Русский корабль - иди нахуй

[utee94 15671]

3 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

Reports this morning that Putins approval rating in Russia has gone up. Russians hate the war but they don't like the west attacking their economy. Going to be a long slog. 

They haven't even begun to feel the sting of the sanctions.  His approval ratings won't survive what's coming.  Hopefully he won't, either.

Edited March 2, 2022 by utee94

[Longhornlove 4719]

That 40km column of vehicles has been stalled for days. Makes you wonder. Is this just a logistics nightmare? Sure looks like it. All those vehicles will be sitting ducks. If Ukraine had enough air support this war would be all but over and there would be a shit ton of dead Russians. A shame there isn't anything we can do about it.

[Chad Fuck 17259]

 

Russians new submarines don’t seem like a step forward.

Poor bastards.

[GabrielsHorn 2142]

 

[Orange&White 5497]

6 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

Reports this morning that Putins approval rating in Russia has gone up. Russians hate the war but they don't like the west attacking their economy. Going to be a long slog. 

The sanctions haven't even been in place long enough for people to have cleared out what was already in their pantry. Wait until the go to the store and what little food is there cost 20x what it did the last time they were there. 

[GabrielsHorn 2142]

 

[Cheeseweasel 26437]

23 minutes ago, AUS-97HORN said:

* tracked vehicle.

 

They didn't track it very well.

[Mantis Toboggan, MD 1491]

Reports this morning that Putins approval rating in Russia has gone up. Russians hate the war but they don't like the west attacking their economy. Going to be a long slog. 

Well the pollsters are probably Cossacks going door to door holding whips, so I wouldn’t put too much credence into that.

[irishtexan 11413]

47 minutes ago, jeevsie said:

But he didn't pull my dear old mom's move:  TELL the entire long story, then say "Long story short...."

My wife does this. When she starts going off on tangents I have to say "short story long" to get her back on track.

[BabaYaga 15116]

Oh snap

Time to start blowing every bridge across the Dnieper and defend the riverbanks, and then the Ukes can try to keep western Kyiv on their side of the river. at least that gives them half the country with shorter defensive lines and no flank attacks like which are occurring now.

 

[Cheeseweasel 26437]

3 minutes ago, Orange&White said:

The sanctions haven't even been in place long enough for people to have cleared out what was already in their pantry. Wait until the go to the store and what little food is there cost 20x what it did the last time they were there. 

And their sons don't come home.

[Orange&White 5497]

25 minutes ago, AUS-97HORN said:

* tracked vehicle.

 

Do you know what goes well with a Russian tracked vehicle? A nice Adidas Track suit.

[phdhorn 6224]

4 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

Reports this morning that Putins approval rating in Russia has gone up. Russians hate the war but they don't like the west attacking their economy. Going to be a long slog. 

I think you raise a valid point.  I have no idea if that poll is "In Russia Hundred Percent Gets You or You Go To Gulag" but I do know one thing from a good bit of interaction with Russians in Europe personally - they don't think like Americans or the West much at all.  It's too deeply-ingrained.  We might be shocked and pissed that Putin has a good bit of support (if that poll isn't bullshit), but that's part of the Rooskie psyche.  I really don't know how the average Ivan Schmoe is taking all this, but I wouldn't be surprised if your point has more relevance than most people think.  And it's possible that their military has developed at least some motivation - to not suck as absolutely terribly has they have the past week, pride and all that.

I think the slog was going to be long anyway, but if one hopeful effect of the sanctions is that it'll cause the populace to turn on Putin, let's just say I wouldn't be too shocked if it had the opposite effect, hopefully not though.
 

I don't think anyone can predict what the public over there will do or think next.

Overall, I find Russians quite annoying.

[Scary Stranger 1708]

15 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

Reports this morning that Putins approval rating in Russia has gone up. Russians hate the war but they don't like the west attacking their economy. Going to be a long slog. 

The polling was done by police at 3a.m.

[SL Xpress 7491]

47 minutes ago, Underdog said:

SLXpress

Thank you. My feelings were hurt a little. Although I hadn’t posted on surly/shaggy regularly for years. Making up for lost time! Longcat post incoming like a TB-2 drone, baby!

[atomheartbevo 88751]

10 minutes ago, Longhornlove said:

That 40km column of vehicles has been stalled for days. Makes you wonder. Is this just a logistics nightmare? Sure looks like it. All those vehicles will be sitting ducks. If Ukraine had enough air support this war would be all but over and there would be a shit ton of dead Russians. A shame there isn't anything we can do about it.

They’ve got to be burning a shitload of fuel to keep the vehicles and men warm.  Which requires more fuel trucks.  

[Surly Bevo 24249]

18 minutes ago, SmokeyTheBear said:

Reports this morning that Putins approval rating in Russia has gone up. Russians hate the war but they don't like the west attacking their economy. Going to be a long slog. 

So Rooskie critical thinking skills and ability to discern cause and effect may be worse than our dumbass population.   So we got that going for us....which is nice.  

[Mitch Cumsteen 18327]

Yo @immamac, you think we could get some sort of badge like texags has for all the nerc certified guys? We desperately need some way of separating out the posers. 

[Brisketexan 103148]

4 minutes ago, phdhorn said:

I think you raise a valid point.  I have no idea if that poll is "In Russia Hundred Percent Gets You or You Go To Gulag" but I do know one thing from a good bit of interaction with Russians in Europe personally - they don't think like Americans or the West much at all.  It's too deeply-ingrained.  We might be shocked and pissed that Putin has a good bit of support (if that poll isn't bullshit), but that's part of the Rooskie psyche.  I really don't know how the average Ivan Schmoe is taking all this, but I wouldn't be surprised if your point has more relevance than most people think.  And it's possible that their military has developed at least some motivation - to not suck as absolutely terribly has they have the past week, pride and all that.

I think the slog was going to be long anyway, but if one hopeful effect of the sanctions is that it'll cause the populace to turn on Putin, let's just say I wouldn't be too shocked if it had the opposite effect, hopefully not though.
 

I don't think anyone can predict what the public over there will do or think next.

Overall, I find Russians quite annoying.

All of this.

Who the hell knows, but this all having the unintended effect of galvanizing the Russians in an "us against the world behind our courageous leader Putin" posture is absolutely possible.

And yes, I find them quite annoying.  Can't tell you how many times we've been somewhere and muttered under our breath "fucking Russians."

[Pescado_Rojo 19193]

9 minutes ago, irishtexan said:

My wife does this. When she starts going off on tangents I have to say "short story long" to get her back on track.

"tell the last part first" 

[atomheartbevo 88751]

9 hours ago, SL Xpress said:

They’ll be there fighting decades from now after the war is long over. 

9 hours ago, BamaATL said:

This is a quality joke.

I made the joke about Japanese soldiers hanging on for decades to some friends and somebody asked me if I was making a racist joke.   I realized I was the oldest person there, and had to explain the Japanese WWII soldiers not giving up until the 1970s and how it was in Gillian’s Island in the 60s, etc.

[SL Xpress 7491]

7 minutes ago, irishtexan said:

My wife does this. When she starts going off on tangents I have to say "short story long" to get her back on track.

In the movie War of the Roses Kathleen Turner’s character says, “To make a long story short….” at which point Michale Douglas interrupts, “Too late.”

[Nivek 16643]

My wife does this. When she starts going off on tangents I have to say "short story long" to get her back on track.

Mine likes to interrupt me, to tell me she doesn’t have time to listen to the 3-5 sentence response I had, and then drone on about it and all the things she has to do for the next 10 minutes.

[Enchubben 5492]

5 minutes ago, phdhorn said:

I think you raise a valid point.  I have no idea if that poll is "In Russia Hundred Percent Gets You or You Go To Gulag" but I do know one thing from a good bit of interaction with Russians in Europe personally - they don't think like Americans or the West much at all.  It's too deeply-ingrained.  We might be shocked and pissed that Putin has a good bit of support (if that poll isn't bullshit), but that's part of the Rooskie psyche.  I really don't know how the average Ivan Schmoe is taking all this, but I wouldn't be surprised if your point has more relevance than most people think.  And it's possible that their military has developed at least some motivation - to not suck as absolutely terribly has they have the past week, pride and all that.

I think the slog was going to be long anyway, but if one hopeful effect of the sanctions is that it'll cause the populace to turn on Putin, let's just say I wouldn't be too shocked if it had the opposite effect, hopefully not though.
 

I don't think anyone can predict what the public over there will do or think next.

Overall, I find Russians quite annoying.

In the slightly modified words of esteemed philosopher David Chappelle:

"Russia if you have a problem with the West, you should sanction us.  Sanction us with your army.  Ohhhh! Wait a minute - you no longer have an army. I guess that means you need to shut the fuck up. That's what I'd do if I didn't have no army. I would shut the fuck up. Shut. The. Fuck. Up.  You think we're gonna take orders from a Russian? You might speak 16 languages, but you're gonna need them when you're in Times Square selling fake hats.

[BabaYaga 15116]

2 minutes ago, atomheartbevo said:

I made the joke about Japanese soldiers hanging on for decades to some friends and somebody asked me if I was making a racist joke.   I realized I was the oldest person there, and had to explain the Japanese WWII soldiers not giving up until the 1970s and how it was in Gillian’s Island in the 60s, etc.

Dan Carlin's podcast series "Supernova in the East" starts out with that wild story.  His initial premise was what makes a soldier behave like this?  How is such an ideology engendered over decades?  Where did it come from?

[Brisketexan 103148]

22 minutes ago, South Austin said:

Let's check on those approval ratings in a month when Putin's war has really hit their pocketbooks and kitchen pantries.

 

22 minutes ago, utee94 said:

They haven't even begun to feel the sting of the sanctions.  His approval ratings won't survive what's coming.  Hopefully he won't, either.

 

15 minutes ago, Orange&White said:

The sanctions haven't even been in place long enough for people to have cleared out what was already in their pantry. Wait until the go to the store and what little food is there cost 20x what it did the last time they were there. 

Don't count on this.  If there is a people that is used to waiting in line for a ration of moldy wheat, it's the Russians.  They do deprivation very, very well.  We'll see if 30 years of exposure to semi-western living has spoiled them, but I think not.

They are serfs/peasants at heart -- it's hard-wired into their culture.  I think there's a good chance that the regular people just take their suffering like Russians, with a shoulder shrug and that's it.

[Parliament 13979]

I haven't heard one way or the other.  Are rhe Allies doing well at supplying fuel to Ukraine?  And how about the Javelins?  How short are they for Javelins?

[956 Worldwide 33958]

Regardless of what happens with the war in Ukraine, we are now watching in real time a fundamental shift in Russian society unlike anything since 1989-1992.  At the moment, we can fairly say that Russia itself is more isolated than the Soviet Union was under the last days of Gorbachev. 
 

The legal framework was there, but you’re now seeing internal suppression of dissent on a level quite beyond what we saw in the late Soviet era and moving to the Brezhnev era. However, the ideological underpinnings are threadbare and not taken serious and so control of the debate is framed almost entirely negatively and in support of the state as such, not for a broader idea. 
 

It’s far too early to predict what this will do the economy but suffice to say it will be cataclysmic. There is nothing in our lifetimes in the United States to compare it to. It’s just indescribable. 
 

TL;DR: Russia faces the choice of getting rid of Putin and doing an about face or actually becoming type of crumbling frozen penal colony message board users joke about it being. 

[DDD Dad 14060]

16 minutes ago, irishtexan said:

My wife does this. When she starts going off on tangents I have to say "short story long" to get her back on track.

 

7 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

"tell the last part first" 

 

5 minutes ago, Nivek said:

Mine likes to interrupt me, to tell me she doesn’t have time to listen to the 3-5 sentence response I had, and then drone on about it and all the things she has to do for the next 10 minutes.

Wife talk not going away.

[Brisketexan 103148]

1 minute ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Regardless of what happens with the war in Ukraine, we are now watching in real time a fundamental shift in Russian society unlike anything since 1989-1992.  At the moment, we can fairly say that Russia itself is more isolated than the Soviet Union was under the last days of Gorbachev. 
 

The legal framework was there, but you’re now seeing internal suppression of dissent on a level quite beyond what we saw in the late Soviet era and moving to the Brezhnev era. However, the ideological underpinnings are threadbare and not taken serious and so control of the debate is framed almost entirely negatively and in support of the state as such, not for a broader idea. 
 

It’s far too early to predict what this will do the economy but suffice to say it will be cataclysmic. There is nothing in our lifetimes in the United States to compare it to. It’s just indescribable. 
 

TL;DR: Russia faces the choice of getting rid of Putin and doing an about face or actually becoming type of crumbling frozen penal colony message board users joke about it being. 

And it has been that thing, within living memory.  The Russian people handled it then.  Perhaps they can handle it now.  The Oligarchs will keep most of their money and prosperity (and they'll find a way to get western goodies, although they'll miss their extravagant trips to Londongrad), and the people will return to being starving peasants waiting in line for a sack of rotten potatoes and a roll of toilet paper.  Meaning.....nothing will improve.  We'll just get the two-fer of war AND suffering of populations.  Yay, 2020s!

[utee94 15671]

8 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

 

 

Don't count on this.  If there is a people that is used to waiting in line for a ration of moldy wheat, it's the Russians.  They do deprivation very, very well.  We'll see if 30 years of exposure to semi-western living has spoiled them, but I think not.

They are serfs/peasants at heart -- it's hard-wired into their culture.  I think there's a good chance that the regular people just take their suffering like Russians, with a shoulder shrug and that's it.

Meh, I'm gonna go ahead and count on it anyway, Eeyore.  The past 30 years have been very good to them relatively speaking, and young Russians clearly don't buy into the state media because they're currently getting rounded up and thrown into jail by the thousands.  The proof is in the pudding.

Young Russians also never suffered under the Soviet regime and don't relate to it at all, and they view Putin as nothing more than an anachronistic artifact of that regime.  That disconnect from Putin is just as likely to "galvanize" them in the opposite direction, as anything that's been suggested moving them in the direction of support for Putin.

Edited March 2, 2022 by utee94

[Macanudo 12649]

11 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

"tell the last part first" 

"No, I don't need to be reminded of who they are, when you first met them and the 296 other details you want to tell me before getting to 'and they bought a new house' or 'their daughter got into NE Directional U.'

[BabaYaga 15116]

Russia's also been stockpiling currency.  Maybe enough for a year +/-?  So this was anticipated.  People act like this is going to go down like Frodo throwing the Ring into the lava and shit's just going to instantly implode.  This will drag on for some time, and they are going to hit us & our allies back.  

[BachelorTrek 2884]

14 minutes ago, Pescado_Rojo said:

"tell the last part first" 

"hyperbolic cosecants"  Lulz.

[Chad Fuck 17259]

11 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

Dan Carlin's podcast series "Supernova in the East" starts out with that wild story.  His initial premise was what makes a soldier behave like this?  How is such an ideology engendered over decades?  Where did it come from?

The Japanese are just like everyone else, only more so.

[Auto Driller 2502]

1 minute ago, BabaYaga said:

Russia's also been stockpiling currency.  Maybe enough for a year +/-?  So this was anticipated.  People act like this is going to go down like Frodo throwing the Ring into the lava and shit's just going to instantly implode.  This will drag on for some time, and they are going to hit us & our allies back.  

A large percentage of their stockpiled currency was held in foreign banks and is now frozen.

[SL Xpress 7491]

1 minute ago, BabaYaga said:

Russia's also been stockpiling currency.  Maybe enough for a year +/-?  So this was anticipated.  People act like this is going to go down like Frodo throwing the Ring into the lava and shit's just going to instantly implode.  This will drag on for some time, and they are going to hit us & our allies back.  

You cheated a little bit by skipping to the end. There were a lot of loooooooooooong takes of just them walking after they imposed sanctions at the fellowship of the ring. I mean…a lot of them.

['stache 21491]

13 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

Dan Carlin's podcast series "Supernova in the East" starts out with that wild story.  His initial premise was what makes a soldier behave like this?  How is such an ideology engendered over decades?  Where did it come from?

Great series. It really made me rethink the ethics of the atomic bombings on Japan. The fire bombings using conventional weapons were super devastating themselves and Japan was just not going to ever surrender.

Edited March 2, 2022 by 'stache

[BabaYaga 15116]

2 minutes ago, utee94 said:

Meh, I'm gonna go ahead and count on it anyway, Eeyore. 

I see this is an "aye" vote!  Carry on.

And I agree.  You could argue the biggest internal threat to both Russia and China is the growing middle class.  They demographic adds a ridiculous amount of lift to their respective countries economies, and come with their own set of expectations.  They have to be able to support it from a consumption standpoint.  

[TwiceHorn 30716]

9 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Regardless of what happens with the war in Ukraine, we are now watching in real time a fundamental shift in Russian society unlike anything since 1989-1992.  At the moment, we can fairly say that Russia itself is more isolated than the Soviet Union was under the last days of Gorbachev. 
 

The legal framework was there, but you’re now seeing internal suppression of dissent on a level quite beyond what we saw in the late Soviet era and moving to the Brezhnev era. However, the ideological underpinnings are threadbare and not taken serious and so control of the debate is framed almost entirely negatively and in support of the state as such, not for a broader idea. 
 

It’s far too early to predict what this will do the economy but suffice to say it will be cataclysmic. There is nothing in our lifetimes in the United States to compare it to. It’s just indescribable. 
 

TL;DR: Russia faces the choice of getting rid of Putin and doing an about face or actually becoming type of crumbling frozen penal colony message board users joke about it being. 

Right.  I have been sniffing around the idea that there isn't a communist ideology deeply instilled in the people and in government functionaries, to include the military.  And that is kind of the wild card here.  Because I think that deeply instilled, or enforced, ideology is what made Russia/Soviet Union more formidable in the past (to the extent it was formidable).

Of course the communist ideology was deeply centered around "discrediting" everything western, and I am relatively certain that part still sticks around.

[atomheartbevo 88751]

3 minutes ago, utee94 said:

Meh, I'm gonna go ahead and count on it anyway, Eeyore.  The past 30 years have been very good to them relatively speaking, and young Russians clearly don't buy into the state media because they're currently getting rounded up and thrown into jail by the thousands.  The proof is in the pudding.

Young Russians also never suffered under the Soviet regime and don't relate to it at all.  and they view Putin as nothing more than an anachronistic artifact of that regime.  That disconnect from Putin is just as likely to "galvanize" them in the opposite direction, as anything that's been suggested moving them in the direction of support for Putin.

This.  The youngsters have their social media, video games, and smartphones and are far more exposed to the rest of the world.  Now Putin is wrecking all of that.  The people in the Soviet Union never had it as well as the youth do today, and the people of the Soviet Union were never exposed to all the goodies that the youth of today are exposed to.  Oh, and now Putin may start conscripting even more of them. 

[956 Worldwide 33958]

I am not ready to call the debate between @utee94 and @Brisketexan. Of course, the Russian people don’t always just take their shit sandwich, as evidenced by 1905, 1917, and 1992.  It’s questionable whether they’d have swallowed Stalinism absent the dark days of the Great Terror and it’s not at all a given that V.V.P. can engineer that kind of brutality.

Anecdotes are anecdotes but the plural are data. Right before COVID I did a trip around the Baltics and Finland and was struck by the behavior of Russian tourists. They were— strikingly normal.  Young couples in European capri pants and white sneakers. Young families quietly chatting over pizza. Small groups of twenty somethings behaving like any other European. 

Of course, it’s been a running joke for years that Russians abroad are awful— it’s either mafiosos, track suited ugos and trashy girl friends, or laborers and sex workers. There have always been normal Russians, they just never were able to do things like take a weekend trip to Helsinki. 
 

I will be curious to see whether the system that produced this class can weather what’s coming. 

[Brisketexan 103148]

1 minute ago, atomheartbevo said:

This.  The youngsters have their social media, video games, and smartphones and are far more exposed to the rest of the world.  Now Putin is wrecking all of that.  The people in the Soviet Union never had it as well as the youth do today, and the people of the Soviet Union were never exposed to all the goodies that the youth of today are exposed to.  Oh, and now Putin may start conscripting even more of them. 

Counterpoint.....young people don't control shit, and can't do shit.  They'll get snatched up and sent to gulags, or conscripted and sent off to be cannon fodder.

It is a mistake common to all countries and cultures that young people think they're important and actually have power WELL before that's actually true.

[BabaYaga 15116]

1 minute ago, TwiceHorn said:

Right.  I have been sniffing around the idea that there isn't a communist ideology deeply instilled in the people and in government functionaries, to include the military.  And that is kind of the wild card here.  Because I think that deeply instilled, or enforced, ideology is what made Russia/Soviet Union more formidable in the past (to the extent it was formidable).

Of course the communist ideology was deeply centered around "discrediting" everything western, and I am relatively certain that part still sticks around.

Communist?  Socialist?  No matter the "ist", they are centralized command and control economies for the most part.  Like the US, Russia benefits immensely from inherent geographical advantages.  They are just so GD big that they can't help but dominate the region to some extent and have so many resources at their disposal.  Their problem has always been how to allocate those resources, and this is where they always fall short.  

[The Dog 42745]

11 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

And it has been that thing, within living memory.  The Russian people handled it then.  Perhaps they can handle it now. 

 

10 minutes ago, utee94 said:

Young Russians also never suffered under the Soviet regime and don't relate to it at all, and they view Putin as nothing more than an anachronistic artifact of that regime.  That disconnect from Putin is just as likely to "galvanize" them in the opposite direction, as anything that's been suggested moving them in the direction of support for Putin.

Speaking as someone who visited Russia back when it was the USSR and after the fall I can verify the latter. The current generation knows nothing of the bread lines of the old communist regime. 

Putin can appeal to Russian nationalism right now because he's controlling the narrative there so well, but the longer this goes the more people will wonder wtf is going on. 

[BabaYaga 15116]

1 minute ago, Brisketexan said:

Counterpoint.....young people don't control shit, and can't do shit.  They'll get snatched up and sent to gulags, or conscripted and sent off to be cannon fodder.

It is a mistake common to all countries and cultures that young people think they're important and actually have power WELL before that's actually true.

Young people, not so much....but the middle class does to a larger extent.  These are the semi and professionals in the country.  They bring to bear a significant amount of intellectual capital, and you can't just lock all of them up without dire economic consequences.  

[Brisketexan 103148]

I am not ready to call the debate between [mention=863]utee94[/mention] and [mention=593]Brisketexan[/mention]. Of course, the Russian people don’t always just take their shit sandwich, as evidenced by 1905, 1917, and 1992.  It’s questionable whether they’d have swallowed Stalinism absent the dark days of the Great Terror and it’s not at all a given that V.V.P. can engineer that kind of brutality.
Anecdotes are anecdotes but the plural are data. Right before COVID I did a trip around the Baltics and Finland and was struck by the behavior of Russian tourists. They were— strikingly normal.  Young couples in European capri pants and white sneakers. Young families quietly chatting over pizza. Small groups of twenty somethings behaving like any other European. 

Of course, it’s been a running joke for years that Russians abroad are awful— it’s either mafiosos, track suited ugos and trashy girl friends, or laborers and sex workers. There have always been normal Russians, they just never were able to do things like take a weekend trip to Helsinki. 
 
I will be curious to see whether the system that produced this class can weather what’s coming. 

The running joke has a basis.  See the image below from our trip to Armenia (where the tourists are mostly other Armenians, Iranian, or Russian).  We were at an ancient monastery, cobblestone paths and rough hikes all around, saw this gal, and we all rolled our eyes....."russians."  

[Zhorn96 1772]

Russia is fucked.  Rick Steves just cancelled his tours to Russia

[BabaYaga 15116]

8 minutes ago, SL Xpress said:

You cheated a little bit by skipping to the end. There were a lot of loooooooooooong takes of just them walking after they imposed sanctions at the fellowship of the ring. I mean…a lot of them.

I meant one the die is cast, as it has been now.  Seems many as under the impression Russia is just going to wither and die on the vine.  They will feel real pain, but they are not toothless either.  

[SL Xpress 7491]

16 minutes ago, BabaYaga said:

Dan Carlin's podcast series "Supernova in the East" starts out with that wild story.  His initial premise was what makes a soldier behave like this?  How is such an ideology engendered over decades?  Where did it come from?

I haven’t listened to the podcast, but I will.

It’s pretty simple in some ways. You have an island nation that was never conquered. Ever. It’s like Captain Kirk with the Kobayashi Maru. That’s making light of things a bit, but there’s some truth there, too. It was inconceivable to the Japanese people that they’d ever lose.

For anyone who doesn’t know, read about the lengths that were taken simply to smuggle out the Emperor’s message of surrender after the atomic bombs were dropped. Plenty of people around him had no desire to surrender even at that point.