If it hadn't worked, it would have just been the first civilian casualties of countless more. The fact that it worked doesn't absolve the evil of it. Those men had to live with what they did. Would they have been forgiven (and forgiven themselves) if they had had to nuke a couple of millions to death before Japan surrendered? There's a reason nukes have never been used again since - the destruction is simply too indiscriminate. That in itself tells me what lesson was learned from it: not all ends justify the means.
But this little mind exercise of yours is quite irrelevant since neither one of us was there. Neither one of us know what other choices they had available, and what the outcomes would have been from them (predicted or actual). History is made of choices and outcomes, which men must take responsibility for.
Back to the topic at hand, communism doesn't get to wash its hands of the millions that seem to inevitably die under it, regardless of the intentions of the regimes that implemented it. If we're not going to abandon such a deadly ideology for good, then it is critical that it reinvent itself, which is not something I think we will see it do, nor is it even guaranteed that it could survive such a transformation.
It has nothing to do with washing the bloody hands of communism. It has everything to do with understanding the enemy. If people here get this triggered over a benign statement that Hitler is worse than Stalin, then we will never be able to think strategically when it comes to things we hate.
Anyway, what justified Nagasaki was not the outcome. It was the intent. Nukes have not been used again because we have not had any War that even minutely approached WW2. We also feared the consequence of using a nuke in a world where other people can nuke us in retaliation. That is the Cold War. Nothing at all to do with learning a supposed maxim that "not all ends justify the means."
Hitler being better or worse than Stalin is not an objective statement. Both were fucking terrible, because both got millions killed. Doesn't matter if it was the systematic dehumanization and extermination of jews, or systematic persecution and extermination of political opponents of the state. And that's why people are down-voting you to hell. There's a larger point against authoritarian regimes in general being discussed here, and your focus on "triggered" people is really a swing and a miss in terms of relevance.
But I don't think this is accidental. You give off a very troll-ish vibe.
If it hadn't worked, it would have just been the first civilian casualties of countless more. The fact that it worked doesn't absolve the evil of it. Those men had to live with what they did. Would they have been forgiven (and forgiven themselves) if they had had to nuke a couple of millions to death before Japan surrendered? There's a reason nukes have never been used again since - the destruction is simply too indiscriminate. That in itself tells me what lesson was learned from it: not all ends justify the means.
But this little mind exercise of yours is quite irrelevant since neither one of us was there. Neither one of us know what other choices they had available, and what the outcomes would have been from them (predicted or actual). History is made of choices and outcomes, which men must take responsibility for.
Back to the topic at hand, communism doesn't get to wash its hands of the millions that seem to inevitably die under it, regardless of the intentions of the regimes that implemented it. If we're not going to abandon such a deadly ideology for good, then it is critical that it reinvent itself, which is not something I think we will see it do, nor is it even guaranteed that it could survive such a transformation.
It has nothing to do with washing the bloody hands of communism. It has everything to do with understanding the enemy. If people here get this triggered over a benign statement that Hitler is worse than Stalin, then we will never be able to think strategically when it comes to things we hate.
Anyway, what justified Nagasaki was not the outcome. It was the intent. Nukes have not been used again because we have not had any War that even minutely approached WW2. We also feared the consequence of using a nuke in a world where other people can nuke us in retaliation. That is the Cold War. Nothing at all to do with learning a supposed maxim that "not all ends justify the means."
Hitler being better or worse than Stalin is not an objective statement. Both were fucking terrible, because both got millions killed. Doesn't matter if it was the systematic dehumanization and extermination of jews, or systematic persecution and extermination of political opponents of the state. And that's why people are down-voting you to hell. There's a larger point against authoritarian regimes in general being discussed here, and your focus on "triggered" people is really a swing and a miss in terms of relevance.
But I don't think this is accidental. You give off a very troll-ish vibe.