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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:
As for as "Liberal" education and "Indoctrination", lemme remind you that of the scientists who designed the bomb, Oppenheimer was a liberal who made an honest, concerted effort to forestall a nuclear arms race and potential nuclear war, and this got him pilloried, his security clearance revoked, and more or less run out of town on a rail.

Teller, on the other hand, was a rightwing nutter, a nihilist, and muchlike Billy Gates, a master at jacking other peoples ideas and claiming them as his own.

This is a guy who delighted in sandbagging Oppenheimer (who testified against his security clearance, in fact) even at the cost of slowing the research, and was in fact too cowardly to even attend the test of the bomb he helped design.

This is a guy so nuts he wanted to use nukes to excavate oil and coal resources, without even the common sense to realize how lunatic that was.
(See Also: Operation PLOWSHARE, Project CHARIOT)

And yet, even though Teller was OBVIOUSLY insane, which of the two did the Government honor more?

So if the "Liberals" you despise so much are so very horrible, then perhaps you'd like to explain to us why it is your so-called "Conservative" breathren who endlessly cover the world in violence and bloodshed, ehe ?

I don't like either end, but I'd rather have a plague of spotted owls than a dead radiactive wasteland.

-Frem

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Hey you...yes you...angry nasty guy.....my reference to "liberal, etc." was concerning the disgusting fact that Japanese kids don't know about these events that took place in their own cities....their education system has all but eliminated references to those events...and that is very sad indeed.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
First...utterly amazing that so many Japanese youths, even those who live in those cities, do not know about the 2 atomic bombs dropped on their cities in 1945...they don't know???...they have no clue???? How can that possibly be??? They reminded me of our own liberally educated and indocrinated kids today.
Next....what a horror show! Beyond belief! We had NO IDEA of what was going to happen there...NO IDEA!!! Perhaps the 2 single greatest crimes against innocent civilians in all history....un-bearable to watch and listen to the survivor's testimony. No one can know, hopefully no one will ever know what they endured for years and years. You cannot watch this without crying & cringing, and questioning everything you ever learned in school about Truman et al's decisions to drop the 2 bombs. I salute the filmmaker for making such an honest, personal, and enlightening educational program, and I could never find any adequate words to express my feelings for the survivors and their families.

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Jong, You otta watch a documentary called "The Fog of War". It is the partial memoirs of Robert MacNamera, the secretary of defense for Kennedy and Johnson. He also happened to work for General Curtis Lemay, one of theee most bloodthirsty military leaders ever in terms of civilian body counts, effective though. He was an Air Corp General in the Pacific and was the one who ordered incendiary (fire) bombs to be dropped all over civilian areas of Japan after we took Iwo Jima. LeMay's bombing campaigns were trying for the Dresden Effect. My point is, LeMay leveled most of Japan's cities and killed 10 times as many innocent Japanese with conventional weapons before they used the A Bomb, the only diff to the Japanese was some radiation, and getting zapped with few milli rads was only one of the many many horrfic ways to die in Japan at that time. As for the Japanese, why even categorize the meathods used to slaughter thier countrymen, women, and children. We dwell on it in the US cuz it's our success. I've done business with the Japanese, and they don't celebrate or dwell on thier failures or past sufferings, that would be a bummer.

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Originally posted by MalBadInLatin:

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
First...utterly amazing that so many Japanese youths, even those who live in those cities, do not know about the 2 atomic bombs dropped on their cities in 1945...they don't know???...they have no clue???? How can that possibly be??? They reminded me of our own liberally educated and indocrinated kids today.
Next....what a horror show! Beyond belief! We had NO IDEA of what was going to happen there...NO IDEA!!! Perhaps the 2 single greatest crimes against innocent civilians in all history....un-bearable to watch and listen to the survivor's testimony. No one can know, hopefully no one will ever know what they endured for years and years. You cannot watch this without crying & cringing, and questioning everything you ever learned in school about Truman et al's decisions to drop the 2 bombs. I salute the filmmaker for making such an honest, personal, and enlightening educational program, and I could never find any adequate words to express my feelings for the survivors and their families.

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Jong, You otta watch a documentary called "The Fog of War". It is the partial memoirs of Robert MacNamera, the secretary of defense for Kennedy and Johnson. He also happened to work for General Curtis Lemay, one of theee most bloodthirsty military leaders ever in term of civilian body counts, effective though. He was an Air Corp General in the Pacific and was the one who ordered incendiary (fire) bombs to be dropped all over civilian areas of Japan after we took Iwo Jima. LeMay's bombing campaigns were trying for the Dresden Effect. My point is, LeMay leveled most of Japan's cities and killed 10 times as many innocent Japanese with conventional weapons before they used the A Bomb, the only diff to the Japanese was some radiation, and getting zapped with few milli rads was only one of the many many horrfic ways to die in Japan at that time. As for the Japanese, why even categorize the meathods used to slaughter thier countrymen, women, and children. We dwell on it in the US cuz it's our success. I've done business with the Japanese, and they don't celebrate or dwell on thier failures or past sufferings, that would be a bummer.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
the hard reality that even before the bombs were dropped Japan had all but officially surrendered, had no planes, no naval vessels, etc left, no ability to wage war or defend themselves other than from caves on the island.

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but back then all we could accept was unconditional surrender

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and Truman was convinced an invasion of Japan proper would cost untold American lives

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Perhaps the 2 single greatest crimes against innocent civilians in all history....You cannot watch this without crying & cringing, and questioning everything you ever learned in school about Truman et al's decisions to drop the 2 bombs.

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Originally posted by Skywalken:

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Perhaps the 2 single greatest crimes against innocent civilians in all history....You cannot watch this without crying & cringing, and questioning everything you ever learned in school about Truman et al's decisions to drop the 2 bombs.

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It's an historical fact that the Japanese were worse than the Nazis. They got what they deserved!

You think what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were crimes. I challenge you to look at footage of what the Japs did in China. After that genocidal campaign, their horrific treatment of POWs (which included cannibalism) and their treachery at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were lucky we didn't wipe out Tokyo and Kyoto.

Admiral William F. Halsey of the U.S. Navy said it best after he toured the devastation of Pearl Harber, "By the time we're through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell."

Whenever I think about Hiroshima and Nagasaki...I smile.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:. I think one big reason he did ok it was to scare the crap out of the Russians.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Thank you for your informative and intelligent response. That's kind of what I understood about that time; the hard reality that even before the bombs were dropped Japan had all but officially surrendered, had no planes, no naval vessels, etc left, no ability to wage war or defend themselves other than from caves on the island.

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:
Any political candidate of any party, creed, culture or religion on the freakin planet who even publicly contemplates using a nuclear weapon, militarily or not, should be taken out back and have some sense beaten into em, period.
To use the fire of the gods as a weapon is insane, and a blasphemy of all belief systems, even atheism, because even athiests value life.

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Originally posted by RocketJock:

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Thank you for your informative and intelligent response. That's kind of what I understood about that time; the hard reality that even before the bombs were dropped Japan had all but officially surrendered, had no planes, no naval vessels, etc left, no ability to wage war or defend themselves other than from caves on the island.

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I beg to differ. Read up on the Battle of Okinawa if you want to see the kind of dug-in resistance the Allied forces would have faced if they had invaded mainland Japan with conventional forces.

Plus, the population was so heavily propagandized that civilians literally threw themselves off of cliffs with their children in their arms, rather than face the brutish, sub-human, baby-eating, child-raping American monsters. And that was on Okinawa, which bears about the same cultural ties to Japan that Puerto Rico does with the mainland U.S. (I.E. "not much".) Multiply by at least a factor of ten for any of the main islands.

As for the bombings of August: One can place the blame for Hiroshima where one wants; with Harry Truman for ordering them; with the crew of the Enola Gay for following through; with the scientists and engineers of the Manhattan Project all the way back to Einstein, whose letter to FDR started the ball rolling; and, of course, with FDR himself for initiating the research.

Blame any or all of them, individually or collectively for Hiroshima.

But the blame for the destruction of Nagasaki rests firmly at the feet of the military government of Japan, 1945. They had two days to surrender. Two Days, with the ultimate evidence of what would happen if they refused smoking in the rubble of Hiroshima. Instead, they chose to ignore the inevitable. That, I think, speaks volumes about their mindset, whatever modern revisionists might say.

And had Truman chosen not to drop the bombs? They already existed; the secrets of their construction would have leaked sooner or later. I think that, without the shining bad examples of Hiroshima and Nakasaki to slow things down, that we would have had at least one full-scale Nuclear exchange by now, probably more.

Sometimes peace has a horrible price.


Dr. Strangelove: The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret! Why didn't you tell the world, eh?!

Russian Ambassador: It was to be announced at the Party Congress on Monday. As you know, the Premier loves surprises

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I'm not trying to be argumentative at all, you are the history man! It's just that I don't get why nuclear warheads are any more evil than a biological weapon or an incendiary that kills the same 140,000 Japanese?

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Originally posted by rue:
Somehow I don't find this discussion - who started it, who did worse to whom - to be enlightening.

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Originally posted by Fremdfirma:
"Sarah if the American people ever find out what we have done to them, they will chase us down the streets and lynch us".
George H.W. Bush, 1992, in response to Sarah McClendon.

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Originally posted by rue:
Hunh ??? Is it a crime to gently suggest a diferent approach ?

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Originally posted by BigDamnNobody:
Did the two bombings bring an end to the war before countless others would be killed?

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Are the 'bombs' worse than more conventional waepons?

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Was the second bomb necessary?

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Has the 'purging' of Japanese history helped or hindered Japanese culture and foreign relations?

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Did Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevent during the Cold War and continue to prevent now, another bomb?

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