Squelching dissent

[tomdarch]

Well, No one said we were perfect by any means.

As for the Indians, ALL NATIVES, were destroyed by not only ourselves, but all of the invading east (until the late 19th century). I mean Spain definitely had their fair share of the action, If you didn't recall, Our brothers to the south do speak Spanish.

Again, what? The US was slightly better than the more thorough in Argentina? Congratulations to us! The US isn't fundamentally different, just a bit better on this count. (And, sadly, we have actually done quite a few terrible things..) We deserve credit for being less bad, but we need to recognize that we are just as capable of doing horrible things as anyone else. It's constant hard work, courage and keeping our ideals in mind that, I hope, gives us a bit of an edge.

That's where the tragedy of Abu Gharab really bugs me. Sure, it was a massive blow to an already damaged image in the eyes of the world. But worse, it was a massive internal failing. Any military leader should have known that the temptation to abuse would be strong, and clearly not only did they fail to stop abuse, some encouraged it, and others turned a blind eye. To then have El Shrubbo make that total bullshit comment about "torture not being in the American soul" was just nuts. This guy was govenor when three guys in his state beat, stripped naked, then chained another man to the back of a truck and dragged him to death. Then they went to a barbecue. Nope, El Shrubbo had no idea that Americans weren't magically immune to the temptation to torture. (Maybe, Cheney didn't brief El Shrubbo about the waterboarding and what was being done to rendered people in order to maintain 'deniability')

And as for the red scare, I'm sorry your family fell victim to ten years of McCarthyism. But, No one was killed, and the government has indeed apologized for this incident. (Something the USSR would never think of doing)

1. Sorry, but American citizens did die - thankfully many fewer than in the USSR. Boy, what an achievement. 2. I'm not familiar with the apology you're referring to. (That reminds me of the recent 'apology' that was issued for slavery. I couldn't quite hear the laughter, followed by tisking and shaking of heads from my black neighbors, but I suspect it was there...)

But more importantly, the US didn't learn much from that era. Well, the US as a whole didn't really learn how to avoid fear. But certain politicians sure learned from McCarthy and others how to create and manipulate fear. Stake out the mosque! Sleeper cells are everywhere! Give up your rights and privacy for an illusion of security! In the days after the 9/11 attacks, several Sikhs were attacked, and at least one was killed. (Ironically, Sikhs have way more history literally fighting Muslims than the west does...) An American lawyer was accused of involvement in the Madrid train bombings - one of the "facts" in the Fed's indictment was (drumroll!) he went to his local mosque! I'm not making this up.

To link this with current events: When anthrax was being mailed in the US, an ABC news reporter (Brian Ross, October 2001) went on air with an amazing scoop. He said that the anthrax in the mail had bentonite, and that the use of bentonite was a 'calling card' of, guess who! - Saddam's WMD program! (A certain senator from Arizona also said publicly that the Anthrax might have been Iraqi. Boy, he knows his stuff!) Well, I have no idea if bentonite was in fact used in Iraq back in the '80s and '90s when they actually did have a WMD program, but it turned out that there was no bentonite in the US anthrax. I wonder where this reporter would have gotten such bogus information? Hmmmm... US law enforcement has all the evidence and is doing all the analysis... The administration is desperate to invade Iraq on the pretense of a massive WMD program that no one seems to be able to find at the time... Who would make up and leak that info and have the credibility (at the time) that a broadcast news operation would take it straight to air, with no way to verify the story.... Hmmmm....

On the note of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, let me put the decision in your hands. Either, You tell 1 million of our own men to march to their death in the invasion of mainland Japan, which would most likely result in possibly three times as many Japanese casualties due to the nature of loyalty to their homeland, OR You drop two bombs, that reduce the number of casualties from millions, to thousands, and ultimately will end the struggle more quickly. So, what's it gonna be?

"1 million" US dead, huh. The old version of that story was 500,000. Quite a few historians have shot down that after-the-fact rationalization that we have been telling ourselves for years. Of course, yes, a mass invasion of the Japanese main island was one scenario that the US was considering. But it was only one of many possible scenarios that any military would have to consider and plan for. Historical documents from the planning of the bombings show that the "half million dead troops" scenario wasn't much discussed by the president or top brass.

Think about how the nuclear bombings worked on the Japanese government to bring them to surrender. They were a display of the extraordinary weapon that the US could use on Japan. What was really gained by dropping them on non-evacuated cities? (The US military in planning for the use of the nukes, specifically avoided bombing certain cities so that they would be full of civilians. Nice, huh?) Its been pointed out that the psychological impact would have been almost as strong if the bombs had been dropped on nearby islands or parts of the main island that were sparsely populated... Of course, something would have been missing. By annihilating not one, but two cities that the US knew were not evacuated, we sent a message to Tokyo about what we were willing to do... Yes, it was better than the absolute worst case scenario, but there was something deeply brutal about the decision to nuke populated cities when we were winning the war and there were alternatives available.

And the USSR may never have nuked a civilian city, but they certainly were prepared to with the design and test of Tsar Bomba, and the placement of Missile sites in Cuba (which turned into something you may have heard of, the Cuban Missile Crisis.)

Of course - they were just as ready to destroy the entire planet as we were. About the Cuban Missile Crisis, in large part the Soviets moved missiles into Cuba in '62 as a response to US missiles that were stationed in Turkey in '61. That put US warheads only a 16 minute flight to Moscow. It's hardly surprising that the Soviets sought to site their missiles closer to the US. So what? That's one example where the US and the USSR really were morally equivalent.

One really scary thing about the Cuban Missile Crisis was the willingness, and possible eagerness, of the US military to engage in a first strike. The US military knew that they had an overall advantage over the Soviet forces and were probably technically right that in a first strike scenario, they would be able to overwhelm the USSR's not-so-reliable missile arsenal. Thankfully, Kennedy thought to ask some what if questions - how many Soviet missiles were likely to get through? For each one, how many Americans would be likely killed? Hundreds of thousands... From the global strategic viewpoint of the military, those were more than acceptable losses. Luckily for all of us, Kennedy stood up to the military.

A young, intelligent president without much 'experience' but a lot of knowledge of the world, a captivating speaker, who wasn't an 'insider' in the military chain of command saved the world from a potentially tragic mistake...

(By the way - Thanks! It's been a while since I've had a good rant!)

[tomdarch]

Wow - talk about timing! Check this out:
http://longstreet.typepad.com/thescienc ... o-use.html
Four days before the first test at Los Alamos, the director of the Chicago site of the Manhattan Project did an anonymous poll of the scientists there. 15% opted for the "most militarily effective to get surrender with minimum cost to our armed forces" choice. Almost half (46%) said they wanted the bomb demonstrated somewhere in Japan and then give the Japanese an opportunity to surrender. The other choices were: give a demonstration in the US with the Japanese present (26%), do public demonstrations, but don't use it militarily (11%) and keep the bomb secret and don't use it in this war (2%).

Even in the midst of the war, three quarters of the people who really understood what these things were going to do, people who probably had relatives, friends and children in the military, didn't want the bombs immediately dropped on civilian cities. I suspect that they understood the trade-off between either using the bomb on civilians versus prolonging the war, at the risk of more of their loved ones dying.

The linked page also includes information on the "blue chip" group who advised Truman on how and when to use the bomb. (Hey! Look! There's Vannevar Bush!) They discuss, "the military application best designed to induce surrender." They also use the interesting language, "that it be used on a dual target, namely, a military installation or war plant surrounded by or adjacent to homes or other buildings most susceptible to damage." Notice how they don't mention people. In the leadup to the use of the bombs, the US had avoided conventional bombing of several cities on the main island, knowing that they would not be evacuated as a result. (Many other cities had already been evacuated, with the population dispersed to factories and the countryside.) They, or we, knew that remaining 'target' cities would be full of civilians. But the advisory group chose to use the words "homes or other buildings." Sounds to me like they had a hard time facing what they were planning to do to all those women, children and elderly people. (For once, us adult males are seen as "less valuable" )

Maybe one big difference between the USSR and the US was that the Soviets would be direct and blunt when they offed civilians, and we Americans would use weasel language?

[MSMITH]

“Again, what?â€

[charlie]

I hereby nominate this as the wordiest thread ever.

Can I get a second?

[Yasmeen]

I'll give you a whole minute.

Sorry.

[Brentucky]

I think anyone who thinks they are what they are today because of the "past before you existed" (not counting monkeys) is a goof unless it's only in the sense that you are learning from it (or other senses that I won't go into). Most of us probably would have committed the same crimes if we were born into such time and places and under such dictators. However, so far as I know you don't get to choose what country you're born into or what vagina you come out of!

It is interesting to read these threads though, and if I were educated enough on such matters I would be right in there with you guys. As it is I know I would just get shut down though so I'll just sit back and enjoy the lessons and the passionate responses. Thanks for all the great commentary! It's good to see tomdarch back in business! Where you been anyway?