dropping those bombs on japan was one of our most disgusting lows.
as media lens points out, when president truman's chief of staff, admiral william d. leahy, wrote that using the "barbarous weapon at hiroshima and nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against japan. the japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons".
so what point was there?
(i am reminded of
bill hicks
talking about the gulf war as testing ground for all the recently developed military grade toys for boys, but to believe that it was a test and a show of force is just too disgusting)
the admiral lamented that the US government "had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the dark ages."
(Quoted, Anthony Gregory, Targeting Civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 6, 2004, http://www.fff.org/comment/com0408b.asp)so how the blithering fuck do we get to here?
60th anniversary of humanity's greatest single crime against itself, and we have stupid fucks like matthew pribek telling us that
our enemies are not our "moral equals," and our adversaries always deserve to lose. no, he wasnt talking about something else.he was talking about the dead civilians of nagasaki and hiroshima, and talking about the necessity to see the accidental members of the political construct that is your home country as better and more valuable than those accidental members of another.
clearly he is a wanker.
but he is not alone.
the daily mail ran an article on the 30th of july this year wherein andrew kenny said
Was US President Harry Truman right to drop it? I have no doubt he was. However I look at it, I cannot see other than that the bomb saved millions of lives, Allied and Japanese. All British combatants in World War II that I have ever spoken to, including my parents, described the same reaction when they heard of the Hiroshima bomb: tremendous relief.
i wonder; if we destroyed half the planet in the future would the other half be given pause enough to do something about being the best humans we can be?
or would there just be the usual shit-flinging until we can build something worth blowing up again?
its not that i abhor violence.
hell, i like a bit of violence.
i just happen to believe, like
henry rollins
, that fighting should be like fucking; consensual.
(i'd go further and say it should involve informed consent, but then that isnt as snappy a catchphrase.)
fucking and fighting are two of our most basic urges, and i dont think we are going to get rid of them anytime soon. i think it would be nice if we could learn that "can i" and "do i want to" are only two of the three questions you should be asking yourself before doing any FnF.
"is he or she up for it" is the other.