Haggis_McMutton wrote:Phatscotty wrote:
Dropping the bomb was not a direct response to Pearl Harbor, we didn't even have the bomb yet. A lot happened between 1941 and 1945. Another possibility that could have happened was Japan said "we're sorry" and surrendered.
Yes Haggis, I think total and absolute genocide would be going too far.
I don't look at it like "you attacked Pearl Harbor, therefore 170,457 troops must die to even out the loss of life and cost of property damage". I think we had to right to try to win the war that we did not start, the duty and responsibility not to lose the war, and most certainly the right to defend ourselves.
Yep, agree with all of that. Never said the US is the "bad guy".
It's just that the stuff you said in the post I quoted was really off point and seriously kinda stupid. I don't understand how you manage to oscilate between reasonable views like the one here and the one in response to BBS and really simplistic stupid ones like the one I quoted. Maybe you were angry when you wrote it or something.
Try looking at who the good response was in response to, and who the ridiculous response was in response to. Teflon is new so I am going along with it, but I wouldn't let other people drag me into something like that.
Haggis_McMutton wrote:Anyway, just wanted to point out that saying "they had it coming" is meaningless because:
1. We are talking about scale of response and specifically scale of civilian deaths. People always die in war, but we consider killing civilians to prove how mean you are a special kind of evil.
2. Comparing war between major nations to a fist fight is beyond ridiculous. Surely you see that? In particular when knocking out the guy that assaulted you, you are doing just that, knocking out the specific person that transgressed against you. When killing 100k civilians you're killing a good proportion of kids and grandmas who's main crime is being unlucky enough to be present at the wrong time and place.
I understand the difference, I think I was just talking to someone who did not or else had them confused. Their post was all over the place it was hard to organize any of it, as I believe their implication was that they didn't have it coming.
We do consider killing civilians evil, but like I said about the context of the time, perhaps I should not try to understand either. I just know that after 4 years of war, in a war where just about every civilian back at home lost a brother or a father or an uncle, or even 2 or 3 or 6, that the gloves had been long removed. Civilian bombings had been going on for a long time before Nagasaki and Hiroshima. That does not justify it, but it does show what kind of time the world was living in, and the staked could not have been higher. I guess it's like the Joker said "when the chips are down, the people will eat each other"
Again, the fistfight was just an analogy to a semantic term used "revenge". The principle of the analogy was nothing more than "he started it" and to prove then when you are attacked if you fight back it's not out of "revenge" its of the right to defend yourself. I still don't fully understand the motive of that statement (I think Chang said it) but I was just trying to respond the best I could to what I was dealing with. Revenge, yes of course that is only human, but that is not the reason we set sail to meet the Japanese fleet.
