Sen. Lindsey Graham Suggests Nuking Gaza, Calls Hiroshima ‘the Right Decision’
Sen. Lindsey Graham Suggests Nuking Gaza, Calls Hiroshima ‘the Right Decision’
Graham argued Israel would be justified in obliterating Gaza because America did it to Japan 80 years ago.
Say it a little louder for all the dipshits trying to argue that a trump presidency would be better for Gaza than Biden is.
If Trump wins I'm going to be too preoccupied with the climate disaster and end of American democracy (in that order) to give a single fuck about what happens in Gaza, Ukraine, or anywhere else.
Why aren't the "But Biden!" people in this thread? It's so very strange they seem to be absent (no, it really isn't).
I feel like the narrative surrounding the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings has changed enormously since I was a kid.
I remember learning that, while tragic, the number of lives lost in the bombing paled in comparison to the numbers of lives being lost and that would be lost in winning the war by conventional means. That it was a way to minimize further bloodshed.
I'm not super well read on the subject, but is that not true? Or, if it is true, does it not matter?
I'm mostly just trying to figure out what caused the shift.
Some disclaimers
I am a 50+ year old American
Up until 10ish years ago I had at least a better than average understanding/knowledge of WWII
My ex's grandmother's family was from Hiroshima and they had family members killed in the bombing.
All that said as tragic as they were I still think those bombs were the correct military decision at that time. I would be willing to have a rational conversation about it though.
The situation in Gaza is completely different and Lindsey Graham and the rest of the GOP are fucking ghouls.
Also, I have always thought that, as horrific and tragic as what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, the fact that the world was able to view the aftermath has been what has prevented a larger nuclear exchange. I don't know if the Cuban Missile Crisis would have gone the same way without everyone knowing exactly what an atomic bomb does.
To this day gaman or Japanese stoicism is a big part of Japanese culture. The Japanese had already lost the war, but the ruling class was willing to sacrifice scores of people to fight to the bitter end.
In an episode of Hardcore History, it detailed that the Allied ships couldn't dock in Okinawa because of all the corpses in the water. The Japanese had inundated Okinawa with propaganda that the Americans were going to rape them all. Many families killed themselves. And the invasion of the mainland was only going to get bloodier.
A terrible as it is to say, dropping the nukes was the more humane option of the two.
Back in HS, I think I was told that it was a regrettable ending and we probably went a bit overboard.
I highly recommend this video from Shaun on the matter. It’s long but you can listen to it instead of watching it and you won’t miss much. Excellent video on this subject that really put a lot of the propaganda around the bombing in a new light.
It depends whether you think killing 200,000+ civilians is a defensible act.
300,000+ if you include the bombing of Tokyo.
Nobody knows how a conventional war would have played out. To assert civilian deaths would have been higher is pure speculation and a gross attempt to justify the slaughter of noncombatants.
Though it is likely that even without nukes, the US would have still razed these cities with conventional munitions, given the events in Tokyo.
I highly recommend this video from Shaun on the matter. It’s long but you can listen to it instead of watching it and you won’t miss much. Excellent video on this subject that really put a lot of the propaganda around the bombing in a new light.
There is a book I liked about this, it is about Allied civilian bombing in WWII in general.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Among_the_Dead_Cities
It's by the philosopher A.C. Grayling, needless to say 'Responses were divided.'
The cognitive dissonance is fascinating. The Hammas attack on 10/7 is all but universally condemned in public discourse because civillians were targeted. Even die-hard militant anti-Zionists will not attempt to justify the Hammas attacks because they know it will only turn the public against them. When a brown force attacks civillians, it is terrorism and reviled.
Here on lemmy.world condemnation of Israel's indiscriminant bombing is also prevalent. Maybe 5%-10% of commenters support Israel's conduct. But of the at least eight people who have expressed an opinion on nuking Japan here in this thread, roughly 75% of them defend it as justifiable and no one has outright said it was wrong.
There are over 100,000 American WWII veterans alive today. They saved the world from the Nazis. We love that for us. Coming out of WWII, we dove right into the cold war. We were battling the USSR for the hearts and minds of the globe. McCarthyism silenced internal criticism. We had no patience for second-guessing our actions in WWII. It was our patriotic duty to convince the world that ours was the side of freedom, democracy, and justice.
So for 80 years now our culture has been saturated with propaganda promoting our glorious, righteous role in WWII. You, your parents, and your parents' parents have been told the same thing in school and have seen the same messages in TV, books, and movies. And I'm not saying it's all a lie. Sure, the defeat of Hitler was a high point in American history. But our understanding of our role lacks any nuance or self-criticism. For example, the Russian front was arguably more crucial to the fall of Germany than the Western front. Churchill is hailed as a hero, but he was an antisemetic racist. E.g.:
WINSTON CHURCHILL published a newspaper article. It was February 8, 1920. Churchill had a different enemy now. Now his enemy wasn’t Germany, it was the “sinister confederacy” of international Jewry.
“This movement among the Jews is not new,” Churchill said. It was a “world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.” He listed Marx, Trotsky, Béla Kun, Rosa Luxemburg, and Emma Goldman as some of the malefactors. The conspiracy had been, he said, the “mainspring of every subversive movement during the Nineteenth Century.” It had played a recognizable part in the French Revolution. All loyal Jews, he advised, must “vindicate the honour of the Jewish name” by rejecting international bolshevism.
And:
“I think you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury on them,” Churchill wrote Trenchard. Churchill was an expert on the effects of mustard gas—he knew that it could blind and kill, especially children and infants. Gas spreads a “lively terror,” he pointed out in an earlier memo; he didn’t understand the prevailing squeamishness about its use: “I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.” Most of those gassed wouldn’t have “serious permanent effects,” he said.
Churchill's War Cabinet ignored the repeated pleas of the British colonial government in India for food aid, allowing between one and four million people to die of hunger in 1943 and 1944.
Churchill was a horrible person.
And likewise, the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unconscionable acts of evil. It is never acceptable to target civillian populations. It wasn't acceptable on 9/11/2001 or 10/7/2023 when brown Arabs did it, and it wasn't acceptable when white Americans did it either.
This is obvious to anyone who wasn't raised inside the Western bubble.
There's also the possibility that because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear weapons have never since been used. What would cold war been like in that case?
My understanding is that even after Hiroshima, the Imperial Army attempted a coup to avoid surrender.
The Japanese were not stopping. The only alternative at hand was a full invasion, which would have killed many, many more.
I’m not super well read on the subject, but is that not true? Or, if it is true, does it not matter?
The issue is that unconditional support of past American actions is no longer acceptable, and so all America's past actions are being re-evaluated. This is good! However, this also often results in people simply taking the reverse position than the accepted one. This is bad.
The atomic bombings were less bloody than a blockade or an invasion would have been, and the people who claim the Soviet Union was going to successfully invade the home islands or that Japan was about to surrender under any terms that would have been considered reasonable, pinky-promise, are just misinformed or deluded.
My man, read the fucking room
Back in 2017 or so, I had a full on MAGA coworker who was ecstatic about the migrant detention centers at the border. If anything, he felt we weren't torturing them enough. One day, he dropped a line that was so heinous it still sticks with me to this day: "we used to do the same to the Japanese and no one cared about it then, so why is everyone up in arms about it now?"
All this to say I'm not at all surprised they're saying this now. They've always felt this way, and they know how despicable it is.
Fwiw, the dude was a 50-something year old Israeli immigrant. He also joked about wanting to join the military to "practice on live targets"
I hate this timeline so much
"we used to do the same to the Japanese and no one cared about it then, so why is everyone up in arms about it now?"
Btw, people cared about it back then, especially the Japanese-Americans being interned.
What'd you say back to him or do?
I knew better than to engage. The guy was a nutter. He got laid off shortly after that thankfully.
Bonus story about this fucker. When I adopted a dog, he told me that "in five years you won't give a shit about the dog and will only care about your boyfriend". Eight years later, my girlfriend and I co-parent the same dog like she's our daughter.
Not to defend the viewpoint, but I assume he was referring to interment camps and not nuclear bombing. That would be more analogous to the border detentions.
I gotta give these people credit. It must take a massive amount of effort to try and be this consistently on the wrong side of history. Like, at some point, it has to be deliberate...
They think they're on the right side of history. It's 100% deliberate. They never admit they are wrong about anything because the thought is completely foreign to them. Right wing boomers absolutely believe they are 100% in the right on every single issue. They can't even imagine they aren't.
So… he knows that… like… Israel would be in the blast radius and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv probably affected by a shit ton of radiation….
Its literally him
You assume that these guy know much about anything except corruption, graft, and drug fueled sex orgies.
At Farmers, they know a thing or two about drug fueled sex orgies.
Nevermind all the other obvious reasons this is terrible but I'm sure Egypt would have some objections to being blasted by a nearby nuke.
Israel is rumored to have tactical nukes that are much smaller yield than the large ICBMs we hear about all the time. Super destructive force in only 1 or 2 km blast radius, which would even fit inside a small area like Gaza. Of course, in addtition to devastating Gaza, there would still be fallout and issues over Israel, and using them in this manner is definitely Not OK. However, I can believe that there are some deluded people in government (both in Israel and in the US) who would view that as acceptable.
Ghouls like him love Israel, it’s just all those… you know, those people who live there
Maybe the cunt is waiting for suitable wind direction before nuking.
How fucking Christian of him. Jesus would be sooooo fucking proud.
I can't hardly take them or anyone that tosses the xtian mythology around. Why should we? History hasn't shown us a "god". Only shifty humans arguing over imaginary friends.
Can we stop letting them in positions of power already? They obviously aren't fit for leadership or power.
That's because he's a performative Christian, or "Christian." He doesn't believe in anything unless it help him get ahead in life - just like most politicians and other moderate-to-high functioning psychopaths and sociopaths.
I mean, he's not wrong, he's just an asshole. By most historians accounts, Fat Man and Little Boy caused less death than an actual war with Japan would have.
They were also retaliatory strikes after a direct attack on an American base, at the tail end of a global conflict, and we just got a new toy. The bomb was basically telling Japan to fuck off with their bullshit, and it did a pretty good job of it.
That doesn't make it the right answer, per se. Glassing the strip probably would net less death and destruction than continuing the genocide or especially allowing it to escalate more. I still have a hard time calling that "the good choice"
And what happens after the glass hardens? We all gonna be honky dory or is somebody else gonna star lobbing nukes?
Um, Actually, I would hardly call it settled or that most historians agree.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/debate-over-bomb-annotated-bibliography/
The senator continued to call the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki “the right decision” by the U.S. That decision ended the war with Japan, but killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians between the initial blasts and the deadly radiation that followed.
“Give Israel the bombs they need to end the war they can’t afford to lose, and work with them to minimize casualties,” Graham insisted.
He didn’t directly suggest nuking Gaza, but he made multiple parallels between ending the war in Japan by using nukes and then basically says we should give bombs to Israel to finish the job without specifying what he means.
So while someone might argue black and white letter of what he said isn’t “nuke Gaza”, he’s still implying something along those lines - the quick finish and a method that can do it.
He is, in fact, saying "nuke Gaza", just in a way that allows him to deny it.
Nuke Jerusalem; piss off everyone. It's the only truly even-handed action.
Hit Mecca, Medina, and Haifa as well to really piss off all the Abrahamic religions.
And Rome to piss off the pastafarians (and Catholics some more too)
This should disqualify him from ever holding office again. I know it won't, but it should.
Lindsey is part of the swamp. He's a Christian Zionist, a doomsday Christian. These types of Christians want to hasten the Day of Judgement. Pretty much they're psychopaths thanks to the Scofield Reference Bible.
I bet they would be off the rails no matter of the literature choices
I can't reinforce the idea enough that they believe god is eal and that they can trick a prophecy to being fulfilled by naming a british colony "Israel".
The biblical Israel is long gone and the current Israel is obviously a different state; you can "fulfill the prophecies" the same way by naming your dog "the kingdom of Israel"
Couldn't ask for a better positioning of titles.
There's really no reason to ever report on or pay attention to things Lindsay Graham says. He has no real values or stands of his own. He is a spineless jellyfish that goes with the tide wherever it allows him to keep the most power.
I have never seen any evidence of him ever voicing and sticking to an actual personal belief.
On the other hand, we should keep outing these Nazis whenever we can so that the decent part of society doesn't collectively forget who punched down and who punched up.
Also, social consequences are IMPORTANT for fighting fascism. Making them feel unwelcome at every table, every party, every workplace, EVERYWHERE is a time-tested and actually fairly effective way to fight the spread of fascist thought. It won't get rid of the most entrenched, the true believers - but it can help the knock-on effect of "hey maybe that guy has a real point".
How's the mental illness going Lindsey? oh ok.
Brain worms.
In case you're wondering, these religious freaks believe that they can force Jesus to return by instigating WW3. So long as Israel is involved, they consider that to be fulfilling prophecy; and the nuclear, the better. I'm sure some of them even consider Trump to be the actual Antichrist, while as usual, most of them think it's whoever the Democrats have in office.
its also stupid because old country of Israel is gone and making a new colony and calling Israel also isn't fulfilling a prophecy - its cosplaying. Might as well call your dog "Israel" and say it fulfills the prophecy
Well, if they continue this way, we all may get to know Jesus together pretty soon
It's not clear how low these people will truly go. The bottom fell out long ago and we are going to see these guys get a lot worse. There are no boundaries to guide them. They will continue to reach no lows time and time again. It's infinite.
I don't understand why Republicans are so strongly on Israel's side at this point. I think almost everyone was on Israel's side on Oct 7th but since then there have been over 35,000 Palestinian deaths, including women and children, and their infrastructure has been obliterated. Israeli losses since Oct 7th only come to 260 soldiers.
Why would anyone suggest nuking Gaza? Oct 7th was terrible but it wasn't perpetrated by the millions of people in Gaza. It was perpetrated by the terrorist group that rules Gaza and, at this point, it seems they aren't much of a threat.
The only reasons I could see for nuking Gaza are:
- To kill all Gaza s before the new crop of radicals being cultivated by Israel's brutality become ripe.
- To try to create a broader conflict with the Islamic world.
They literally believe every single man, woman, and child in Gaza is part of Hamas, and therefore a terrorist.
They have no capability for empathy and can’t imagine a world in which a citizen of a foreign nation can disagree with the ruling party, despite about half the country he is part of ruling disagreeing with him.
They are also financially motivated to unconditionally back Israel because of lobbying, or corruption, whatever you prefer to call it.
Part of it is due to fundamentalist evangelical Christians, who believe that Israel needs to firmly own the region in order to bring about the apocalypse. See: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/05/14/half-of-evangelicals-support-israel-because-they-believe-it-is-important-for-fulfilling-end-times-prophecy/
This is the same reason that Trump moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, and former Australian prime minister, a devout evangelical Christian, tried to.
I don’t understand why Republicans are so strongly on Israel’s side at this point. I think almost everyone was on Israel’s side on Oct 7th but since then there have been over 35,000 Palestinian deaths, including women and children, and their infrastructure has been obliterated. Israeli losses since Oct 7th only come to 260 soldiers.
Because it's turned from a real issue with it's real horrors and complexities into a partisan/cultural wedge issue.
Why would anyone suggest nuking Gaza? Oct 7th was terrible but it wasn’t perpetrated by the millions of people in Gaza. It was perpetrated by the terrorist group that rules Gaza and, at this point, it seems they aren’t much of a threat.
Might be important to note that it's still an ongoing thing, with civilians still captive or missing. So talking about it in the past tense might be missing an important reason for Israel's extreme behavior.
Racism. They don't view brown people, especially brown muslims as human beings.
Somebody got dumped.
this sort of homophobia isn't helping.
out of all the queer guys I'm friends with, exactly zero of them have detonated nukes in response to their boyfriends breaking up with them.
so all that's left is you bashing a piece of shit, not for being a piece of shit, but because he kinda seems gay.
kindly, respectfully, fuck off with this shit.
Better?
And this guy is considering sane compared to Trump.
But yes please don't for Biden so that we see what nuclear genocide looks like I guess?
Japan was completely blockaded, which is such a profound thing in war that it's really all you need to defeat "nuking was necessary" arguments.
And they were completely resource starved, another profoundly important detail of a war machine.
And the fanaticism + "they will die to the last man, woman, and child" is grossly misrepresented in the context of nukes.
But these details aren't relevant to how Palestinians and the situation in Gaza is portrayed. No siree.
Good thing he brought that up, so we all can debate again how awfully bad is to use a nuke, and to nuke civilian targets.
Gaza should not be nuked.
Gaza should not be nuked.
I'll even be so bold as to say nobody should be nuked.
Wow I can't believe mods let antisemitism like this go unchecked!!
the policy makers of the united states of America
Voted in by a generation of entitled, narcissistic boomers that were unfortunately exposed to leaded gasoline and paint at an early age, who know about as much about world history as their IQ counterparts: third graders.
Ignoring... just everything so very very wrong with this statement by Trump's favorite sock-puppet... how does this even make sense as a plan? I'm pretty sure this would be the first case of one-sided nuclear mutually-assured destruction.
It's like setting off a fertilizer bomb in your nextdoor neighbor's house because you hate them and want to burn their house down: you don't get to be surprised when your house catches on fire too.
Would this be before or after Israel is able to control the direction the wind blows?
Didn’t you get those powers at your bar mitzvah? It’s supposed to be right after we get the codes for the space lasers.
I didn’t get a bar mitzvah, personally, so I’m a shitty Jew who doesn’t have those powers.
I sort of got a bar mitzvah, but the asshole Israeli who was supposed to teach me Hebrew sucked at it and I never learned. So I read my passage with a crib sheet that told me how to pronounce everything. My cousin, who was the rabbi officiating, took me aside and said, "they may not know what you're doing out there today, but GOD KNOWS!" My dad and I had a good laugh about that for years.
I only did the whole thing for my grandparents' sake.
I've been saying we should nuke South Carolina for years.
Her congrats Lindsey, you figured out the path to peace that I thought was a good idea (briefly) when I was a stupid teenager.
Hint: the idea of stupid and you're stupid.
Why is the answer always more murder?
Hey yo linds, i don't think they wanna render the area uninhabitable, o ye lord of the dipshits
only your science denying base might think it was a good idea to go be settlers then
He’s really gone of the deep end. I mean, he’s always been a bit all over the place, esp wrt to Trump, but wow…
This really isn't all that different from his old friend and former presidential candidate John McCain (dodged a bullet there), singing 'Bomb Iran' to the tune of the Beach Boys' 'Barbara Ann.'
I'm pretty sure that McCain was referencing this 1980 spoof:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vince_Vance_%26_the_Valiants
Yeah, the Wiki page says so too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_Iran
"Bomb Iran" (or "Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran") is the name of several parodies of the Regents' 1961 song "Barbara Ann", originally written by Fred Fassert and popularized in a "party" cover version by the Beach Boys in 1965. The most popular of the parodies was recorded by Vince Vance & the Valiants in 1980. "Bomb Iran" gained a resurgence in notoriety in 2007 during John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.
Team Trump obviously has the goods on Lindsey. There is literally no other good explanation.
This really isn't off the deep end for him. He's said atrocious things for decades.
I think Graham is just a sleazy politician and knows it will give him more clout. Republicans who have taken a stand against Trump have mostly ended their careers; it's been a surprising amount of courage from some individuals I didn't think were capable.
Lindsey Graham doesn't have brain worms, he is the brain worm.
Hiroshima was a war so epic they call it a world war, and we had to relearn the reality of our destructive nature after that. I don't think the Middle East is at that scale yet
You go girl.
i mean to be fair, nuking japan was definitely one of the options. Japan during that time was smoking some good fucking shit
absolutely not
It's crazy to me that to this day Americans still pat themselves on the back about nuking entire cities filled with children, by using the completely fictional and hypothetical propaganda pushed by the government since they did it. "there would have been more death if we hadn't"
It's not really propaganda, the Japanese lost their navy and air force. They were basically prepping for Armageddon and they got it, just not how they planned... with fewer US service men dying.
It's sad but they FAFO.
This is a breakdown with the timeline of events showing that it probably wasn't necessary and didn't save more lives. You yourself just said they lost their military forces so how were they a threat? Japanese surrender was inevitable, nuclear force on civilian targets is never justifiable.
We killed cities full of children so our soldiers wouldn't have to fight their soldiers. Why didn't anyone think of that before? Kill the women and children. It's easier, they don't fight back, and if you kill enough of them, their soldiers will surrender just to stop the slaughter. Brilliant!
entire cities filled with children
Matt Gaetz is moving there immediately!
So he infact did not suggest nuking Gaza.
Why is media like this? Someone says something stupid and then they lie about it claiming they said something even more stupid. How am I supposed to take these articles seriously? What else do you lie about?
She? Lindsey is a dude.
Oh. Sorry about that. This is how much I pay attention to American politics.
So he infact is an old man, not a she.
Why are Israeli trolls like this? Someone points out something stupid genocidal Israeli supporters said and then when people get outraged, they pretend they didn't say it.
How am I supposed to take these Israeli trolls seriously?
Why is it ok for America to drop two nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end their existential threat war, why was it ok for us to do that? I thought it was ok. So Israel, do whatever you have to do to survive as a Jewish state.
The journalist didn't even mention nuclear bombs, Senator Graham brought it up themselves and then suggested it would be 'ok' to nuke Gaza if it ends the conflict. Yeah, the article is shit, it's The Daily Beast... watch the actual interview.
He did not say the specific words "We should nuke Gaza," but for anyone to read the article or watch the interview and not understand that is exactly what he is suggesting... That person would have to be an utter moron or be arguing in bad faith.
EDIT: Missed a space
Takes quite a bit of mental acrobatics if that's the conclusion one pulls out from that. That's motivated reasoning and partisan thinking. I seriously doubt even he is dumb enough to suggest for someone to use nuclear weapons literally on their back yard. That doesn't make any sense. What he said is stupid as it is. No need to start making shit up.
About every reply here is taking the headline at face value. Imagine that.