a different history

[rich]

easy for you all to say that 60 yrs in the future. so you call it
terrorism, good for you guys. you've shown your moral worth. but the fact
remains that with the hell of Iwo Jima and Okinawa fresh in the minds of
most well if youve got something that will end it well youre gonna use that
rightly or wrongly not to mention showing the Russians something, too. now,
what was decided is always debatable but getting on your high horse from
afar is easy. history isn't.

rich

On Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 8:32 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hiroshima and Nagasaki were mostly chosen as targets due to the high
> numbers of civilian casualties that would result and how this would
> affect morale. It was a show of force. It's pretty much on the record
> that any military gain would just be a by-product. I think a similar
> move today (eg using biological weapons on a civilian population)
> would be a war crime, although we're in a totally different world and
> I'm not retroactively applying that label to the atomic bombings. But
> the intention to kill a huge number of civilians in order to instil
> fear is pretty much my textbook definition of terrorism.
>
> I've said on the list before that Hiroshima is a beeeeeautiful city
> today and I highly recommend visiting, which no sitting US president
> has done (still!). I might pass through Nagasaki later in the month,
> too, but that's to visit the new hotel staffed by robots:
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/16/japans-robot-hotel-a-dinosaur-at-reception-a-machine-for-room-service
>
> On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 10:04 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I have been practically unable to read anything at all about the events.
> Not Hiroshima.
> > Learning by existing what I have learned--and even seen about it--I,
> too, still am viscerally against it and must be forever now.
> > But, I usually reserve the word terrorism for acts outside of declared
> war acts. The U.S. had declared war on Japan.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Sent from my iPad
> >
> >> On Aug 8, 2015, at 6:22 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> It's a neat trick how 'terrorism' becomes 'demonstration of dominance'
> >> when the good guys push the button.
> >>
> >>> On Sun, Aug 9, 2015 at 7:45 AM, Dave Monroe <
> against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>> Death is Lighter than a Feather
> >>> Westheimer, David
> >>>
> >>> http://untpress.unt.edu/catalog/3060
> >>>
> >>>> On Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 11:19 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>> Wellerstein's an excellent historian of the nuclear weapons complex
> -- see
> >>>> his blog at http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/.
> >>>>
> >>>> There's no knowing how long Japan might have withstood a blockade with
> >>>> Manchuria gone (and undoubtedly further Soviet advances or threats
> into
> >>>> northern China), but that alternative too would have been far from
> >>>> bloodless: see German health and mortality late in WWI, Leningrad and
> the
> >>>> 1944-45 "hunger winter" in the  Netherlands in WWII. Japanese
> nutrition was
> >>>> already hurting badly by mid-1945; unless and until the Emperor
> endorsed
> >>>> surrender, I can imagine hundreds of thousands of additional civilian
> deaths
> >>>> from malnutrition and disease.
> >>>>
> >>>> That said, my 1960 reaction to reading 'Hiroshima' remains the same:
> like
> >>>> all the "strategic" bombing of cities from 1939 on, it was terrorism
> and it
> >>>> was wrong in any context -- as was the rationale for 70 years of
> nuclear
> >>>> weapons development and deployment.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>> On Sat, Aug 8, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> https://ideas.aeon.co/viewpoints/alex-wellerstein-on-what-options-were-there-for-the-united-states-regarding-the-atomic-bomb-in-1945
> >>>>> -
> >>>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>> -
> >>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20150808/3e82679c/attachment.html>