‘US government documents admit that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington’s Cold War on the Soviet Union. Ben Norton reviews the historical record.’
The level of propaganda to not only justify turning innocent civilians into dust and basically fuck the land for the next life, but to also convince your population that it was necessary is something else
Honestly it doesn’t take any convincing to make Americans support atrocities. The US can just do them and Americans will invent justifications all on their own.
I think it’s because of patriotism “oh the US did this atrocity? Well I am usonian and I did nothing wrong, therefore the atrocity was ok”.
Yeah people here take things very personally even though no one supports the government much? I don’t get it
Every aspect of culture and education in the US is dedicated to drilling into the minds of people that the US are the most good, the most just, the most honest, that their systems of governance are based on these values, and the majority of people work hard towards maintaining that.
So when a USonian is faced with this narrative being broken, they fall back into cognitive dissonance. It’s only recently we’ve seen a reversal of this to a significant scale, but ask anyone and they’ll likely tell you that they still believe these things were true a couple decades ago and it’s only now that the US has become bad.
Whatever the US has accused communists of doing to their people, the US has already perfected it.
Moral superiority over even their alleged hwite brethern in Europe, is a FUNDAMENTAL part of the American Empire. Almost all things are seen by a Americans, through a lense of self-superiority. Every falling that an American espouses suddenly becomes a moral virtue that should be celebrated.
There’s a heavy dose of shame and denialism too. To be told your whole life that you are the good guys and that your country gets into every war for noble reasons, you have to really reconcile atrocities in a way that doesn’t conflict with that myth. To do so otherwise is admit your entire upbringing is a lie, your leaders are malicious psychopaths, and that you’ve been complicit in voting for them your whole life. That can really really break people. It’s a greatly traumatic thing and is on par with losing your religion or estranging yourself from family.
I’d say for the majority of American liberals, they understandably have a difficult time facing the truth. Because the truth is fucking dark.
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One thing missing from a lot of the dialogue is choice of targets because they wanted to perform bomb blast studies on virgin targets
Roll that over in your mind for a minute
They went as far as intentionally not bombing certain cities, to encourage refugees, industries and military offices to relocate there, so when they did bomb them later they’d inflict greater casualties and damage. They didn’t do this explicitly to drop nukes, but the list of targets largely contained these cities.
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What? What is that supposed to mean?
“Virgin”, as in never being hit upon before, if you know what I fully mean…
What… NO. No they pecking didn’t.
but le internet historian guy said muh both sides.
if you want an even deeper dive Shaun made an amazingly bluntly horrifying video about the same topic that is 2 hours long and very very detailed!
SeanShaun. (💀boy)Planet Shaun
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Shaun did a really good video about this 2 years ago.
Geopolitical Economy Report is so good…
video summary: https://www.summarize.tech/youtu.be/5vMEgneKF10
there is a famous youtube video on this that go through all the military personnel memoirs and other documents about the lead up to the bombing. https://youtu.be/RCRTgtpC-Go
also watch oliver stone docuseries on american history (first 2 episodes)
My favorite contradiction about this is how westerners engage in the most ridiculous purity politics about violence but when it comes to dropping bombs that can literally end humanity and destroy the planet on hundreds of thousands of civilians, apparently that is justifiable.
The Bomb didn’t kill the Empire, Stalin did
not to continue shilling the based children’s book ive talked about either on this account or one of my other accounts that i lost the login for before, but Addicted to War talks about this (in addition to laying it out clearly that a literal first grader could understand it that the U.S. military is just three oil/fruit/whatever commodity companies in a trench coat)
Most of the propaganda which says Japan wouldn’t have surrendered is entirely based on orientalism.
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But the US motivation for dropping the bombs was to intimidate the Soviets, not to just attack the Japanese. They had already firebombed most Japanese cities to the ground at that point. Their goal for Japan with the bombs was to pressure Japan into surrendering to them so they could use them as a bulwark against the Soviets.
People tend to split history of the era into like, “WW2 ends. (Free Space.) Cold War begins.” But it isn’t nearly so clear cut. The cold war started long before world war 2 was ever over, and the US’s actions at the end of the war were just as much focused on their next conflict as they were on the current one.
Their goal for Japan with the bombs was to pressure Japan into surrendering to them so they could use them as a bulwark against the Soviets.
if that was their goal, they could have accepted the surrender they were offered. imperial command had only one condition – the survival of the emperor – which they were granted anyway after the bombs were dropped. the US opted not to accept that surrender so they could use Japan as target practice.
At that time the US wasn’t accepting anything less than unconditional surrender. The US changed their minds on that when the Soviets invaded.
It’s messy for sure, probably one of the most eventful weeks in human history, so I’m sure there was a lot of back and forth. The pressure to surrender to the US came after they rejected Japan’s first surrender offer and after the Soviet liberation of Manchuria.
my point is that the desire to drop the bomb led them to prolong the war.
Oh right, I don’t disagree with you there. Turns out tiny paragraphs aren’t very good at establishing the nuance of a complicated historical event. (and I probably wasn’t very good at getting my point across)
yep, the fact that even brief summaries have to cover things day by day during that period are a testament to that. I have no clue how skullboi covered it in just 2 hours.
Yeah, going through this thread has reminded me to watch that video again. And his Harry Potter one. Not related to this topic, I just really like his casual destruction of TERF bullshit.
Yeah we can’t be totally sure until afterwards, but the same is true for letting the peace process actually be attempted as planned. Hindsight works both ways, and given the US admitted it was doing it just to intimidate the Soviets, and the alternative was sitting around for a bit longer and negotiating till that ran dry it is clearwhat the wrong choice was
letting the peace process actually be attempted as planned
Japan was already attempting to surrender for months before the bombs were dropped.
Yeah we can’t be totally sure until afterwards, but the same is true for letting the peace process actually be attempted as planned.
In war, the neutral position is to assume that the enemy won’t surrender. Why are you arbitrarily putting the “correct” time to negotiate just before the atom bomb? Why not a year before? What made this time so special except for the ad hoc context.
given the US admitted it was doing it just to intimidate the Soviets, and the alternative was sitting around for a bit longer and negotiating till that ran dry it is clearwhat the wrong choice was
Shithole US sucks and obviously did it for the wrong reasons. But A single firebomb raid killed as many as the atom bomb. While you’re negotiating, the US is still gonna be firebombing shit. A few extra months of war, or even blockade, would have outweighed the casualties of the bomb. Now the US wasn’t doing this for humanitarian reasons of course, but the first bomb was the least bad option done for the wrong reasons.
Second bomb was absolutely just a dick-measuring contest with the Soviets.
The least bad option is stopping the bombings. Japan was at a point when kamikaze attacks didn’t do shit to the navy sitting on their shores. Time had been bought, oil was nonexistent. The horrors of the firebombing of Tokyo dont make the nukes justified. You can cease bombings during negotiations.
And the time before the bomb dropped was the correct time, the Soviets had entered the war against Japan, Japan’s chance at negotiating through a third party was now gone and the walls where closing in. This was the plan. The Soviets stayed out until that point with the intention of the Allies being literally to use that as leverage. The door was left open on purpose
The US drops the first bomb August 6th, August 7th the USSR declares war on Japan (technically telling Japan on the 8th and with the caveat that the USSR would consider itself at war from the 9th on). So yeah I’m gonna go with prior to the Soviets entering the war as per the United States own wishes, as the ideal time for negotiations. The US had broken Japan’s codes and was reading messages like this from Ambassador Sato
“There is no alternative but immediate unconditional surrender if we are to prevent Russia’s participation in the war.”
Japan was at a point when kamikaze attacks didn’t do shit to the navy sitting on their shores. Time had been bought, oil was nonexistent.
Again, this is absolutely true but only really knowable ad hoc. If you have a source stating the conditions of Japan were known at this point, it would change my perspective.
The horrors of the firebombing of Tokyo dont make the nukes justified.
Correct, but for the US it’s likely to be one or the another. Even in a theoretical blockade, the amount of people who starve would probably outweigh the bomb. There are no good options in war, use of the first atom bomb was probably the one with the least casualties.
You can cease bombings during negotiations.
You can but you’re allowing the enemy to re-group. We shouldn’t trust the genocidal Japanese government to act in good faith just like we shouldn’t trust the Nazis. Every day still at war meant Japan was still slaughtering people in camps.
“There is no alternative but immediate unconditional surrender if we are to prevent Russia’s participation in the war.”
Which does not say “We must surrender immediately.” It says, “If we don’t, we’ll have to fight Russia as well.” One ambassador saying that surrender is a good option is not the Government of Japan saying so.
They had no means to do anything. They had been restricted to the home islands. Also you keep saying “ad hoc” but I think you misunderstand that the navy keeps track of whether or not enemy planes sink their freaking ships. You can kinda keep track of that “hey did that plane blow you the fuck up or did it get shot down” and then get the answer. Pilots keep track of their fucking kills, that is not ad hoc information. The navy tracked the damage done by kamikaze.
They had no fucking navy, Yamato was sent out for a suicide mission and it didn’t even get the chance, it got sunk almost instantly. The military couldn’t do much of anything.
Japan’s Holocaust was as bad as the Nazi’s. They were killing, raping, mutilating, and enslaving millions of Chinese, Burmese, Korean, Vietnamese, and other peoples on a daily basis. Every extra day the Japanese empire was in power was another day of hell for millions of innocent people. Japan’s rulers know the War was lost after Germany fell. They were happy to keep the killing going.
I guess that justifies the murder of civilians for you?
By that logic, 9/11 was justified
Please explain, in detail, why the lives of the Japanese civilians in Hiroshima were more important then the lives of the Korean/Burmese/Chinese people being killed every day?
Please explain, in detail, why the lives of American civilians in the twin towers were more important than the lives of middle eastern people being killed every day?
Do you see how horrific and crazy this sounds? Using your logic, you can justify killing civilans of most countries, hell using your logic France deserves to get nuked out of existence because of what they are currently doing to West Africa.
Thankfully we shouldn’t use this logic.
I don’t think you understand what the word “civilian” means
The Japanese Empire was killing a lot of civilians. Chinese civilians, Burmese civilians, Vietnamese civilians. Explain to me why their lives shouldn’t be considered important?
Explain to me how murdering a bunch of Japanese grandparents, children, babies, and non-combatant adults does anything to remedy that.
By that logic, it’s A-OK for Iraq to come murder everyone in NYC and for Afghanistan to kill the entire state of Wyoming.
To repeat something that I wrote a dozen days ago, it is good to see somebody acknowledging some of the Empire of Japan’s violence against civilians, but two wrongs don’t make a right. Most of the victims of the bombings were civilians who had no direct involvement in their government’s atrocities, and we’ve seen from the Axis’s reprisals how counterproductive it was to use the local civilians as whipping boys, so punishing them for ‘their’ military’s atrocities is not only grossly unfair but wasteful.
That said, I should get around to talking more about the Eastern Axis’s atrocities against other Asians. I already talked about the famines in Java and Vietnam, but that is far from enough.
The Japanese imperial military machine was responsible for those atrocities. Not the toddlers and grandmas the US bombed.
Your description of the conditions is correct but your conclusion is a non-sequitur. It does not follow logically that the only or best option to stop those atrocities was to mass murder civilians. Despite what the propaganda about the bombings that has since been inculcated into the western public claims, they were not in fact necessary for compelling Japan’s surrender. There were already internal disputes about this in the Japanese leadership for some time, but after their decisive defeat in Manchuria at the hands of the Red Army the decision to surrender as soon as possible became pretty much unanimous. Every day that went by was another day that the Soviets took more territory and came closer and closer - through the Kurils - to the Japanese home islands. The Japanese imperialists knew just as well as the Nazis that they stood a much better chance of avoiding punishment for their crimes (and some of them even being allowed to retain some power in the post war state) if they surrendered to the US rather than the USSR. Moreover we now know that the US leaders knew this. Their primary motivations were to have a live weapons test and to intimidate the Soviet Union.
Their primary motivations were to have a live weapons test and to intimidate the Soviet Union
and to deny the USSR their due in treaty by claiming that they didn’t help defeat Japan/ preventing them from doing another gosh darn destroying Nazi Germany and hogging more credit
you probably know this but for the sake of clarity, the atomic bombs were dropped on August 6th, and a few days later on the 9th. Soviets invaded on the 7th. their plans for Hokkaido were for the 24th, and cancelled by the surrender.
post war assessments make clear that soviets’ comprehensive destruction of the Kwantung army was perceived by parts of the japanese and us governments as sufficient on its own to force the surrender, but your comment sort of reads like the americans dropped the bombs after the soviet’s success to force the japanese to surrender to them instead, which is chronologically unsound.
You say there were ‘options,’ yet somehow managed to avoid actually naming them.
What would you tell the Koreans/Chinese/Burmese whose families died while the negotiations stretched out?
And what of the Japanese civilians? Are their lives automatically forfeit because they had the gall to be born in the bad guy country?
Do not justify atrocities with other atrocities. And do not ignore the bulk of another person’s argument to pretend they had no argument. You just look like an idiot when you do that.
What of the Japanese civilians?
You haven’t given me one word about why their lives were more valuable than the enslaved peoples.
Well this is some inverted reasoning. The bombs didn’t end the war quicker and the US military didn’t think that they would. It was pointless cruelty to civilians that saved no one, for the sake of intimidating the USSR.
And if we follow this logic, then every (white) inhabitant of the US deserves to have every single atom of their bodies blasted out into interstellar space at the speed of light for their country’s past and present crimes.
You’re being deliberately obtuse, take your concern trolling elsewhere.
Not much since there’d be quite few of them. Japan would be on the retreat at that point and would have very limited capacity to carry out further atrocities.
What would you tell people that lost their families in the Korean war to support the atomic bombs, since Japan surrendering to the US instead of the USSR all but guaranteed that war?
Japan already knew they had lost and were trying to surrender at that point.
“A limited capacity.” Or, they might have decided that if they were going to lose, they would take as many people as they could with them.
Read up on biological warfare Unit 731 and tell me that there was no chance they’d have killed as many people as they could.
Fascists are often cowards, I’m not saying they wouldn;t callously kill people during their retreat, rather that atrocities take planning and coordination, ergo time, time they wouldn’t have if they wanted to flee and they would have,
If your logic held up there’d be little stopping them from committing these light-speed atrocoties between the second bomb and the surrender.
Plus, if they really wanted to go out in a blaze-of-glory Goetterdaemmerung situation, why would the atomic bombs have made any difference whatsoever? The argument seems to be “the Japanese government wanted to kill Japanese civilians, and the only way we Americans could stop them was by… killing Japanese civilians.”
See also: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#Surrender_and_immunity
Destruction of evidence
As the Second World War started to come to an end, all prisoners within the compound were killed to conceal evidence, and there were no documented survivors.[102] With the coming of the Red Army in August 1945, the unit had to abandon their work in haste.
Curious.
American grant of immunity
Interesting.
Among the individuals in Japan after its 1945 surrender was Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, who arrived in Yokohama via the American ship Sturgess in September 1945. Sanders was a highly regarded microbiologist and a member of America’s military center for biological weapons. Sanders’ duty was to investigate Japanese biological warfare activity. At the time of his arrival in Japan, he had no knowledge of what Unit 731 was.[69] Until Sanders finally threatened the Japanese with bringing the Soviets into the picture, little information about biological warfare was being shared with the Americans. The Japanese wanted to avoid prosecution under the Soviet legal system, so, the morning after he made his threat, Sanders received a manuscript describing Japan’s involvement in biological warfare.[104] Sanders took this information to General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers and responsible for rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupations. MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese informants:[105] he secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731, including their leader, in exchange for providing America solely, with their research on biological warfare and data from human experimentation.[6] American occupation authorities monitored the activities of former unit members, including reading and censoring their mail.[106] The Americans believed that the research data was valuable and did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons.[107]
The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with “poisonous serums” on Chinese civilians. This took place in August 1946 and was instigated by David Sutton, assistant to the Chinese prosecutor. The Japanese defense counsel argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. The subject was not pursued further by Sutton, who was probably unaware of Unit 731’s activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental. Later in 1981, one of the last surviving members of the Tokyo Tribunal, Judge Röling, had expressed bitterness in not being made aware of the suppression of evidence of Unit 731 and wrote, “It is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind was kept secret from the court by the U.S. government.”[108]
Critics argue that racism led to the double standard in the American postwar responses to the experiments conducted on different nationalities.[109] Whereas the perpetrators of Unit 731 were exempt from prosecution, the U.S. held a tribunal in Yokohama in 1948 that indicted nine Japanese physician professors and medical students for conducting vivisection upon captured American pilots; two professors were sentenced to death and others to 15–20 years’ imprisonment.[109]
It just keeps going.
Separate Soviet trials
Although publicly silent on the issue at the Tokyo Trials, the Soviet Union pursued the case and prosecuted 12 top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731 and its affiliated biological-war prisons Unit 1644 in Nanjing and Unit 100 in Changchun in the Khabarovsk war crimes trials. Among those accused of war crimes, including germ warfare, was General Otozō Yamada, commander-in-chief of the million-man Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria.
Official silence during the American occupation of Japan
As above, during the United States occupation of Japan, the members of Unit 731 and the members of other experimental units were allowed to go free. On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington in order to inform it that “additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii, can probably be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as ‘war crimes’ evidence”.[6]
According to an investigation by the The Guardian, after the end of the war, under the pretense of vaccine development, former members of Unit 731 conducted human experiments on Japanese prisoners, babies and mental patients, with secret funding from the American Government.[114] One graduate of Unit 1644, Masami Kitaoka, continued to perform experiments on unwilling Japanese subjects from 1947 to 1956. He performed his experiments while he was working for Japan’s National Institute of Health Sciences. He infected prisoners with rickettsia and infected mentally-ill patients with typhus.[115] As the chief of the unit, Shiro Ishii was granted immunity from prosecution for war crimes by the American occupation authorities, because he had provided human experimentation research materials to them. From 1948 to 1958, less than five percent of the documents were transferred onto microfilm and stored in the US National Archives before they were shipped back to Japan.[116]
Ultimately, inadequate scientific and engineering foundations limited the effectiveness of the Japanese program.[122][123] Harris speculates that US scientists generally wanted to acquire it due to the concept of forbidden fruit, believing that lawful and ethical prohibitions could affect the outcomes of their research.[124]
So glad US nuked civilians so they could have sole occupation of Japan.
I didn’t name the option because it was implied. The option was: don’t use the nuclear bombs. Everything else stays the same. The Japanese would have still surrendered within the same timeframe. There would have been no stretched out negotiations for precisely the reason i laid out, namely that every day that they did not surrender their position wrt the Soviet Union became worse and worse. And there is no evidence to suggest that the bombing of civilians, either in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or in the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities, did anything whatsoever to bring about the unconditional surrender any faster.
Murdering civilians does not compel fascist regimes to surrender because - newsflash! - fascists don’t value human life. The bombings of civilians in Germany by the western allies also had no effect on the timing of the Nazi defeat, and neither did the same actions in Japan. And in fact this does not just apply to fascist states, killing civilians is simply not an effective strategy in war in general. The Nazis didn’t achieve anything with their bombing raids on London, they would have been better off had they kept focusing on military targets. Killing civilians in the erroneous belief that this will intimidate your enemy into surrender is called terrorism, and moral judgements aside it is simply a fact that that is a counterproductive strategy.
Nowadays the Kiev Nazi regime are also under the similar delusion that if they just hit enough civilian targets in Russia this will somehow destabilize Russia or scare Putin into backing off. It is not working, and entirely unsurprisingly is having the exact opposite effect.
Japan had been trying to surrender for months before the bombs were dropped. the US could have simply accepted the terms and executed the military leaders. instead they dropped the bombs, accepted the terms, and inducted the worst war criminals into the US military.
Even after accepting your premise there is a huge amount of middle ground between doing nothing and nuking civilian centres.
Like what, exactly?
Remember two things. First were the Asian peoples who were being slaughtered by the Empire. Why should they go on suffering one extra day? The other is that Truman had an obligation to protect American lives; that was his sworn duty. Why should he allow any US service men to die to protect the lives fo Japaense?
First were the Asian peoples who were being slaughtered by the Empire. Why should they go on suffering one extra day?
Nice grandstanding, too bad part of the victims the US nuked included Korean slave workers brought against their will from Korea, so that reasoning doesn’t fly. Or are Korean lives worth less than non-Koreans?
The other is that Truman had an obligation to protect American lives; that was his sworn duty. Why should he allow any US service men to die to protect the lives fo Japaense?
Zero American lives would’ve been lost if they just held a naval blockade while the Soviet Union launched the invasion from Manchuria to Hokkaido. Nobody said it’s the US who had to invade Japan. Whatever casualties the Red Army would suffer would be Stalin’s problem, not Truman’s. Like you said, why should he allow any US service men to die?
dropping the bombs did not end the conflict sooner. and it certainly didn’t bring justice for anyone. the US prevented that from happening by exonerating the people who actually conducted the atrocities.
as mentioned in the video, Japan was already willing to surrender because of the USSR
If they were so willing, why didn’t they just do it?
As soon as the soviet invasion of Manchuria started they met to discuss surrender.
Which was, incidentally, before the second bomb dropped.
they were already attempting to surrender before that. they just had one single term - that the emperor would be allowed to live. the Americans stalled them, holding out for an unconditional surrender (which they didn’t stick to after the bombs were dropped), and when they went to the Soviets after, they were ignored because Stalin wanted to remain on good terms with the US / wanted favorable terms at Malta.
perhaps “expected to be willing” would be a better description; see this comment
the US refused to accept the terms, which were that the emperor would be allowed to live. they subsequently accepted the same terms after the bombs were dropped. US diplomatic cables suggest that the real reason the bombs were dropped were 1. to test their effectiveness and 2. to send a message to the Soviets.
they also attempted to surrender to the Soviets, desperately, once they realized the US was stalling them. the Soviets ignored their attempts to surrender because they wanted to remain on good terms with the US and the talks at Malta, to broker the new world order post WWII, had yet to happen.
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Nothing you said was wrong, but the conclusion doesn’t follow to me. Does any of that justify the bombings? The US didn’t nuke two military bases, these were largely civilian city centers. Relevant military targets (within range of US bombers) had generally already all been levelled at that point.
Not to mention that it has been shown, time and time again, that the nuclear bombs were not integral to the Japanese surrender. Unless your argument is simply that murdering civilians is totally okay purely out of a sense of revenge.
You don’t have to compare atrocities of the scale of Nazi regimes or the Fascist Imperial Japanese regime.
Behold the MOAB! (mother of all bad takes)
Yep, I’d expect to see something like this pretty much anywhere on the US internet today, since August 9th is the one day of the year when Japan goes from Wholesome Anime Country to Evil Genocidal Asiatic Barbarian Land in the minds of most Americans. I would not have expected to see it on GenZedong.
this is a bad bad take
It doesn’t matter how atrocious a county’s leaders and their conscripted goons are. Innocent masses of civilians don’t deserved to be dehumanized and wantonly slaughtered.
And also, it wasn’t just Japanese people that died in these bomb attacks. Plenty of these migrant slaves that the Japan colonized died in them too.
By this logic, if thousands of Japanese civilians deserved to die in nuclear hellfire because of their fascist rulers, what horrific retribution do innocent Americans “deserve”?
do you understand the difference between a state and it’s military vs the civilians who merely live there? the people who committed those atrocities were inducted into the American military apparatus.
This video says a whole lot of nothing. It took 6 minutes to finally talk about people regretting, and that lasted another 5 minutes.
Pro tip: you need to unmute the audio. He starts going through the evidence after less than three minutes
I’m guessing this person was worried that the video would say something bad about America, so they stuffed their ears full of big macs and bald eagles as a precaution before watching.
this makes perfect sense, they must have fallen out at the six-minute mark
