Well well well, some nutjob terrorists not only kill thosands of people, but they help bring out the nutjobs we already have in the country.
Pathetic.
Fuck the people who did this attack!!!!!!!
A few of my friends are Middle Eastern, and most of them are practicing Moslems. All of them are nice, kind, wonderful people. They're crying with us in this time of tragedy. A very small minority have the idea that the US needs to be punished by them acting on the will of Allah. They are COMPLETELY out of touch with what constitutes being Moslem and being human. My friends and many others around the world and around the country are proof of this. We must not forget that there are Moslems and people of Arabic descent among the victims in this. We must not forget that there likely are Moslems and people of Arabic descent participating in the rescue effort.
In this time, I truly am worried for my friends. It's horrible enough that thousands of innocent people died at the hands of fanatics. It's only compounding the damage by taking the anger out on other innocent people.
quote:
Originally posted by Siegfried:
This is just a reactionary offshoot of the original insanity that caused the destruction in New York and Washington.
As Marge Simpson once said...
"Well Duh"
j/k, hope you don't mind me trying to defuse my own anxieties with a little humor
[ September 12, 2001: Message edited by: USS Vanguard ]
Fuck no! All bombing civilians is going to do is give the message that the US deserves to be hated.
Erm. I might have misinterpreted. Rob, did you mean to frag people celebrating the WTC and Pentagon attack, or the people celebrating the attacks on Mosques?
[ September 13, 2001: Message edited by: MeGotBeer ]
[ September 13, 2001: Message edited by: The_Tom ]
This is the fact of war.
These Islamic fundmentalists are at war, and they are celebrating their victory, just as the allies celebrated such victories in WWII, or any other war - and in such cases many lives military or civilain are lost.
It doesn't matter what side you're on, when at war you celebrate victories, even with great loss to the enemy. It is horrifying but it is true, whether you're an American or an Afghan; whether it's Hiroshima, or New York. The victor celebrates.
quote:
Rob, did you mean to frag people celebrating the WTC and Pentagon attack, or the people celebrating the attacks on Mosques?
Both, I think.
quote:
Rob doesn't consider the mosque attacks atrocities.
Not yet, I don't. Nobody's died, AFAIK.
But let's get something straight. This is no longer the Civil-War era of "Let's go out and watch the battle, cause nobody'll shoot at us, we're civilians." WWII saw the end of that forever, and introduced the concept of "Total War."
At the very least, those who are celebrating these attacks IN America (and other non-Islamic countries) should be deported to these countries which they think are so great.
And the people attacking Mosques should be given rifles and parachuted over some terrorist camp sopmewhere. Perhaps they'll be of some use there.
That doesn't mean we should target civilians. "Oooh, there's a university in Kabul. Okay, let's bomb the dorms, the science building, oh, let's set two tomahawks for the union..."
When and if we determine a government has played a role in this attack, then military targets certainly are fair play. Barracks, boot camps, supply depots, naval facilities, air facilities, etc. If we decide to target any government buildings, like capitals or federal buildings, we should do so when we can assure ourselves of a low civilian body count.
How do we look, if screaming about how particularly atrocious this attack was due to it being primarily being made against civilians, we turn around and attack with the deliberate intentions of killing civilians?
"If you want to keep playing this game, we can play it too, and we can play it better and harder than you can. Don't ever touch us again, because we'll pay you back a thousand times."
Or to paraphrase the punchline of a favorite joke... "We ain't PLAYED 'Cowboys and Terrorists' yet."
Still, we should target only camps and installations first. Unless that doesn't work.
Hey, we like screaming about how wrong it is to attack our civilians, but we've got no problem doing it to yours because we're a bunch of fucking hipocrites.
Not to mention it would erode our support by the nations of the world.
quote:
"If you want to keep playing this game, we can play it too, and we can play it better and harder than you can. Don't ever touch us again, because we'll pay you back a thousand times."
And I don't think that would discourage people.
[ September 13, 2001: Message edited by: MeGotBeer ]
"If you want to keep playing this game, we can play it too, and we can play it better and harder than you can."
When the "game" is "killing innocent people", I would never want to admit to being able to "play it better and harder". It's like saying "You terrorists think you're so great? Well, we're even more amoral than you are!".
Offering dragons quarter is no good. They regrow their heads and come on again. They have to be killed.
There are three schools of thought in the world, and history has shown them to be, in increasing measure of success:
1. Do unto others.
2. Do unto others as you would be done by.
3. At first, do unto others as you would be done by, and then do unto them as they do unto you.
The first breeds enemies.
The second works, but only as long as all of your neighbors follow the same principle, which, as we know, not everybody does.
The third, however, gives one both the moral high ground AND the ability to repay all acts in kind, AND provides good incentive for neighborly behavior.
This discussion illustrates, I think, the Problem of Terrorism and How to Fight It.
Consider:
In the 20th Century, we had to adapt to the concept of a total war, eluded to elsewhere in this thread or perhaps another. That is, the someone chivalrous European notion1 of wars being fought between two trained armies was abandoned by the reality of wars being fought between nations, where anything and everything within those nations became a target. This was cause for much concern. (Consider the casualty rates for WWII.)
However, adapt we did, primarily because we didn't have a choice, but also because the ever-evolving concept of nationalism made it easy to confuse peoples with governments.2
That is no longer the case.
What has just been demonstrated so horribly is the influence of non-governmental organizations. Osama Bin Ladin is not a government. His organization is not a government. They have no physical territory. No GDP. But they do have an idea that many others agree with.
I don't want to sound pretentious here, as that's a great pet peeve of mine, but it strikes me that the war we are about to fight is a memetic one.3 Terrorism is fueled by ideas, and ideas can only be combated by other ideas. We've seen lots of talk about these attacks being attacks not just on the United States but on a somewhat nebulous batch of concepts; freedom, democracy, and capitalism included. This may be true. I think it's dangerous to speculate about motives until we have some idea of who all the players are. At any rate, assuming this is true, how can we respond? If the issue is, say, Liberal Democracy vs. Wahhabi Theocracy4, how do we go about fighting that war? We could smash every such government in the world.5 But the idea would still exist.
Of course, all this is somewhat seperate from the point at hand, which is the punishment of those directly responsible. This is a much less thorny issue, once all the investigations are completed. But the larger issue remains.
1: Of course, there were always atrocities lurking beneath the surface. Villages destroyed in an attack or pillaged afterwards. The main difference is that the technoloy of war at the time did not allow this to occur on a large scale.
2: This footnote is pretty irrelevant, actually, but there was something I wanted to bring up that didn't fit into where I was going.
In WWII, and all modern wars, civilians die in great numbers. Specifically, how many Germans in Berlin or Dresden or Hamburg were actually soldiers or Nazi party members? The usual justification is that these people were nevertheless supporting the German war effort, and I think that's probably correct, as far as it goes. But it raises the question of what constitutes an acceptable civilian casualty.
3: Memetics being a sort of study of how ideas propagate, which you probably already know, but which is explained here anyway.
4: Wahhabi being a particular, rather strict interpration of Islamic law, or Shari'a. The Jack Chick of Islam.
5: A difficult prospect, considering that there are only two such nations, one being Saudi Arabia, which is one of our closest allies in the region, and one being Afghanistan under Taliban (or Taleban) control, which is scarcely a government at all.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well. Those were deliberate, pre-meditated attacks against civilian targets, in retribution to a military action. Was that acceptable? IMO, no.
Civilian casualties are unacceptable, unless it's the least evil.
quote:
They were ALL gearing up to fight off an invasion
I strongly suggest you read Hiroshima by John Hershey.
And haven't we talked to you about blanket statements before ... ?
They were all gearing up to fight off an invasion? Blanket statement indeed. Does this include all the children going to school or running errands for their parents? Does this include the people who are not in the military but are simple shopkeepers, farmers, diner owners, etc? Oh wait, the shopkeepers sell stuff to the military, and the farmers and diner owners feed the soldiers. Yeah that's right, they deserved to be nuked.
I suppose you only believe it when American casualties are involved, huh?
[ September 14, 2001: Message edited by: Tahna Los ]
However, I believe such WAS the case in other places, such as Okinawa.
Or are they still labelled civilians?
It does not matter if some civilians joined the Air Force just to ram the Yorktown or some other carrier. The point is that not everyone had (or wanted to have) some military involvement. And they died in Hiroshima.
Yes it ended the war.
But people still remember the civilians who died in that bombing. The Civilians whose only role in the War was death.
No wait, they should not be remembered, cuz they were not civilians, they were HEARTLESS SOLDIERS who maimed our American Brothers and sisters. Even those who only grew rice and sold sushi in the shop next door.
I'm sorry if I'm going off a rant. I am not trying to justify the actions of the Japanese in this War. I am also not trying to attack the use of Nuclear Bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the Chinese also fought the war against Japan). I am trying to fight any statement which comes close to saying that "those Jap civilians deserved what they got". But one has to remember that not everyone has one train of thought, as Omega appears to profess.
[ September 14, 2001: Message edited by: Tahna Los ]
"All material and psychological resources could be combined to defend hearth and home, to annihilate the invaders on soil that was known and loved. The motto would truly be, "Victory or Death!"-and the spirit would be that of the special attack corps."
"Japan at War" Dr. K Jack Bauer
That's curious. If that were true, one would think the annihiliation of two Japanese cities wouldn't stop them.
Blanket statements are BAD.
I agree, the two nuclear bombs was a necessary evil, but don't go around thinking that innocent people weren't hurt, whether they were going to be future enemies or not.
The atomic bomb(s) killed a lot of people, but it also saved many.
The first part of that statement is a fact. The second an opinionated assumption.
quote:
Originally posted by USS Vanguard:
If you think about it, if the United States were ever invaded wouldn't many many MANY civilians take up arms as well against the enemy?
coughcoughRedDawncoughcough
"Opinionated?" Hardly. Opinion influenced by trends and knowledge, yes. Even WITHOUT the civilian contingent, attackers facing well-dug-in soldiers on familiar ground, even if the defenders' numbers are small, face the prospect of high losses. So yes, the use of the A-Bombs saved lives, as they made a massively costly invasion unnecessary (thus saving American lives that would have been lost) And gave the Japanese Army (and the civilians who might have joined them) a symbol of power they could surrender to (thus saving other Japanese soldiers' and civilians' lives), and pretty much made other bombing unnecessary (thus saving all the people who would have died as a result of continued conventional bombing.)
quote:
Originally posted by First of Two:
They (the invaders) USED nukes in 'Red Dawn.'
Yeah, the Sovs against the ChiComs.
You also seem to think the Soviets and Cubans mobilizing a large enough force to invade the U.S. without raising the eyebrows of any clerk at any intelligence organization (not that ours have done a really smash-bang job in the past few years) is possible.
You also seem to think that you can't at the same time recognize the strategic value of dropping a nuclear bomb, while also recognizing the tragedy of the innocent civilians -- unless you honestly expect that young Japanese children, babies, etc. would've been aiming rifles at our soldiers -- killed in such an action.
Friday August 10, 1945 reads as follows
"Nagasaki Bombed 'Just for the Hell of it'
with the sub head lines
"Second A-Bomb Would Have Just Sat Around Anyway, Say Generals" and "French Surrender to U.S."
and the picture carries the caption "U.S. filmmakers and photographers were thankful to get a second chance to capture pictures of the A-Bomb mushroom cloud"
sorry.. just a little levity if you wanted it
As I understand it, the second bomb was dropped because of a mistranslation, either accidental or deliberate.
After the 1st bomb was dropped, the Tojo government sent a response that they would consider a the US surrender demands.
But the Japanese translator translated the word 'consider' as 'ignore,' for some unknown reason.
So the 2nd bomb was dropped.
Although quite honestly, it was dropped to show the rest of the world that we had the capacity to make more than one of these things.
quote:
As I understand it, the second bomb was dropped because of a mistranslation, either accidental or deliberate.After the 1st bomb was dropped, the Tojo government sent a response that they would consider a the US surrender demands.
But the Japanese translator translated the word 'consider' as 'ignore,' for some unknown reason.
So the 2nd bomb was dropped.
Almost right. IIRC, Japan's government did indeed send a response in which it stated Japan was considering surrender. But the decision to do so wasn't immediately communicated after Hiroshima was destroyed. There was a delay of one day before government officials could convene, which proved to be fatal.
Just to stress the point: Japan had been defeated utterly long before the first bomb was dropped. It wasn't necessary to obliterate two cities (thereby butchering 180,000+ civilians and condemning future generations to horrible genetic mutations) to force the country to surrender, since it was already about to. But that fact tends to get overlooked a lot.
[ September 15, 2001: Message edited by: IDIC ]
quote:
Just to stress the point: Japan had been defeated utterly long before the first bomb was dropped. It wasn't necessary to obliterate two cities (thereby butchering 180,000+ civilians and condemning future generations to horrible genetic mutations) to force the country to surrender, since it was already about to. But that fact tends to get overlooked a lot.
Actually, an Allied invasion of Japan would probably have been required before the country capitulated. Troops from Europe (including my Grandfather, a Captain in the Md. National Guard) were already being prepared to be sent to staging areas in the Pacific when the bombs were dropped.
It's important to note, however, that the estimate of Allied casualties has grown in the past sixty-or so years. While today we estimate an invasion of Japan to cost about one million Allied troops, the estimates that Harry Truman and others in our Government looked at were much less.
I would recommend Hiroshima: In History and Memory, edited by Michael J. Hogan as an excellent resource of essays by prominent historians regarding all the various issues about the decision to drop the first nuke. Contributors include J. Samuel Walker, Barton J. Bernstein, Herbert P. Bix, John W. Dower, Paul Boyer, and Seiitsu Tachibana.
quote:
"Ultimately, to understand, to rue, and even to deplore the use of the A-bomb are separable, and not neccessarily linked, judgments [sic]. To fail to understand the reasons for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is regrettable. To judge those actions by a set of ethical standards usually abandoned in World War II and sometimes revived in later years is appropriate. But to ascribe those moral standards to the leaders and citizens of the United States, or the other major powers, during World War II is to distort the history of that terrible war and to misinterpret the important decisions made in it." -- Barton J. Bernstein
[ September 15, 2001: Message edited by: Malnurtured Snay ]