Post a response to this discussion thread
1. That was not a typo. *This* is a typo: hte for the. That was an astounding omission, really not justifiable by claimed sleepiness or whatever.
2. What Hitler would have done was damned relevant -- after all, what Hitler would have done was the reason that the United States launched the effort to develop an atomic bomb in the first place. Had there been no German atomic-bomb project -- had Albert Einstein not been able to inform President Roosevelt that Germany was vigorously mining and gathering uranium ore and conducting fission experiments -- there would have been *no* American atomic-bomb program nor any British atomic-bomb program, either.
Moreover, American government officials decided to use the atomic bomb on Japan after Hitler had surrendered in large part because of their perception that Japan had, in the ugly phrase so popular at the time, "sneak-attacked" the United States at Pearl Harbor -- struck a serious blow at a nation with whom Japan was at peace at the time of the attack. The facts of the incident turned out to be significantly different -- viz., that the Japanese diplomats' difficulty in deciphering coded instructions as to when and how to break diplomatic relations left the message undelivered until well after the attack on Pearl Harbor was already underway. Gordon Prange's AT DAWN WE SLEPT and David Kahn's THE CODEBREAKERS make that clear. But, as J. Samuel Walker shows in TRUMAN'S DECISION TO DROP THE ATOMIC BOMB (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), Truman decided to drop the atomic bomb for a set of reasons, including:
* lingering American rage at the "sneak attack";
* American anti-Japanese racism,
* American anger at Japanese treatment of British and American civilians and POWs,
* the need to justify the extraordinary expenditures on a weapon that had lost its primary reason for development with the death of Hitler and the surrender of Germany;
* the need to establish American strategic and tactical superiority to the USSR for the postwar world.
Thus, we have to understand what happened -- which is a far more difficult and demanding task than throwing around such adjectives as "savage." As Victorial Glendinning wrote in her life of the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, "To understand is not to forgive -- it is merely to understand."
3. Regarding your other point, that of the relative degrees of savagery between Native Americans and white or Euro-Americans, the rest of this thread pretty much accepted your point, so what are you complaining about?
Post a response to this discussion thread