Killing Women and Children First
The anniversaries passed with little fanfare in America. No nation really likes to remember its crimes. Stories appeared about the bombings in the German and Japanese press—though both nations feel honor-bound to place them in the context of fascist atrocities which provoked them. But with a few exceptions, the American press has done little to remind us what Allied bombers wrought 60 years ago over the skies of Dresden and other German civilian targets, or over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And of course, there’s no hint of repentance. We were engaged in total war. The war had been forced on us by aggressive, inhuman regimes, of whom we could only demand unconditional surrender. In the face of so many extremes, of governments which could rape Nanking and slaughter the Jews, to win we could rightly resort to the most extreme of means. There was a powerful inner logic driving us to exterminate all those civilians. And so we did it. And so we refuse to regret it. And so we plan to do it again.
The First Crusade, launched in 1096, began as a just war—every bit as warranted as America’s or Britain’s World War II. It was waged against an oppressive, aggressive Islam, which had enslaved half a dozen Christian nations. It ended with Crusaders slaughtering the unarmed Jews and Moslems of Jerusalem. That first V-J day was ugly, as ugly as the second. Because few media choose to remind us of them, we ought to recall for ourselves what happened, in just three cities out of the many bombed in the waning days of World War II. We must decide if, upon the next provocation, we wish to end another crusade with a righteous massacre.
We will have to make our decision soon. If security experts are right, we need not wonder if someday terrorists will pull off another 9/11, this time with greater firepower, setting off a dirty bomb or releasing anthrax on our shores. It’s a matter of where and when. And how we will respond.
Editors at National Review Online famously mused about whether we ought simply to “nuke Mecca.” Such toxic scorn is part of the lingering poison spread by our bombs, by our continued defense of what Churchill and Truman ordered in 1945. Conservative journalists, would not, I think, have quipped back and forth about whether to “level every building, gas all the schoolchildren, and incinerate all the old people and women” of Mecca. If it took the deployment of soldiers, to do over the course of weeks what the SS did to the Warsaw Ghetto, I don’t think journalists would joke about whether to order it. But the quick, decisive nature of a nuclear attack—it’s like putting an entire city inside a microwave—helps us ignore the blood-soaked realities. We can skip over the details of the slaughter, which we neatly hide in two bumper-sticker syllables: “Nuke ‘em!”
Let us remember, before we decide:
On Feb. 14, 1945—on Shrove Tuesday, as the children and parents of Dresden returned in their carnival costumes from the last festival before Lent—British bombers descended upon a city of no military significance, crowded with tens of thousands of civilian refugees who’d fled the onslaught of Russian armies to the East. (Those Russian armies, to avenge the real atrocities committed by the Germans, routinely raped and killed German women in their thousands as they conquered. Our air campaign was meant to speed their advance—thus ceding to Soviet control larger swathes of postwar Germany) Using incendiary bombs which ignited thousands of wooden buildings before sucking out all the oxygen to asphyxiate any survivors, the Anglo-American air forces created a self-sustaining ‘fire storm’ which sucked people into the blaze. In two days, as many as 35,000 people, nearly all unarmed civilians, were killed—a small portion of the 400,000 non-combatants who died during Allied bombings of Germany. Ash Wednesday dawned on a city of cinders.
By August, 1945, Imperial Japan was militarily helpless to do anything but resist a ground invasion of its home islands. Its fleet had been sunk, its air force shot from the sky, its armies evicted from their vast conquests. A nation which could not feed itself was cut off from all trade, and entirely surrounded by enemies.
American strategists, still smarting from the furious struggle of doomed Japanese on Okinawa, warned of the cost in American soldiers—some put estimates in the high six figures—should the Allies attempt to take the islands. Others wondered if such an invasion was even necessary, since their foe had neither fuel nor food. Still others—perhaps those with the ear of President Truman—thought it wise to showcase the new American weapon, developed at such great cost and in utter secrecy, to send a warning shot to a grasping, ambitious Stalin.
On August 6, 1945, a lone American plane entered the skies over Hiroshima—an industrial town of small military worth—and dropped a single bomb named “Little Boy” from a height of 2,000 feet. The atomic blast which resulted killed some 80,000 people almost instantly, and caused the deaths by radiation poisoning and other causes of some 60,000 before year’s end. Lingering illnesses would claim many more; according to the city of Hiroshima, the final death toll of the bombing was 237,062.
When the first bombing failed to provoke a Japanese surrender, a second was planned for August 9. After weather conditions forced pilots to skip the initial target city of Kokura, another lone American plane descended on the ancient capital of Japanese Christianity, Nagasaki, and again dropped a single bomb—this one named “Fat Man.” The military targets in the town—major factories—were indeed destroyed. So were 75,000 civilians that day; at least an equal number would die within the year.
It’s easy to lose sight of reality, when we’re dealing with such numbers. So let’s think of it this way: Every child who died from our bombs was as innocent as Anne Frank.
Our bombing accomplished its goal, forcing elements within the Japanese government to surrender, and warning the Soviets of America’s unmatched capacity for destruction—which they raced to equal and exceed, in the great quest for nuclear firepower which continues to this day. As former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara—an architect of our civilian bombing during World War II and one of our helmsmen in Vietnam—points out, the U.S. continues to target hundreds of cities, mostly in our strategic partner, Russia, with enough firepower to massacre more than 200 million people. Conversely, our Russian allies still target cities from New York to Los Angeles. The missiles would arrive within an hour. They can be launched on 15 minutes notice. Several times, they have nearly been launched by mistake. In 1962 they were nearly launched on purpose. There is no imaginable reason, apart from bureaucratic inertia or blind insanity, for Americans and Russians to be targeting each other this way. And yet we continue—as smaller nations scramble desperately to join the nuclear suicide club.
The roots of this premeditated, ritual mass slaughter lie back in the 1920s. As Military historian Williamson Murray explains in The Luftwaffe, 1933-45: Strategy for Defeat, generals shocked by the slow, pointless attrition of World War I, tried to imagine ways to break such future deadlocks. Deeply elitist, both fearful and contemptuous of their own nation’s working classes, these strategists decided that proletarians were not made of such strong stuff as soldiers; subjected to protracted assaults from the sky, they theorized, any populace would rise up and demand surrender. This theory was almost completely unsupported by the facts; the civilian rebellions in Germany, Russia, and Austria during World War I were not provoked by enemy firepower. But the theory won the day through much of Europe.
While most of Germany’s victories were accomplished through close air support of combat troops on the ground, Hitler threw resources into strategic bombing instead—leveling cities like Rotterdam and Warsaw, and trying to force a British surrender from the air. Thankfully, he failed—as this strategy failed on every front where it was tried. Civilians, it turned out, reacted surprisingly to bombs; they grew angry at the men who were dropping them. Their morale quickly rose instead of declining. Their war effort increased. The Allied bombing of Germany did not even succeed in crippling the German war machine, which moved its production underground. At best, Murray concludes, Allied bombing helped shorten the war by a few months—chiefly by forcing the Germans to use their T-88 guns for anti-aircraft instead of antitank warfare. The atomic bombs in Japan did not provoke an uprising—though they forced the government to surrender a few months sooner, and perhaps more completely, than a total blockade of the island might have done. Was this really worth the carnage?
Strategic bombing would continue to fail after World War II—in Vietnam, for instance. Likewise, brutal retaliations against rebellious citizens would fail to quell guerilla conflicts across the world—with a regularity that astonished its practitioners, who seemed to ask themselves, “We were completely and utterly ruthless, don’t we deserve to win?”
But the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II did succeed in just one area: They entirely shifted the focus of military planning. Instead of imagining how to achieve the greatest military effect with minimal harm to civilians—the supposed aim of war since St. Augustine wrote in the 5th century—generals began to plan instead how to preserve their military forces by threatening to obliterate whole cities. Looked at from the sanest perspective—that of the helpless citizens caught up in the frenzy of war—the duty of soldiers on both sides is to resolve the military decision at minimal cost in civilian life. By deciding to kill several hundred thousand Japanese citizens, in order to spare American troops, we reversed the logic of combat, making civilians hostages to the well-being of men under arms. This hellish inversion defined the Cold War—in which relatively few Soviet or American soldiers would die (save in conflicts like Korea), while the entire populations of both countries stood always an hour or so away from extermination.
It is not surprising that soldiers, who are only human, might come up with such a strategy. What’s shocking is that we civilians stood for it—and still do. We really should not be surprised when murderers directed or inspired by Osama bin Laden—from London to Madrid to Baghdad to Chechnya — adopt the same disregard for civilian life as the world’s nuclear powers have shown and continue to show in their nuclear policy. Of course, nothing justifies the butchery of citizens of any country by those who disapprove of its government’s policies—in peacetime or in war. That goes for New York City, where I live. It also went for Dresden, and Nagasaki.
So long as our missiles target cities, so long as we build more “city-buster” bombs to point at vanished enemies, our condemnations of “terror” will ring hollow. And the race to master the means of mass slaughter will go on.
This essay originally appeared August 6, 2005—the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima—at Godspy.com.
Comments
An excellent piece, though some of it is antiquated--we do not build “city buster” bombs, and have not done so for a very long while. In fact, we build no nuclear weapons at all today, and there is a very real possibility that withing ten years we will have lost the technical know-how to reliably do so without atmospheric testing. We retain fewer nuclear arms now than we have in decades, and the number continues to decline. Moreover, despite the rhetoric of certain political figures, we do not maintain “hair trigger” alert--we’ve been off continuous air alert for close to twenty years, and our bombers do not go on “fail safe” missions in which a special code has to be issued to prevent attack, as was the case for many years during the Cold War. I could go on, but my point is that contrary to the impression an uninformed person might glean from your article, the situation as it stands today is really very different than it was during the Cold War. The main point, really, is that the direction that we have been trying to move in for some years is precisely toward the development of much smaller, less lethal weapons that can be targeted at discreet facilities without being forced to hold entire populations under threat. It is actually leftist politicians who have led the charge to prevent such a development, under the theory that as long as our choices remain either armageddon or peace, we’re less likely to choose armageddon. (Having studied nuclear strategy as a graduate student, I’m finding it astounding how little people understand the actual dynamics of this debate, and how many people believe that threatening cities rather than military facilities is some kind of right-wing fixation, when the reality has been something rather different. The Nuclear Posture Review might be the poorly understood document to be punblished by any Presidential administration in my lifetime.)
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The part about the Hiroshima bomb being dropped from 2,000 feet must be incorrect. Per several sources, I understand it was dropped from about 31,000 feet and detonated at about 1,900 feet. http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/hiroshima.htm
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Mr. Zmirak,
“We will have to make our decision soon. If security experts are right, we need not wonder if someday terrorists will pull off another 9/11, this time with greater firepower, setting off a dirty bomb or releasing anthrax on our shores. It’s a matter of where and when. And how we will respond.”
I find the bulk of your entire argument to be inaccurate, dangerous and misleading. But let us focus on the pivotal point of this discussion, determining how we should respond to the nuclear attack of an American city by Islamic terrorists. The WW2 analogies you are relying on to support your claim that civilian punishment is an ineffective mode of warfare does not reflect the reality of what has occurred in the Islamic World. The use of brutality and excessive violence to crush and deter Islamic militants is not atypical behavior in this region and has frequently occurred with success. Arab governments rarely demonstrate moderation when dealing with radical Islamic movements. Syria, Egypt, Algeria, and Tunisia have all faced threats from Islamic extremists and have successfully crushed them without mercy. Thomas Friedman has called this phenomenon “Hama Rules,” named after a city in Syria leveled by President Hafez al-Assad:
“In February 1982 the secular Syrian government of President Hafez al-Assad faced a mortal threat from Islamist extremists, who sought to topple the Assad regime. President Assad identified the rebellion as emanating from Syria’s fourth-largest city—Hama—and he literally leveled it, pounding the fundamentalist neighborhoods with artillery for days. Once the guns fell silent, he plowed up the rubble and bulldozed it flat, into vast parking lots. Amnesty International estimated that 10,000 to 25,000 Syrians, mostly civilians, were killed in the merciless crackdown. Syria has not had a Muslim extremist problem since.”
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Mike:
Unlike Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, the US is purportedly a peaceful commercial republic. I don’t want to live under a brutal, ruthless dictatorship even if you do.
Militant Islam is a threat only insofar as we stick our noses in over there, and allow them entry over here. We are vulnerable only because of our lack of will to maintain a traditionalist, majority-Anglo nation, not because we get squeamish over massacring civilians. And do you actually believe ruthless carpet-bombing would solve the problem? Put the shoe on the other foot and imagine the Saudi Arabian Army occupying your town and ordering in the gunships.
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Kill em all, Allah knows his own. They would be thankful to us for sending them straight to heaven. Sadaam had the same problem with a town where someone tried to kill him and he did the same thing as Assad. He didn’t have any problems with Bin Laden types as well. He was hanged as a mass murderer for it but that was just politics.
I keep hearing a Tom Lehrer song in my head:
So long Mom
I’m off to drop the bomb
I won’t be home for tea.
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Senor Doug,
“Unlike Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia, the US is purportedly a peaceful commercial republic. I don’t want to live under a brutal, ruthless dictatorship even if you do.”
How we treat those abroad need not reflect how we treat those at home. I do not subscribe to a universal moral code. Do you?
“Militant Islam is a threat only insofar as we stick our noses in over there, and allow them entry over here. We are vulnerable only because of our lack of will to maintain a traditionalist, majority-Anglo nation, not because we get squeamish over massacring civilians.”
I strongly agree that diversity has increased our vulnerability. But easily penetrable borders, ships armed with missiles and other such dangers would continue to threaten us even if we were a homogeneous people. Our oceans are no longer protection against an enemy whose expansionist ideology makes them want to attack us for reasons far beyond the claim that they hate us because we are sticking our noses in over there.
“And do you actually believe ruthless carpet-bombing would solve the problem?”
It would. Yes. If we had the fortitude to carry it all the way through. But I would only support such a policy as a last resort. I think tactical bombing would be more fitting. For instance, an immediate and overwhelming September 12th retaliatory strike in Afghanistan would have been far more effective than waiting three weeks to send in the Special Forces, Afghan mercenaries and remote control drones.
“Put the shoe on the other foot and imagine the Saudi Arabian Army occupying your town and ordering in the gunships.”
Put the shoe on the other foot indeed. Imagine nineteen American hijackers flew planes into the center of Mecca and destroy the Kaaba. How would they react?
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Mike Gavan,
It is irrelevant as to how Islamic governments act with regards to our own moral calculation
concerning a response. If Islamic governments are brutal, then it does not follow that we can be.
Mr. Zmirak has a great article here. He forgets to mention that WWII ended on August 15th,
reminding Catholics that there is an upper limit on evil.
“Then the dragon stood before the woman about to give birth, to devour her child when she gave birth.
She gave birth to a son, a male child, destined to rule all the nations with an iron rod.”
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Our oceans are no longer protection against an enemy whose expansionist ideology makes them want to attack us for reasons far beyond the claim that they hate us because we are sticking our noses in over there.
Pray identify this enemy for me. I see no evidence of a flotilla of Arab warships, poised to add us to the caliphate the moment we let our guard down. And if you say “immigration,” then we’re talking politics, not military strategy. There is no expansionist Persian or Arab Muslim threat other than the multiculturalism of our own doing, and that can only be solved by a change in policy; levelling Arab and Persian towns 6,000 miles away won’t eliminate that threat.
Imagine nineteen American hijackers flew planes into the center of Mecca and destroy the Kaaba. How would they react?
The same way they react to American troops blowing up their houses. Surprise, surprise.
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“If we had the fortitude to carry it all the way through.”
Read the Morality of Obliteration Bombing by John C. Ford: http://www2.bc.edu/~schloess/jesuitmoderns/w07/resources/TS_1944_Ford-bombing.pdf
Also see Romans, Shall we do evil that good may come? Woe to the man who puts his faith in evil.
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It also occurs to me that if our borders are irrevocably porous and Muslim communities are a permanent fixture in the US, why is that not an argument for treading more lightly in Muslim lands? If we lack the will to keep them from the US, I don’t see how we’ll get the balls to employ the favored imperial tactic of killing the men, raping thw women, and enslaving the children. And this gets me back to the original point: we’re NOT Syria, Egypt, Tunisia or Algeria and shouldn’t be. (Nor are we the British Empire, but that’s a different rant.)
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Senor Doug,
“Pray identify this enemy for me. I see no evidence of a flotilla of Arab warships, poised to add us to the caliphate the moment we let our guard down.”
The present threat is this…Bin Laden and those like him desire to overthrow apostate regimes in the Middle East. They have also recognized that the most effective way to rally the masses to their cause is to attack the Unite States and Israel. Consider what 911 did for recruitment. Michael Scheuer and Ron Paul are wrong. It is not Bin Laden’ message and it is not our actions that have created so much support for Islamic terrorism, it is Bin Laden’s actions, a truly magnificent display of power that gave all young men in the Islamic world a taste of glory. We can thus anticipate further attacks against us for the simple reason that this will help his short-term objective of establishing a Caliphate.
Your argument is also completely shortsighted. Consider for a moment that prior to the 1917, Russia was a backwards, third world agrarian nation who presented no real threat to the world. Thirty years later the Soviet Union was a superpower. Now imagine that a Bin Laden was successful in overthrowing the Saudi regime. Certainly this would increase the threat he would present to the United States exponentially. Do you really think a Bin Laden would be satisfied with just Saudi Arabia, or would the entire Middle East be his next target? And do you think that even this would be enough to satisfy his expansionist creed?
In either of these two scenarios, our current dependency on foreign oil would give an enemy like this an easy target to cause catastrophic destruction.
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Casey Khan,
“It is irrelevant as to how Islamic governments act with regards to our own moral calculation
concerning a response. If Islamic governments are brutal, then it does not follow that we can be.”
Let me quote Andrew Klavan:
“The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them—when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love….Sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values.”
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“And this gets me back to the original point: we’re NOT Syria, Egypt, Tunisia or Algeria and shouldn’t be.”
And this gets me back to my original response: How we treat those abroad need not reflect how we treat those at home. I do not subscribe to a universal moral code. Do you?
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I do not subscribe to a universal moral code. Do you?
Actually I do, even though I’m pretty shoddy at upholding it. A moral code is, perforce, universal.
We are also getting a bit off-topic. I don’t subscribe to the theory that the world’s Muslims are a hair’s breadth from putting us all in dhimmi status even though they’re all twenty feet tall and can shoot lethal rays out of their eyes. But even if they are, you are presenting an equally compelling argument for diplomacy rather than bombing people who’ve never harmed a hair of your head. Again, I fail to see how dropping bombs on places 6,000 miles away is supposed to make us more safe rather than motivating yet more recruits into al-Qaida.
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In either of these two scenarios, our current dependency on foreign oil would give an enemy like this an easy target to cause catastrophic destruction.
This is an economically ignorant statement. Not a single drop of that oil is of any use to Arab rulers if they won’t trade it on the open market.
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So if I follow this correctly, we are opposed to radical Islam, so in opposing radical Islam we level a country whose dictator was also opposed to radical Islam and threaten another country where I am sure the situation is very much the same. Sounds very much to me like Ron Paul was right and we should let the Arab countries deal with radical Islam themselves. All we need to do is make sure we keep them out of our country.
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Mr. Gavin writes: “Michael Scheuer and Ron Paul are wrong. It is not Bin Laden’ message and it is not our actions that have created so much support for Islamic terrorism, it is Bin Laden’s actions ... that gave all young men in the Islamic world a taste of glory.” By that reasoning, in other words, the US and Israel can do as they please with people in the Middle East and expect no violent reaction. In reality, we’ve been doing bin Laden’s work for him by pissing off the Muslim world while insanely inviting third worlders into our countries. What more can you expect of moronic neocon policies? I suspect Mike Gavin’s moral code is that whatever hostile actions the Israelis visit on the Palestinians, Lebanese and others is A-Okay. Tom Friedman and John Podheretz are truly in bed together, whether they know it or not.
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Its hard to believe all this radical religion came about because Abraham had two sons by different women…
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Heeeeere we go again!
Blame the nasty Germans for all the world’s ills.
I wonder if Zmirak reads any of the books, blogs, opinion pieces, talked about in this and other forums?
It seems to me that all he wishes is to see his words in print without digesting a little of the give-and take.
He obviously remembers nothing except his own agenda.
H.F. Wolff
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*Imagine nineteen American hijackers flew planes into the center of Mecca and destroy the Kaaba. How would they react?*
That’s a great analogy—if you happen to believe that commerce does, and should, occupy the same place in U.S.society as Islam does in Saudi society.
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This was a timely posted essay, not outdated as some commentors here have felt, in light of the still widely held belief that targeting civilians was justifiable, making it so in future confrontations, of which Iran is within striking sight (certainly in Iraq there was no concern for the best interests of the civilians left unprotected on a smaller scale), even as they in turn foolhardily threaten Israel.
“Sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values,” glosses over the well-made point of this essay that civilians are not to be less valued than armed men, and indeed have just as much right as the civilians on “Gods side” to determine their own future (which is usually not much different the world over), and not have it powerlessly snatched from them.
“Also see Romans, Shall we do evil that good may come? Woe to the man who puts his faith in evil.”
To repeat the corny, but appropriate, phrase, what would Jesus do if confronted with such a mind-boggling determination toward annhilation that we can sanitize when it suits us?
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Senor Dog,
“This is an economically ignorant statement. Not a single drop of that oil is of any use to Arab rulers if they won’t trade it on the open market.”
This is a statement ignorant of human psychology. You assume that an Osama Bin Laden would care if he lost money from withholding oil production for a few months, more than enough time to completely disrupt our economy. Or are the Marxist and the Free Traders right when they claim everything men do is determined by economics? No, sir, the desire of Bin Laden to bring down the West supersedes any concern over oil trade in the open market.
“We are also getting a bit off-topic.’
Indeed…you will recall that Mr. Zmirak’s article was about what we should do in the event that Islamic terrorists attack a U.S. city with nuclear weapons. My initial response was to this hypothetical scenario. If we are to return to topic, what military response do you advise? Withdrawal perhaps? With a sincere apology for stepping onto their lands? I’m sure that will go over well.
“Again, I fail to see how dropping bombs on places 6,000 miles away is supposed to make us more safe rather than motivating yet more recruits into al-Qaida.”
I’m reminded of a conversation that took place between Stalin and Mao in a Jacuzzi. Mao was bragging to Stalin how powerful his “peoples” army was because of how many troops he could muster to fight. Stalin’s response was to say, “Mao, you are mistaken. In the world of technology, more masses equals more bomb fodder.”
So yes, it is possible that more recruits might be the initial response to strategic bombing. Until we kill them too. And so on. Make no mistake, kill enough of them and they will no longer want to fight. Human nature will always override religious fanaticism. This is something that has already been proven in the Islamic world. Please see my original post referring to Hama Rules.
“Do you believe in a universal moral code? Actually I do, even though I’m pretty shoddy at upholding it. A moral code is, perforce, universal.”
I find no room for further discussion. At the end of the day, there is no common ground between idealists who believe there exists some great universal humanity among men that necessitates all people be valued equally and practical realists who believe that in order to survive and prosper in a competitive world, you must be willing to put the interest of your family, culture and nation before the interests of outsiders. Men like you who adhere to some abstract concept of morality are the reason Western Man has no will to survive in what is very much a competitive world. I only hope we are able to purge ourselves of your kind before you drag us to our doom with your slave morality.
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M.Nucci,
“So if I follow this correctly, we are opposed to radical Islam, so in opposing radical Islam we level a country whose dictator was also opposed to radical Islam and threaten another country where I am sure the situation is very much the same. “
I have said nothing to give you the impression that I supported the invasion of Iraq.
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Cherusci,
To hell with the Israelis.
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Senor Doug,
I apologize for calling you Senor Dog. That was unintentional.
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By the logic of the war party and people like Bill Bennett who said that there is a “war on drugs” and anyone using or selling drugs was a traitor or enemy combatant which by the definition we adopted during WWII means neighbors and shops in the neighborhood are all fair game for obliteration including all guilty people that live and work there.
Even commentators on TakiMag seem to support the idea of going into areas where there are drugs and either bombing or using artillery to destroy them. McCain wants a surge to send in the troops into these areas and take out the “bad guys” and make us safe. Police are already buying APC’s and eying tanks for paramilitary SWAT teams.
We totally lost our moral compass during WWII and have spiraled down ever since. The mass murder of civilians was and is against Catholic moral teachings. The embrace of war leads to the embrace of abortion and rendition and torture.
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*I’m reminded of a conversation that took place between Stalin and Mao in a Jacuzzi. Mao was bragging to Stalin how powerful his “peoples” army was because of how many troops he could muster to fight. Stalin’s response was to say, “Mao, you are mistaken. In the world of technology, more masses equals more bomb fodder.”*
Hmmm. Was that around the time that they agreed Mao would send hundreds of thousands of that useless cannon fodder into Korea to reverse the gains of the newly atom-armed Americans?
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Mike Gavin,
You fail to understand the difference between a justified killing in self defense and murder.
“who believe that in order to survive and prosper in a competitive world, you must be willing to put the interest of your family, culture and nation before the interests of outsiders. Men like you who adhere to some abstract concept of morality are the reason Western Man has no will to survive in what is very much a competitive world.”
Western man has become impotent with its adherence to a morality based on tolerance. It is a morality based on caritas that will save it. Defend your family, yes. Defend your country, yes. Kill those who try to harm you, ye it is justified. But murder whole civilizations so that you can drink Starbucks, watch the NFL, and remain in profligate comfort, hell no. Living under such cowardice is unacceptable.
Western man will not survive because it has shunned caritas.
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C. Khan:
Amen to that!
H.F. Wolff
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkYHLjUfEvQ&NR=1
Watch the ‘cross’ around the neck of Abdullah. The Saudi government is NWO to the core. Al-Qaeda is actually an improvement.
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Men like you who adhere to some abstract concept of morality are the reason Western Man has no will to survive in what is very much a competitive world. I only hope we are able to purge ourselves of your kind before you drag us to our doom with your slave morality.
Actually, I’m a rather bigoted and reactionary Orthodox convert with a mindset well-geared toward preserving myself, my family and my culture. Your militarism and truculence, by contrast, is the reason the US is attempting to act like an empire. And do you know what happens to empires? They end up broke, socialist, and populated by their enemies.
So yes, it is possible that more recruits might be the initial response to strategic bombing. Until we kill them too. And so on. Make no mistake, kill enough of them and they will no longer want to fight.
You’re not going to do it. George Bush isn’t going to do it. And I’m certainly not going to do it. So please give the internet tough guy talk a rest.
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Eye for an eye?
During the occupation of Nanking, the Japanese army committed numerous atrocities, such as rape, looting, arson and the execution of prisoners of war and civilians. Although the executions began under the pretext of eliminating Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians, it is claimed that a large number of innocent men were intentionally misidentified as enemy combatants and executed as the massacre gathered momentum. A large number of women and children were also killed, as rape and murder became more widespread.
According to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, estimates made at a later date indicate that the total number of civilians and prisoners of war murdered in Nanking and its vicinity during the first six weeks of the Japanese occupation was over 200,000. That these estimates are not exaggerated is borne out by the fact that burial societies and other organizations counted more than 155,000 buried bodies. Most were bound with their hands tied behind their backs. These figures do not take into account those persons whose bodies were destroyed by burning, by throwing them into the Yangtze River, or otherwise disposed of by the Japanese. The extent of the atrocities is debated between China and Japan, with numbers ranging from some Japanese claims of several hundred, to the Chinese claim of a non-combatant death toll of 300,000. A number of Japanese researchers consider 100,000 – 200,000 to be an approximate value.] Other nations usually believe the death toll to be between 150,000–300,000.The casualty count of 300,000 was first promulgated in January of 1938 by Harold Timperley, a journalist in China during the Japanese invasion, based on reports from contemporary eyewitnesses. Other sources, including Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking, also conclude that the death toll reached 300,000. In December 2007, newly declassified U.S. government documents revealed an additional toll of around 500,000 in the area surrounding Nanking before it was occupied.
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Dear Sage,
I really, sincerely hope that you are right about our and the Russians’ nuclear posture. This is one issue on which I would like to be proven DEAD wrong. I was relying on Macnamara’s statements in an article in Foreign Policy, assuming him to be well-informed. If he’s mistaken, happy day! I hope that our ginned up conflicts with Russia never reverse this policy.
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OT:
Like the ad for your book, JZ- very cool! I look forward to reading it.
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Mike,
We are not going to be hit by a nuclear bomb. The neo-con technocrats will be poring over satellite photo’s of Iran looking for evidence of ICBM’s (truly a joke) and somebody will walk into a suburban shopping mall, shatter some vials on the floor, and walk out. This will happen, again, because the US lacks the will to maintain itself as a traditionalist, Christian and majority-Anglo nation, and pursues an insane policy of invade-the-world, invite-the-world.
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Gavin wrote, “… the most effective way to rally the masses to their cause is to attack the United States and Israel.” Why lump these two countries together? As the joke goes, one is a tolerant constitutional democracy and
the other one’s a fish.
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I am pretty sure The United States and Israel is a single country. The media is always using terms like The United States and Israel today said ...
If America comes back to its pre-Imperial ideals and brings the troops home and starts living up to all the BS the uber-patriots scream about instead of just paying lip service, we will win the war of ideas. The world wants to see a homily and not hear a lot of lies and self-serving crap. The more we say do as we order and not as we do the more the world will root for our destruction or at least humiliation.
Oddly candidate Bush said we need a humble foreign policy.
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To Henry: The story of a Nazi diplomat who became the “Angel of Nanking” makes for some interesting reading.
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I refer all doubters about the atomic bombings of Japan to the work by Paul Fussell, “Thank God for the Atomic Bomb” in which he points out, indisputably, to correctly assess the merits of the arguments of the doubters one must inquire of their age. If they were too young to have been shot or sliced by Japanese bayonets ( as all POW’s were to have been) then they are not to be listened to in the matter of whether or not the Bomb was to have been used. I doubt Zmirak was ever in the least threatened by bullets or bayonets then or ever. He is just another fraud.
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“...slaughter the Jews
...Crusaders slaughtering the unarmed Jews and Moslems of Jerusalem.
...what the SS did to the Warsaw Ghetto
Every child who died from our bombs was as innocent as Anne Frank.”
In John Zmirak’s world everything is measured in and compared to Jews. To visualize, to make it true for us who understand so much less than he does. Cause we’re stupid cattle and he’s right there along with them, almost one of them. Yes, he indeed is. But not as an equal among equals, but as a useful beast of burdon to his masters.
One day he will see. Then he will look at himself in the mirror with horror and say “What have I done, what have I done?” But it will be too late then. Read Gustave Flaubert’s Salambbo, Zmirak. And Joe Sobran’s “Are You A Marxist?”.
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Mark says “If they were too young to have been shot or sliced by Japanese bayonets ( as all POW’s were to have been) then they are not to be listened to in the matter of whether or not the Bomb was to have been used”.
Surely Mark must suffer from “Old Dufferism” to claim only those who lived through the propaganda of the time, have qualification for critique.
Luckily, history does clarify realities from false illusions of threats, and to those who use their minds to such purpose, it becomes abundantly clear that nuking Japan had more to do with the calculated development of US Empire than to quelling a spent force for defensive purposes.
It’s worth rubbing salt into the wound by recalling that, without US interference artificially isolating Japan in the first place, Japan would have had no reason to be aggressive towards the US at all.
A similar policy is now operated in the Middle east by the US, where you attack an enemy, so he will show himself to attack you, then you can destroy him. The US funds all manner of desperados in Iraq in this quest for supremacy.
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Sorry to ignore the later comments and instead take up some details which were posted rather at the beginning of this debate: “a majority Anglo nation” ? Sorry? Whatever happened to all those German, Irish, Italian, Polish and Jewish immigrants - the “wretched refuse” of the poem?
And for all those who advocate carpet bombing as a final solution: The British RAF became very good at it (Dresden was already mentioned). Their Bomber command was not tried at Nuremberg, because it is not considered good sport hanging one’s own soldiers.
My grandfather was one of the soldiers clearing the rubble at Dresden. He never talked about it. He just cried in his sleep.
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“How we treat those abroad need not reflect how we treat those at home. I do not subscribe to a universal moral code. Do you?”
Need not, but historically it does, as a conversation with Randy Weaver, the survivors of the Waco Massacre and other BATF/FBI atrocities, as well as the people gunned down by the State in its ‘War on Some Drugs’ might reveal to the curious. Assumed Christianity has something to say about universal morals, but I have the same responsibility to not assault my blood brother as I do a stranger (unless to defend myself). I also have the requirement to protect the innocent stranger in the instance of my blood brother attacking said stranger without justification. The ‘My Mother, Drunk or Somber’ principle does not apply. Empire abroad leads to empire at home. ST
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