This is another “dope slap” if you will as to what is important.
The duty of adults is to take care of and protect children. The political process which selects who will make the decisions that do – or do not – protect children too often does not put protecting the vulnerable, and future generations as high as nationalism, or profit in that political selection process.
While September 11, 2001 must never be forgotten, August 6, 1945 also must not be forgotten.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A…
A moment of silence….
Please share widely!
Another moment of silence…
… but if it’s all the same to you I’ll take my moment to remember December 7th, 1941 on December 7th, 2008.
It is all the same to me, but I do hope you remember the Americans that were killed on Dec 7, 1941. In fact, I’ll remind you.
.. that its not all the same to you by finding it necessary to hold some kind of ‘contrarian’ remembrance. AmberPaw’s desire to remember the date of August 6th in no way diminishes the memory of the victims of December the 7th, but your reflexive need to be contrarian demonstrates an unbecoming defensiveness.
Perhaps you’d get something out of HBO’s documentary White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an exquisitely painful film that brings the unbearable suffering of innocents to the fore.
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p>Sometimes the respectful and mature thing to do on the anniversary of death is to simply acknowledge and move on, even if you don’t have any empathy personally. Countering with another example is crass, disrespectful, and self-indulgent.
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p>Remembering the dead of Pearl Harbor is a fine thing to do–on December 7. Remembering the dead of Nagasaki and Hiroshima is a fine thing to do on August 6.
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p>Perhaps I will. I will see if I can locate it and watch it. But I would not hold my breadth since I have a pretty good opinion of how I fell already, but anything could happen. Have you seen “Letters from Iwo Jima” or “Flags of our Fathers”? Good movies which attempt to show how “committed” these Japanese soldiers were.
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p>You opinion. I don’t advise you how to live your life nor should you tell me. There are examples every single day of people conducting themselves in manners I don’t approve of or find repulsive. But people tell me to be more “tolerant” and try to understand people’s differing mannerisms and behaviors more. Why don’t “you” try to be more tolerant of me and of how I feel about something?
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p>Again, freedom allows each of us to live our lives in “our own” way. Often when I think of solemn things, it bridges me to other sad events. I know you may not, but I do. And if people feel differently, why do you have the right to tell them NOT to feel a certain way? A few days ago they put a scumbag murdering rapist to death. On the anniversary of his death, some may remember him. But if someone else were to tell me they would rather remember his victims on that day, then I would support their choice.
but also remember the living, both Japanese and Allied forces that are living today because of the dropping of both those bombs. The Japanese had already shown at places like Iwo Jima that they were willing to die to the last man. Japan at the time was a cult of the Emperor and there was no greater honor than to die for the Emperor. Had the bombs not been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as horrid as they were, countless more probably would have died on that day. Truman was faced with a great moral quandry. Do something dramatic that would end the war quickly or drag out the suffering. What would you have done in that circumstance?
The suicidal devotion that the average Japanese soldier demonstrated while trying to hold a useless piece of land on some speck of an island certainly suggested that without the game changing bomb the slog that the end of Pacific campaign would have been ugly on a scale difficult to imagine.
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p>That having been said, it is worth lamenting the horror of a world that can demonstrate such a thing as the lesser of two evils.
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p>I’m not convinced that they needed to bomb more than once. And I do wonder if they had chosen a less populated area if the shock and awe message would have been just as clearly communicated and received.
I know the bomb killed lots of Japanese. How about the MILLIONS of Chinese who were slaughtered by the Japanese? How about the rape of Nanking? How about the Japanese abominations in Southeast Asia and Korea?
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p>The Japanese were not going to surrender. The A Bombs saved more Japanese than you would like to admit.
Especially if you were living back then. Many things take on a different light after 40, 50 or 60 years vs. the moment. I think it was clearly the right thing to do, but of course we will find some people who think it was unnecessary. Were there 2 shooters for JFK, was it right for Lincoln to suspend habeas Corpus? Many things are right at the time but then time allows us to examine issues in detail and criticism abounds.
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p>I’ll stick with the idea that the Japanese fighting on Iwo Jima were indicative of the many hundreds of thousands who would have fought to the death on the Japanese mainland.
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p>We will truly never know the truth.
can be found here. I’m no expert, but it always seemed like a pretty horrific thing to do given the many civilian deaths.
… while the Allied marines were trying to work their way through the Pacific Islands, the Japanese demonstrated a willingness to go entirely too far even when things were obviously hopeless. Simply put, when their backs were up against the wall, their ethic was to ensure a high cost to the enemy rather than any other strategically more advantageous option. They didn’t retreat. They didn’t surrender. The marine losses were outrageously high after each battle had been obviously won.
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p>It is for this reason that the “they were already defeated” argument doesn’t hold water for me. I can understand where it comes from, but it must be understood that ‘defeated’ when it comes to that culture doesn’t mean that ‘its over’. Far from it, it actually means ‘now the really ugly part begins’.