60 Years Ago This Week

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Well, tw, in post #104, p.7, you said something smart. Good going.

djacq, you got some holes yet: what the decent members of the human race should demand is an end to the indecencies of oppression. You've been sucked in by the specious arguments of the moral-equivalency set, and you should not have been so deceived.

Democracies avoid oppression(s), though without complete success, owing to human nature: the root of prejudice is that man is a categorizing animal, and the two largest categories are Me and Not-Me. It is all too easy to be disdainful of the Not-Me, which can lead to attacking and abusing such Other. The faculty of self-restraint is a happy one here, and we both know it's not always present.

Non-democracies, on the other hand, mostly exist to oppress somebody, somewhere, somehow. Being unaccountable to their subjects, nondemocracies make war on, well, whim.

It is also too much, even for a joke, for a belligerent leader to refuse to conduct negotiations (as Truman did in July 1945)--and then use the lack of negotiations as an excuse to unleash whatever destruction tickles his fancy.

Your last paragraph needs taking apart, as it misrepresents Truman's motivations and policy: Japan's government sent out peace feelers in mid-1945, asking about terms for peace. Since we Allies had decided at Yalta in 1942 that the only peace would come with the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, and Truman did not waver from this when he inherited the Presidency, the kindest thing to say about Japan's representations in 1945 was that they were the product of wishful thinking. Truman could see the whole thing was bootless. Since there was still the war to win, it was time to shock and awe the Japanese into unconditional surrender. This was done. In large measure, come to think of it, this was done by Hirohito telling the generals it was time to quit, and it seems looking back that we were duly grateful.