LeMay who stirred up all the trouble in the 1960s. Didn't he run with Goldwater? LeMay elected a Democrat! His remarks were so silly and imprudent. What a small world.
Was droping bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 evil?
by new hope and happiness 108 Replies latest jw friends
-
new hope and happiness
i started this thread based on a picture i saw of a mother holding a child as she fled the bomb. So what a great site this is ...so many answers to a subject i was ignorent on. Now reading the thread i ask myself was America the devil? Or was it two sixes and nine. Anyway my thought is so many of those children who were bombed were children with childish thoughts. Yet they never grew old and missed summer vacations with mum and dad because they were killed in that nightmarish, hellisj experience. If Truman didnt fuck up, tjen America did and if America didn't HUMANItY did...but i tell you what, i once justified this EVIL ...i called it Armageddon. uggggggg
-
Bart Belteshassur
James Brown - Have you got a name of the passeger ship involved, interested in that comment?
BB
-
James Brown
Bart.
The Lusitania.
-
Finkelstein
It bares to keep in mind that Japan was invading much of the surrounding countries in Asia including China and causing enormous damage to those countries.
Japan was very much the aggressor in that part of the world, so there was a bit of appropriately deemed retribution to be paid for that aggression.
Historically Hiroshima and Nagasaki were actions of showing the power of theses bombs but also as a point of retribution for what Japan had done in the previous years.
.
The decision was made with the initiative of abruptly stopping the war and with the intent of not having any further US military casualties.
The US could have pressed on by using conventional military armament by the cost in lives would have been knowingly greater.
.
Those particular bombings also showed to the world just how destructive they were which inadvertently kept certain nations from actually going to war from
the knowing power and capability of nuclear armament.
-
prologos
Yes, the lesser of 3 evils, and
It was the leader's families that would be the next targets in a nuclear exchange, It was no longer the rank& File that were burned to a crisp.
The leaders had become the prime targets, that gave them this epiphany of restraint.
Had the war dragged on without those new means, the victims would have died similar deaths anyway.
-
Frazzled UBM
I have been to the Hiroshima Peace Museum - it is very moving. The killing and inflicting of radiation sickness on thousands of innocent people including children was morally repugnant.
BUT I do not agree with the concept that man is evil. Man is capable of both great cruelty and savagery and also great humanity, compassion and self-sacrifice. To say man is either basically evil or basically good is an oversimplification.
-
new hope and happiness
Frazzled to make my point may i say:-
Your above statement was false.
Now if your above statement was false, that must also be a TRUE statement.
Yes i agree with you " basically evil or good is an over simplification"
-
Bart Belteshassur
JB - The Lusitania was sung in 1915, and America did not enter the war until 1917. This event had little to do with America entering the second world war I am afraid, so I don't really get the point of bringing it up.
BB
-
Frazzled UBM
Good and evil are moral concepts - they result from humans applying values to behaviour and making moral judgements. The debate on this thread reflects that. Is there behaviour that is 'inherently evil'? This is an interesting question - while morality varies a lot between cultures there appears to be a consensus that murder not in self-defence is wrong unless it is sanctioned by the State (war or the death penatly). Is this a natural law or is it a form of societal self-preservation - i.e. our mutual security dictates that we prohibit murder. The fact that we have a form of State-sanctioned murder suggests the latter.