boom
One thing I will never understand is how an alarming number of liberals--otherwise normal, sane people--can defend the atomic bombings of Japan. It just makes no sense to me. Ugh. Anyway, what with the Japanese defense minister's recent comments, the topic's been coming up lately. Here is a particularly horrifying post by an individual who doesn't usually sound like a deranged sociopath. I went off on him in comments, and since my response was more substantial than what I generally post here, I will reprint it:
A people are responsible for their government, don't let evil lunatics run your country is the lesson.
And if you do, don't complain when someone else has to smarten you up in the most violent way possible.
Why is it that on this ONE ISSUE an alarming number of otherwise sane liberals go completely batshit crazy? You go from mocking Debbie Schlussel to being her. As if you can somehow justify atrocities with self-satisfied, facile "rules" that you just made up...so if people have a shittastic government, and they don't all rise up and stage a bloody revolution, they all deserve to die? Can it be possible that you are truly unaware of how smug/callous/insane that sounds? I know that I'VE been letting evil lunatics run my country for quite some time--and you bloody well would be too, if you lived south of the border. Someone should probably nuke a few of our cities. So WOULD that be okay?
Of course not, America has, once again, not wrecked the kind of havoc and certainly not for the same reasons as Imperial Japan. I do believe that Bush sincerely thought he was doing the right thing in invading Iraq, that he believed all the “beacon of democracy” nonsense.
You say "of course not" as if this is an obvious, or even sensical, point. You think our motives MATTER to anyone on the receiving end of American "justice?" Sure, I think Bush probably believed all that crud, too (though I think the people surrounding him were much more cynical)--so what? That just means he's fucking deranged. Who KNOWS what he'll do next? It seems like those of us who let him get in power are BADLY in need of a little nucuylar "smartening up."
This whole "it was okay JUST THIS ONE TIME, because their leaders were REALLY REALLY SUPER HORRIBLE, but NO WHERE ELSE!" business is fucking nonsense. Either you're in favor of murdering the shit out of untold thousands of civilians (and leaving thousands more with horrible diseases) because their leaders suck, or you're not. I can't believe a non-wingnut would even THINK about trying to argue otherwise.
A people are responsible for their government, don't let evil lunatics run your country is the lesson.
And if you do, don't complain when someone else has to smarten you up in the most violent way possible.
Why is it that on this ONE ISSUE an alarming number of otherwise sane liberals go completely batshit crazy? You go from mocking Debbie Schlussel to being her. As if you can somehow justify atrocities with self-satisfied, facile "rules" that you just made up...so if people have a shittastic government, and they don't all rise up and stage a bloody revolution, they all deserve to die? Can it be possible that you are truly unaware of how smug/callous/insane that sounds? I know that I'VE been letting evil lunatics run my country for quite some time--and you bloody well would be too, if you lived south of the border. Someone should probably nuke a few of our cities. So WOULD that be okay?
Of course not, America has, once again, not wrecked the kind of havoc and certainly not for the same reasons as Imperial Japan. I do believe that Bush sincerely thought he was doing the right thing in invading Iraq, that he believed all the “beacon of democracy” nonsense.
You say "of course not" as if this is an obvious, or even sensical, point. You think our motives MATTER to anyone on the receiving end of American "justice?" Sure, I think Bush probably believed all that crud, too (though I think the people surrounding him were much more cynical)--so what? That just means he's fucking deranged. Who KNOWS what he'll do next? It seems like those of us who let him get in power are BADLY in need of a little nucuylar "smartening up."
This whole "it was okay JUST THIS ONE TIME, because their leaders were REALLY REALLY SUPER HORRIBLE, but NO WHERE ELSE!" business is fucking nonsense. Either you're in favor of murdering the shit out of untold thousands of civilians (and leaving thousands more with horrible diseases) because their leaders suck, or you're not. I can't believe a non-wingnut would even THINK about trying to argue otherwise.
posted by GeoX, one of the GeoX boys. at 1:06 AM
I completely agree. Maybe now you can understand my frustration.
The issue goes far beyond just the atomic bombings of Japan. I think that warmongering liberals are even worse than warmongering conservatives. In fact, warmongering liberals are very similar to neoconservatives, because both of them support wars on messianic ideological grounds. They both justify wars with noble-sounding ideals that have wide appeal among reasonable, decent people, who wouldn't go for the patriotic-bloodthirst type of rhetoric, but easily fall for the we-have-to-kill-them-in-order-to-save-them rhetoric.
What makes this particular case so striking is that it illustrates the mentality behind the rhetoric. Even if you think that the war against the Japan was justified, it's still easy to argue that the atomic bombings in particular weren't necessary -- Japan would have surrendered without them, and certainly after just the first one. The only condition Japan asked for was to be allowed to keep its emperor, which was granted to it anyway. But it's not enough to just disable or defeat the enemy -- in the warmongering mentality, it's necessary to _slaughter_ it, specifically with "the most violent way possible." And the reason for this sudden bloodthirst isn't so much that the Japanese government committed atrocities, but rather because the Japanese rejected the West and attempted to create their own independent centre of power, of course by means of violence and atrocities. So, all of a sudden, all of them are guilty for the atrocities of their government, and all of them deserve to be slaughtered. This mentality was widely replicated in the nineties during Clinton's assault on Serbia.
- SK