You have to understand that only Americans can be self loathing. If someone bombs us, we ask "why do they hate us?" So for someone of another country to actually justify and defend an American act of war...well, it can be quite jarring in certain corners.
I've always commended America for what she's done in her 250 years. But we're looking at the grand scheme of things, and Americans don't have the foundation to make comments or judgments about "wiping out cultures". Citizens of older nations have evolved way past that mentality because of how close it hits to home. America, on it's corporate leash, is the only developed nation still running around waging war with alterior motives in mind. No one is saying the Japanese were angels. I've always supported using the a-bomb to end the war. But your comment about your mother coupled with a terrible attempt to put a spin on what the newspaper stated; that was enough for me to make my conclusion. Taking a stand shouldn't mean losing judgment. That's one of the sad things about people engrossed in politics, they lose their means for objectivity.
Some of us spent the spring of 2003 shocked and awed by the mob madness that had spread across the country like a virus. Man those were scary days.
Part of the problem with the three days was that the Hiroshima bomb so utterly obliterated communications around the area that there was little immediate info available even to the Japanese leadership. And also keep in mind that Russia declared war on August 8, an event for which the Japanese had good communications about as well as a conventional understanding. This was probably the top concern before the true knowledge of Hiroshima was available.
I was just reading The Clash of Fundamentalisms earlier today and the author mentioned that many people around the (non-Muslim) world "celebrated" after 9/11. The US media didn't show us any of this (or maybe I just never heard about it before today), but people from various countries (again, non-Muslim) were documented as celebrating after 9/11 -- countries mentioned were Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Greece, and China. (LINK: See page 2).
If you can't handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen. You will respond when you're spoken to DD, especially when you accuse others of being intellectually bankrupt. Don't let certain facts fly over your head, then jump on anything that attempts to add credibility to your blabbering. You are the epitome of the self righteous, clueless, naive stereotype the world has of Americans. Try, once in a while, to see where citizens of other countries are coming from. What their socio-economic conditions are. Why they don't accept the big American empire that is run by all kinds of motives other than the ones they advertise.
So people of a lower socio-economic status are allowed to cheer at the deaths of humans? At what exact point does it become distasteful?
As I've stated before I don't treat war lightly and abhor it but there is such a thing as just war that does have to be fought. Its not something I enjoy or encourage.
i remember seeing video of what appeared to be thousands in egypt, saudi arabia and palestine dancing and cheering as if it was the greatest day in their lives. they showed it on the news for a day or so then quickly brushed it aside. and ironically, it was tehran where they held candlelight vigils. as far as the 3 days b/t the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki, i think many historians say that it really wasnt enough time for japan to comprehend what had happend to them, let alone enough time for them to properly respond. the u.s. had estimated that it would have cost 1 million men to invade japan so there is a justification there for using the 1st bomb, but many would argue that the 2nd one was dropped out of a sense of revenge. and also to intimidate the russians - i would argue that the cold war officially began w/ the the first bomb dropped.
Here’s another related bit of information that may be relevant to your discussion. Earlier that year FDR had been elected to his 4th term as president. He had been president for 12 years, since 1933, but he was in ill health and within a few months he died in office. For reasons I can’t remember he had a new Vice President for that term, and in those days VPs were often selected for political reasons. Truman was selected because he appealed to certain groups and that appeal helped FDR win the election, but he was not someone who FDR knew very well or who he confided in. In fact he confided in him so little that when FDR died he had not told Truman about the existence of the atomic bomb or the Manhattan Project. The first time Truman learned of the existence of the bomb was after he became president, less than 4 months before he had to make the decision about whether or not to drop it on Japan. Another interesting side note is that Stalin knew more about the bomb at that point than Truman did, because Stalin’s spies had infiltrated the Manhattan Project, the program that Truman didn’t even know existed while he was Vice President of the United States. This is the kind of thing that, when it came out, made Americans very paranoid about “communism”, by which they meant Stalin and the Soviet Union, and you see remnants of the ensuing intense anti-communism and anti-socialism rhetoric, which lasted throughout the Cold War, even today. If you’ve ever wondered why some Americans rant and rave about communism so much, the root of that dates back to the end of WWII and the beginning of the Cold War.
So, Americans didn't really know what happened. They didn't get to watch Hiroshima get blown off the map the way Palestinians could watch the WTC crumble. But, if they had been able to see it, Americans would certainly have been dancing in the streets to celebrate Hiroshima. I have no doubt. People around the world are the same.
Poppycock. Ever heard of the Wobblies? The Red Scare? Ever read much about the Industrial Revolution? The Great Depression? If anything, America's fear of Communism grew out of corporate responses to the labor movement and latched on to fears about the Russian bomb to further the paranoia.
I’ll accept that, but I think that the events at end of WWII and on though the Cold War took the fear and rhetoric in the US far beyond what existed in any other western country. And I think the fact that the US still doesn’t have a single payer government run health care system, and that the opposition to one features prominently talk about “socialized medicine”, shows just how deeply that rhetoric rooted itself into the American psyche. That’s not true of every American, of course, or even most of you, but it seems to be present in enough people that it has had a major impact on political decisions.
Well DUH !!! I travel the world all the time...do you? If Americans are dancing in the streets over other innocent citizens death than they fall into the same category. No one should be dancing about a tragedy that takes innocent human lives. But this thread is a joke, it is an attempt to point fingers and make a correlation between the A-bomb and 9-11 and people's reactions to it. You can not compare different eras....it is not apples to apples, and this thread was intellectually bankrupt because it was attempting to justify one set of idiots by pointing fingers and saying...SEE they did it too. Two wrongs do not make a right. Those people would be in the same category as everyone else....innocent people dying should NEVER be celebrated.... I do agree that people all over the world are the same, by nature..... Those that have the freedom to think for themselves and don't have total government control are especially similar. DD
thanks all for the info (thanks Grizzled for that bit of info specifically, very interesting). Dadakota, grow up dude. I apologized for the miscommunication minutes after your post. This was not a fingerpointing exercise till you made it one. Thank God anyone in this thread can see the difference in responses after your first post and before. Regardless I won't get drawn into your silly "I dont care but, but, but..." argument. I don't feel the need to justify murder or war on any front, to make it seems less or more important. To me the only acceptable war is in self-defense and should stop when you don't need to defend yourself anymore. Other than that, it's all the same bull****. I guess I'd rather be intellectually bankrupt than morally bankrupt. My interest is purely in the HUMAN way of thinking regarding war-related deaths. Try to understand that rather than waste your time arguing something which has completely ruined the direction, and hence the purpose, of my thread (thanks for that).
I'm not sure you can chalk that up distrust of government to the Red Scare of the post-war years. From our founding there has been an emphasis on the individual over the state that hadn't really existed in any other nation up till then.
We could have a very long discussion on this, but I think the second Red Scare and the cold war rhetoric up to Reagan’s “evil empire” references are really what created the hysterical anti-communist mentality that is present in a certain fairly large segment of American people. I think the emphasis on the individual was not that much different than it was in Canada or many other nations. There were differences and there are a lot of factors that could be discussed, of course, but when non-Americans hear this talk of “socialized medicine”, for example, and they scratch their heads and wonder where it comes from, I think this is where it comes from. I don’t believe there was mass hysteria when the US “socialized” police departments and fire departments before that time, for example.
