To be uncomfortable with the film Oppenheimer?

[LKM23]

I haven't seen the film, I'm sure it's a brilliant thriller and will be a Blockbuster hit. I don't think I'll watch it though, it makes my feel really uncomfortable.

It feels like a man who at the end of the day killed thousands of people and damaged millions is being celebrated and turned into a hero.

I lived in Japan for 10 years in my twenties. I visited both Hiroshima and Nagasaki and spent a lot of time with people both directly and indirectly affected by the dropping of the bombs. Those scars are real and still there and will be for a very very long time. It changed Japan and the people who live there forever and at the end of the day I think he was an awful person.

AIBU?

I've seen the play, Oppenheimer. I assume this film is based on the same book as the play. It certainly does not glorify him, although he was a brilliant mind. He was not responsible for the way politicians and the military used his work. If he hadn't developed atomic energy first, other scientists in Germany or Russia would have. He absolutely regretted the way his work was used to develop nuclear weapons, and the human suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Japanese would have fought to last or committed suicide, awful as it is, if the bombs weren't dropped more lives would have been lost.

"Ota Masahide, a survivor and Okinawa historian, wrote in an article for the Asia-Pacific Journal in 2014 that the military distributed hand-grenades to the civilian population as the means to commit suicide with loved ones. Those that survived the grenades “worried” about being alive and found other ways to kill themselves with other weapons such as scythes, razor blades, ropes, rocks, and sticks. Military propaganda had warned the civilian population that if they were captured, the Americans would torture, rape, and murder them."

https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/japanese-mass-suicides/

I think that's over simplifying matters. We are all a product of our time and our experience. A person who's lived through extreme hardship and fear due to oppression by another race or country is bound to have been affected. My own grandparents were occupied by the Nazis. They had a lifelong dislike of Germans. There are probably plenty of Ukrainians who dislike Russians. If you're lucky enough to have lived in peace you can't really judge.

So we should have just left it to the Japanese criminal leadership to carry on with their murderous war? I'm sure their wisdom about who should die, and how they should die often in the most disgusting experiments is beyond reproach.

I wonder how many Japanese mothers were thankful for the end of the war as their teenage sons were being forced to be kamikazes pilots. The horror of seeing your terrified badly trained son going off to deliberately kill themselves is hard to contemplate.

Thank you for this review, I have been in two minds about seeing it due to the subject matter as I tend to go for escapist stuff due to finding real life grim enough. You have made it sound really thought-provoking and balanced and I think I will go and see it now

Maybe you should look up Oppenheimer's work.
Maybe you should look up Christopher Nolan's work.
Maybe you should look up Cillian Murphy's work.

None of them are into mindless flag-waving hero worship.

I know what you mean. I felt weird about it too. I understand people saying it’s history etc but why dramatize it? We can read about it in history books. The atomic bomb etc makes me feel sick.

Have you accepted the utter horror that the Japanese nation/government/army/whatever visited upon Asia from 1931-45?

And the thing is... Japan is not like Germany, where they have picked over their past. I had a long conversation with a Japanese woman once who wanted to talk to me about the war (she must have known something about my family background - see a few pages back for details) and she explained that she'd been taught nothing about it all in school, and felt deceived and betrayed as a consequence.

It leaves a bad taste in the mouth to see people casually labelling victims of hideous Japanese war crimes as racist - would you say the same of holocaust victims or those who suffered so horrendously in the Mau Mau rebellion or the multitude of other genocidal crimes?

Yes. There are a lot of us who wouldn't be here if they'd not dropped the bombs in Japan because our fathers would have died in a land invasion. We can look back now in horror, but we can't impose 21st century peacetime norms on politicians in WW2.

Some of the attacks on Germany were pretty horrific with normal bombs, obviously Dresden, but see also Hamburg and even the Navy trying to blow up the island of Hel(i)goland after WW2 (which was the biggest ever non-nuclear explosion, although thankfully there was nobody there).

Not my sort of film but it's up to people if they want to make it and watch it.

Well you can say that about nearly every war film ever made.

I think you need to know if it glorifies him or is actually a look at his life and the implications of his work. You can't assume just because there's a film about someone it's a celebration. So Yabu to judge before you know much.

Saw who do you think you are this week and thought it had a similar problem - didn't properly acknowledge what a horrible thing it was. Was strange viewing

YABU. Japan has been very successful in pushing a martyr narrative. They were utter, utter bastards before an during the war. They would have carried on being so. Maybe read up on it a bit?

I hate the glorication of any war. Innocent people die. I don't know how the film portrays the story. Let's hope its truthful and includes the tens of thousands who was indiscriminately killed the moment the bomb hit and the torturous death of the other tens of thousands.

When my bil passed out I couldn't bring myself to look at the bombs but luckily bil seemed to understand. He joined up to stop deaths, as works in bomb disposal so I do see that the forces are nessary and there are hero's. But one person's marter is another's terrorist. Armed forced are nessary in our parasitic species. That's the human condition. We can't live in peace. It's beyound us. But unlike other species we have the ability for such large scale destruction.

Let's hope its truthful and includes the tens of thousands who was indiscriminately killed the moment the bomb hit and the torturous death of the other tens of thousands.
And let's hope it includes the romusha, the Asian slave labourers, dying of cholera on the Burma-Siam railway, and the civilian internees weighing 5 stone at the end of the war, and the starving civilians.
So we can understand why everyone wanted the war over as soon as possible.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

@Cyclebabble you still believe that about saving Allied lives? No. It has long been acknowledged that the US dropped the bomb for Stalin and the Soviet Union. To shite them up.

What on earth is wrong with disliking others?

It’s not hindsight when you know they’re surrendering.

Wrong. This is a myth perpetrated by history revisionists.

@Ridemeginger

Couple of points with reference to the play you referred to about Oppenheimer:

. If he hadn't developed atomic energy first, other scientists in Germany or Russia would have.

But Oppenheimer didn't develop atomic energy first...it was a developing area of research for several decades pre WW2, and if anybody can claim to have been the first to harness nuclear energy it was Enrico Fermi, who had the first nuclear reactor up and running in '42...

He absolutely regretted the way his work was used to develop nuclear weapons

Oppenheimer did express regrets belatedly, but objectively there is no way around the fact that he did very much work, literally hands on at times, in developing the very first nuclear weapons....

I hope the film doesn't leave the same impression.

The war was most definitely not over, the Japanese would probably have dragged it out for years longer without the dropping of the bombs, dreadful as the result was. Oddly eough I was watching Who Do You Think You Are and the young man had a photo of Hiroshima from his grandfather's stuff. The expert told him that the sailors from the British warship that went to Japan for the surrender were taken on a tour of Hiroshima very shortly after it happened in open top vehicles, no consideration of radiation .

Quite. But how else to virtue signal? 🤔

Facts and history aren’t glorification and seems to me that knowledge is a good thing.

Well said!!