Our discussions of events like the atom bomb need to occur at a higher level—namely the understanding that while fire bombings of Dresden & Tokyo, internment, postwar use of forced labor, & the atom bomb aren’t justified, the Japanese & German empires were murderous monstrosities

Both of them were aggressors in the juridical, legal, ethical, political, historiographic & social scientific definitions, and as political & military structures they were certainly not victims.

The US’ participation was obviously imperial & opportunistic, it had no blessed motives, and, while US chauvinism falsely places credit with the US, the idea that the US didn’t play a crucial role in the conduct of the war & defeating the Axis Powers is absurd.

What’s more saying it’s ‘bad’ the US won the war is a Basically ahistorical take and one that devalues the lives of both the German & Japanese militaries, who were ruthlessly efficient & brutal in the murder & domination of millions.

It is notable that, for example, while Trotsky was critical of the USSR, opposed to the US, and saw the US, Japan, UK, France & Germany in the same league he nonetheless advocated everyone giving their all to destroy the Axis Powers whatever the risks.

Spanish Veterans of the Spanish Civil War fought in both the French and Soviet Armies, and international Veterans of the Spanish Civil War fought in partisan movements, & enlisted in British, French & Canadian armies to fight the axis.

It’s also important to note that while certain left wing elements, like Dubois & other black radical groups in the US, or various factions in Egypt & The Middle East portrayed the Axis & anti colonial allies, this was not the standard position of the left by any means.

Because, at the time, people in North Africa, or in the colonies of France & British, knew that if the Axis won, it wouldn’t be the end of colonialism & imperialism, nor would it be peaceful, but that it would intensify the brutality of the colonial empires, which is saying a lot

There are a couple pseudo-exceptions—various groups in the Pacific that were already being oppressed either way, that the Japanese supported to ease their invasion & receive local support—but there were Indigenous Vietnamese people’s that supported the US in that war, for example

And the popularity of the Axis in parts of Egypt & the Middle East largely has to do with the role of European educated, usually Christian, intellectuals, & the dominance of a reactionary rentier class that hated the Soviets.

The only other pseudo exceptions are fascist regimes in Latin America, Eastern Europe, & SE Asia that portrayed themselves as emancipatory anti imperialists, & anti communist nationalists among the bourgeois & rentier led NatLib movements, that’s it.

These are the only examples of leftists or superficial leftists, being pro Axis and or opposed to giving it all to defeat it, regardless of the fact that they may have opposed the US, UK & France, and/or the USSR

The only groups, outside of the above, that were anti war or pro Axis were:
1. Fascists
2. Axis supported groups
3. Isolationists & America Firsters
4. Industrialists who stood to lose
5. Anti communists
6. Antisemites & racists &
Outside of the above reactionaries

7. Strigent anti war pacifists—either of a religious Christian, liberal (like Bertrand Russell), or other persuasion (Gandhi)

It is notable many pacifists changed their stance in response to the Axis (for ex. Einstein) & many after made exceptions.

There *were* leftists who saw all the sides as bad, but nonetheless wanted to bring them to defeat, and there were leftists who saw the Axis as an expression of the imperial powers own ideology, & as an inter imperial war, but they didn’t counsel accommodation

In other words, the overwhelmingly dominant left wing, anarchist, ML, Trotskyite, socialist, SocDem, anti Imperial, anti colonial, anti racist, & related positions was that regardless of the Allies’ own imperialism & racism, the Axis had to be crushed at all costs.

The dominant liberal, progressive, reformist, and related opinion was also that the Axis had to be crushed. And the dominant ‘public’, military & state position in the USSR, China, Western Europe, Anglosphere & US was that the Axis had to be crushed at all costs.

The only place it wasn’t the dominant position were:
1. Fellow travelers & sympathizers
2. Isolationists
3. Anti-communists
4. Conservatives
5. Nationalists
6. Axis subjects
7. Reactionary NatLib
8. Strict Pacifists

Note that the anti Axis sentiment eventually became dominant among conservatives & conservatism as well. This was out of ‘patriotism’ and the status of the war, but the position changed nonetheless.

That nationalists in the Anglosphere split into the factions for & against, but ‘anti’ Axis was larger once the war started. And nationalists in the USSR, Poland, France, China, SE Asia, & most of North Africa were anti Axis from the beginning.

Strict pacifists, as I said, often turned coat because of this, but even the ones that were against the war, were nonetheless still anti-Axis and supported non violent resistance to them. It was a consistent, yet totally naive position & its application.

Before, Up to and through WWII, all the Axis Powers ran massive propaganda, public relations, indoctrination, media, corporate, entertainment, academic, & other campaigns to maintain their image, and a lot of it worked.

AFTER the war, the governments of Germany, Japan, and Italy all launched massive rehabilitation & public relations campaigns, ironically, *with* the help of the US, & to a lesser degree other Anglo Powers, & worked w anti-communist propagandists & revisionists.

Denazification in West Germany was ended, the Nazis re-employed & many helped escape by the US, UK, Catholic Church & Latin American states, Nazi officers spread the idea of the ‘Clean Wehrmacht’, & Speer washed his hands publicly.

The governments of the US, Germany & Japan worked hard to portray the citizens as equally victims of their governments, the USSR as aggressors, & the genocides as the work of a few madmen, & of little significance.

The USSR downplayed the particularist significance of the Axis, but not its relevance. The German rehabilitation effort was less successful because of the scale of the atrocities involved, its direct witnesses, & the destruction wrought in all allied countries but the US.

Nonetheless, one regularly sees people downplaying the Holocaust and particularities of the Nazis, and the clean Wehrmacht, German citizens as ‘dupes’, victims & forced conscripts, the ‘few good’ German & Nazi, the ‘clean Speer’ myth still exist including on the left.

The popularity of the film ‘Jojo Rabbit’ speaks to this in the broader culture. And if one watches pop culture, say, the Twilight Zone or the second Batrlestar Galactica, Which is critical of the Nazis, nonetheless portrays it as the Germans being victims of it.

In reality, 10% of the country were in the party, most youth in various youth groups, the vast majority, some 80% of German troops & the SA were volunteers not conscripts, and a quarter or more of the country was employed by the German state.

What’s more, a further 10% of the country, not members of parties, actively supported the Nazis & the Holocaust, and 1% directly carried it out on a proximate level. 18% were in the army. Between 1/6th & 1/4th of youth in the Hitler youth.

Among civilians,after the war,50% said the extermination was unseemly but good & necessary, and almost 80% had a positive view of Hitler. Now consider the millions of communists, Romani, Jews, criminals, pacifists, Jehovah’s witnesses, & socialists who had been killed or expelled

In other words, a strict majority supported the Nazis, the genocide, and the war, in whatever sense. This is true among adults & children, and once all the people they murdered/expelled, or that simply lied after the war are included, the percentage rises.

In reality, among the groups not actively targeted by the Nazis—and even among some of them—some 70-90% supported the genocide and more the 90% supported Hitler, the war and the Nazis.

What success the German rehabilitation effort had, had to do with the clean Wehrmacht, the ‘duped Germans’ narrative, the high number of German Americans, anti-communism, & so on. While its lack of total success had to do with witnessing, East German communism, & the like.

Japan launched a similar campaign with the US help. And, due to his necessary role, the Emperor went from being portrayed as murderous madman to savior, and the rehabbing effort of MacArthur & his constitution, made Japan look comparatively good.

Both Germany & Japan were fundamental in the post war American order, and the US needed consent to fund, trade & militarily support them.

Between the fact that Americans really are prejudiced, the Japanese Internment effort, the fire bombings of the mainland, and the atom bomb—all genuinely destructive & unjust—the Japanese rehab effort was far more successful, especially among the left.

There is the idea that since the Japanese were less fundamentally racist & genocidal, the war against them was less just than the Nazis, and an accompanying idea that non white non western powers can’t be racist & imperialist.

In order to believe this, one has to deny that the Japanese very much did adopted racist ideology to justify their ideology, they were explicitly imperial & colonial from the beginning, and one has to basically deny the humanity of people in China, Korea, SE Asia & the Pacific

The Japanese Military were intensely brutal & murderous and every month the war dragged on, Japan killed 1.5-3x as many Chinese civilians (& injured roughly the same as well) as Japanese civilians who died in Hiroshima & Nagasaki.

While all men in Japan had to register at the age of 20 for service, & women had civil service obligations, the line between volunteers & conscripts was often fuzzy and a substantial majority were volunteers and/or enthusiastic conscripts. People as young as 15 eagerly registered

And the Japanese military’s reputation for fantacism wasn’t unwarranted. Most of Japans population actively supported the war, civilian or not, and even social democrats collaborated. Commies & anarchists were repressed.

After the bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the Japanese Military & political establishment was split between those who wished to continue the war & those who wished to surrender—many wanted to avoid unconditional surrender either way—the Emperor split the tie.

The Japanese Military were afraid of Soviet invasion, & knew they would have to eventually surrender if the Soviets declared war. However they hoped the US & USSR would get mired down in land invasions on the mainland & in China, securing a more optimal bargaining position

Thus, that the atom bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki were atrocious war crimes and not necessary, doesn’t lessen the fact that the Japanese empire was brutal & murderous, broadly supported en masse & had expansive territorial colonial visions.

Japan’s vision for China and much of the Pacific, resembles the Nazi vision of Lebensraum in Poland & The USSR. They didn’t want to actively murder them en masse in an industrialized fashion—but had no qualms with doing so—bc they wanted to use them as slaves.

By the end of the war, 25% of the German labor force & a substantial portion of its industrial output was the toil of 15 million slaves. The Japanese empire used some 10-12 million slaves throughout the war.

The Nazis had built slave camp capacity for 80% of Poland’s population, which, when you count all the murdered & dead, the foreigners and Germans in it, is actually more like 100% of its citizens.

Again, the Nazis intended to use some 80-100% of Poland’s 27 million people as slaves, and 100s of millions in the USSR to die or be used as slaves. Japan intended to turn Korea & Coastal China into a massive slave state & settler colony.

The Nazis and the Japanese empire were both settler colonialists, imperialists, slavers & genocidaires. They were both racist, brutal, authoritarian, expansionist, and fanatic. And both were broadly supported by a majority of their populations.

There is a reason that the 80-120 million direct casualties of WWII, (foregone mortality & indirect deaths are several factors larger) as well as the millions intended to be murdered & enslaved, made it the fastest anthropogenic mass murder process in history.

Indeed, both the Nazis and the Japanese were scaling up, not down, their processes as the war waned on—Nazis saw it as their duty to exterminate the Jews even if they lost the war, and to do so *everywhere* including the Middle East, & eventually the US for which they had plans.

And so, the second half of the war, but also several sub periods of 43, 44 & 45, saw, for example, 3 million Jews & several million Poles, Russians, Roma, dissidents, exterminated in just 6-11 months.

The Japanese Empire’s ‘Three Alls’—Kill All, Loot All, Burn All campaign—implemented in May 1942 result in 2.7 Million Chinese civilians murdered in a matter of months.

At the rate that the war was accelerating, had the war gone on in either theater for 1-2 years, probably half to 2/3rds of all Jews in the world would have been murdered, another 3-5 & close to 100% would have been.

Probably some 20-40 million more Soviets & Chinese citizens each would have been murdered—more if Hitler had been successful—as well as some 6-9 millions poles. & as I said before, some further 20-60 million People in Eastern Europe/Eurasia & 10-30 million in East Asia enslaved

This is assuming, ofc, that they lost—had they won, the Germans would have enslaved some 200 million people in Eurasia, as well as 10s of millions in Western Europe, and eventually planned to exterminate & enslave most of Africa & kill 10s of millions in Middle East

Had the Japanese won, they would have murdered & enslaved 100s of millions throughout the entire Japanese Coprosperity sphere.

They both intended to take over all the French, British, and other colonies they could, and to intensify the brutality, murder, enslavement & settler colonialism there, not keep it the same or lower it.

The Nazis and Japanese Empire were basically intent on a concept of world domination only seen in kitschy b movies, and they were willing to, for example, cede to semi autonomous UK, and carved up alliance with the US, *in theory* if it would work.

I want you to imagine a world where the US is given full, not just presumed, dominion over the Americas, UK & it’s Anglo sphere given free reign but under suzerainty to the Axis, the Nazis controlling Europe, Eurasia, Middle East & Africa, & Japan controlling the rest of Pacific

*That* is the world that would have occurred, not the fantasies of Phillip K Dick, however compelling they may be. And it’s a world where probably 2/3rds would be murdered or de facto enslaved & another 1/6th as second class citizens.

So, even if, as many of you seem to want to do, you want to downplay the Holocaust, just note that the Axis had plans to murder, enslave, conquer & exploit just about everybody on this planet & planned to intensify settler colonialism & genocide.

What’s more WWII is in the top 5 largest anthropogenic mass murder events in history, (depending how defines the concept it’s either in 1st, 2nd or 3rd place), & the *fastest* anthropogenic mass casualty event by rate & process.

It also intended to intensify this, &, by its own stated intention, it wished to dwarf all previous plans to subjugate, dominant, settler colonize, murder, & exterminate the world—after all, the Germans & Japanese were convinced they were superior at everything, including murder

Anyone who convinces rhemselves That There could be have a benign end to the above is either a liar, a dupe or delusional. It was a world war, after all, and a war for the literal world.

The mature position to understand is that the foregoing analysis can be acknowledged and one can still condemn a variety of atrocities & war crimes—such as the horrific bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki—as these are independent of each other, not mutually exclusive.