On Faith - and War- was RE: virus: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

carlw (carlw@lisco.com)
Mon, 15 Mar 1999 12:57:01 -0600

I apologize for the length of this posting, but it seems to be one of those issues in which one needs to present a lengthy answer to make one's point with any clarity. I've thought so long about relationships between ethics, military science and history (and religion, etc.) that I now find it hard to say anything brief about them. But I will try not to let that stop me :-) .

I am in the unusual (for me) position of defending a position that I feel is not as strong as it should be. I usually choose my fields of engagement much more carefully. I seem to have been cast into the role of a non-militarist or even anti-militarist by the responses I received to my ‘wanna-be-humorous ’, sniping from the sidelines, original off the cuff note. While any difficulty I run into defending my position is probably well deserved, the role is not. As a one-time staff officer in a nuclear equipped, highly capable and well-motivated defense force, and still very much a student of military history, I stand with Robert A. Heinlein on the issue of force. "Anyone who clings to the historically untrue --and thoroughly immoral doctrine that 'violence never settles anything' I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking alit worst." -LL Col. Jean du Bois Starship Trooper. At the same time, while completely dismissing morality* as an effective measure of anything, I am partial to and a proponent of ethical conduct, off the battlefield as well as on it. The matters raised in the brief notes we have exchanged about this fascinate me deeply, and I have changed my mind about them many times - possibly will change my mind about them many times more, although probably not today.

I agree that your scenario describes how people have attempted to justify the bombing of civilian areas, but in fact, in political-military circles, this policy is usually proposed more as being intended to improve moral on one's own side, than to impact the opposition. Even in 1945, the evidence of at least 80 years of bombardment had shown that it was all but useless against prepared military positions or defended (and dug in) military production facilities such as those of the Rohr Valley. Even with moderately prepared civilian populations, the loss of life is much lower under bombardment than is generally understood. On the other hand, during WWII, the destruction of property (particularly in older European and Japanese cities) was almost complete, due to the flammable natures of the construction methods and materials used.

Due to the above factors, fire-storming population centers did not achieve its stated objectives, it increased resistance as it lead to the creation of large population segments with immense hatred of "the enemy", nothing else to do but work, and who put up with unspeakable deprivation in the belief that they were assisting their forces. This undoubtedly was a strong factor leading to an unnecessary protraction of the war in Europe and in the Far East, and much higher morale in the German forces than the National Socialists had any right to expect. Again. I know of no senior officer today who would class fire-storming civilians a generally sensible or even effective tactic - and in WWII it had precisely the opposite effect to those claimed in attempts to "justify" it.

In case you believe I am as guilty of revisionism as some of the "no nukes - ever" kind of so-called military historians, if you want scathing contemporary opinions of attacks on civilian centers by military personnel, you need not look further than Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding (Dowding and the Battle of Britain, Robert White) who opposed the idea strenuously when Winston Churchill suggested it, after learning from "Bomber Harris" that 97% of all bombs dropped by the RAF were missing their targets by more than 1/2 mile. Carpet bombing was not a reasoned, well-thought out military strategy (or tactic); it had no military objectives; it was an act of terror and reprisal, born out of ineptitude, incompetence and the inability to deliver precision air based attacks. It was invented by politicians and forced down the throats of the UK military leadership. Those who objected to it, including Dowding, were replaced by less scrupulous operators. Enough of the war records have been released in the last 5 years for this to become extremely clear, if it was not already.

Contrast:

"... Bomber Command only bombs for purely military purposes and only aims at achieving military objectives, any suggestions of attacks on working class or residential areas we reject as absurd and an attack on the honor of the airmen who sacrifice their lives for their country..." Winston Churchill, speaking in a BBC speech in February 1944*.

With these now released documents:

"An offensive of extensive bombing could sap the morale of the enemy provided they are directed against the workers' districts [our emphasis] of 58 German towns, each one having a population of 100,000 inhabitants. Between March 1942 and the middle of 1943, it should be possible to make a third of the total population of Germany homeless." Final Report of Professor Lindemann from 30 March 1942 at the request of Bomber Command.

"... it is clear that the aiming points are to be the built-up areas, not, for instance, the dockyards or aircraft factories... This must be made quite clear if it is not already understood." Report of the Chief of Air Staff Sir Charles Portal, 14 February 1942.

*The only possible audience for this was the Allies’ own populations, and most probably mainly for the British public. The Axis knew it was lies and as the Americans had joined in the strategy of bombing the hell out of civilians in occupied Europe in January 1943, it is unlikely that they would have been taken in by these claims.

After three years spent trying various bombing strategies, carpet-bombing of large areas with a mixture of high explosive and incendiaries was the only technique that did much the political leadership required. in the way of "photographically visible" damage. Which is exactly what More than one hundred four-engine, heavy lift, bomber aircraft would take part in successive waves of bombing of a single town. The first illustration of this reality was the bombing out of existence of Wuppertal, in May 1943, where the (defended) military objectives concentrated in the Elberfeld district were systematically avoided in favor of the (undefended) residential districts of Barmen.

The destruction by saturation bombing of civilian areas, using a carefully selected mix of high explosives and incendiaries was a British experiment which the American's adopted in Europe and used on their own initiative in the east when it was shown during the Casablanca Conference of January 1943 how ineffective the American's so-called precision bombing really was. From that time on there seems to have been unusually few scruples about the indiscriminate bombing of the civilian populace of Europe, German or Occupied Europe. One tends to forget or not to hear how many non-Germans died during Allied bombing raids. I should like to make it extremely clear that I am not discussing the bombing of purely military objectives (airfields, warships, military encampments, harbors, submarine pens, and the like) despite the fact that it is absolutely certain that innocents will perish as a result. I am not even protesting "mixed actions" where the target is for example a car factory, which produces trucks that can be used to assist the enemy's war effort. Even where the raid is timed to occur during working hours so as to make it more difficult to combat the damage inflicted due to the need to evacuate the injured. These actions are covered by the "Principle of the Double Effect." Such casualties are not "deliberately inflicted", but are, as it were, an unintended side effect which, given the technology and other circumstances, means that the side effects cannot effectively be avoided. That is not at all the same thing as a side effect that will not be avoided. The same goes for balancing "slight injury" to my forces, against death and destruction to the enemy. The enemy loses if it is at all within my power. But to deliberately target enemy civilians with the (unjustified by any evidence) suggestion that this might negatively affect my enemy’s morale cannot be used. My enemy might just as well justify his use (and publication of his use) of concentration camps and genocide on the grounds that it will affect my morale. That is one of the reasons we invented "war crimes" in the first place. And either anybody, including the victor must be bound or nobody is bound. Which is the huge danger in the blatantly partial ‘enforcement’ of war crime legislation by the American mono-power and the United Nations.

Maybe the idea of bombing civilians doesn't offend you because they were not “your civilians”. But the justifications for the raids on Dresden, Hamburg, Berlin, Tokyo and Khobe seem mighty shaky to me, especially when I read the contemporary accounts of indignation over the destruction of Coventry (the engineering works that were the intended target there and were a "legitimate" military target), the previous uproar over the destruction of Rotterdam (a vital harbor and so a "semi-legitimate" objective) in 1940, and the smashing of Guernica (pure unjustifiable terrorism against a civilian target) in 1937. For completeness, I should note that there were no firestorms over Guernica or Rotterdam. That exquisite and effective strategy lay for the British to discover, as they had invented the concentration camp a brief 40 years before all this. I am not saying the Axis would not have carpet-bombed and fire-stormed Allied cities post 1943, had they had the power, the means or the opportunity to do so. I am almost certain that they would have, and after the reduction of Dresden in particular, would probably have enjoyed doing it. The point was that they did not attempt it during 1940 - 1942 when they could have employed such tactics, but where military minds were working with “well reasoned strategies” and turned it down as unacceptable.

Maybe those days are still too close to us, and too many who participated in both the decisions and in the acts are still alive and "reverenced". The necessary emotional objectivity is lacking. Too many of us were involved, either personally or through those known to us and loved by us, too many of us were directly involved personally, or involved indirectly. It is not altogether easy for us to gain a perspective that permits us a clear view of our own acts. It is always easier to see the innate wrongness of an enemy's acts than of our own.

As you will read further down, maybe this disease, which makes it "alright" for us to perpetuate "war crimes" in the name of "expediency" while condemning them in our opponents', still applies to us. In the same way as Allied political leaders spoke of "precision bombing" against military targets during WWII; while ordering raid after raid targeted against civilians; in the early 1990s, during the Gulf War, the US media showed an awful lot of "precision bombing" of "military targets. That this "precision" involved 88,000 tons of bombs was not obvious. The other "unobvious factor was that seventy percent of these bombs missed their targets and killed civilians. In Clinton's December 1998, bomb Saddam campaign (some surmise it was orchestrated to keep eyes focused away from "congress"-ional attention) the UN estimates that 25,000 civilians were killed. That seems to be an awful lot of "collateral damage" for a "pin-point" bombing campaign.

I hope I have now adequately explained my thinking with regard to carpet-bombing and fire storming. Now I will attempt to focus on the nuclear aspects of WWII. I readily acknowledge that these decisions were complex, non-trivial and that the ethics were all decidedly mixed up. I also note that social awareness and respect for alternative viewpoints seems to be rather different today from that which existed then. Finally I note that I have the advantage (or disadvantage) of having lived in many countries and become accustomed to many different perspectives, which probably makes it more difficult for me to visualize killing large numbers of people who are "different" to me than it might have been for many senior war staff in the 1940s. The position I took in my earlier note, and I am now defending, is that I hope that faced with the same circumstances, and at the same time, I hope that I would have made different choices from those made by the Americans. I think that my choices might have been more rational. And, as I shall attempt to show, I suspect that to at least some extent, the choices made by the Americans in July and August of 1945 may have been driven more by their beliefs in "differences" than by reason. Certainly

While many Allied military apologists have made the same suggestion as you do, that destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki was somehow "preparation for the next war", or that achieving the same results using conventional techniques would have caused more casualties on both sides is facile. Many formal military historians (and I) would strongly suggest that the suggestion is not only obscene, but also post-fact revisionism. It is well addressed in the article I reference at the end of this note (at http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/96spring/sp-essay.htm which appeared in 1996 in the US Army College quarterly). Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki were in any way legitimate war targets. They were simply "dormitories". Chosen for the impact they would have and not military purposes.

At the time and subsequent to the bombings, the USA and USSR were allies, and while there were some security concerns, in late 1945 there was not the paranoia that characterized both sides after 1948. The US had nuclear weapons and believed that they could prevent proliferation. The USSR did not and was not expected by the USA to have access to them - ever - despite Russian intelligence efforts, largely because of the large number of industrial techniques that were required to reach the point of weapons grade radioactive material production, the very point which seems to have bedeviled Saddam's efforts in this direction. A very persistent and interesting suggestion in this area is that the Americans in fact bartered with a number of senior German officers for their freedom in exchange for information and materiel from the highly advanced German nuclear research program. It would not amaze me were some of this story to be substantiated, as the Russians overran a number of German research facilities but seem not to have acquired personnel, documentation or materiel from them (or if they did, no mention of this has yet escaped from their archives or scientists), and the Americans and British seemed to anticipate that the Russians would not acquire such information. Which is difficult to credit unless the British and Americans had secured these “spoils of war” for themselves. I would argue that the use of nuclear weapons was not required and that the Americans knew this, as the Japanese were already prepared to surrender prior to Hiroshima after the Americans had dropped the requirement to abolish the Emperor's throne from the terms offered in the Potsdam Declaration. We have known since 1998 that the Russians had access to American nuclear test material that clearly demonstrated the capacity of nuclear weapons, (and that the Americans knew it and knew how much of an impact it had had on the USSR), so a "demonstration" was not needed. I would consider your suggestion that Truman and his war cabinet considered executing a minimum of 200,000 civilians as an "exhibition" is fairly offensive, even if they were "the enemy" and "only Japanese", even for the immensely racist America of the time. The idea that a nation would consider this, and simultaneously push for the Nuremberg trials of German military and political leaders for seems more hypocritical than even the English are credited for.
I would also take issue with the suggestion that military actions are usually "carefully reasoned". Most tactics are figured out in the field and are about as far from reason as it gets. All plans get screwed up in translation from the map to the terrain, and by the impact with the reality of the stressed out non-super-heroes that have to implement the ideas, almost always under less than ideal circumstances. In my opinion, by 1942 there was not a leader on either the Allies or Axis staff who was not certifiably, if not clinically, insane. The cumulative stress involved in long, high-intensity wars is very difficult for people who have not been exposed to it to understand. Certainly the quiet analysis of strategic and tactical decisions and the drop in quality of analysis reflected in their documents makes it very clear just how large a deterioration had occurred in the respective leaderships' decision making abilities. I wrote this before finding the article quoted below, and would suggest that their words, “It was not a methodical process...” was very much an understatement. When I studied warfare we were taught to be effective. "It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand the profitable way of carrying it on." In my opinion, General Staff tends to be very much more competent than their political masters as they spend a lifetime learning to make war effectively. This includes both the theory and practice. Since Sun Tzu wrote "The Art of War" in about 700BCE, we have known that the easy way of achieving rapid yet total victory is to provide your opponents with a way to back down without losing overmuch face. And of course, rapidity is needed if wars are to be fought cost-effectively. "If the campaign is protracted, the resources of the State will not be equal to the strain.", "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare." "In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. .... Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans; the next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy's army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to attack his cities."

It should be noted that Niccolo Machiavelli (1521 Dell'arte Della Guerra - The Art of War) proposed similar stratagems, and as we move into current times Carl von Clausewitz (Vom Kriege or On War 1832), Otto von Bismarck (German Chancellor from 1862 to 1890 in his memoirs), Col Maude (British Military Strategy 1908), B. H. Liddell Hart (UK, 1932, The British Way in Warfare), Charles A Willoughby (USA 1939 Manoever in War), Edward Mead Earle (USA 1943), Lenin (USSR Complete collected works) and right up to modern times with Herman Kahn (USA 1960, Thermonuclear War), Marshall V.D. Sokolovsky (USSR 1962 Military Strategy) are authors whose books I have before me who have promoted similar views. The US army still believes it - or says that they do. A visit to the US Army War College quarterly’s archives (http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/parameters/ ) will give you many related articles. Their links to on-line resources (http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/parameters/links.htm#mil_peri ) are particularly good.

I strongly recommend you examine
http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usawc/Parameters/96spring/sp-essay.htm Looking Back at the Bomb (JAMES E. AUER and RICHARD HALLORAN). The authors disagree with my conclusions here, but not very strongly, and I would argue that the reason that I would come to a different conclusion is largely based on material that has been declassified in the UK, CIS and US only subsequent to the publication of their article, and some of which from the C.I.S. would not have been available to them even if they had had access to US classified resources.

In their article, the authors say, "Sifting through this mass of material, it seems evident that Japan had been defeated by late July 1945, and that some Japanese leaders realized this." They go on to say that while defeated, Japan had not yet surrendered and that various options to force a surrender were evaluated. I think this sentence is memorable "Each option was considered, some more thoroughly than others, between 12 April when Mr. Truman became President and 24 July when he approved an order to drop the bombs after 3 August 1945. It was not a methodical process--government then was no more neat and orderly than it is today--but the decision was taken after three and a half years of a brutal, draining, desperate war." I really would argue that "reasoned" is the last word that the process described here should be dignified with, and that the two keys to the decision were "after three and a half years of a brutal, draining, desperate war" and another mentioned slightly later in the article "Negotiating on Japanese terms was seen as breaking faith with Allies and a political land mine within the United States, where the public backed unconditional surrender."

They examine your theory, that it was a lesson to the Russians - and discard it. In my opinion on fair grounds, made even stronger by our knowledge of how much the US knew about how much the USSR knew. On the other hand, I feel that they raised but have not satisfactorily answered the political problems that definitely (in my opinion) contributed first to the carpet bombing of civilian facilities with the intent of creating fire storms and secondly to the detonation of the bombs of Hiroshima and even more, over Nagasaki (BTW I might have swallowed your example with a lot less fuss had you simply said "Hiroshima" - but you didn't).

Some of these factors were:

The President:
In a letter to his wife Bess, President Truman wrote of his Uncle Will, "says the Lord made a white man of dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I." As noted in the article Truman also suffered from a lack of international experience, and a severe inferiority complex. He had said that the surrender in Japan would be "unconditional" and that America would "pound at Japan" until it surrendered unconditionally. The political cost of retracting, to him and his party, was one that I would suggest weighed more heavily on his mind than the authors acknowledge.

The Populace and American Psyche:
"White Americans" really hated the "inferior" Japanese and general US paranoia and xenophobia combined with a slow progress out of the depression that had raised conspiracy-belief levels higher than they would be again until the advent of the Internet had left America feeling very insecure and uncertain of what its role in the world was. Most Americans probably imagined that Japanese territorial ambitions and an "illegal" surprise attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese had dragged them into a war that was being run by faceless "Jewish Bankers" and “International Financiers”. They were in a state of terrible anxiety. We should not forget that American citizens of Japanese descent (in many cases, of other eastern origins but suspected of being Japanese sympathizers) had been rounded up and cast into internment camps for the duration of the hostilities. Throughout, and even for a while after WWII, Jewish refugees were actively returned to Europe and refused landing in the United States. Denmark under German occupation accepted more Jewish refugees from Europe than the United States did during World War II. How much more were the "evil eastern foreigners" hated?

Until and unless better reasons are advanced to explain the decisions taken than have been provided to date; in particular the decisions taken to attack civilian targets, I think that belief must be held to have acted more strongly than reason. Let me finish this section by suggesting that the bad guys don't always wear black hats - and the ethics of today may be even less rigorous than they were 50 years ago. The following piece, from http://www.psychohistory.com/08_gulf.html (and a horrifying article about American stupidity and duplicity), is from another site and about another war. Yet I think that the sentiment and phrasing is appropriate for what was going through American minds in those dark days of 1945. The difference is that today, we cannot claim that the racism inherent in fighting "dirty Arabs", excuses in any way ethical short cuts taken in waging war against civilians. Our methods may be the same, but our justifications sound a great deal hollower. Perhaps history will regard the United States as the principle malefactor in the Gulf War. It is a concept worth considering.

'Since sacrificial rituals are scripted by God, they have a compulsive quality that make them feel like they are inevitable and out of the hands of those carrying them out. Although some Americans who had had better childhoods-including Jimmy Carter and Chief of Staff General Colin Powell70 thought sanctions should be given a chance before starting the war, Bush rejected proposals from Gorbachev and Saddam agreeing to remove Iraqi troops from Kuwait in exchange for a pledge to leave Saddam in power.71 Even though this was precisely what the war accomplished, a peaceful solution was unacceptable. "There was always an inevitability about this," Bush said as he gave the order for invasion. On the first night of the war, he was reported as "watching the nation go to war-almost exactly following his script-as he sat in a little study off the Oval Office, clicking his TV remote control...[He] calmly remarked: 'Just the way it was scheduled.'"72 America began the war by dropping 88,000 tons of bombs on Iraq, seventy percent of them missing their targets and killing civilians.73 One veteran newsman at NBC was fired for trying to report the slaughter of Iraqi civilians.74 Illegal fuel air explosives which before the war the press feared Saddam would use against Americans were exclusively and widely used by American troops on both military and civilian areas.75 Americans watched B-52s carpet bomb whole cities on TV, entranced literally in a trance devouring images of missiles going down air intakes, hospitals blown up, water reservoirs and filtration plants being destroyed and schools being demolished.76 Soldiers said it was like "shooting fish in a barrel."77 Despite efforts to deny the reality of the killing by calling the carpet bombings "surgical strikes" and tens of thousands of mangled Iraqi civilian bodies "collateral damage," the Pentagon later admitted it massively targeted civilian structures, in order, they said, "to demoralize the populace."78 The dissociation in our heads, however, was almost complete. We were killing people, but they weren't real. One TV reporter told us after the first eight thousand sorties had pulverized Iraqi civilian areas, "Soon we'll have to stop the air war and start killing human beings,"79'

This is of course, the same President George Bush who, when asked if he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who happened to be atheists replied, "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." What would the nation have said if this had been said about Jews? Or about Hindus? Or even about traditional AmerInds?

Which brings us back to the gods. And your comment that "The Crusades may have been ordered by the priests, but it was generals that commanded the battles. And generals don't give a damn about faith, they only care about winning." is simply untrue. Generals (good ones - that is "good" as in "effective") tend to know more about ethics than any priest will ever learn. The effective application of force requires skilled management of men. And the best way to motivate your men is to let your cause be just. Again, this was said by Sun Tzu and has been repeated by every serious military writer since then.

Imagine the president of the United States saying to the abolition era gunmen of Chicago - Christian knights in those days had no higher ethic - that he would appreciate it if they would invade and sack Los Angeles, Hollywood, and Pasadena. The issue of guarantees for a crusade and incitements to war by Pope "Innocent" III had about the same effect as you can imagine an invitation like this would have had. This is the "spiritual" background to one of the Crusades, the Albigensian Crusade. The victims were some of the hardest working, most principled, “nicest” and certainly amongst the wealthiest, people of Europe. They were quietly minding their own businesses in cities and villages in what is today Southern France. Unfortunately, their gentle “communist” belief was winning converts, which made the Roman Catholic Church most unhappy. Who were the executioners? A contemporary poet claimed that twenty thousand knights and two hundred thousand afoot converged upon the Albigensians. They were led by the Cistercian Abbot of Citeaux, Arnaud-Armaury, spiritual leader of the Albigenses Crusade and as bloody a priest as Torquemada, together with a seedy English-French adventurer mercenary, Simon de Montfort, whose purse was empty. The King of France was not in it, at first, only because his terms to the Pope were exorbitant, later because he objected to the decimation of his country.

Innocent boasts that they took five hundred towns and castles from the heretics, and they generally butchered every man, woman and child in a town when they took it. Noble ladies with their daughters were thrown down wells, and large stones flung upon them. Knights were hanged in batches of eighty. When, at the first large town they came to, Béziers, soldiers asked how they could distinguish between heretics and orthodox, Arnaud-Armaury replied with an apposite biblical quotation, from 2 Tim. 2:19: "The Lord knoweth who are his - Cognovit Dominus qui sunt eius." and said, on July, 22nd 1209, "Kill them all, God will know his own." Note that because the punch line is a biblical verse, neither he nor his informant(s) are likely to have misquoted him, and the point of the story to his fellow Cistercians who quoted him was the wit of the abbot's reply. Perhaps the Albigensians were less amused as the rabble raped their women and then put to the sword the forty thousand men, women and children who had surrendered; before pillaging and then destroying the town.

The Pope's behavior during these horrible years was revolting. Raymond of Toulouse, to spare his people, submitted before the crusade began. The Pope had expressly told his legates ("Letters," xi, 232) to "deceive him and pass to the extirpation of the other heretics." Pope Innocent’s brutal treatment of Raymond, without any trial, earned the censure of the Catholic king of France. Pope Innocent III stopped the crusade after two years of almost unparalleled butchery, then yielded to the fanaticism of the monks and the greed of the soldiers, and reopened it. When it reopened in 1214, the promise of Papal forgiveness drew a further hundred thousand "pilgrims" to join "God's Army".

Are you sure that the opportunity for church sanctioned rape, together with pillage and looting which had enriched every member of the previous force, would not have influenced this prayerful, faithful group of devoute and loving Christian bretheren? <Extreme Sarcasm>.

Generals commanding the crusades? No. The crusades were a mob, led on and encouraged by mercenary priests. Which of course brings us right back to faith. And what could be less rational than that?

TheHermit

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-virus@lucifer.com
> [mailto:owner-virus@lucifer.com]On Behalf
> Of Tim Rhodes
> Sent: Monday, March 15, 1999 12:19 AM
> To: virus@lucifer.com
> Subject: RE: virus: Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

>
>
>
>
>

> On Sun, 14 Mar 1999, carlw wrote:
>

> > Umm, no. Before the uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima
> (on 6 August 1945)
> > and the plutonium bomb used on Nagasaki (on 9 August 1945),
> Japan had
> > already told the Americans that they were ready to surrender
> > (conditionally), and had told the American's allies (the
> Russians), that
> > they were ready to surrender unconditionally.
>

> [big history snip]
>

> > So I don't think your example is one of reason? Unreason
> perhaps. Look at
> > the August 10th entry above. Maybe "These people are evil
> devils and we need
> > to punish them"? Sounds like faith to me.
>

> I dare say, you're looking at the bombings as the end of one
> war and see it as
> unreasonible in that context. But they were not, they were
> meant as the first
> shots in a much more subtle struggle for power, a war that
> would not end for
> another 40 years after that.
>

> And in that context, it was a surpremely logical and reasoned
> tactic. (And
> brutal and ugly and unforgivible at the same time.)
>

> Don't kid yourself, Carl, the _tactics_ of war are many
> things, and highly
> reasoned, more often than not, tops that list. Carpet bombing was not
> developed as an act of faith, it was a well thought out,
> reasoned strategy for
> achieving a specific objective -- destroying the morale and production
> capablities of an enemy, entirely. And that objective
> itself, was a well
> reasoned, objectively considered resopnse to the question,
> "How do we make sure
> we win this war?" Now if you simply don't like the power
> that objectivity
> gives you to get things done (at any cost) that's one thing,
> but to deny that
> it is there or pawn it of on "faith" is another thing entirely.
>

> The Crusades may have been ordered by the priests, but it was
> generals that
> commanded the battles. And generals don't give a damn about
> faith, they only
> care about winning.
>

> And what could be more rational than that?
>

> -Prof. Tim

>
>