not to beat a dead horse

[Michael Bailey]

On 1/29/08, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
> Dyson's response to Lytton's criticism, I would argue, is, to me,
> still rather chilling
>
> rich

Hmm, I think I part company with you there, Rich.
To some extent, I found it reassuring.

What Dyson's POV is allowing for is
a) culpability on both sides
and b) the possibility of forgiveness

The Holocaust looms large as a reason to condemn
German combatants, and von Braun is tarred, willy-nilly, with that brush.

But, as Pynchon reminds us, the boilerplate of any contract
in the USA is injustice against  Native Americans;
and all WWII scientific research here took place against
a backdrop of recent slavery, where segregation as well as
systematic oppression of blacks and other races was still going on.

Dora was certainly no joke; neither are our ghettos and Indian
reservations.  Germany's racism had greater intensity,
but as for duration, the US is still hanging in there
- for instance, the systematic exclusion of blacks
from the 2000 Florida ballot,
which really isn't funny and not at all trivial.

The firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo, not to mention
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were elective activities:
the war could have been pursued and
won without them (though I can't prove that and don't
even want to try) - but our Western democracies chose
repeatedly to take war aggressively to non-combatants.
(kind of like those "Islamofascists" in the news, except
we really did it, and on a huge scale)

A tribunal for a successful worldwide Socialist
revolution might have indicted Dyson together with
von Braun, on the grounds that both these men should have
withheld their efforts from immoral war-mongering governments.

After the war, there is no sign that von Braun engaged in
further Nazi activities.  I'm not aware that he really did a heck
of a lot of science either: mostly he contributed a name, a face
and a voice to the space program, but that was worth something.

The only way a war ever ends is when people stop fighting and
start doing something else...