(urth) (no subject)

[Marc Aramini]

--- On Tue, 1/18/11, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com> wrote:
> You're right: this American (and not a conservative by any
> means)
> considers the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a necessary
> evil. The
> alternative would have been a much larger cost in Japanese
> lives, plus
> an unguessable number of American lives, as we attempted an
> invasion
> of the Japanese Home Islands.
> 
> 

In anything, the biggest most devastating knock out blow has a better chance of ending the conflict decisively.  Just as in Boxing, sometimes that large blow can be more merciful than beating someone up for twelve rounds.  Attrition over years could have cost many more lives.  The nice thing about the current trendy Judeo-Christian majority is that once war is disengaged there seems to be very little wholesale slaughter, something you can have no assurance of with a more non-traditional take or a "purging" tradition (Hitler's, for example, he seems to be the most obvious monster in this particular room, or the older zeitgeist that there is only one truth, one word, inquisition style, and thankfully this has fled with the onset of modernity, at least in America). 

 If I were a minority in danger of being purged and I had to chose an ethos to prevail in the world, I would certainly want either a humanist one that is absolutely premissive and too forgiving as ours seems to be, or one that starts with "love thy neighbor as thyself" with a very very broad definition of neighbor.  The easier to exploit the suckers in charge and avoid getting eliminated, where intimations of heinousness are pretty much ignored until after the fact.

The Spanish conqeurors did seem to assimilate a bit more in their hostile takeovers with the natives than, say, the Puritan tradition, where they just kind of got them out of the picture one way or another definitively.