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Garrette
SFN Regular
USA
562 Posts |
 Posted - 05/10/2002 : 13:31:14
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This is a spin-off from the death penalty thread.
quote:
Originally posted by Omega:
“So you want me to tell you if I believe something exists before you define it?” I did. Please read my last post again.
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“How do you define CAHs?” I did in my previous post in the beginning.
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“On what basis or with what criteria have you judged Pol Pot, Stalin, and Hitler?” By the definition given in my previous post.
This is the only thing close to a definition that I could get from your last post:
quote:
Again, to me, it has to do with the intention behind the crime. The motives behind the CAH (let's just call them that) solely arise from racial, national or religious considerations on an almost unimaginable scale. The crime does not only affect an individual or nation, it affects all of humanity.
I believe the term CaH is fairly new even, from after World War II, when the world had to come to terms with the holocaust in Germany. Genocide is an example. The only reason to set out an exterminate an entire group of people is purely racial and/or religious. It has nothing to do with what the group in question has done or not done. The people who order the genocide are not threatened by the group, they belong to the ruling class and do not starve or freeze..
The specificity of genocide doesn't arise from the extend of the killings, or the savagery of the resulting infamy, but solely from the intention: The destruction of a group.
Based on this, I wrote this:
“It is a CAH if the intent of the crime is the eradication of a group for racial, national, or religious reasons AND lots of people get killed.”
Unless you correct me, I will assume that my restated definition is accurate.
But then you say this:
quote:
“Are you suggesting that it is self-evident in these cases?” The definition given applies and does not apply to individual murderers.
Which still confuses me when you insist that it is not the volume or quantity that matters.
quote:
“This is an old quotation, because I don't normally respond to loaded comments; I do not view it (the bombing of Hiroshima) as a CAH because I do not view it as needless.”
The bomb could've been dropped, say, off the cost of Japan to prove the strength of the bomb.
It was needless to drop it on a city.
Very interesting. Let's try this out in two ways:
1. A review of the actual event to see if your implied prediction is borne out, the implied prediction being that Japan would surrender after the dropping of the first bomb off the coast.
Actual event: A bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
Japanese response: No surrender (Gorgo will dispute this)
Conclusion: The implied prediction was falsified, ergo, dropping the bomb off the coast
would not have cause Japan to surrender.
2. A thought experiment:
Proposed event: The bomb is dropped off the coast
Hypothetical Japanese response: They do not surrender
Follow-on question: Would it NOW be okay to bomb Hiroshima without it being a CAH? If not, I submit that you will call it a CAH regardless of circu
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Garrette
SFN Regular
USA
562 Posts |
Posted - 05/10/2002 : 13:32:24 [Permalink]
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quote:
Originally posted by Omega:
“Would you shoot a 7 year old Hitler?” As I already said, no. I'll be happy to explain why, if an explanation is needed.
You say you don't know. Either you haven't thought about the scenario, or you have arguments in favour of either doing it or not. What would be your arguments in favour of doing it?
You're pretty much dead accurate on both counts.
I had not thought about it before and haven't had the time to think it through in detail yet.
I can think of arguments for and against.
The argument for killing him is the obvious hope that a Hitler-dead-at-7 will eliminate the future well-known horrors of WWII and the Holocaust.
The argument against is based on the lack of Perfect Knowledge in this scenario. Not knowledge about whether the 7 year old is the Right Bad Guy. Perfect Knowledge about Unintended Consequences. Not being well-versed in time travel, I cannot say with any reliability that the future history resulting from a Hitler-dead-at-7 would not be worse than the one I know of. Perhaps WWII and the Holocaust will happen anyway. Perhaps something worse will happen.
But the real factor is one you didn't mention: I'm human, too, though I'm sure you doubt it at times. Regardless of what I might intellectually believe is the Right Thing To Do, the thought of killing a 7 year old who, to date, has committed no crimes, repulses me. Perhaps to a degree that I could not achieve my own goals of choosing the Harder Right.
If you had asked what I believe the Right Thing To Do is, I'd answer the same regarding the first two factors, but leave off the humanity caveat.
Best I can do.
And, yes, I am interested in your reasons for not killing him.
My kids still love me. |
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@tomic
Administrator
USA
4607 Posts |
Posted - 05/10/2002 : 14:10:47 [Permalink]
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Since time travel is the capability that makes such a thought experiment as this worth considering you have to consider that there are other things that could be done short of killing the child. You could try to influence the outcome of history in so many other ways but, as Garrette said, the result could be much worse. If you could travel back in time you would be better off trying to remove the conditions that allowed a figure like Hitler to ascend to the position he did. Kill Hitler and someone else just like him would have been there to take control. While this does not address the moral question, without time travel in the first place it's a pointless question to ask. So I would say no I would not kill Hitler as a 7 year old. If i could travel back in time I would use my advance knowledge to try some other method to engineer the future history I wanted. Something else to consider, horrible though it may be, is that we would be deprived of the lesson that history has given us. Not that many people seem to learn from it.
@tomic
Gravity, not just a good idea...it's the law! |
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Omega
Skeptic Friend
Denmark
164 Posts |
Posted - 05/10/2002 : 18:17:05 [Permalink]
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Garrette> I wonder if we'll still be at this in a year :)
The problem with boiling down definition, is that a shade may become lost.
What makes a CaH such is not only the scale. Let's take Hitler and Stalin as examples. They ordered the killings. They never pulled the trigger or gas-chamber lever. They were men in power. I for one, can't kill six million people by myself. If I start to randomly shoot left and right, I'd be in prison in no time. The system stops me.
But when the CaH start, you have a system that starts to allow for mass-murder. In Germany or Stalinist Soviet Union what happened in the camps was not illegal in the countries in question. Whether it was political prisoners, the handicapped, gays, Romanis, Jews or Armenians they had nowhere to run.
People in power have a responsibility. And they have power. Maybe Nazi-Germany or Stalinist Russia are perfect examples of power corrupts, ultimate power corrupts ultimately. But that is another thread.
So: What is to me the difference between your single heinous murder, and my CaH? If we take the single murder, the reason, the motives may be many. Anger, hunger, insanity. But the perpetrator does the murder by him/herself. It is still illegal.
Now take Hitler. His motives are political. Give the German population a scape-goat. Someone to blame for economic recession, mass unemployment and poverty. He has the power to order the slaying. And he does. Without seeing the people who sends to the camps, he orders their horror and terror in camps, medical experiments and death.
So it is not from start the volume of people dying, it is inherently the abuse of power. Because the ones I consider guilty of CaH have power, they can even make their crimes nationally legal. They can force other members of the nation to carry out the crime for them. Maybe that helps with your confusion?
Hiroshima. There were well-documented peace feelers put out by high-ranking officials in the months before the bombing. These officials indicated numerous times to multiple sources in the international diplomatic community that surrender would be acceptable on the condition that the Emperor's position could be maintained. Not only were Allied officials informed of this interest on Japan's part in negotiating a peace settlement, but the record is clear that the U.S. had intercepted a number of these messages regarding a desire for negotiations directly.
Three days later--and despite the likelihood of an immediate surrender by Japan--a plutonium bomb, was dropped on the city of Nagasaki.
So I do not agree with you, that since the bombing of Hiroshima did not lead to immediate surrender, it would not have lead to surrender. Then also a bomb dropped off the coast of Japan could've achieved the same thing.
After Nagasaki the whole world--in particular, Russia, the other main contender for postwar dominance--could see the devastating power of these new kinds of weapons. The United States had demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that it would not hesitate to annihilate countless civilian men, women, and children in order to accomplish its aims. The U.S. hoped that such "atomic diplomacy" would secure its position as world superpower in the postwar period.
Truman called the incineration of Hirsohima's infrastructure and tens of thousands of its inhabitants “the greatest thing in history”. (Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 734)
A surving Hiroshima grocer described what he saw:0
“They had no hair because their hair was burned, and at a glance you couldn't tell whether you were looking at them from the front or in back.... If there had been only one or two such people ... perhaps I would not have had such a strong impression. But wherever I walked I met these people.... Many of them died along the road.... They didn't look like people of this world.” So this is ok?
Japan officially surrendered on August 14th. 5 days after Nagasaki |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 05/10/2002 : 19:57:25 [Permalink]
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quote:
Regardless of what I might intellectually believe is the Right Thing To Do, the thought of killing a 7 year old who, to date, has committed no crimes, repulses me.
Were I to not attempt to save a 7 year old boy trapped in a burning building when I had the opportunity, I would consider myself a coward.
Would I not also be considered a coward (perhaps even more so) were I to refuse to kill the 7 year old boy when I had the opportunity, simply because I feared my own conscience and guilt? (This is assuming "perfect knowledge" that this was indeed Hitler, and he would indeed do the things he did when he grew up; personally I would risk a worse alternative, since Hitler's atrocities would be a certainty, compared to vague and endless "what if" alternatives).
I would gladly sacrifice my own morals and go against my conscience and reluctance to kill a 7 year old whom I knew was going to grow up and order the murders of millions of people.
My guilt would be a miniscule price to pay.
Of course, this is easy to say when it's all hypothetical! 
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Truth above pride and ego; truth above all |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 05/10/2002 : 19:59:35 [Permalink]
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quote:
Something else to consider, horrible though it may be, is that we would be deprived of the lesson that history has given us. Not that many people seem to learn from it.
In thinking about this earlier, I thought the exact same thing. This would give me pause much more than the thought of killing a 7 year old (again, only with the certainty that he really was Hitler, and that there was nothing I could do otherwise to prevent what he would become).
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Truth above pride and ego; truth above all |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 05/10/2002 : 20:10:32 [Permalink]
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This reminds me of something. Garette (and sorry if I'm getting off track in this thread), was it you who recommended Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series to me? I started it back up, and I'm glad I did! I'm on the 6th book.
When Rand refused to kill Lanfear, and thought to himself that he couldn't kill her because she was a woman, even though she was killing two of his friends, and claimed that he would never kill a woman, no matter what, I couldn't think of a more selfish thing to do.
Rand was choosing to avoid his own guilt, even at the expense of other people's lives.
Any thoughts?
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Truth above pride and ego; truth above all |
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Omega
Skeptic Friend
Denmark
164 Posts |
Posted - 05/11/2002 : 09:01:29 [Permalink]
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TokyoDreamer> So do you believe that history is the sole doing of "great" men?
"All it takes to fly is to fling yourself at the ground... and miss."
- Douglas Adams |
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Lars_H
SFN Regular
Germany
630 Posts |
Posted - 05/11/2002 : 10:05:19 [Permalink]
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I just want to add my own 2 cents on the whole Killing-a-7-year-old-Hitler thing.
I would not, and not because I am afraid to sacrifice my own conscience.
Assuming that time travel was possible and, it was only possible to travel back in time to 1906 Austria, and that I had no other way to influence history then killing the most likely still innocent boy, would it be the right thing to do?
This seems to be one of those impossible scenarios that are build up to allow only one possible solution and every time an alternate solution is found more restrictions are added. You can't try to change any of the other factors that lead to WW2 and the holocaust. You can't just have a talk to the impressionable boy and try to explain things to him. You can't shoot to wound and permanently cripple him to keep him from running for office.
If I bring it up I would probably also get a form of transtemporal omniscience to assure me that killing Hitler will not make things worse then they were before.
Those restrictions are unrealistic, not just because of the time travel issue, but because it tries to build a scenario along the lines of simplified thinking people use to justify their real world decisions.
Some people use scenarios like the 7 year old Hitler to convince people like me that sometimes I would have to go against my own morals.
They ignore the fact that real live only presents you with choices like that when you refuse to see the possible alternatives.
...
And the practicle reason why I would not kill Hitler? Even if I could operate a gun without hurting myself, even if I could rationalize to myself that it had to be done for the greater good and could manage to look a seven year old boy into the eyes and shoot him, I would proabably avoid it. afterall without WW2 I would probably never have been born and I would not risk destroying the causal stability of the Universe for the lives of a few humans...
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Lars_H
SFN Regular
Germany
630 Posts |
Posted - 05/11/2002 : 10:29:50 [Permalink]
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Another Scenario
Imagine you just have come back to your own time from killing Hitler. Your leave your time machine to find a post-nuclear-wasteland. From the ruins civilization you gather what has happened. Because WW2 never happened the power of the Nuclear bomb was not developed before the cold war. It's power never got demonstrated on innocent Japanes citizens before the cold war.
The Nazis never gained power in Germany the Holocaust never happened. Millions of lives were initially saved. But without the events in Germany as a warning, anti-semitism never became politically incorrect. The civil-rights movement in the US was just a pale shadow of it's counterpart in the original timeline and both sides of the cold war were more extreme and less aware of the possible consequences of their doing.
When the inevitable finally happened and a nuclear war broke out there were almost no survivors.
So now you look back at your time machine as you realize that you made things worse then they were before.
But wait! Not all hope is lost you have an idea of how to restore the original timeline. Somebody has to take the place of the dead Hitler and restore the timeline to it't original course.
Sure, you have to kill millions of innocent people to do it, what is live of a few millions compared to the survival of the entire human race? It is just the same as before with the innocent 7-year-old boy you killed, isn't it?
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ktesibios
SFN Regular
USA
505 Posts |
Posted - 05/12/2002 : 20:59:53 [Permalink]
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"There was a sound of thunder in the room."
What would Cthulhu do? |
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Donnie B.
Skeptic Friend
417 Posts |
Posted - 05/13/2002 : 11:35:43 [Permalink]
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The "7-year-old Hitler" argument is a straw man. As pointed out in other posts, (1) time travel doesn't exist, and probably can't exist in a stable cause-and-effect universe, and (2) even if it did exist, the effect of eliminating the single individual, Adolph Hitler, would have unpredictable consequences.
It's no more meaningful to pose this question than it is to suggest that I might want to murder my neighbor's 7-year-old daughter because she might grow up to be a serial killer.
On the issue of CAH's, mark me down on the side that opposes the death penalty even for those heinous crimes. My reasons are the same in this case as for any other question of capital punishment: the imperfect knowledge of the past, coupled with the imperfect system of justice, leads to results that are unacceptably ambiguous. With imprisonment, errors can perhaps be corrected, but this is not the case with the finality of an execution. Underlying this is the terrible possibility of abuse of that ultimate power by a corrupt authority.
I happen to believe that the Hiroshima bombing was not a CAH, given the time and the context. If it were to occur today, it would be; but in 1945, both sides were committed to total war. Nagasaki, I feel, was awfully close to the line, and may have crossed it, even by 1945 standards.
It's a great and terrible irony of history that the reason Japan had not reached terms prior to Hiroshima was the American demand for "unconditional surrender". Japan was willing to undergo invasion and nuclear destruction to preserve its emperor. And yet, when the actual surrender occurred (even after the Russian invasion and the atomic bombings), it was not unconditional: Japan got to keep its emperor. In other words, it was all for nothing.
-- Donnie B.
Brian: "No, no! You have to think for yourselves!" Crowd: "Yes! We have to think for ourselves!" |
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Tokyodreamer
SFN Regular
USA
1447 Posts |
Posted - 05/13/2002 : 12:54:28 [Permalink]
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quote:
The "7-year-old Hitler" argument is a straw man.
I fail to see how it could possibly be a straw man. It's simply a hypothetical moral dilemma.
quote:
As pointed out in other posts, (1) time travel doesn't exist, and probably can't exist in a stable cause-and-effect universe
I totally agree, but that is totally and completely irrelevant to the topic at hand.
quote:
(2) even if it did exist, the effect of eliminating the single individual, Adolph Hitler, would have unpredictable consequences.
Granted, and this is something that one would possibly take into account when deciding what they would do.
I would suggest (very politely, I assure you) that individuals who don't want to participate in a hypothetical situation simply because they think there is no possible way for the situation to ever be a reality, simply don't respond, as is their perogative.
However, a moral dilemma does not deserve criticism because of the impossibility or improbability of its situation.
One must simply suspend one's disbelief, and answer a simple moral question (here's my version):
You find yourself transported back in time, standing in a room with a loaded pistol. There is a child in the room, whom you know with absolute certainty is Adolph Hitler. You also know with absolute certainty that you will be transported back to your own time in exactly one minute (how you know either is not important or relevant; it's a hypothetical, people!). There is nothing else on your person, on the child's person, or in the room at all, just you, the kid, and a pistol in your hand.
What would you do?
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Truth above pride and ego; truth above all
[Dratted grammar and punctuation...]
Edited by - tokyodreamer on 05/13/2002 12:59:56 |
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 05/13/2002 : 14:05:40 [Permalink]
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Most of what I know about Nagasaki I learned at the Ground Zero Museum there, as I lived in Nagasaki for a short time in the late 60's. It seemed very odd (as I also spent quite some time in countries that had fallen victim to the Japanese) that the Japanese like to portray themselves as the "victims" in the Second World War. Never do they mention that they were the ones who enslaved the Pacific.
The so called "peace feelers" that Japan offered did not include invasion. Japan was "sacred ground" and the Emperor was not only king he was "God." Nor was the infrastructure to be touched. It amounted to, "let's take a breather and allow us time to rebuild our navy and air force."
The racism of the Japanese is legend. When the first Americans arrived in the 1800's mats and rice paper were placed everywhere they went so that they would not soil the sacred dirt of Japan. More often than not my Japanese friends and I (I was an Irish citizen at the time and had yet to become an American) would be turned away from clubs and restaurants because of my skin. My friends would be cursed for being associated with me.
The Museum at Nagasaki bragged that all of Japan had vowed fight to the death as soldiers to defend their land and God against the barbaric invaders. When my host translated this plaque for me he laughed and said "I always knew you were a barbarian!"
The American's expected to receive causalities around the million man mark. How many Japanese would have died in an amphibious invasion is anybody's guess, but it would have been many more than a million. A case could be made--albeit a very strange case--that the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan saved many more Japanese lives than they took. They certainly saved a great many American lives.
Japan kept their Emperor but he stepped down from being a deity.
The bitch about using A-bombs to end the war seems one about style. It's okay to defeat the Axis but don't hurt anybody while you are doing it.
One strange thing at the museum were many flyers-notes that had been dropped out of American airplanes by the thousands for days in advance warning the people of what was to come and telling them to leave. The signage said that the citizens were too brave to run and proudly faced their fate, ready to die for their Emperor.
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My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. ---Thomas Henry Huxley, 1860 |
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Omega
Skeptic Friend
Denmark
164 Posts |
Posted - 05/14/2002 : 06:24:23 [Permalink]
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Slater> “It seemed very odd (as I also spent quite some time in countries that had fallen victim to the Japanese) that the Japanese like to portray themselves as the "victims" in the Second World War. Never do they mention that they were the ones who enslaved the Pacific.”
So enslaving people makes it okay to drop an atomic bomb?
All sides during WW II committed atrocities, just not the USA? You seem to subscribe to the common myth, that the Allies “had no choice”.
“There was nothing left to do but use the bomb," Secretary of State James F. Bynes coolly asserted in 1947. The alternative to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Churchill railed in front of the British House of Commons a week after it happened, would have been to sacrifice "a million American, and a quarter million British lives in the desperate battles and massacres of an invasion of Japan." (Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision, pp. 571, 371.)
In his August 9 public statement, Truman declared, "We have used (the atomic bomb) in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans."
Asserting that dropping the bomb saved more Japanese lives than it killed and incinerated borders on the verges of propaganda.
When the Hiroshima City Council wrote a letter in 1958 protesting Truman's assertion that he had "no qualms" in using the bomb against Japan and that "if the world gets into turmoil...it will be used (again). You can be sure of that," Truman called a press conference to defend his decision to drop the bombs. He claimed that dropping the bombs had spared "at least a quarter million of the invasion forces against Japan and a quarter of a million Japanese" from complete destruction, and "twice that many on each side" from serious injury. He claimed that dropping the bomb "was urgent and necessary for the prospective welfare of both Japan and the Allies." (Quoted in Alperovitz, Decision)
Truman's ridiculous assertion here that the bomb actually benefited Japan would be echoed during the Vietnam War in the idea that U.S. troops had to destroy villages in order to save them.
I suppose the consensus among scholars today, that the bomb was not needed to end the war, is just wrong? They're just historians. What do they know?
When the Smithsonian planned an exhibit 50 years after the event that questioned the U.S. decision to drop the bomb, right-wingers mounted a massive pressure campaign to shut the exhibit down. The following exchange took place on the August 28, 1995, broadcast of "This Week" on ABC between host David Brinkley and conservative columnist George Will:
Will: “The Smithsonian has some people obviously working for it who shouldn't be. They're tendentious, and they rather dislike this country and... “
Brinkley: “And ignorant.”
Will: “And ignorant. It's just ghastly when an institution such as the Smithsonian casts doubt on the great leadership we were blessed with in the Second World War.”
The Smithsonian exhibit happened, but it was cleansed of any criticism of the U.S. decision to drop the bomb.
Formerly classified documents and the personal diaries of key players have been made available to the public in the decades since the war. Anyone familiar with those documents would conclude that the bomb was unnecessary--except for characters such as Will and the now-fallen Newt Gingrich. They have a stake in keeping the lie alive that the Second World War was the "good war," that the U.S. was pure in its desire to get rid of fascism and usher in an era of global peace and prosperity, and that it was purely a victim of Japanese aggression. However, even as events unfolded in 1945, many of Truman's closest advisers and high-ranking military officials thought that Japan was already defeated and that they would soon surrender on terms that would be agreeable to the Allies.
Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Truman, told his biograph |
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Slater
SFN Regular
USA
1668 Posts |
Posted - 05/14/2002 : 10:30:19 [Permalink]
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So enslaving people makes it okay to drop an atomic bomb?
Tell me with a straight face that if Denmark had had the bomb they would not have used it on the Nazis.
You seem to subscribe to the common myth, that the Allies "had no choice".
We had a choice. The choice was --end the war in a week killing 100,000 of the enemy and sparing our own men OR let the war last another year with estimated causalities on all sides over the two million mark.
Secretary of State James F. Bynes coolly asserted in 1947. … Churchill… Truman declared, "We have used (the atomic bomb) in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans."
I'm not sure why you put these quotes here as they seem to be arguing my side of this debate. Surely if anyone knew the reasons, necessities and purposes behind Allied actions during the Second World War it was these three.
Asserting that dropping the bomb saved more Japanese lives than it killed and incinerated borders on the verges of propaganda.
The propose was to spare American lives. If fewer Japanese had to be killed as a side effect that's just icing on the cake.
Who do you think these Japanese are? You give the impression that you have some strange racial stereotype. The shuffling and giggling Geisha. The Kung Fu master who would never hurt a fly. Cherry blossoms in the spring.
Do you think they would roll over and play dead like an Asian version of France? These guys are a bunch of tough Mother F---er's. They were already using themselves as human bombs. They had no intention of giving up.
Do you think that the people who were incinerated by the A-bomb are any "deader" than they would be if they were shot or bayoneted or starved to death because they wouldn't surrender to a blockade?
Truman's ridiculous assertion here that the bomb actually benefited Japan would be echoed during the Vietnam War in the idea that U.S. troops had to destroy villages in order to save them.
Now who is spewing out propaganda? What is ridiculous about WW II ending a year early meaning that lives on both sides were spared?
I suppose the consensus among scholars today, that the bomb was not needed to end the war, is just wrong?
If there were a consensus then, yes it would be wrong. But there isn't anything remotely like a consensus among WW II scholars about the subject.
Brinkley: "And ignorant."
Will: "And ignorant. It's just ghastly when an institution such as the Smithsonian casts doubt on the great leadership we were blessed with in the Second World War."
Again you bring up people supporting my assertions. Noted Newsmen this time. Again you show that there is no consensus.
Are you contending that because these guys are honored reporters, statesmen, presidents and prime ministers then they are ipso facto wrong?
The Smithsonian exhibit happened, but it was cleansed of any criticism of the U.S. decision to drop the bomb.
As is only right.
Let's say the Danish National Museum puts on a show about WW II and one of the curators decides to do a section on the Danish Freedom Fighters and the Resistance. But to be perfectly fair let's do it from the point of view of those poor souls in the SS who suffered so from their blood thirsty tactics. Oh how they suffered, those poor, poor Nazis, at the hands of those viscous Danes!
What do you think? Any chance of a museum show like that being put on in Denmark? I don't think so.
And yet you expect the National museum in Washington, only steps from the Capital building, to host an anti-American propaganda show.
They have a stake in keeping the lie alive that the Second World War was the "good war," that the U.S. was pure in its desire to get rid of fascism and usher in an era of global peace and prosperity, and that it was purely a victim of Japanese aggression.
Lie? The Lie?! We did end fascism. We conquered most of the world--Europe, Northern Africa, Asia and the Pacific. It would have been the largest empire in the history of mankind. Only we did something unprecedented. We gave it all--including Denmark--back to the rightful owners.
many of Truman's closest advisers and high-ranking military officials thought that Japan was already defeated
What is this supposed to imply? That some thought one way but after careful consideration of all the facts it was decided that they were mistaken? That the best minds in this country were trying to win this war against our attackers in the best way that they could?
Or is it supposed to imply that archfiend Truman salivated over roasting little Jap babies, can't let Hitler have all the fun now can he?
Spare me this anti-US rhetoric. Truman was trying to win the Second World War and save as many American lives as possible in doing so.
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My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonize with my aspirations. ---Thomas Henry Huxley, 1860 |
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