JTT wrote:oralloy wrote:
Civilians were not the target of the A-bombs dropped on Japan.
Delusion, like rivers, runs deep.
Oral: My facts are deeper yet.
Your "facts" are childish propaganda trotted out by war criminals to make a deluded populace feel good about themselves and perpetuate a myth that is quickly dying.
Quote:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
Robert McNamara
Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command.
Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.
LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
Quote:http://www.math.yorku.ca/sfp/sfp.ex.html
It wasn't necesssary to hit them with that awful thing, Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Forces Europe, and later President of The United States.
Oral: Perhaps. Perhaps not.
We will never know for sure without being able to re-run history.
Wrong again. And you've switched positions with the speed of a person that has but a minute grasp of the truth.
You have the brain of a child, engrossed in a series of John Wayne movies. Historians, even thinking veterans seem to be able to look at the facts and see that serious wrongs were committed by the Allies, which FYI, includes the USA.
Oral: Regardless, the opinion that it was not necessary, is an opinion formed of hindsight.
Hindsight was not a luxury that Truman had when the war was ongoing.
You read right over the facts, didn't you?
Quote:When the atomic bomb was dropped, President Truman said that it was to make Japan surrender without losing large numbers of American lives in an invasion. This has long been the accepted truth. The release of documents and diaries now shows this story is false.
Oral: Nope. All the released documents continue to show that the motive for dropping the bomb was to force Japan to accept our surrender terms without needing an invasion.
"Leave me alone" says Oralloy, "I'm trying to watch this Audie Murphy movie and bask in the propaganda."
You've made it a lifelong habit of avoiding the facts. Sad, oh so sad that the people of the world continue to suffer and die because of this type of arrant stupidity.
Quote:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
Let me go back one moment. In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves in the skin of the Soviets. In the case of Vietnam, we didn't know them well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil war.
What makes us omniscient? Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe that we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. Not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning.
Were those who issued the approval to use Agent Orange criminals? Were they committing a crime against humanity? Let's look at the law. Now what kind of law do we have that says these chemicals are acceptable for use in war and these chemicals are not. We don't have clear definitions of that kind. I never in the world would have authorized an illegal action. I'm not really sure I authorized Agent Orange. I don't remember it, but it certainly occurred, the use of it occurred while I was Secretary.
Quote:They believed that if they allowed the Japanese to retain the Emperor, as they later agreed to, the Japanese would accept American terms of surrender.
Oral: One guy, Grew, proposed that Japan would surrender if we guaranteed that Hirohito's son could be a figurehead emperor (meaning that Hirohito would be deposed), but few were interested in giving Japan any such guarantee.
I doubt many people wasted much time on wondering whether Japan would surrender if only we gave them a guarantee that we had no intention of ever giving them.
Excuse me for being so frank, but you're a blithering idiot. That's exactly what happened. Japan retained their emperor.
Quote:Other reasons, such as a racist disregard for Japanese life, are also important.
Oral: What was important was avoiding an invasion that would cost a lot of American lives.
You've forgotten to include the propaganda piece about wanting to save millions of Japanese lives. It always boils down to only Americans, doesn't it? In fact, all civilized countries long ago agreed that no country can do as it wishes simply to save its own citizens lives. There are rules, there is always to be "proportionality".
Again, that's the current theme that gets daily play in Iraq. There's no thought given to the thousands upon thousands that you kill. Killing people is no problem when you're saving them for democracy. What irony, what pathetic irony.
Quote:These facts are shocking. They show that the post-war economic and technological order founded by America and its Allies started with an act of injustice to rival, in nature if not in scale, those of Stalin or Hitler. They call into question the moral basis of our society.
Oral: Balderdash!
What a dynamite set of facts you've presented, Oralloy. And this last argument, I'm convinced.
Go back and read my last paragraph, above. It doesn't matter to you and the rest of the unthinking just how many are killed but you can whine and kvetch when it happens to your own.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that American lives are any less important. They are of EQUAL importance to every other citizen of this planet. I'm merely pointing out the stunning hypocrisy. This isn't a new thing either.
Quote:Fifty years of brazen lying, misinformation, distortion, indirection, and partial or delayed release of documents by the Allied governments has suppressed these facts.
Oral: So far, these quotes have provided no facts to avoid.
And you haven't gone to the links nor have you ever read anything that wasn't John Wayne approved.
Quote:
Terrorists target civilians. Civilians were not the target of the A-bombs.
I'll repeat an extremely pertinent quote because you probably missed it. If you gloss over it this time, scroll up and read the first one.
Quote:
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War
Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan? And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities. 58% of Yokohama. Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland. 58% of Cleveland destroyed. Tokyo is roughly the size of New York. 51% percent of New York destroyed. 99% of the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama. 40% of the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya. This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which by the way was dropped by LeMay's command. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.
Quote:This followed by less than a month the infamous firebombing of the German city of Dresden, on February 13-14, 1945.
Despite its humanitarian pretenses, the American military was demonstrating in these actions that it was capable of acting just as brutally as Germany or Japan in the conduct of war.
Oral: It should be noted that the burning of Dresden, and of other German cities, was a UK act, not a US act.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
Once the targets had been agreed at Yalta, the Combined Strategic Targets Committee, SHAEF (Air), informed the USAAF and the RAF Bomber commands that Dresden was among the targets selected to degrade German lines of communication. Their authority to do this came directly from the Western Allies' Combined Chiefs of Staff.
The Combined Chiefs of Staff (CCS) was the supreme military command for the western Allies during World War II. It was a body constituted from the British Chiefs of Staff Committee and the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff.
JTT wrote:Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities
Oral: Most of the Japanese cities that were napalmed suffered a low fatality rate.
It's going to take me some time to go through all of the facts you've provided from that astute brain of yours and at least as long to review your sources.
Quote:
http://www.ditext.com/japan/napalm.html
McNamara's comment on the bombing was this: LeMay said that "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." "And I think he's right," says McNamara. "He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals." . . . "LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
We have Curtis Lemay and Robert S McNamara weighed against Oralloy and his dynamite research. And you seriously want to contend that you're not a blithering idiot. Good god matey, get a grip on something approaching reality.
oralloy wrote:JTT wrote:Killing 50% to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities
Most of the Japanese cities that were napalmed suffered a low fatality rate.
It's going to take me some time to go through all of the facts you've provided from that astute brain of yours and at least as long to review your sources.
Quote:http://www.ditext.com/japan/napalm.html
McNamara's comment on the bombing was this: LeMay said that "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." "And I think he's right," says McNamara. "He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals." . . . "LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?"
We have Curtis Lemay and Robert S McNamara weighed against Oralloy and his dynamite research. And you seriously want to contend that you're not a blithering idiot. Good god matey, get a grip on something approaching reality.
Everything you stated was contradicted, in spades, by other Americans, knowledgeable Americans who were truly in the thick of things.
You'd look far less ridiculous if you were to drop the swaggering John Wayne attitude and own up to the facts.
