I am not a rabid Harry Truman fan, but an honest assessment of his life and presidency turns up much to admire. His postwar kindness to the defeated Axis powers and the winning of the peace through the Marshall Plan were genuinely great things.
The suffering of the Japanese people immediately after the war would have been much greater without this kindness shown by the United States and Harry Truman.
Do you concede these points, Halo, or are all American presidents automatically warmongers to you?
I was pulling for you to actually back up some of your “I am a bastion of enlightenment” crap with actual ideas we could think about Halo13, but it appears you have nothing else. In the midst of all the discussion here the best you can do is:
Good call. It’s a paraphrase of a line from A Fish Called Wanda. Otto (Kevin Kline) directs the line at Archie (John Cleese) and his wife Wendy (Maria Aitken), except it was “the Russian Empire”.
And if Truman said the a-bombing was “the greatest thing in history”, he might have been thinking about how wars could be now be ended in one huge bang rather than after months and years of slow slaughter. Truman himself had seen action as an artillery commander in the 35th Division in WW1. He had ample opportunity to witness for himself the destruction caused by years of warfare.
Besides, all (or most) of Truman’s advisors were telling him this one operation would end the war in the Pacific. The fact that the operation went off successfully is enough call for relief, if not hyperbole.
Holding up a single out-of-context quote as self-evident damnnation is pretty fucking weak.