A-bomb handwringing

[Jeff Matthews]

5 minutes ago, sputnik said:

Just who is wringing their hands?? Who is trying to make you feel guilty?? 

Me!  I am!  Me!  That's who!  Guilty!  Guilty!  GUILTY!!!

[oldtimer]

22 minutes ago, sputnik said:

Who is trying to make you feel guilty??

Duh!  Them...

[oldtimer]

16 minutes ago, Jeff Matthews said:

Me!  I am!  Me!  That's who!  Guilty!  Guilty!  GUILTY!!!

Perry Mason again?

[jimjimbo]

3 minutes ago, oldtimer said:

Them...

A timeless great film.

[oldtimer]

10 minutes ago, jimjimbo said:

A timeless great film.

Always liked ants, except if they are fire ants swarming on me.  Of course there is also Mant, a classic fictional film from the John Goodman film, Matinee, a favorite in our house.

How many of us had an ant farm as kids?  Kind of like an etch a sketch where the ants did all the work. 

[geoff.]

[Mallette]

6 hours ago, Jeff Matthews said:

That's too indiscriminate.  We don't fight wars like that.

Always have...but we have not been in a war since WWII. Some we sort of acted like we were, but none have been fought as a war should be and with a formal declaration. We did our last truly heroic fighting defeating the Tet offensive even though it was very much like Pearl Harbor or the Battle of the Bulge and with Operation Linebacker II where we destroyed the enemies will to resist resulting in the Paris Peace Accords. Of course, they broke the treaty after we were two years gone and claimed the victory...but claiming victory over an absent foe is pretty weak. Later stuff is techno victory against those who cannot be considered worthy enemies. A worthy enemy cannot be fought humanely if you want to survive. They must have ruin brought  to them until  they surrender or are destroyed or they will do that to you. The current generations simply know little or nothing of the experience of war.

Dave

[Jeff Matthews]

5 minutes ago, Mallette said:

The current generations simply know little or nothing of the experience of war.

Thankfully!  I would not have wanted to be raised while the world was at war.  

[Mallette]

21 hours ago, Jeff Matthews said:

Thankfully!  I would not have wanted to be raised while the world was at war.  

Of course, I was  not around  for that but all the  adults I knew were and it was only a few years in the  past so was talked about constantly. Never heard a single one say the bomb was not the best thing we did in that war. There was no sympathy for the Japanese. Everyone knew our soldiers gave up  trying to take prisoners as they simply refused and tried everything they could to resist...so we  simply burned the, bayoneted them or whatever. Of  course, it WILL happen again. We've just been lucky. But when it does we need to forget about this "humane war" crap or we'll be incinerated or enslaved. War is about the last side standing, nothing less, nothing more. The victor decides what war crimes are and who committed them. We certainly didn't charge hardly any of our own during WWII even though such crimes were committed on a large scale and daily as the war went on. Yes, their was Calley in Vietnam, but we darned near "humaned" ourselves to death there and left the dirty tricks to the enemy for the most part. Having been there, I certainly know many who committed such "crimes" but fully understand why the did what they did. Calley was a real war criminal and the officer who put his Huey between Calley and the South Viets was a true hero. 

Dave

[Bosco-d-gama]

11 hours ago, Mallette said:

Always have...but we have not been in a war since WWII. Some we sort of acted like we were, but none have been fought as a war should be and with a formal declaration. We did our last truly heroic fighting defeating the Tet offensive even though it was very much like Pearl Harbor or the Battle of the Bulge and with Operation Linebacker II where we destroyed the enemies will to resist resulting in the Paris Peace Accords. Of course, they broke the treaty after we were two years gone and claimed the victory...but claiming victory over an absent foe is pretty weak. Later stuff is techno victory against those who cannot be considered worthy enemies. A worthy enemy cannot be fought humanely if you want to survive. They must have ruin brought  to them until  they surrender or are destroyed or they will do that to you. The current generations simply know little or nothing of the experience of war.

Dave

The current generations ‘know’ and sadly ‘believe’ what they’ve been taught/indoctrinated about pretty much anything, wars included. Many of these same folks will proclaim that those who do not learn from history are bound to repeat it. Yet they do not have any practical grasp on history......  just academic perspectives based on theory more than reality. We will see many ‘well intended’ repeats of history in many of life’s arenas.

[Mallette]

23 minutes ago, Bosco-d-gama said:

The current generations ‘know’ and sadly ‘believe’ what they’ve been taught/indoctrinated about pretty much anything, wars included.

Agreed. Real wars are battles to survive, not police actions. The American way of total war was proven by Sherman. Fact is that Sherman loved the south and its people. However, his job was to quell the rebellion and he killed every soldier or sympathizer in his path across Georgia, destroyed everything in his path, and took anything of value with him. But he  publically said that all they had to do to make it stop was to  lay down their arms. When when Joseph E. Johnston surrendered to William T. Sherman on April 17, 1865, Sherman agreed to let them keep their weapons, horses and pretty much to be simply turned loose. That was promptly rejected by the Union cabinet in Washington. Another meeting had to be held (April 26) to agree on military terms only, in line with Robert E. Lee’s recent surrender to Ulysses S. Grant. This effectively ended the war.

Since then, major successes in that level of conflict were demonstrated by Patton and the A-Bombing, and most recently by Operation  Linebacker II which broke the back of North Vietnam in the fall of 1973 with total air war exceeding the thousand plane raids of WWII and resulted in their caving in to the Paris Peace Accords in January. Yes, I am sadly aware of the myth of "...the only war we ever lost..." but it is just that, pure myth. WE failed in that when NV totally broke the treaty two years after we were completely gone except  for embassy guards, our national will was as weak as it is today and  we choose to let the honor of those who fought and won that war mean nothing. 
It really is a downer  to note how few know anything about history.

Dave

[OO1]

3 minutes ago, Mallette said:

Agreed. Real wars are battles

Dave

well we are fighting a health battle as we speak ,  an entire older generation is being wiped out  under our eyes,  can someone scratch me , I think , I am dreaming -

[Mallette]

20 minutes ago, RandyH 000 said:

well we are fighting a health battle as we speak ,  an entire older generation is being wiped out  under our eyes,  can someone scratch me , I think , I am dreaming -

And we are fighting it the way we handle police actions. We need to fight it like WWII with victory as the only option. 

Dave

[OO1]

7 minutes ago, Mallette said:

And we are fighting it the way we handle police actions. We need to fight it like WWII with victory as the only option. 

Dave

right , when  there's a will  to win  , we are United -

[Bosco-d-gama]

8 minutes ago, Mallette said:

And we are fighting it the way we handle police actions. We need to fight it like WWII with victory as the only option. 

Dave

Most do not understand ‘what’ they are fighting.  Unfortunately our leaders and the media have more vested in driving agendas than rallying the country into any cohesive program/mindset to combat this monster. The adversary here is not ‘persons’ or ‘platforms’. Essentially it is the same as the alien embryo exploding from your chest. It is a teensy virus evolved to infect animals and kill them as a matter of survival. They do not care about anything. Their biggest vulnerability is that they are ‘dumb’. They do not work by design but by default. The more we know about them the more predictable they become and we can use our wisdom to help defeat them. But............ humanities biggest vulnerability is that too many of us are dumber than the virus.

[Jeff Matthews]

2 hours ago, Bosco-d-gama said:

But............ humanities biggest vulnerability is that too many of us are dumber than the virus.

Speak for yourself!

[Bosco-d-gama]

5 hours ago, Jeff Matthews said:

Speak for yourself!

Goes to show ya that they do make things bigger in Texas.😉

[Islander]

As someone commented, wars are about money, and it’s become really obvious in recent conflicts.  When ISIS was on the move, their strategy was to capture as many oil wells as possible, so they could sell the oil and buy ammunition.  At the peak of the actions, when they were in control of large areas of three countries, they were spending a million dollars a month on ammunition.

 

Who was buying that oil?  Was it the usual buyers, who just changed the name on the receipts and carried on as usual, not caring that they were helping fuel the war actions one of the most  evil groups of probably the last fifty years?

 

Who was selling ISIS all that ammunition?  The ammo came primarily from three countries:  Russia, China, and the US.  The other ten countries were places were smaller countries, like Finland.

 

That war cost 400,000 lives, as ISIS slaughtered its way across the Middle East.  To them, there were no “fellow Muslims”.  They were Sunnis, and claimed to be eradicating Shiites, but killed even more Sunnis.  It wasn’t a “normal” war, like one country expanding into a neighbouring country, fighting defending soldiers for supremacy, with civilians being essentially ignored or treated as war spoils who can be put to work in the service of their new masters.

 

Instead, ISIS treated the slaughter of civilians as one of the goals of the war, trying to exterminate the Yazidis, or take their women for sex slaves, for example.  This was a war driven by hatred above all else, making it one of the most horrific wars of the last fifty years.

 

However, that war could have been shut down within a month or two, if their oil customers had stopped buying their oil, and if arms suppliers had stopped supplying them with the materiel to keep fighting.  Instead, rich and powerful people around the world decided that it was better to keep making money than to stop a brutal war.

 

The role of money in the war against the Japanese is not as obvious to me, since I haven’t studied it in depth, but money is the prime motivator for most wars.  How long can we stand aside while our leaders put money ahead of lives, especially the lives of people who live far away and look different from us?  It’s time to end our support for wars that settle nothing, displace tens of millions, and kill millions.

 

Think about the next military adventure your country starts promoting, and I don’t mean just the US.  When leaders promote something evil, they’re evil leaders, not the good ones that you pictured when you elected them.

 

All that may seem off-topic from WW II, but it still holds true.  In WW II, militaristic types in the Japanese government were able to convince their public that it made sense to attack the US, just as they had convinced them that it was a good and noble thing to invade Korea in 1910.  We in the western democracies have more freedom and power than the citizens of Japan in the first half of the 20th century, the people of Russia, China, Vietnam, and some other countries, so it’s up to us to speak out and resist when our leaders want to gear up to head overseas to kill people.  While a few people get very rich from wars, the country as a whole becomes poorer, because wars are very expensive.

 

What if all those bullet makers instead made medical instruments?  What if some of those many military bases became health centres?  The money saved would make it possible to improve the lives of our fellow citizens, by making university tuition free, like in several European countries.  And that’s just one example.  

 

I’ll stop now, because this is getting long.  WW II is over.  It’s a done deal.  There were savage things done by all involved.  However, when Superbike World Champion Carl “Foggy” Fogarty was touring a WW II museum in Germany, and was hearing about how terrible the English bombing campaign had been for the German people, he responded, “Well, you fookin’ started it!”

 

Maybe that’s what the citizens of Japan need to remember.

[Marvel]

...what is the point of anyone feeling proud to be the winner, when standing on a pile of ruins and rubble?”

 

― Bhumibol Adulyadej

[CECAA850]

25 minutes ago, Marvel said:

...what is the point of anyone feeling proud to be the winner, when standing on a pile of ruins and rubble?”

 

― Bhumibol Adulyadej

Because they're still standing????????