The truth is that Hamas started this war because they knew that the rest of the world would restrain Israel. If they honestly thought that Israel would fight unconstrained I don't think they would have launched the war.
That is why this weakness of "immediate ceasefires now!" will ultimately put more people in body bags than otherwise.
The people arguing for the ceasefire don't care, as they want Palestinians to have the ability to rise up and fight again, another day.
Israel knows all this, and I think they are determined to not let it happen again.
And, of course, it's always Democrats who are on the "constraining" side, causing more problems.
Democrats cause more wars due to weakness and fecklessness than do the "crazy warmonger Republicans" because the enemies know that the Republicans (and Trump) will fight back.
The Left is always overly concerned with how things appear, rather than how they actually are.
Some in Israel are determined. Others were briefly determined but now their will has been sapped through habits of mind and wishful thinking. It is astonishing to see a country willing to commit national suicide over fewer than 200 (very very very tragic) hostages -- the whole reason Hamas took them. I'm not sure Israel can stand firm or survive as a country once Biden inevitably pulls the rug out from under them. I hope so.
Thank you for your thoughtful post. I recently returned from a tech mission to Israel. Someone in our group asked the deputy mayor of Jerusalem this question: Do you think Israel ought to go it alone and forget about America?
Her reply made me think: “No, we can’t do that. Don’t Americans realize that the only thing keeping radical Islamic jihad from America is Israel?…Israel needs America and America needs Israel.”
End of story. And thank you for being in the 10% that supports Israel. We appreciate you!!!!
This furthers Obama's goal of driving a wedge between the US and Israel to benefit Iran. No matter how this current conflict ends, Israel will have learned the hard lesson of US foreign policy under Obama/Biden. The US is not a reliable ally and cannot be depended upon. What US doesn't fully understand is that the Israeli Jews can't be driven out. They have no place to go.
Never understood my Jewish friends. All were left wing, yet, it seemed the biggest supporters of Israel were right wing. I came to the conclusion, that, ideology mattered far more than than there actual Jewish state.
It's interesting to see how opinions are formed. Ukraine is easily as supportable a cause as any from a "Reaganite" perspective. Even today most R voters support Ukraine funding and the bill would pass but for MAGA considerations. But it gets caught up in who-believes-what team dynamics. Trump was for (and almost got it done) TikTok divestiture before he was against it. How soon before the Rs in congress, who have been pretty consistently anti-TikTok/ByteDance, drop the issue? CCP interests defended by Rs!
The Politico article you posted on Twitter was a good one. It shows how positions change among groups. And it was pretty balanced. The FDA has always had a heavy hand, long before Trump, Biden, etc. The Ds need more pols like Polis and Shapiro.
If you don't stop the Russians in Ukraine now, you will have to stop them with Americans lives somewhere in the not too distant future. Bullys keep on being bullies till someone knocks them on their ass. As adults we forget what we learned on the playground.
When I look at the history of Western promises concerning eastward expansion of NATO, Putin's public speeches making warning after warning (that we never heard about because most of our journalists only speak English) the political upheavals in Ukraine, which should have been left to play out rather than settled by the Victoria Nuland and the CIA, I'm left more than a little confused. Putin is no doubt a bully, but his next step west will involve NATO. Putin may take that step if Biden is re elected based on Biden's decisions in Afghanistan and now Gaza. Putin would be foolish not to. He could wreck NATO in one stroke while Obama/Biden/Blinkley try to figure out who to blame.
This is BS. The truth is that if you keep poking the bear, eventually you will get bit. Putin is evil. No doubt about that. But Russia thinks it needs to protect itself from NATO expansion. So when the warmongers push for Ukraine in NATO you get what you get.
He's not a Democrat. Ironically, Churchill was a Conservative, went to the Liberal party for a short time, then went back to being a Conservative where he stood the rest of his life.
This is the same BS that's been passed around since the war. Its disgusting and immoral. Trying to justify the Allies war crimes by saying, nonny nonny boo boo they did bad things is right out of first grade. The Allies bombed German cities way out of proportion to the bombing they did to London. They deliberately targeted civilian populations. Especially the Brits who bombed at night and did not mind killing women, children and the elderly. Its a disgrace to even try to justify this. Studies done at the end of the war demonstrated that this wanton bloodletting did nothing to advance the war effort. Documented that war production increased up to the very last months of the war. It was blood lust by nations pretending they were angels of the Lord meting out vengeance. Malmedy you say? The allies all did the same things which is authorized by any armies on the advance that cannot take prisoners as it would slow or stop the advance. Then there were the many many thousands of German prisoners held by the allies who perished because they were starved and held in the open in fields surrounded by machine guns and barbed wire. Nothing was done for them for weeks going into months. Just like the Soviets marching German POW's to Siberia and their doom, very much the same thing was done by the allies. This story has been hidden from the public for decades but its well documented in spite of Eisenhowers orders to keep it hidden. Oh Hitler had to be stopped, its true but we teamed up with an even worse butcher in Stalin who killed many more than the Germans did. Jews, included. How is that a moral victory over evil? It was not. The commies in the US Govt and GB helped make this travesty happen. I'll stop here because you won't read much more but i won't return here again.
Respectfully, they weren't war crimes. I also wasn't justifying it--but if we would have stopped bombing, Germany would have continued to execute Jews. There is no doubt. There is also no doubt that if Israel stops, Hamas will not. German prisoners taken by Western Allies were treated very well. German prisoners taken by Russia were not.
For what it's worth, the Swiss treated American POWs horribly.
You are correct. Mass bombing of civilians did nothing to hasten the war's end. It did, however, steel the determination by those civilian survivors to NOT give in. Conventional military thought, first conceived by Generals Grant and Sherman, was that total war would crush the enemy's spirit and the populous would demand war's end. England did not give up when London was destroyed; Germany did not when Berlin or Dresden were leveled; Japan only surrendered after the SECOND atomic bomb. Distaste for a new war was instilled in both the Japanese and German populus.
I agree with Jeff 98% of the time but using his same analogy, Hitler was stepping up against communism when FDR was trying to turn the U.S. to the left, and Churchill just couldn't accept that Germany was a legitimate rival to England in terms of industrial production, technology and human capital.
We all know that Germans are both uber intelligent and pretty laid back. But, stealing their land at Versailles, forcing them to pay reparations that caused hyperinflation, and then being populated by some Jewish folks who wanted Munich to become as communist as Moscow, finally pushed them over the edge.
In reality, America didn't win the European theatre, the USSR did, and Eastern Europe lived behind an Iron Curtain for a generation.
In no shape or form do I condone Nazi genocide, Russian genocide (or, genocide by Muslims against Jews or vice versa) but these horrific events-like most human choices-weren't random. Mentioning that some Jewish people were leaders of the communist movement in Germany and Poland (Rosa Luxemberg, Leo Jogiches, Karl Radek, Paul Levi, etal) makes someone no more of an antisemite than saying Blacks commit a disproportionate share of crime in the U.S. makes one a racist.
In 2016, around 70% of white, Christian, men with children voted for Donald Trump. Meanwhile, around 65-70% of Jewish men voted for Clinton (over 80% of Jewish women pulled for Hillary). As someone who was in politics for years, I know that many Jewish voters support Democrats because they associate Republicans with what they consider far-right Christian principles. (i.e. opposition to abortion, vouchers for religious schools, etc) That doesn't mean Jewish voters are wrong or irrational, nor does it make them ipso-facto anti-Christian. It merely means they're on the other side of the trade with Christian bible belters. Well, when it comes to communism, I'm what's called, a permabear.
Your folk history fails you again. The vast majority of German Jews were not communists. And most communists were not Jews. German antisemites used communist Jews to further their existing aims. This is an interesting article, sections III, IV and VI are most pertinent. https://www.commentary.org/articles/jerry-muller/communism-anti-semitism-the-jews/
And in the USA you do realize that during the Cold War the vast majority of Jews and Ds were also anti-communist? Today, it's honestly hard to tell Trump's attitudes towards communists, or at least their strong-man leaders.
Good article-which I'd read before-and if it appears I was saying anything different than Muller, then my bad. Indeed, Muller's last line of the essay, “The Trotskys make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay the bills”, was pretty much the point I was making.
As someone who grew up in a far North Side of Chicago condominium, traded on the floor of two futures exchanges, worked on Wall Street and now lives in South Florida, I've known more patriotic, right-wing Jews than I can shake a stick at. But it doesn't matter to me if someone is Jewish or a virtue signalling Protestant housewife in Wilmette, anyone who votes for the modern Democrat party is dead to me.
I think a counter argument could be that the Nazi and Japanese atrocities were so horrific as compared to the "normal" horrors of war that it required unconditional surrender. You can argue that the European victors in WW I brought WW II upon themselves with both the treatment of the defeated as well as they way they treated the Japanese and the Italians, who were on the Allies side. It's both true and a good argument.
But when you look at the Holocaust, the Einsatzgruppen, the rape of Nanking, and on and on and on. Then no.
Most particular how they acted after the countries they were fighting surrendered. A lot of Russians greeted the Nazi's as liberators, at first, for freeing them from Stalin. The Nazi's killed them anyway for being "inferior". The Japanese were willing to surrender but wanted to keep control of Manchuria, and Korea (ie keep Koreans as slaves in perpetuity) Their demands were non negotiable. So the US didn't negotiate and said no.
I'm not sure that anything less than Unconditional Surrender would do.
At the end of the Civil War Custer demanded unconditional surrender from Lee's representative. Grant let the Confederate soldiers keep their horses. It was called a Gentleman's Agreement. Don't think that would have worked at the end of WW II.
I would actually suggest to any and all, you might want to spend some time either listening to some books and or reading them the old-fashioned way because this part of history is missing a lot of facts that throw a lot of it into a very different light. While Hitler was one evil dude, he partnered with another in Joseph Stalin in the USSR/German non-aggression pact that is what made WW II possible. Hitler knew he would not begin to think about going to war without the USSR placated, and since Nazism and Communism are essentially one in the same (Remember one is international SOCIALISM and the other is national SOCIALISM) it made the whole nice tidy agreement born in hell possible. Also, by this point Stalin had done Hitler one way better by committing Genocide, that would not be acknowledged by the west until the fall of the wall if we are being honest, on a much grander scale. The horrors of this called out early and often and warned about by the likes of Muggridge, Conquest et al.
While Stalin was a thug, he was also always playing the long game. Starting the moment, the USSR came to be, Lenin and then Stalin knew that penetrating the west on all levels, in particular political, intellectual and through all manners of "media" was necessary for the desired worldwide revolution of the proletariat!
How this ties to Germany, besides the fact that Germany invaded Poland and then the USSR invaded Poland from the other side two days later, which never seems to get mentioned as a day that lives in infamy in history books, is that this is what made it possible for Hitler to invade and start the war. Without that agreement he has to continue to wait, bide his time. What could have happened had he had to do this, who knows.
There are three other things anyone interested in WW II and all things surrounding it should look into.
1. The United States Government was compromised, heavily compromised- I will list out some books if any are interested and seeing what we know right now, and I know if we ever could get ahold of the GRU files that the re-write of history that should already be on the table might take even larger and more frightening turns. (Hint, McCarthy was incredibly right, even more so then he knew-which means Hoover’s suspicions were spot on because in all likelihood that is where McCarthy got his numbers and names)
2. Germany had many groups of people in the Nazis hierarchy that reached out as early as 1942 to the allies about help with getting rid of Hitler. But each time this was squelched by Stalin either directly or indirectly. Why? Even as his country was hosting a ton of Germans at a very bloody Moscow “party”, Stalin, like I said played the long game. Something only Churchill began to approach doing on the allied side. In the end, the USSR got all of the territory it was promised in the 1939 USSR/Germany non-aggression pact at the end of WW II. Getting rid of Hitler was always possible, but Stalin was having none of this. One of the big reasons, not to spoil some of the reading and known facts is that the German's wanted to dump Hitler and turn their attention, along with the American's and British on the USSR. The many high ranking- German's realized what the USSR was very quickly. Keep in mind it was the communists and the Nazis fighting it out in the late 1920’s for control of Germany. Patton also realized this. If the war stops in 1942 or 1943, think about how many more Jews would be alive, how many more Allied and German soldiers would have been alive? No Iron curtain, cold war takes on a whole different feel and all of the people behind the Iron Curtain don't know the hardships that they would go through for nearly 50 years. Korea most likely does not happen, perhaps the guys working for the other side don't leave Chiang Kia-shek out to dry. Truly sad on all levels.
3. The foundations for most of our bureaucracy at the federal level was laid during FDR's turn in the white house. The explosion of growth in D.C. into the modern mecca of lobbyists running from one of the hundreds of unconstitutional agencies/groups to another is mind boggling at times. Other foundations were laid that as most wise people have commented on over the last oh 500 plus years is that if your foundation is weak, it is compromised, over time this will not play out well, and it hasn't. The OSS, the state department, Soggy Bottom, et al, found their “cultural” footing under FDR and his gaggle of “reds” and it was not good. One of the keys to this time period is someone who has all but been lost to history, Harry Hopkins. A man who had articles written about him as he lived in FDR's white house, in the Lincoln bedroom, running the country for FDR. He was called the Co-president. He also was mentioned in the less than 1% of Venona cables we have decrypted and was also mentioned in a very prominent former KGB higher up's speech from two plus decades ago as a hero of the USSR, the most productive and influential source the USSR has ever had.
Lend lease also is not what people think it was, not by a long shot and Major Jordan’s Diaries are a must read for anyone.
Excellent point. The initially reasoning for the bombing was wrong. Both sides thought it would break the other sides will. It didn't. Ditto the US firebombing of Japan. The rulers didn't care and wanted to continue ever after the both A-Bombs. German war production actually increased after the bombing started. But it did eventually destroy enough infrastructure to make any kind of mass production and shipment of supplies virtually impossible. The Japanese started to produce things in peoples houses and assemble the parts elsewhere. The firebombing stopped that.
The Japanese leaders knew we had A-Bombs and knew of the successful test at Los Alamos. The History Channel has two excellent programs called The Samurai and the Swastika. Tells how the Japanese military tried to stop the surrender.
The important thing to remember is that Mao, Stalin and Hitler didn't kill a lot of people to obtain power. The real killings began after they came to power. The US stopped killing after the wars were won. The others only began after their wars were won.
Hamas is the same. If they "win" that's when the real killings will begin.
The declaration of Unconditional Surrender around 42-43 had almost everything to do with this, even though Churchill fought this declaration after seeing what it did after WW I.
Did you ever notice how many people who claim that the US committed war crimes, or that Israel is currently committing war crimes, despite being the single most humane military force in the history of the planet by dropping leaflets and making phone calls to property managers in advance of an attack, thereby removing the element of surprise, which is the number one thing in success of an attack, rarely if ever mentioned that the war was started by people committing crimes to begin with and there is no such thing as proportional retaliation when someone's trying to kill you. If someone pistol whips you in downtown Chicago or New York City and then points a gun at your head and you end up making a single surgical strike one inch above and in front of the top of their ear with the middle knuckle of your hand that drives their skull bone into the brain and kills them, does anybody have the right to say it was disproportional because you killed them but they hadn't killed you? That is literally how absurd and ignorant the above argument sounds to most people who have had to defend themselves against death threats.
The truth is that Hamas started this war because they knew that the rest of the world would restrain Israel. If they honestly thought that Israel would fight unconstrained I don't think they would have launched the war.
That is why this weakness of "immediate ceasefires now!" will ultimately put more people in body bags than otherwise.
The people arguing for the ceasefire don't care, as they want Palestinians to have the ability to rise up and fight again, another day.
Israel knows all this, and I think they are determined to not let it happen again.
And, of course, it's always Democrats who are on the "constraining" side, causing more problems.
Democrats cause more wars due to weakness and fecklessness than do the "crazy warmonger Republicans" because the enemies know that the Republicans (and Trump) will fight back.
The Left is always overly concerned with how things appear, rather than how they actually are.
Some in Israel are determined. Others were briefly determined but now their will has been sapped through habits of mind and wishful thinking. It is astonishing to see a country willing to commit national suicide over fewer than 200 (very very very tragic) hostages -- the whole reason Hamas took them. I'm not sure Israel can stand firm or survive as a country once Biden inevitably pulls the rug out from under them. I hope so.
Thank you for your thoughtful post. I recently returned from a tech mission to Israel. Someone in our group asked the deputy mayor of Jerusalem this question: Do you think Israel ought to go it alone and forget about America?
Her reply made me think: “No, we can’t do that. Don’t Americans realize that the only thing keeping radical Islamic jihad from America is Israel?…Israel needs America and America needs Israel.”
End of story. And thank you for being in the 10% that supports Israel. We appreciate you!!!!
This furthers Obama's goal of driving a wedge between the US and Israel to benefit Iran. No matter how this current conflict ends, Israel will have learned the hard lesson of US foreign policy under Obama/Biden. The US is not a reliable ally and cannot be depended upon. What US doesn't fully understand is that the Israeli Jews can't be driven out. They have no place to go.
Commies gonna commie🤷🏼♂️
Biden is balancing US support of Israel with the Palestinian-/Hamas-supporting voters in his party’s coalition.
And he is doing it badly.
"Jewish state of Israel under the bus"
Never understood my Jewish friends. All were left wing, yet, it seemed the biggest supporters of Israel were right wing. I came to the conclusion, that, ideology mattered far more than than there actual Jewish state.
It's interesting to see how opinions are formed. Ukraine is easily as supportable a cause as any from a "Reaganite" perspective. Even today most R voters support Ukraine funding and the bill would pass but for MAGA considerations. But it gets caught up in who-believes-what team dynamics. Trump was for (and almost got it done) TikTok divestiture before he was against it. How soon before the Rs in congress, who have been pretty consistently anti-TikTok/ByteDance, drop the issue? CCP interests defended by Rs!
This is just an amazing thread of replies. Who could have guessed that so many Rs were pro-CCP? https://twitter.com/DanCrenshawTX/status/1766565761487601691
The Politico article you posted on Twitter was a good one. It shows how positions change among groups. And it was pretty balanced. The FDA has always had a heavy hand, long before Trump, Biden, etc. The Ds need more pols like Polis and Shapiro.
If you don't stop the Russians in Ukraine now, you will have to stop them with Americans lives somewhere in the not too distant future. Bullys keep on being bullies till someone knocks them on their ass. As adults we forget what we learned on the playground.
When I look at the history of Western promises concerning eastward expansion of NATO, Putin's public speeches making warning after warning (that we never heard about because most of our journalists only speak English) the political upheavals in Ukraine, which should have been left to play out rather than settled by the Victoria Nuland and the CIA, I'm left more than a little confused. Putin is no doubt a bully, but his next step west will involve NATO. Putin may take that step if Biden is re elected based on Biden's decisions in Afghanistan and now Gaza. Putin would be foolish not to. He could wreck NATO in one stroke while Obama/Biden/Blinkley try to figure out who to blame.
This is BS. The truth is that if you keep poking the bear, eventually you will get bit. Putin is evil. No doubt about that. But Russia thinks it needs to protect itself from NATO expansion. So when the warmongers push for Ukraine in NATO you get what you get.
Where's a Churchill when we need him?
He's not a Democrat. Ironically, Churchill was a Conservative, went to the Liberal party for a short time, then went back to being a Conservative where he stood the rest of his life.
As Churchill famously said, if you are not a liberal in your 20's and 30's you have no heart, if you are still one by your 40's you have not brains.
This is the same BS that's been passed around since the war. Its disgusting and immoral. Trying to justify the Allies war crimes by saying, nonny nonny boo boo they did bad things is right out of first grade. The Allies bombed German cities way out of proportion to the bombing they did to London. They deliberately targeted civilian populations. Especially the Brits who bombed at night and did not mind killing women, children and the elderly. Its a disgrace to even try to justify this. Studies done at the end of the war demonstrated that this wanton bloodletting did nothing to advance the war effort. Documented that war production increased up to the very last months of the war. It was blood lust by nations pretending they were angels of the Lord meting out vengeance. Malmedy you say? The allies all did the same things which is authorized by any armies on the advance that cannot take prisoners as it would slow or stop the advance. Then there were the many many thousands of German prisoners held by the allies who perished because they were starved and held in the open in fields surrounded by machine guns and barbed wire. Nothing was done for them for weeks going into months. Just like the Soviets marching German POW's to Siberia and their doom, very much the same thing was done by the allies. This story has been hidden from the public for decades but its well documented in spite of Eisenhowers orders to keep it hidden. Oh Hitler had to be stopped, its true but we teamed up with an even worse butcher in Stalin who killed many more than the Germans did. Jews, included. How is that a moral victory over evil? It was not. The commies in the US Govt and GB helped make this travesty happen. I'll stop here because you won't read much more but i won't return here again.
Respectfully, they weren't war crimes. I also wasn't justifying it--but if we would have stopped bombing, Germany would have continued to execute Jews. There is no doubt. There is also no doubt that if Israel stops, Hamas will not. German prisoners taken by Western Allies were treated very well. German prisoners taken by Russia were not.
For what it's worth, the Swiss treated American POWs horribly.
don't want none, don't start none
You are correct. Mass bombing of civilians did nothing to hasten the war's end. It did, however, steel the determination by those civilian survivors to NOT give in. Conventional military thought, first conceived by Generals Grant and Sherman, was that total war would crush the enemy's spirit and the populous would demand war's end. England did not give up when London was destroyed; Germany did not when Berlin or Dresden were leveled; Japan only surrendered after the SECOND atomic bomb. Distaste for a new war was instilled in both the Japanese and German populus.
I agree with Jeff 98% of the time but using his same analogy, Hitler was stepping up against communism when FDR was trying to turn the U.S. to the left, and Churchill just couldn't accept that Germany was a legitimate rival to England in terms of industrial production, technology and human capital.
We all know that Germans are both uber intelligent and pretty laid back. But, stealing their land at Versailles, forcing them to pay reparations that caused hyperinflation, and then being populated by some Jewish folks who wanted Munich to become as communist as Moscow, finally pushed them over the edge.
In reality, America didn't win the European theatre, the USSR did, and Eastern Europe lived behind an Iron Curtain for a generation.
Most of what has been popularly learned about the consequences of the Versailles treaty is wrong. And you appear to be a stark raving antisemite. https://www.historynet.com/failed-peace-treaty-versailles-1919/
In no shape or form do I condone Nazi genocide, Russian genocide (or, genocide by Muslims against Jews or vice versa) but these horrific events-like most human choices-weren't random. Mentioning that some Jewish people were leaders of the communist movement in Germany and Poland (Rosa Luxemberg, Leo Jogiches, Karl Radek, Paul Levi, etal) makes someone no more of an antisemite than saying Blacks commit a disproportionate share of crime in the U.S. makes one a racist.
In 2016, around 70% of white, Christian, men with children voted for Donald Trump. Meanwhile, around 65-70% of Jewish men voted for Clinton (over 80% of Jewish women pulled for Hillary). As someone who was in politics for years, I know that many Jewish voters support Democrats because they associate Republicans with what they consider far-right Christian principles. (i.e. opposition to abortion, vouchers for religious schools, etc) That doesn't mean Jewish voters are wrong or irrational, nor does it make them ipso-facto anti-Christian. It merely means they're on the other side of the trade with Christian bible belters. Well, when it comes to communism, I'm what's called, a permabear.
Your folk history fails you again. The vast majority of German Jews were not communists. And most communists were not Jews. German antisemites used communist Jews to further their existing aims. This is an interesting article, sections III, IV and VI are most pertinent. https://www.commentary.org/articles/jerry-muller/communism-anti-semitism-the-jews/
And in the USA you do realize that during the Cold War the vast majority of Jews and Ds were also anti-communist? Today, it's honestly hard to tell Trump's attitudes towards communists, or at least their strong-man leaders.
Good article-which I'd read before-and if it appears I was saying anything different than Muller, then my bad. Indeed, Muller's last line of the essay, “The Trotskys make the revolutions, and the Bronsteins pay the bills”, was pretty much the point I was making.
As someone who grew up in a far North Side of Chicago condominium, traded on the floor of two futures exchanges, worked on Wall Street and now lives in South Florida, I've known more patriotic, right-wing Jews than I can shake a stick at. But it doesn't matter to me if someone is Jewish or a virtue signalling Protestant housewife in Wilmette, anyone who votes for the modern Democrat party is dead to me.
A good point and very true.
I think a counter argument could be that the Nazi and Japanese atrocities were so horrific as compared to the "normal" horrors of war that it required unconditional surrender. You can argue that the European victors in WW I brought WW II upon themselves with both the treatment of the defeated as well as they way they treated the Japanese and the Italians, who were on the Allies side. It's both true and a good argument.
But when you look at the Holocaust, the Einsatzgruppen, the rape of Nanking, and on and on and on. Then no.
Most particular how they acted after the countries they were fighting surrendered. A lot of Russians greeted the Nazi's as liberators, at first, for freeing them from Stalin. The Nazi's killed them anyway for being "inferior". The Japanese were willing to surrender but wanted to keep control of Manchuria, and Korea (ie keep Koreans as slaves in perpetuity) Their demands were non negotiable. So the US didn't negotiate and said no.
I'm not sure that anything less than Unconditional Surrender would do.
At the end of the Civil War Custer demanded unconditional surrender from Lee's representative. Grant let the Confederate soldiers keep their horses. It was called a Gentleman's Agreement. Don't think that would have worked at the end of WW II.
I would actually suggest to any and all, you might want to spend some time either listening to some books and or reading them the old-fashioned way because this part of history is missing a lot of facts that throw a lot of it into a very different light. While Hitler was one evil dude, he partnered with another in Joseph Stalin in the USSR/German non-aggression pact that is what made WW II possible. Hitler knew he would not begin to think about going to war without the USSR placated, and since Nazism and Communism are essentially one in the same (Remember one is international SOCIALISM and the other is national SOCIALISM) it made the whole nice tidy agreement born in hell possible. Also, by this point Stalin had done Hitler one way better by committing Genocide, that would not be acknowledged by the west until the fall of the wall if we are being honest, on a much grander scale. The horrors of this called out early and often and warned about by the likes of Muggridge, Conquest et al.
While Stalin was a thug, he was also always playing the long game. Starting the moment, the USSR came to be, Lenin and then Stalin knew that penetrating the west on all levels, in particular political, intellectual and through all manners of "media" was necessary for the desired worldwide revolution of the proletariat!
How this ties to Germany, besides the fact that Germany invaded Poland and then the USSR invaded Poland from the other side two days later, which never seems to get mentioned as a day that lives in infamy in history books, is that this is what made it possible for Hitler to invade and start the war. Without that agreement he has to continue to wait, bide his time. What could have happened had he had to do this, who knows.
There are three other things anyone interested in WW II and all things surrounding it should look into.
1. The United States Government was compromised, heavily compromised- I will list out some books if any are interested and seeing what we know right now, and I know if we ever could get ahold of the GRU files that the re-write of history that should already be on the table might take even larger and more frightening turns. (Hint, McCarthy was incredibly right, even more so then he knew-which means Hoover’s suspicions were spot on because in all likelihood that is where McCarthy got his numbers and names)
2. Germany had many groups of people in the Nazis hierarchy that reached out as early as 1942 to the allies about help with getting rid of Hitler. But each time this was squelched by Stalin either directly or indirectly. Why? Even as his country was hosting a ton of Germans at a very bloody Moscow “party”, Stalin, like I said played the long game. Something only Churchill began to approach doing on the allied side. In the end, the USSR got all of the territory it was promised in the 1939 USSR/Germany non-aggression pact at the end of WW II. Getting rid of Hitler was always possible, but Stalin was having none of this. One of the big reasons, not to spoil some of the reading and known facts is that the German's wanted to dump Hitler and turn their attention, along with the American's and British on the USSR. The many high ranking- German's realized what the USSR was very quickly. Keep in mind it was the communists and the Nazis fighting it out in the late 1920’s for control of Germany. Patton also realized this. If the war stops in 1942 or 1943, think about how many more Jews would be alive, how many more Allied and German soldiers would have been alive? No Iron curtain, cold war takes on a whole different feel and all of the people behind the Iron Curtain don't know the hardships that they would go through for nearly 50 years. Korea most likely does not happen, perhaps the guys working for the other side don't leave Chiang Kia-shek out to dry. Truly sad on all levels.
3. The foundations for most of our bureaucracy at the federal level was laid during FDR's turn in the white house. The explosion of growth in D.C. into the modern mecca of lobbyists running from one of the hundreds of unconstitutional agencies/groups to another is mind boggling at times. Other foundations were laid that as most wise people have commented on over the last oh 500 plus years is that if your foundation is weak, it is compromised, over time this will not play out well, and it hasn't. The OSS, the state department, Soggy Bottom, et al, found their “cultural” footing under FDR and his gaggle of “reds” and it was not good. One of the keys to this time period is someone who has all but been lost to history, Harry Hopkins. A man who had articles written about him as he lived in FDR's white house, in the Lincoln bedroom, running the country for FDR. He was called the Co-president. He also was mentioned in the less than 1% of Venona cables we have decrypted and was also mentioned in a very prominent former KGB higher up's speech from two plus decades ago as a hero of the USSR, the most productive and influential source the USSR has ever had.
Lend lease also is not what people think it was, not by a long shot and Major Jordan’s Diaries are a must read for anyone.
Soom books to kill time, put you to sleep.
American Betrayal- Diana West
Blacklisted by History- M Stanton Evans
FDR's Folly's- Jim Powell
The Progressive Era- Murray Rothbard
Disinformation- Pacepa
The Venona Secretes-Romerstien and Breindel
Great Society- Amity Shlaes
Witness- Whittaker Chambers
Excellent point. The initially reasoning for the bombing was wrong. Both sides thought it would break the other sides will. It didn't. Ditto the US firebombing of Japan. The rulers didn't care and wanted to continue ever after the both A-Bombs. German war production actually increased after the bombing started. But it did eventually destroy enough infrastructure to make any kind of mass production and shipment of supplies virtually impossible. The Japanese started to produce things in peoples houses and assemble the parts elsewhere. The firebombing stopped that.
The Japanese leaders knew we had A-Bombs and knew of the successful test at Los Alamos. The History Channel has two excellent programs called The Samurai and the Swastika. Tells how the Japanese military tried to stop the surrender.
The important thing to remember is that Mao, Stalin and Hitler didn't kill a lot of people to obtain power. The real killings began after they came to power. The US stopped killing after the wars were won. The others only began after their wars were won.
Hamas is the same. If they "win" that's when the real killings will begin.
The declaration of Unconditional Surrender around 42-43 had almost everything to do with this, even though Churchill fought this declaration after seeing what it did after WW I.
Did you ever notice how many people who claim that the US committed war crimes, or that Israel is currently committing war crimes, despite being the single most humane military force in the history of the planet by dropping leaflets and making phone calls to property managers in advance of an attack, thereby removing the element of surprise, which is the number one thing in success of an attack, rarely if ever mentioned that the war was started by people committing crimes to begin with and there is no such thing as proportional retaliation when someone's trying to kill you. If someone pistol whips you in downtown Chicago or New York City and then points a gun at your head and you end up making a single surgical strike one inch above and in front of the top of their ear with the middle knuckle of your hand that drives their skull bone into the brain and kills them, does anybody have the right to say it was disproportional because you killed them but they hadn't killed you? That is literally how absurd and ignorant the above argument sounds to most people who have had to defend themselves against death threats.