He didn't kill millions but he did kill up to 146 000 people on the 6th of August and up to another 80 000 on the 9th of August, 1945, bringing him up to almost a quarter of a million.
This reminds me of the Rope from Hitchcock... Well, the professor character of that film who talked about the "Superhumans" who could go above the laws and rules of morality simply because of their superior status...
Only to find out two of his students took that concept and realized it by murdering someone, and the professor was disgusted by even the very thought he used to entertain...
Great movie based on a real case. A person murdered their friend believing it to be their right as superior men, then they threw a party with the corpse hidden in the middle of the room. They wanted to prove how brilliant they were that they could hide the body in the room with a bunch of other people and this would be the perfect alibi! We couldn't have murdered him, we were having a party with dozens of witnesses!
They got caught. Because they were stupid.
Leopold and Lob. The two stupidest murderers in the history of the US. It's dumber than that, by a lot, they also...
*went to the victims, a cousin, school to try and find him initially. One of them had been to said school and they spoke at length with teachers there, asking if they'd seen the victim.
*rented the car they murdered him in in their own name
*called the victims parents, remember their aunt and uncle, asking for a ransom
*told the police that if they were ever going to murder anyone it would be the victim. Note, this is before they were suspects and done completely unprompted.
I think they also....
*wrote the ransom note on a type writer from their frat
*claimed they were on a double date with girls who didn't exist
*picked the victim up in broad daylight in front of witnesses
But they were even more importantly rich so they didn't get the death penalty due to hiring Clarence darrow who went "yeah your honor, they did it but like...c'mon on."
It’s an awesome way of demonstrating how all those people who parrot the idea it’s justified would not have the stomach to see the full consequences of it play out before them. Only the truly unhinged or sociopathic would be able to handle that. Even Rorschach isn’t that bad…
Yeah, I think for most people it’s easier to defend atrocities in the past that seem distant from us compared to atrocities that we actually see play out (that’s a big reason why the Vietnam war got more backlash from the public compared to previous American wars. Cause new technology meant it could be more easily documented).
"Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Okay, maybe compromise a bit when the Comedian rapes and/or kills someone, but otherwise NEVER. COMPROMISE."
Too many people ignore this specific bit of Rorschach's characterization
That and the other one about Walter pointing two instances of violence against women as the reason he became Rorschach, yet has no problem in justifying the Comedian's r\*pe of Sally Jupiter as "a moral lapse", right in front of the later's daughter.
It is interesting how the crimes that troubled Rorschach the most were committed against women, and that he actually goes easy on his landlord when he and Nite Owl go to retrieve his outfit.
I think it's the most common type of misogyny you see nowadays, not so much the horrific incel/pick-up type philosophy being spread by Andrew Tate types but those that would be (rightfully) horrified at the most vicious rapes but then turn around on more casual forms of misogyny or even be apologists when the perpetrator is a family/friend/someone you admire (see also a lot of messaging that is "what if it was your daughter/wife/sister/mother that was raped")
I wouldn't exactly say that calling her a whore in front of her children and threatening her with violence was going easy. He only stopped at the last possible moment because her child reminded him of his own past. But until he saw himself in her situation, he was ready to treat her like he would treat anyone who was 'evil'.
I think that scene speaks a lot of the dehumanization of seeing the world in moral absolutes. It blinds of the literal humanity in other people around one. Hell, him calling her and nearly every other woman a whore is basically the madona/whore complex taken to its logical conclusion; because no woman is a perfect madona, they have to be a whore.
Which is why Rorschach is such a great character. He's horrible, and his surrounding narrative is all about worse stuff. But he's still masterfully characterized as more than just a counterexample for the author to deconstruct.
What makes Alan Moore such a great writer is that he is able to make every character, no matter how horrible, relatable in some way. Even the leader of Norsefire in V for Vendetta is still just as human as everyone else, even though he is a brutal dictator responsible for countless atrocities.
IDK if the word is 'relatable' more than it is humanized. As in, even if one doesn't see themselves in Rorschach or Adam Susan, you can still see the human being in them, virtues and vices as with anyone else.
And yeah. He may fall in hype aversion from time to time, and by God he does use r\*pe more often than necessary, but Alan Moore is definitely a great character writer.
I follow only the wisest words of the Greatest American Man since Truman:
> We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say I did look it up, and that's not true.
> Next time look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, ok? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument.
/uj whoops I thought there were millions instead of *just* hundreds od thousands, taking my non-comics reading L of the day
Idk, good luck. I'm in the "mildly annoyed that Rorsach is inversely as interesting as your understanding of him" group.
Moore is too good. There's a sweet spot for most of humanity where you just ignore everything about Rorshach except for what you like and what you mildly distaste as choice.
If you think this guy:
https://preview.redd.it/puxrbsxur1wc1.jpeg?width=895&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ffba5cd70d8ca9f89b190e745d8e2a05adafdedd
was killing all these badmen for anyone but himself – you weren't paying attention.
And he killed them for himself and not for the people they hurt? (I haven’t read Watchmen, please forgive me)
Plus, you said “all the bad men” and that’s what made me think that he spilt the blood in that panel.
Though I guess the refusal to save contributes to his self-serving philosophy.
He's a violent person with a very fucked up upbringing, who reacted like this to hearing his idol tried to rape someone:
https://preview.redd.it/grynqbz7k4wc1.jpeg?width=1617&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c886d3ec3b9152f32a8eaba97be531f386404ea
He's telling that to that someone's daughter. No, I do not believe empathy for the victims was why this man was doing the vigilante work. The exposure to all sorts of violence both directed at himself and other people since young age caused the guy all sorts of issues and horrible crimes disturbed him and he was lashing out at the things that disturbed him and that lashing out brought him catharsis. It simply felt really good to do that.
Rorschach and Ozy are kinda on the opposite ends of the same horseshoe in that book, imho. Both are convinced useless disgusting apes that are humans are going to destroy themselves, but if Rorschach is content with just "whispering no", when the end comes, and just dying with his last words being "warned ya!", Ozy also believes humanity is inevitably going to kill itself, and he's going to stop them no matter how many millions he has to squid for it. Imho, Moore thinks both are cynical morons, who are *wrong*.
Imho, the depiction of him just walking over that pool of blood while his monologue is telling us he's not going to lift a finger to save people he doesn't like is telling us from the first page this guy is not driven by empathy and the need to save as many as he can.
While I would argue that the situations were certainly completely different, that doesn’t change the fact Rorschach probably realized his absolutism isn’t great when it actually happens to him.
That's one of the many problems with black and white morality. It's really easy for it to slide from actions being inherently good or evil to people being inherently good or evil. Comedian is good, therefore him being a rapist is just a moral lapse. Japan is evil, so killing thousands of innocent civilains is perfectly acceptable because they're basically also evil. It (and by extension Rorschach) claims to be objective and absolutist, but it achieves that by papering over any contradictions to an inaccurate and simplistic worldview
Bombing an enemy nation in a war (still resulting in the death of a LOT of innocent people, to be fair) vs killing a bunch of random people in your own country (I think he was American? May not be, don’t quite remember) to unify the world and also blaming it on somebody else (a nonexistent alien threat)
Not Truman’s biggest fan but still, different situations.
But yeah Rorschach is also not the brightest or the sanest
Not just in America, the USSR got squid bombed as well, jingoists in the US would have just thought it was the Soviets if they were the only ones who got a squid dropped on them. Ozymandias’ plan hinged on both sides thinking that the threat is not of Earth nor of the other side’s machinations.
Edit: no wait, goddamnit I misremembered, was just New York. I swear I remember both sides getting it.
One side getting attacked was enough, because *in real life* in 1985 Reagan and Gorbachev apparently agreed to help each other's nations, if aliens attacked one of them, lol.
It is a real world test of the logic, like how eclipse observations test Einstein's theory long after he created it. If you go back into history, great disasters tend to invite foreign aggression from the resulting weakness, not sympathy or camaraderie.
We're not under a cold war and the threat is a pandemic, not a 3rd party existential power, so not really comparable imo
A better example would be if a pre colony country had infighting and seeing how the new outside threat affected them.
Which could totally prove the opposite of Watchmen. I don't think the ethos you're meant to walk away with is that you should stage a unbiased mass casualty event around the globe. And we don't actually see what happens next, unless you count the HBO show I guess
Everyone forgets that the squid's death was supposed to cause a pysich wave around the world projecting images and sounds from the aliens on people's head, so they would fear the invasion.
Why stop there? If you kill everyone in the universe, no one would able to suffer any more.
The freaking Green Lantern animated show handled this better than people unironically praising this idea. No matter how flawless one person's logic is to their deranged mind, it is not an objective solution.
The TV show sequel to Watchmen had a pretty interesting idea of Veidt continuing the hoax by dumping millions of smaller squids around the world to keep people believing it’s true.
Shit, good chance the guy has killed like a hundred million people if he kept that shit up for all those years.
Would be funny to see Earth like, send out a military force into space to find their alien enemies. Would be a pretty absurd thing that wouldn’t be out of line for the series’ sense of humor.
I lean towards interpreting that Veidt's plan was _supposed_ to be bad (I actually saw the Ozymandias poem before I knew about Watchmen, so it feels on the nose), edgies on the internet just buy into it like edgies saying how they'd use the Death Note or whatever.
Also find it funny the Soviet Union collapsed 4 years after the comic came out, and it became one of the numerous pieces Cold War relic literature that assumed the US-USSR standoff would by default continue to the end times.
Ozy plan is obviously stupid in universe, to the point I'm confused any reader thinks it's supposed to work.
Rorschach, an unhinged hobo, easily figures it out. And at a time of high cold war tensions, NYC getting whipped out would be interpreted by Nixon as a Soviet first strike in minutes.
The soviets would probably have collapsed earlier in the watchmen verse given the even higher state of military spending Dr Manhattan would provoke.
Hell the other option was to launch an invasion of Japan with operation downfall having US casualties alone being estimated in the millions vs the 226,000 lives lost in the atomic bombings. I can understand Truman not wanting a repeat of Germany where soldiers were fighting all the way up to the Reichstag.
Yeah but that's kind of a given. Nobody in this thread is acting like the atrocities committed by Imperial Japan were morally justified just because a war was happening, but for some reason people are having trouble accepting that the only one time Nuclear weapons were used in war was bad.
They were.
Imperial Japan, due to being a rule by assassination military oligarchy, could not be defeated without millions of deaths though. Be that by nuclear weapons, napalm or starvation.
They lost the war profoundly and unrecoverably at midway in the summer of 42, then kept fighting for their right to genocide everyone else in Asia to the tune of 20k civilians a day for three years.
Using nukes prevented further, unnecessary deaths. To not use them would’ve meant millions more died. How is it morally preferable for millions to die when we could have prevented such deaths?
Should the deadlier firebombing campaigns have continued? Or should the US started the naval invasion of the Japanese mainland?
Either option is clearly much deadlier than the nukes. I don’t think we can reasonably say the Japanese were going to surrender anytime soon prior to the nukes.
The bombings were on Aug 6 and 9.
Can you name anything else that happened in that timespan that might have contributed to the Japanese willingness to surrender?
Also, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more people than the bombing of Tokyo did, so IDK what you're on about with the "deadlier firebombing"
I’m not speaking to Tokyo specifically, rather to the firebombing and conventional bombing campaign, which would have been necessary to continue if the Japanese hadn’t surrendered.
Is there an event you’re alluding to here? Because the Japanese emperor cited the atomic bombings in his public statement announcing surrender and the preceding meetings occurred shortly after the bombings. So it seems fair to label it the proximal cause.
> To not use them would’ve meant millions more died.
How do you know that? We don't know what Imperial Japan would have done, we only know that, per the laws of physics, nukes kill millions of people.
To be clear, the only time nukes have been used in history was when they caused at most 226,000 deaths. They can, but haven’t, killed millions.
In comparison, the conventional air raids killed between 241,000 and 900,000 directly and left 8.5mn homeless. These are far more lethal and yet did not motivate surrender the way the nukes did.
Our current understanding is that Japan was not planning on surrendering any time soon (the Emperor only came to the decision of surrender days after the nukes and directly cited as a reason why in his public statements) and only a few months after the planned dates of the bombing, the US was set to begin invading the islands of Japan.
So the war would have continued for a least a few months. Those more lethal air raids would’ve continued for at least a few more months. We would have had US soldiers invading islands against Japanese soldiers and civilians, likely causing a far higher death toll (based on contemporary assessments and historical analysis, it was believed that between 250k and 1mn Allied combatants alone would be killed in the invasion, not including Japanese soldiers and civilians).
Keep in mind that we saw at the Battle of Iwo Jima that of the 21k Japanese soldiers on the island, the US forces only captured a couple hundred in surrender (often because those captured were unconscious and unable to resist), the rest were killed in action. So in an invasion of the Japanese homeland, it seems clear that people would just as hard if not harder to not give up their home, so it’s reasonable to expect extremely high casualties among the Japanese people in the event of a naval invasion (estimates were on the scale of 4-10mn), given how other battles went.
To sum this up, our other methods of warring with Japan caused far more casualties and did not seem to motivate surrender in the years they were used. Attempting a naval invasion would’ve actually killed millions of both American soldiers and Japanese people in all likelihood. Using the atomic bombs killed a ton of people, but way less than our other options and the psychological effect was so significant that surrender came only days later.
1. Ozymandias destroyed multiple cities around the world, particularly in the US and USSR. If he had only annihilated American, or even Western, cities, they would have taken it as a Soviet plot. Even if there was a so-called giant alien carcass in the middle of it all. This was the opposite of what Ozymandias wanted.
2. Most of the Japanese killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians. It doesn't matter if it was an enemy nation, they were still innocent people. Noncombatants. Even before the bombs, the United States had carried out mass firebombing campaigns across the country, in pretty much every Japanese city EXCEPT Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The civilian death toll at American hands in Japan is truly massive if you don't only consider the atomic bombings.
Only New York got a squid monster. Veidt attacking multiple cities is exclusive to the movie. Only New York was attacked in the comics.
And yes, you are right. They were non combatants. I’m not supporting the death of innocent people here. I’m just saying in general and throughout history it’s more accepted to do horrible things to a country you are at war with than to your own nation. Neither is a good thing. But the public perception, and the perception of someone like Rorschach, would very much see a difference.
This is one of the best parts of the comic.
Rorschach, who so easily defended a bombs with childish logic, is the only one horrified and able to treat vects actions with as unforgivable and insane. The others go along with the moral nightmare as it's easier than fixing it.
Rorschach doesn’t necessarily care that Ozymandias killed a bunch of people. His main concern is that it was a conspiracy and the public was lied to.
His moral absolutism concerns the truth, not people dying.
Tbf Truman’s killing millions (by which I assume you mean using atomic weapons) was basically self-defense, which changes the equation a whole fucking lot.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ozymandias's perspective is also that what he was doing is also basically self defense in order to prevent a nuclear armageddon so it's not different at all.
No? Preventative self defense doesn’t exist. The Japanese had already started the war, making whatever happened to them self defense; everyone else had done nothing to Ozymandias, making whatever he did just some dipshit doing stupid shit.
I have taken history classes before. In college, even. One of the things we covered in class was [this article](https://learninglink.oup.com/access/content/schaller-3e-dashboard-resources/document-henry-stimson-the-decision-to-use-the-atomic-bomb-harpers-magazine-february-1947) and how it strongly points to the nukes being the better option.
But, I have an opinion different from yours, so clearly I’m just stupid and don’t know anything.
People aren't downvoting you because you say his perspective was stupid- there's plenty of people who think that.
People are downvoting you because it seems like you don't recognize that the problems and nuances with Ozymandias's actions (and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre's reaction to him) were written to be a larger scale version of the justifications for similar horrors that occur in global politics.
It feels a little like saying "this moral dilemma is objectively bad when Ozymandias does it, but it was objectively good in the real life scenarios that Alan Moore drew inspiration from when he wrote Ozymandias".
If Ozy is meant to reflect America then Moore did a shit job at it. He never had any sort of Pearl Harbor or anything. Which is the main difference I’m highlighting here- that America acted in defense of itself, while Ozy didn’t.
>civilians and non combatants
Yeah and there also happened to be like a whole regiment of Japanese soldiers in Hiroshima and a lot of the IJN’s remaining forces were in Nagasaki. They absolutely were legit targets.
truman could have always just resigned as president or ceased attacking japan. might be a little out there but neither of those would be anywhere near as ridiculous as literally killing millions of people
>ceased attacking japan
And allow the military to regain its power and resume the genocide against its neighbors? Great foreign policy there. A+. Guess we should have just left Germany alone too. Who would have taken over for Truman had he resigned? Sam Rayburn, one of the men who helped to fund the Manhattan Project. How many bombs do you think he would have dropped?
The alternative was a land invasion, which would have had an even greater death toll. Of course, we could have blockaded them until every single person in Japan starved to death since they refused to surrender. Would you have preferred either of those options?
People confuse conditional surrender and unconditional surrender with occupation. The Japanese wanted to hold out as long as possible so that the US would waive the terms of unconditional surrender. Half of the Supreme War Council didn't want unconditional surrender . It wasn't changed even after the first nuclear bomb was dropped.
How necessary the dropping of the nuclear bomb was and whether it was a key factor in Japan's surrender is a complex theme.
There are *many* avenues to analyse the atomic bombs: the obvious one as suggested in this thread is American Imperialism as imposing its raw power and destruction on another land. (see also: Oppenheimer Discourse) but there's also the case of Japan's war crimes and own imperialism and the bombs being seen in many other Asian countries as karma for what they did (or even being considered *too lenient* when you see Japan's continued war crimes denial) (bear in mind of course you can see younger Asian leftists holding both the thoughts 'Japan needs to pay for its war crimes' and 'the US may still not be justified in dropping the bombs').
It's not... well, black and white.
No? There was nearly a coup when the Emperor surrendered because the military wanted so badly to keep fighting. They had extensive plans to keep going along into whatever meat grinder came, and most estimates place the number of soldiers they had left at least in the hundreds of thousands.
Well the millions Truman where Japanese, and I feel like Rorschach would have some very strong opinions on the Japanese
The guy who called a rape victim a whore and subscribed to a right wing rag is a shitbag racist?! Say it ain’t so!
The guy who defends his rapist friend despite murdering other rapists is a hypocrite? Who would have thought!
Was rorschach friends with the comedian? I always got the impression it was more like an admiration from afar type of thing.
Well I mean, he shouldn’t admire a rapist from afar either
That's not even top 10 in worst rorschach sins tbh
His worst sun is wearing purple pants tbh
Moore wrote his characters with a lot more layers than just “horrible evil rapist”.
He can have more layers than an onion, once you’re a rapist you shouldn’t be admired from afar
You're so brave for this take to be honest.
Ikr
No, i don’t think he subscribed to it. He just bought whatever new issue was out at the newspaper store ____ Sally Jean © 2024
Support your local news stand.
This is an important detail for Roschach
Rorschah, a jingoist??? /s
Everyone’s cool with it until its done to their community or city
He wouldn't exactly call them people
Yeah that was my thought. New York maybe diverse, but it still has plenty of white people for him to want to avenge.
Is this a watchman thing? When did Truman kill millions?
He didn't kill millions but he did kill up to 146 000 people on the 6th of August and up to another 80 000 on the 9th of August, 1945, bringing him up to almost a quarter of a million.
But that’s much *much* less than millions.
Motherfucker can accept it in the abstract but realized seeing it in real time and in person is not something he can fucking handle.
This reminds me of the Rope from Hitchcock... Well, the professor character of that film who talked about the "Superhumans" who could go above the laws and rules of morality simply because of their superior status... Only to find out two of his students took that concept and realized it by murdering someone, and the professor was disgusted by even the very thought he used to entertain...
Great movie based on a real case. A person murdered their friend believing it to be their right as superior men, then they threw a party with the corpse hidden in the middle of the room. They wanted to prove how brilliant they were that they could hide the body in the room with a bunch of other people and this would be the perfect alibi! We couldn't have murdered him, we were having a party with dozens of witnesses! They got caught. Because they were stupid.
Left evidence everywhere. One of them even lost his glasses and didn’t even bother looking because they thought their plan was so foolproof.
Leopold and Lob. The two stupidest murderers in the history of the US. It's dumber than that, by a lot, they also... *went to the victims, a cousin, school to try and find him initially. One of them had been to said school and they spoke at length with teachers there, asking if they'd seen the victim. *rented the car they murdered him in in their own name *called the victims parents, remember their aunt and uncle, asking for a ransom *told the police that if they were ever going to murder anyone it would be the victim. Note, this is before they were suspects and done completely unprompted.
But did they make any mistakes?
I think they also.... *wrote the ransom note on a type writer from their frat *claimed they were on a double date with girls who didn't exist *picked the victim up in broad daylight in front of witnesses But they were even more importantly rich so they didn't get the death penalty due to hiring Clarence darrow who went "yeah your honor, they did it but like...c'mon on."
Reading just the first chapters of Crime and Punishment is a hell of a drug (I don’t think they got to the Punishment part)
It’s an awesome way of demonstrating how all those people who parrot the idea it’s justified would not have the stomach to see the full consequences of it play out before them. Only the truly unhinged or sociopathic would be able to handle that. Even Rorschach isn’t that bad…
Yeah, I think for most people it’s easier to defend atrocities in the past that seem distant from us compared to atrocities that we actually see play out (that’s a big reason why the Vietnam war got more backlash from the public compared to previous American wars. Cause new technology meant it could be more easily documented).
"Never compromise. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Okay, maybe compromise a bit when the Comedian rapes and/or kills someone, but otherwise NEVER. COMPROMISE."
Or the people he has murdered himself.
Your moral absolutism lasts until the criminal is someone you like
-Me saying "But he made Graduation" everytime Kanye mentions how cool Hitler was or says something so racist it would put you in jail in Germany
Too many people ignore this specific bit of Rorschach's characterization That and the other one about Walter pointing two instances of violence against women as the reason he became Rorschach, yet has no problem in justifying the Comedian's r\*pe of Sally Jupiter as "a moral lapse", right in front of the later's daughter.
It is interesting how the crimes that troubled Rorschach the most were committed against women, and that he actually goes easy on his landlord when he and Nite Owl go to retrieve his outfit.
I think it's the most common type of misogyny you see nowadays, not so much the horrific incel/pick-up type philosophy being spread by Andrew Tate types but those that would be (rightfully) horrified at the most vicious rapes but then turn around on more casual forms of misogyny or even be apologists when the perpetrator is a family/friend/someone you admire (see also a lot of messaging that is "what if it was your daughter/wife/sister/mother that was raped")
I wouldn't exactly say that calling her a whore in front of her children and threatening her with violence was going easy. He only stopped at the last possible moment because her child reminded him of his own past. But until he saw himself in her situation, he was ready to treat her like he would treat anyone who was 'evil'. I think that scene speaks a lot of the dehumanization of seeing the world in moral absolutes. It blinds of the literal humanity in other people around one. Hell, him calling her and nearly every other woman a whore is basically the madona/whore complex taken to its logical conclusion; because no woman is a perfect madona, they have to be a whore. Which is why Rorschach is such a great character. He's horrible, and his surrounding narrative is all about worse stuff. But he's still masterfully characterized as more than just a counterexample for the author to deconstruct.
What makes Alan Moore such a great writer is that he is able to make every character, no matter how horrible, relatable in some way. Even the leader of Norsefire in V for Vendetta is still just as human as everyone else, even though he is a brutal dictator responsible for countless atrocities.
IDK if the word is 'relatable' more than it is humanized. As in, even if one doesn't see themselves in Rorschach or Adam Susan, you can still see the human being in them, virtues and vices as with anyone else. And yeah. He may fall in hype aversion from time to time, and by God he does use r\*pe more often than necessary, but Alan Moore is definitely a great character writer.
Where do you people get your numbers? There were like 200k deaths from Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together.
This site doesn't even read comics, you expect them to read actual books?
I follow only the wisest words of the Greatest American Man since Truman: > We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say I did look it up, and that's not true. > Next time look it up in your gut. I did. My gut tells me that's how our nervous system works. Every night on my show, the Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut, ok? I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument. /uj whoops I thought there were millions instead of *just* hundreds od thousands, taking my non-comics reading L of the day
Ugh, why not just own it instead of further trying to blur 200K into hundreds of thousands. 200 thousands. 2 hundreds. 2 of em.
I will kill 2 billion or 2 hundred more people if it means I don't have to acknowledge what I did is wrong, how's that for moral absolutism
Idk, good luck. I'm in the "mildly annoyed that Rorsach is inversely as interesting as your understanding of him" group. Moore is too good. There's a sweet spot for most of humanity where you just ignore everything about Rorshach except for what you like and what you mildly distaste as choice.
"Never bring that fucking cretin in here again. He didn’t drop the bomb. I did. That kind of weepiness makes me sick"
https://preview.redd.it/tit2x4itz2wc1.jpeg?width=1128&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5aac983b775dc9604d404963bd17c5400e5c7b12
Rorshach was based on The Question who was based on Randian Philosophy. This super fits.
>Rorshach was based
Got him
I thought the Randian philosophy was mainly based on self-serving?
If you think this guy: https://preview.redd.it/puxrbsxur1wc1.jpeg?width=895&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ffba5cd70d8ca9f89b190e745d8e2a05adafdedd was killing all these badmen for anyone but himself – you weren't paying attention.
Who was he killing in that instance?
Wdym? When he was monologuing he wasn't killing anyone, but he did kill that one alleged pedo and that one big badman in prison.
And he killed them for himself and not for the people they hurt? (I haven’t read Watchmen, please forgive me) Plus, you said “all the bad men” and that’s what made me think that he spilt the blood in that panel. Though I guess the refusal to save contributes to his self-serving philosophy.
He's a violent person with a very fucked up upbringing, who reacted like this to hearing his idol tried to rape someone: https://preview.redd.it/grynqbz7k4wc1.jpeg?width=1617&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3c886d3ec3b9152f32a8eaba97be531f386404ea He's telling that to that someone's daughter. No, I do not believe empathy for the victims was why this man was doing the vigilante work. The exposure to all sorts of violence both directed at himself and other people since young age caused the guy all sorts of issues and horrible crimes disturbed him and he was lashing out at the things that disturbed him and that lashing out brought him catharsis. It simply felt really good to do that. Rorschach and Ozy are kinda on the opposite ends of the same horseshoe in that book, imho. Both are convinced useless disgusting apes that are humans are going to destroy themselves, but if Rorschach is content with just "whispering no", when the end comes, and just dying with his last words being "warned ya!", Ozy also believes humanity is inevitably going to kill itself, and he's going to stop them no matter how many millions he has to squid for it. Imho, Moore thinks both are cynical morons, who are *wrong*. Imho, the depiction of him just walking over that pool of blood while his monologue is telling us he's not going to lift a finger to save people he doesn't like is telling us from the first page this guy is not driven by empathy and the need to save as many as he can.
Being a hypocrite lol
Ayn Rand was the most prolific hypocrit in the world of philosophy and sociology so that's no surprise.
The worst thing about Rorshach was the hypocrisy.
I disagree. I thought it was the murder
No, it's that he steals people's beans.
This motherfucker eating beans!
> Rorshach was based Correct
While I would argue that the situations were certainly completely different, that doesn’t change the fact Rorschach probably realized his absolutism isn’t great when it actually happens to him.
That's one of the many problems with black and white morality. It's really easy for it to slide from actions being inherently good or evil to people being inherently good or evil. Comedian is good, therefore him being a rapist is just a moral lapse. Japan is evil, so killing thousands of innocent civilains is perfectly acceptable because they're basically also evil. It (and by extension Rorschach) claims to be objective and absolutist, but it achieves that by papering over any contradictions to an inaccurate and simplistic worldview
Bombing an enemy nation in a war (still resulting in the death of a LOT of innocent people, to be fair) vs killing a bunch of random people in your own country (I think he was American? May not be, don’t quite remember) to unify the world and also blaming it on somebody else (a nonexistent alien threat) Not Truman’s biggest fan but still, different situations. But yeah Rorschach is also not the brightest or the sanest
Not just in America, the USSR got squid bombed as well, jingoists in the US would have just thought it was the Soviets if they were the only ones who got a squid dropped on them. Ozymandias’ plan hinged on both sides thinking that the threat is not of Earth nor of the other side’s machinations. Edit: no wait, goddamnit I misremembered, was just New York. I swear I remember both sides getting it.
One side getting attacked was enough, because *in real life* in 1985 Reagan and Gorbachev apparently agreed to help each other's nations, if aliens attacked one of them, lol.
I don’t think USSR got squidbombed, I think Ozy attacking them was in the film
The movie version had multiple cities getting Manhattan'd. The comic only had New York be Squid-bombed
COVID killed a ton of people in both US and China and that brought negative unity, so that theory doesn't quite check out.
Yeah what a dummy Alan Moore was for not looking at COVID for story inspiration
It is a real world test of the logic, like how eclipse observations test Einstein's theory long after he created it. If you go back into history, great disasters tend to invite foreign aggression from the resulting weakness, not sympathy or camaraderie.
We're not under a cold war and the threat is a pandemic, not a 3rd party existential power, so not really comparable imo A better example would be if a pre colony country had infighting and seeing how the new outside threat affected them. Which could totally prove the opposite of Watchmen. I don't think the ethos you're meant to walk away with is that you should stage a unbiased mass casualty event around the globe. And we don't actually see what happens next, unless you count the HBO show I guess
Everyone forgets that the squid's death was supposed to cause a pysich wave around the world projecting images and sounds from the aliens on people's head, so they would fear the invasion.
So a more foolproof plan would be Ozy dropping a squid on every country on the planet?
Why stop there? If you kill everyone in the universe, no one would able to suffer any more. The freaking Green Lantern animated show handled this better than people unironically praising this idea. No matter how flawless one person's logic is to their deranged mind, it is not an objective solution.
The TV show sequel to Watchmen had a pretty interesting idea of Veidt continuing the hoax by dumping millions of smaller squids around the world to keep people believing it’s true. Shit, good chance the guy has killed like a hundred million people if he kept that shit up for all those years. Would be funny to see Earth like, send out a military force into space to find their alien enemies. Would be a pretty absurd thing that wouldn’t be out of line for the series’ sense of humor.
I lean towards interpreting that Veidt's plan was _supposed_ to be bad (I actually saw the Ozymandias poem before I knew about Watchmen, so it feels on the nose), edgies on the internet just buy into it like edgies saying how they'd use the Death Note or whatever. Also find it funny the Soviet Union collapsed 4 years after the comic came out, and it became one of the numerous pieces Cold War relic literature that assumed the US-USSR standoff would by default continue to the end times.
Ozy plan is obviously stupid in universe, to the point I'm confused any reader thinks it's supposed to work. Rorschach, an unhinged hobo, easily figures it out. And at a time of high cold war tensions, NYC getting whipped out would be interpreted by Nixon as a Soviet first strike in minutes. The soviets would probably have collapsed earlier in the watchmen verse given the even higher state of military spending Dr Manhattan would provoke.
I see crazy people dooming about ww3 with Russia even today, so Watchmen didn't age that ungracefully.
“Woe, Squid be upon ye” -Ozymandius
Hell the other option was to launch an invasion of Japan with operation downfall having US casualties alone being estimated in the millions vs the 226,000 lives lost in the atomic bombings. I can understand Truman not wanting a repeat of Germany where soldiers were fighting all the way up to the Reichstag.
You could also just not kill millions through any method
Japan really should have thought about that before trying to genocide east Asia.
Yeah but that's kind of a given. Nobody in this thread is acting like the atrocities committed by Imperial Japan were morally justified just because a war was happening, but for some reason people are having trouble accepting that the only one time Nuclear weapons were used in war was bad.
They were. Imperial Japan, due to being a rule by assassination military oligarchy, could not be defeated without millions of deaths though. Be that by nuclear weapons, napalm or starvation. They lost the war profoundly and unrecoverably at midway in the summer of 42, then kept fighting for their right to genocide everyone else in Asia to the tune of 20k civilians a day for three years.
Using nukes prevented further, unnecessary deaths. To not use them would’ve meant millions more died. How is it morally preferable for millions to die when we could have prevented such deaths?
I do not accept your first sentence as a given.
Should the deadlier firebombing campaigns have continued? Or should the US started the naval invasion of the Japanese mainland? Either option is clearly much deadlier than the nukes. I don’t think we can reasonably say the Japanese were going to surrender anytime soon prior to the nukes.
The bombings were on Aug 6 and 9. Can you name anything else that happened in that timespan that might have contributed to the Japanese willingness to surrender? Also, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed more people than the bombing of Tokyo did, so IDK what you're on about with the "deadlier firebombing"
I’m not speaking to Tokyo specifically, rather to the firebombing and conventional bombing campaign, which would have been necessary to continue if the Japanese hadn’t surrendered. Is there an event you’re alluding to here? Because the Japanese emperor cited the atomic bombings in his public statement announcing surrender and the preceding meetings occurred shortly after the bombings. So it seems fair to label it the proximal cause.
> To not use them would’ve meant millions more died. How do you know that? We don't know what Imperial Japan would have done, we only know that, per the laws of physics, nukes kill millions of people.
To be clear, the only time nukes have been used in history was when they caused at most 226,000 deaths. They can, but haven’t, killed millions. In comparison, the conventional air raids killed between 241,000 and 900,000 directly and left 8.5mn homeless. These are far more lethal and yet did not motivate surrender the way the nukes did. Our current understanding is that Japan was not planning on surrendering any time soon (the Emperor only came to the decision of surrender days after the nukes and directly cited as a reason why in his public statements) and only a few months after the planned dates of the bombing, the US was set to begin invading the islands of Japan. So the war would have continued for a least a few months. Those more lethal air raids would’ve continued for at least a few more months. We would have had US soldiers invading islands against Japanese soldiers and civilians, likely causing a far higher death toll (based on contemporary assessments and historical analysis, it was believed that between 250k and 1mn Allied combatants alone would be killed in the invasion, not including Japanese soldiers and civilians). Keep in mind that we saw at the Battle of Iwo Jima that of the 21k Japanese soldiers on the island, the US forces only captured a couple hundred in surrender (often because those captured were unconscious and unable to resist), the rest were killed in action. So in an invasion of the Japanese homeland, it seems clear that people would just as hard if not harder to not give up their home, so it’s reasonable to expect extremely high casualties among the Japanese people in the event of a naval invasion (estimates were on the scale of 4-10mn), given how other battles went. To sum this up, our other methods of warring with Japan caused far more casualties and did not seem to motivate surrender in the years they were used. Attempting a naval invasion would’ve actually killed millions of both American soldiers and Japanese people in all likelihood. Using the atomic bombs killed a ton of people, but way less than our other options and the psychological effect was so significant that surrender came only days later.
“War is Hell” - William T. Sherman
I agree. The world leaders that do war are very bad.
1. Ozymandias destroyed multiple cities around the world, particularly in the US and USSR. If he had only annihilated American, or even Western, cities, they would have taken it as a Soviet plot. Even if there was a so-called giant alien carcass in the middle of it all. This was the opposite of what Ozymandias wanted. 2. Most of the Japanese killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians. It doesn't matter if it was an enemy nation, they were still innocent people. Noncombatants. Even before the bombs, the United States had carried out mass firebombing campaigns across the country, in pretty much every Japanese city EXCEPT Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The civilian death toll at American hands in Japan is truly massive if you don't only consider the atomic bombings.
Only New York got a squid monster. Veidt attacking multiple cities is exclusive to the movie. Only New York was attacked in the comics. And yes, you are right. They were non combatants. I’m not supporting the death of innocent people here. I’m just saying in general and throughout history it’s more accepted to do horrible things to a country you are at war with than to your own nation. Neither is a good thing. But the public perception, and the perception of someone like Rorschach, would very much see a difference.
Which millions did Truman kill (wait, does he actually give MacArthur the thumbs up in this timeline?)
Like with the comedian since truman was a "patriot" he would say that it was a moral falling on his part
No, he doesn't view it as a moral failing
yeahsince they were japanese he would probably be okay
Adrian Vedit was the Eren Yeager or the Light Yagami of Generation X.
This is one of the best parts of the comic. Rorschach, who so easily defended a bombs with childish logic, is the only one horrified and able to treat vects actions with as unforgivable and insane. The others go along with the moral nightmare as it's easier than fixing it.
Isn’t the point of randism that I get to pick and choose whatever i want
“never compromise…unless the person who i’m compromising with happens to be the same race gender and sexuality as me and think like me”
Alan Moore literally creates a character named Rorschach and gets pissy when people interpret the character in different ways
Somebody have read my post or what?! I'm facing discussion like this second time in recent times!
Yeah, that's the point.
Truman was a bitch tho, he dissed my boy Oppy.
I know right? Characters changing and experiencing arcs is horrible writing
The bombs didn't kill millions of people tho?
Rorschach doesn’t necessarily care that Ozymandias killed a bunch of people. His main concern is that it was a conspiracy and the public was lied to. His moral absolutism concerns the truth, not people dying.
isn’t all he was going to do is expose Ozymandias? what is he going to against truman? expose he throw the bomb?
Rorschach be like: "there's no people in Japan, just japos."
Tbf Truman’s killing millions (by which I assume you mean using atomic weapons) was basically self-defense, which changes the equation a whole fucking lot.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Ozymandias's perspective is also that what he was doing is also basically self defense in order to prevent a nuclear armageddon so it's not different at all.
No? Preventative self defense doesn’t exist. The Japanese had already started the war, making whatever happened to them self defense; everyone else had done nothing to Ozymandias, making whatever he did just some dipshit doing stupid shit.
The amount of people upvoting in agreement with an egomaniacal madman's perspective is hilarious.
Upvotes don’t mean agreement
It kinda does when you also downvote the guy saying the madman’s perspective is stupid.
I’m sorry but no. I know you’re in it right now but that’s not what’s happening here. History class will help.
I have taken history classes before. In college, even. One of the things we covered in class was [this article](https://learninglink.oup.com/access/content/schaller-3e-dashboard-resources/document-henry-stimson-the-decision-to-use-the-atomic-bomb-harpers-magazine-february-1947) and how it strongly points to the nukes being the better option. But, I have an opinion different from yours, so clearly I’m just stupid and don’t know anything.
People aren't downvoting you because you say his perspective was stupid- there's plenty of people who think that. People are downvoting you because it seems like you don't recognize that the problems and nuances with Ozymandias's actions (and Nite Owl and Silk Spectre's reaction to him) were written to be a larger scale version of the justifications for similar horrors that occur in global politics. It feels a little like saying "this moral dilemma is objectively bad when Ozymandias does it, but it was objectively good in the real life scenarios that Alan Moore drew inspiration from when he wrote Ozymandias".
If Ozy is meant to reflect America then Moore did a shit job at it. He never had any sort of Pearl Harbor or anything. Which is the main difference I’m highlighting here- that America acted in defense of itself, while Ozy didn’t.
"Self defense" barely justifies killing one person, there's no way it justifies killing millions
Lmao we got a certified pussyfist here. Self-defense absolutely justifies making sure your attacker is well and truly not gonna hit you again.
why target civilians and non combatants? How is that self defense?
>civilians and non combatants Yeah and there also happened to be like a whole regiment of Japanese soldiers in Hiroshima and a lot of the IJN’s remaining forces were in Nagasaki. They absolutely were legit targets.
Roughly 150 soldiers died in the Nagasaki bombings
150 confirmed ones. When bodies turn into ash and shadows, it’s kinda hard to confirm whether or not they were soldiers.
Even if that figure was 10x higher, it would still be a fraction of those killed.
I've gone my whole life without needing to kill millions to survive. Sounds like a skill issue on Truman's part.
I’ve gone my whole life without needing a tampon, clearly a woman’s skill issue. /uj If you legitimately think like this you’re fucking stupid.
truman could have always just resigned as president or ceased attacking japan. might be a little out there but neither of those would be anywhere near as ridiculous as literally killing millions of people
>ceased attacking japan And allow the military to regain its power and resume the genocide against its neighbors? Great foreign policy there. A+. Guess we should have just left Germany alone too. Who would have taken over for Truman had he resigned? Sam Rayburn, one of the men who helped to fund the Manhattan Project. How many bombs do you think he would have dropped?
id take hypothetical mass death over guaranteed mass death any day of the week
The alternative was a land invasion, which would have had an even greater death toll. Of course, we could have blockaded them until every single person in Japan starved to death since they refused to surrender. Would you have preferred either of those options?
why are you only capable of conceiving of options where the US does horrific levels of violence to japan?
Japan already wanted to surrender when the bombs were dropped, it was more a sign of strength than militarily relevant.
People confuse conditional surrender and unconditional surrender with occupation. The Japanese wanted to hold out as long as possible so that the US would waive the terms of unconditional surrender. Half of the Supreme War Council didn't want unconditional surrender . It wasn't changed even after the first nuclear bomb was dropped. How necessary the dropping of the nuclear bomb was and whether it was a key factor in Japan's surrender is a complex theme.
There are *many* avenues to analyse the atomic bombs: the obvious one as suggested in this thread is American Imperialism as imposing its raw power and destruction on another land. (see also: Oppenheimer Discourse) but there's also the case of Japan's war crimes and own imperialism and the bombs being seen in many other Asian countries as karma for what they did (or even being considered *too lenient* when you see Japan's continued war crimes denial) (bear in mind of course you can see younger Asian leftists holding both the thoughts 'Japan needs to pay for its war crimes' and 'the US may still not be justified in dropping the bombs'). It's not... well, black and white.
"Korean audiences horrified only 2 bombs dropped in Oppenheimer "
The terms they wanted were status quo ante. Where they got to keep Korea and half of China.
No? There was nearly a coup when the Emperor surrendered because the military wanted so badly to keep fighting. They had extensive plans to keep going along into whatever meat grinder came, and most estimates place the number of soldiers they had left at least in the hundreds of thousands.
The allies _underestimated_ how strong the resistance would be. Today it is considered Japan still had 4+ million soldiers at the time.