So what? We could have pursued getting a bomb of our own without joining the fray.
[/quote]
Getting a bomb of our own wouldn’t have solved anything. We needed to stop Hitler from doing it.
Other than stopping Hitler from getting the bomb, I DON’T think it was defensively more necessary.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Like I said, Hitler could have gotten the bomb.
[/QUOTE]
Like I said, so what? If that’s the extent of your rationale of why we should have fought in Europe but not bothered with the Japanese and the Pacific, all I can say is…weak. Well, that and ‘not worth bothering to continue the discussion with you’, and leave it at that.
-XT
Like I said, so what?
[/quote]
So he could have bombed us with it. Duh.
If you think that was too weak a reason to enter the European theater, I won’t argue with you.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
Getting a bomb of our own wouldn’t have solved anything. We needed to stop Hitler from doing it.
[/QUOTE]
Why? Why did WE need to stop Hitler from doing so? If we had a bomb of our own then Hitler et al getting it would have been pretty much the equivalent of Stalin et al getting it…which, you know, actually happened in real life. Didn’t destroy the country, last time I checked.
But Hitler wasn’t really getting all that close to GETTING the freaking bomb. They were on the wrong track, and weren’t spending the resources to really make it happen. They were pretty far from having even a working pile by the end of the war, IIRC. So, again, why did WE need to be involved, if we didn’t need to be involved against the Japanese? And why does stopping Hitler from getting the bomb justify (I assume) the killing of all those babies in Europe?
-XT
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
So he could have bombed us with it. Duh.
[/QUOTE]
And we could have bombed him back with it. Duh. Of course, he really couldn’t have, since Germany wasn’t really all that close to getting an atomic bomb in any case (not to mention the fact that Germany didn’t have a long range strategic bomber…but I guess the magic elves would have gotten them that too, ehe?). We were years ahead of them, in retrospect…and since retrospect seems to be what you are basing most of your BS on, well, there you go.
I think it’s too weak to bother arguing with you, yes. If you feel the same way, well, there you go.
-XT
Getting our own bomb wouldn’t have protected us from anything, we didn’t know at the time exactly how far away Hitler was, and no, not even the goal of stopping Hitler justified any of the firebombings of German civilians.
And we could have bombed him back with it.
[/quote]
That would be pointless. We would still be toast, and it would still be morally unjustified to do it back.
What?? The magic 20/20 hindsight machine only works for arguing one way?? That seems sort of double-standardish to me, man.
-XT
There’s no moral relativism involved in saying we didn’t know how close Hitler was to getting a bomb. Saying we didn’t know something at a given time is not analogous to saying people had different moral perceptions at a given time.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
There’s no moral relativism involved in saying we didn’t know how close Hitler was to getting a bomb. Saying we didn’t know something at a given time is not analogous to saying people had different moral perceptions at a given time.
[/QUOTE]
But you are going back and forth on this. You are saying we should have known what was a threat and what wasn’t a threat, and let one enemy (who had actually attacked us and sunk a large portion of our fleet) alone while pursuing another enemy (who had really not done much too US, at least not until we started to seriously supply their enemies with weapons and supplies), and you are basing your assertions on a mixture of hindsight on one hand, and simply what we knew on the other, depending on which seems to make your bizarre case best (at least in your own mind, seemingly).
BTW, just so you know, the Japanese ALSO had a nuclear program. Here is the Wikion it, FWIW. They were actually closer to getting an actual weapon, in realty, than Germany was. Your perceptions of who was or wasn’t a ‘real threat’ to the US seems a tinge…I don’t know, racially or ethnically I guess…motivated, to me. You are dismissing the Japanese as a threat for reasons you seem to sum up as ‘Well, we needed to keep Germany from getting the bomb’, as if this was the sole or even one of the more important reasons for the war.
And none of this explains why it’s seemingly justifiable to defeat Hitler at all costs (including blowing away European babies), but wasn’t equally justifiable to do the same to the Japanese. Or why you are so focused on what the US (and to a lesser degree the UK) did, but without context, as if your own moral compass should somehow dictate the actions and attitudes of people who lived in completely different times and had completely different outlooks and attitudes.
To me, your arbitrary declaration that we simply shouldn’t have ever been at war with Japan is merely a way for you to not have to deal with the reality of the argument that it was really the cleanest way to end the war, the way that would cause the least harm and casualties. You simply declare, by fiat and based on nothing more than some vague assertion you are making about threats to the US (contextless, as if us being attacked directly didn’t matter or never happened), that we should have never even been at war with Japan in the first place.
-XT
Well, the thread really took off when Dio weighed in. Bravo. [slow applause]
But you are going back and forth on this. You are saying we should have known what was a threat and what wasn’t a threat, and let one enemy (who had actually attacked us and sunk a large portion of our fleet) alone while pursuing another enemy (who had really not done much too US, at least not until we started to seriously supply their enemies with weapons and supplies), and you are basing your assertions on a mixture of hindsight on one hand, and simply what we knew on the other, depending on which seems to make your bizarre case best (at least in your own mind, seemingly).
[/quote]
I’m not saying we “should” have known anything at all. I’m also not arguing strongly that we necessarily had to fight Hitler. I’m comfortable listening to an argument that we should not have.
I haven’t said this, and I don’t agree with it,. I DON’T think it was justifiable to defeat Hitler at all costs. I DON’T think the firebombing of German civilians was justified. How are you getting that I think otherwise?
Context is irrelevant to morality. I’m not a moral relativist. Wrong is always wrong. There is no context by which is it morally ok to set a toddler on fire.
When I’m asked for a moral opinion, I use my own moral compass. Go figure.
I think it’s ludicrous to say that slaughtering innocent people by the hundreds of thousands is a “clean” way to end the war, and outrifht laughable to say it “causes the least harm and casualties,” but I also stand by the assertion that we could have just abandoned the Pacific theater altogether and that would have been the end of it. I don’t buy that Japan was a threat.
Indeed. Let’s just say this wasn’t quite the debate I was looking to have…
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
I think it’s ludicrous to say that slaughtering innocent people by the hundreds of thousands is a “clean” way to end the war, and outrifht laughable to say it “causes the least harm and casualties,” but I also stand by the assertion that we could have just abandoned the Pacific theater altogether and that would have been the end of it. I don’t buy that Japan was a threat.
[/QUOTE]
It’s ludicrous and laughable only because you dismiss the entire war. If you look at the reality, the ‘dirty’ way to end the war would have entailed a forced entry invasion, which would have cost potentially millions of lives and seen much more destruction on all sides…especially that of the Japanese. However, if you hand wave away the war, you don’t have to deal with that nasty reality stuff, so you can simply and blithely call it ‘ludicrous’ and ‘laughable’.
As to your assertion that you don’t ‘buy’ that Japan was a threat, the trouble is you aren’t an informed shopper, so your purchasing choices are pretty irrelevant. Japan was certainly a threat, both in perception and in reality, both in the context of what the US knew at the time and in historical hindsight. Without the US in the Pacific Japan would have almost certainly seized and controlled much of the Pacific Rim, and would have cut our trade routes at the least. In Asia, Japan, completely unchecked, would have almost certainly absorbed most if not all of Indo-China, all of China, and probably India to boot. Granted, this wasn’t a direct threat to the US as much as it was to the UK and the Euro’s, but it was certainly an indirect threat in the medium and long term. Also, by giving Japan a completely free hand in the Pacific, we would have undercut the Australians ability to support the Brits in the European side of the war, undercut the UK by pretty much giving Japan it’s overseas possessions (thus undermining their ability to keep on fighting Germany), and probably brought Japan into the war against Russia (which, given that they weren’t fighting us, they would have had the leisure to open a second front against the Russians, thus undermining them and their efforts to focus on Germany).
Directly, the Japanese threatened our Alaskan possessions, our possessions and alliances in the Pacific, and our trade, in the short term and left completely unchecked. In the long term a Japanese empire with such secure resources and the ability to expand it’s military and industrial strength would have been as much or more of a threat to the US as Germany could ever have been.
Because you said we needed to fight and defeat the Germans, and the reality is that this entailed strategic bombing, which, again, given the weapons of the day, entailed civilian causalities. If you weren’t willing to kill civilians then you couldn’t win, and you said that we had to win against Hitler et al to keep them from getting the bomb. Q.E.D. you are at least ok with bombing civilians, if not, perhaps firebombing them, which simply means you are taking an arbitrary stance that some ways to kill babies are better than others, from the perspective of your moral compass.
For instance, you are seemingly ok with babies starving to death, or being killed in ground fighting, as long as they weren’t deliberately killed, if it achieved the ends of stopping Hitler from getting a bomb he wasn’t really that close to getting. Your supposed moral stance is really just an arbitrary line you are drawing to either hide your eyes from reality or simply because you think it makes your arguments more sound on a message board (since I know how smart you are, I’m picking the second choice, Monty…do I win the ceramic dog and board game edition of the Straight Dope??).
You aren’t laying out a strong argument at all…that’s the problem. You are arbitrarily saying we should have fought Hitler, while saying we shouldn’t have fought Japan, without giving any solid reasons for either. Just a vague assertion about Germany getting a bomb (because we THOUGHT they MIGHT get one, in the long ago). The fact is, we had more reason to fight Japan at the time, and given what we knew (i.e. they blew the crap out of our most powerful fleet and base in the Pacific, and they had a string of pretty much unchecked victories in the Pacific up to that point, etc etc) Japan was much more a direct threat to us than Germany (who we had fought a sort of shadow and illegal Naval war with them due mainly to the fact that we were supplying arms and armaments to the allies and the Germans were taking exception to this).
-XT
No I didn’t. I said we had a defensive reason to do so, but I didn’t say we NEEDEd to.
No I’m not. I’m not ok with any of this.
You misunderstand me. I have no strong feeling on whether we should have fought Hitler one way or the other. I just think, dispassionately, that there was at least marginally a defensive purpose to fighting Hitler that didn’t exist for Japan, and I certainly don’t agree that Hitler had to be defeated “at all costs,” or that anything and everything ould have been justified in trying to achieve that goal.
Well, this pretty much clears everything up.
Germany was immoral because they killed civilians.
U.K. was immoral because they firebombed.
U.S. was immoral because they nuked.
Now, not yet explicitly stated by Dio, but drawn logically from his point of view:
Japan was immoral because they rolled over China, Korea, Indochina, et al.
U.S.S.R. was immoral because they weren’t particular about who they rolled over (i.e., Poland) on their way to fight Germany, and they sure weren’t particular about who they killed once they got to Germany.
Unless someone can find proof that some nation didn’t do something along the way that harmed civilians, we conclude that every nation that participated in World War II was, ipso facto, immoral.
And, since Dio points out that context is irrelevant and wrong is always wrong, there’s no difference between any of the participants. Everyone was immoral.
We’re all evil. Let’s close the thread.
That basically sums it up. My real objection is the way Americans (well pretty much everybody, but in this case Americans) always want to make bullshit, sanctimonious excuses for why their own unethical actions weren’t really unethical.
I didn’t say all those countries were equally unethical, by the way. Some were obviosuly worse than others, but that doesn’t mean we can pretend we got through it with clean hands.
[QUOTE=Diogenes the Cynic]
No I’m not. I’m not ok with any of this.
[/QUOTE]
Then you are not ok with us going to war for any reason with Germany or anyone else. Because that was the reality. There was zero way to fight that scale of war and given the weapons and abilities of the day, and in that area, without massive civilian deaths. 10’s of millions of civilians died in Europe. Taking out the firebombing, that still left…10’s of millions of civilians killed in Europe. And taking out the two atomic bombs in Japan, that still left…10’s of millions dead in Asia as well. In Japan, take out the 200-300k killed by the atomic bombs and you still had nearly 2 million killed (with most likely several million more dead if we had to invade). Even taking out the firebombing of Tokyo you still have over a million civilians killed.
Being attacked is, IYHO, not a ‘marginally defensive purpose for fighting’??
You are being completely inconsistent. If there is no justification for killing civilians, then you can’t justify the US’s involvement in the war on either front, nor even our support of the allies, who were going about the job of killing civilians already. Given the weapons of the day, there was simply no way to get around killing civilians.
I’m cool with that philosophy, even if I find it completely silly and pretty much non-reality based. The trouble is, you aren’t solidly asserting, well, anything, except that you disapprove of babies being killed. I disapprove of babies being killed as well, and my guess is that so do most other folks. The thing is, if you go to war, babies are invariably going to get killed. And if you DON’T go to war and simply turn you back (‘you’ being the US) then, well, babies are still going to get killed. The only difference is that the blood won’t be on your own hands, I suppose.
-XT
Then you are not ok with us going to war for any reason with Germany or anyone else.
[/quote]
OK.
Not necessarily, no.
Ok.
My hands are the only ones I’m responsible for.
I don’t buy that all armed conflict has to end in dead babies, though, nor do I buy that refusing to engage will have that result.
[QUOTE=****]
I don’t buy that all armed conflict has to end in dead babies, though, nor do I buy that refusing to engage will have that result.
[/QUOTE]
Broadly, lay out for me how you could fight a war on that scale without killing civilians.
If the US refuses to engage in either conflict, lay out for me (again, just broadly), how this would have entailed less civilian causalities.
No snark intended, I’m genuinely curious how you think this would play out or work.
-XT