that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped”.

There is evidence that the Americans had been preparing to use the A-bomb against the Japanese as early as 1943 and that, in the words of General Leslie R Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, the US nuclear weapon programme, “the target… was always expected to be Japan”.

It’s an attitude that may have been driven by the different ways in which the Allies saw their enemy in Europe and in Asia. Germans were depicted as brutal and savage, but the bigotry was restrained to some extent by the fact that they were European and white. The Japanese, however, were particularly despised because they were non-white. As the historian John Dower observes in his pathbreaking book, War Without Mercy, the Pacific war was especially brutal because both sides saw the conflict “as a race war” that was “fuelled by racial pride, arrogance and rage”.

To question the morality of the bombings now can be deemed unpatriotic
It was common for western diplomats to refer to the Japanese as “monkeys” and “yellow dwarf slaves”. A former marine, Andrew Rooney, observed that US forces “did not consider that they were killing men. They were wiping out dirty animals.” Truman himself wrote: “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.”

“The entire population of Japan is a proper military target,” wrote Colonel Harry F Cunningham, an intelligence officer of the US Fifth Air Force. “There are no civilians in Japan.” The deliberate firebombings of Japanese cities are believed to have killed some 350,000 civilians. Against this background, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki become more explicable.

The Japanese too were vicious, cruel and racist. But Japanese attitudes and atrocities are well known; those of the Allies are often forgotten, because they were the “good guys”. So much so that simply to question the morality of the bombings now can be deemed unpatriotic.

When, 25 years ago, Washington’s National Air and Space Museum planned an exhibition to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of Second World War, part of which put the bombings in historical context, it faced fierce criticism from politicians and veterans. It was forced to rework the exhibition and its director, Martin Harwit, had to resign. He later reflected: “Those who in any way questioned the bomb’s use were, in this emotional framework, the enemies of America.”

At a time when Black Lives Matter protests have thrust the history of slavery and of empire into public debate, it is striking that there remains such historical amnesia about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We seem much less aware today of the sheer inhumanity and moral indefensibility of the bombings than even the military hawks were at the time.

In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara, the former US defence secretary who had been LeMay’s military aide during the Second World War, reflected on the question of war crimes: “LeMay recognised that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

That’s not just a historical question. It’s as relevant today, and to today’s wars, as it is about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. History may be written by the victors, but morality should not be defined solely by them.

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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Re: I'm curious. I guess this is political.

Post by Big RR »

The decision 75 years ago to use atomic bombs was fuelled not by strategy but by sheer inhumanity
I have to disagree; the strategy was to stress to the Japanese leadership the futility of keeping on fighting, just like the firebombing of Tokyo was. (or, using an earlier example, Sherman's march was) Was it inhumane? I think likely was; but was it intended to be inhumane and absent of any other strategy? I seriously doubt it. War is inhumane and messy.

Personally, I would have preferred to bomb the emperor's palace or military headquarters, but my guess is this was rejected because there would be no one to surrender (among other reasons). And, at that time, how do you have a weapon which will end the war and save the lives of your troops (and regardless of the number it saved a great number of American lies) and not use it? We think that way now about nuclear weapons, but it was just viewed as a bigger gun then.

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