Re: Nagasaki


[Follow Ups] [Post Followup] [Dodge Power Wagon Forum]


Posted by Sherman in Idaho [72.47.9.37] on Sunday, August 12, 2012 at 16:26:28 :

In Reply to: Re: Nagasaki posted by Denis [69.250.178.202] on Friday, August 10, 2012 at 09:02:21 :

The miracle is that the US, Germany and Japan made real peace after the War. We lent them the money to rebuild their countries so they could build good stuff cheaply and sell it back to us to pay off their debt. The US was gracious in victory and the Germans and Japanese were gracious in defeat, to the point where there really are no hard feelings any more.

The German and Japanese people were victims of their governments as much as anything. No doubt nationalism and patriotic pride sounded good to impoverished people in the 1930s (when the whole world, really, was impoverished) and they got conned into accepting a military dictatorship. I have letters from my grandmother's family in Germany, written in the 1930s. Despite the Nazi censor's stamps on the envelopes, there's nothing in the letters along the lines of "We love Adolf Hitler. We hope Germany conquers the world", etc. The letters basically just say "How are you? Life is very hard for us. We are very poor. We're barely getting by. I hope things are better for you in America."

It's very hard even for good people to stop a bad government. The government can always find ways to create external enemies, spy on its people, appeal to nationalistic pride, and disappear those who become a serious threat. It's interesting that prior to the outbreak of hostilities, there were already oil embargoes against Japan and Germany, and both countries made conquering oil fields a top strategic priority, so in a sense WWII was the first war for oil.

Yes, I too pray nuclear war never happens again. It's hard to believe the losing side in any war would not resort to the use of a weapon that they have available, but if there's any hope in that direction it comes from WWII, when both losing sides had nerve gas but never used it. In WWII there were still clear battle fronts with large concentrations of ground forces that would have been easy targets for a gas attack, or they could have gassed civilian cities. It was a stretch for the Allies to say Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, and Tokyo were military targets. If they were, then surely so was London. A V1 loaded with nerve gas would have taken Londoners into an even deeper level of hell. So, there is some hope.

On the other hand, there are ancient battles in which 30,000 to 40,000 men were killed in a single day of fighting with edged weapons, and in our day, most of the victims of the Rwandan genocide were hacked up with machetes rather than even being shot. So, I have to say that it's war itself that is horrific, not any particular weapon or technology.

For now, we're saved from large-scale war by the fact that any nation that wants to go on a military offensive has to choose whether to attack its customers, its vendors, or its bankers. As long as we're all economically dependent on each other, we're probably safe at least from nuclear war, if not from insurrection and civil war.



Follow Ups:



Post a Followup

Name:
E-Mail:
Subject:
Message:
Optional Link
URL:
Title:
Optional Image Link
URL:


This board is powered by the Mr. Fong Device from Cyberarmy.com