Was Rey a slave? They never explicitly stated anything of the sort, did they? I got the impression she was pretty much free to do as she pleased, and the only reason she was there was to wait for her family or something. I just got the impression that she was very poor.
And one thing worth mentioning is that the Jedi pretty much committed genocide against the Sith in the early days of the force (though, again, the canon is very confusing, now).
Kylo Ren and his master also aren't technically Sith. They're part of some new order of baddies.
Also, the people who lost their lives in Hiroshima and Nagasaki really couldn't help living in a country that happened to be at war with America. I'll never look on that whole mess with approval. In fact, I'll always hold it against America, especially since so many Americans refuse to acknowledge just how wrong it was. Some are unbearably arrogant about it, even.
Based on how she was treated by the scrap dealers, I assume she lived in a sort of de-facto slavery. Yeah, her house was far away and she had a land speeder, but if she didn't do business with the scrap dealers she probably would have died of hunger or thirst before she made it to another settlement. I suppose it's more equivalent to extremely unfair employment practices than the actual urban slavery that was clearly seen in Episode I.
For the sake of convenience, let's ignore everything "canon"
before Episode I and focus on what we can see in/deduce from the movies.
Are you sure about that? They're not the Empire, but they definitely seem pretty Sith-y to me, especially with that Snopes guy and Kylo's reverence for Vader.
bombs away mfer (argument time)
Okay, look. I'm going to keep this simple. Every actual (*glares at salon.com*) scholarly article that has ever been written on the subject that you can find tells the same old story:
1. Japan refuses to surrender even in dire odds. No matter what the Emperor thought during this time (all evidence indicates he had zero desire for peace until maybe unfortunately close to the bombings), his military leaders would refuse the idea of a surrender if it were proposed (it wasn't).
2. The USA drops two atomic bombs after sending a vague warning to the Japanese government (which it promptly ignores). The bombs fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two industrial cities that probably would have been targeted by the equally destructive firebombing campaigns that already ravaged Tokyo and that had killed double the number of people that the atomic bombs would.
3. Directly because of this, the Emperor forces the military command to obey him and Japan surrenders. There's a reason the sentence "The enemy has, for the first time, used cruel bombs" leads Hirohito's speech to his own people on Japan's surrender, and it's not because he just found out what an incendiary bomb is. The bombs ended the war, plain and simple.
Combined, the atomic bombings killed approximately 120,000 people at the most. Estimates for a casualty count from Operation Downfall (the planned invasion of mainland Japan) 514,072 American casualties alone, and that's a conservative number: strategists under the Department of War at the time made an estimate that predicted 1.7 million American casualties, and 5-10 million Japanese fatalities. Even if the civilian participation in the defense of Japan (of which that 5-10 million number would be a large part of) was a fraction of what the War Department believed it would be, it would still be far, far more death and devestation for both sides had the atomic bombs never existed and had Operation Downfall been set into motion.
Was the bombing tragic and horrible? Absolutely, but no more so than the entire war. Ultimately, because of the bombs and solely because of the bombs, the war ended without the true devestation that an American invasion would have brought.
Plus, on a personal note, my grandpa on my mom's side was a front-lines mechanic in the Pacific theater. He would probably have been sent in after a landing on Japan, where all sorts of nasty shit could have killed him, from civilian combatants to land mines and booby traps. Instead, after the bombs, the war ended. He went home to the family farm he grew up in, got married, had a bunch of kids, and lived well into his nineties. It's not that much hyperbole to say that I might owe my existence to Little Boy and Fat Man, and I'm sure a lot of people, Japanese and American, could say the same.
why do you people keep drawing me into arguments i need to learn to ignore this shit
