You snipped the end of my sentence. It reads in full
How effective or ineffective it was can be debated, but not that it had no effect at all. It didn’t have the morale shattering, war winning effect all on its own that that Giulio Douhet and others had predicted, but in the ETO for example strategic bombing of Germany effectively destroyed the Luftwaffe and tied down thousands of guns and hundreds of thousands of men in AAA defenses who could more profitably have been used on the Eastern Front.
Well, however you want to look at it. But Fort Sumter was in Charleston Harbor, in South Carolina. By your standards, the South “seized” all of the Southern states by seceding. Heck, the colonies “seized” themselves, from Great Britain, by declaring independence - if you want to look at it that way.
Not exactly. The issues are similar, but distinct. If there was a right to secede from the Union, it wouldn’t automatically follow that every piece of property owned by the federal government but located in the seceding state became property of that state.
Even the CSA was aware of this, and send a delegation to sign a peace treaty with the U.S. and make an arrangement to settle the issue of the stolen federal property, but no agreement came of it.
Another case of ‘similar but distinct’. The Confederates claimed a right to secede, but instead of pursuing their claim before the Supreme Court, which was invested with the power to adjudicate disputes between states and rule on interpretation of the Constitution, they declared that they were correct and set about seizing property.
I’m not sure what you mean by “strategic” bombing, but I think the professional opinion is that bombing civilians is not only ineffective, but counter-productive. The German bombing attacks on London, for example, did nothing to weaken British resolve - if anything, it strengthened it. The Americans dropped more bombs on North Vietnam that they did in all of WWII, but still lost the war. In his book, Speer wrote that when the allies switched from attacking munitions factories to bombing civilians, they (the Germans) were down to one week’s worth of ball bearings. Had they kept on attacking factories, instead of people, it would have crippled the German war effort.
There is just so much wrong compressed into such a small space here.
The professional opinion is that the weapons weren’t yet up to the task. With nuclear weapons it is possible to effectively destroy an entire nation. The firestorms at Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo were all quite devastating, but being able to conjure up a firestorm at will wasn’t possible, largely being a matter of luck and uncontrollable circumstance.
Here you are actually right; prior to the war the casualties bombing would produce was grossly overestimated, and the morale of the survivors was expected to be broken. Psychological casualties among civilians were expected to outnumber physical casualties by a factor of 10-1. Not only was the ability of bombing overestimated, the underlying logic of its morale breaking effect was on unsound logic. You can’t surrender to a bomber.
Bullshit, on many levels. First, there was no switch from bombing factories to bombing civilians. It had become clear very early on to Bomber Command that the smallest target they could reliably hit at night was a city, and even that was dicey. See the Butt Report:
The USAAF continued with the fiction that precision bombing was possible during daylight using the Norden bomb sight, but they were perfectly aware that very few of their bombs were actually hitting the intended target either:
The USAAF continued to attack “factories” rather than “civilians” throughout the war in Europe, there was no shift from bombing armament factories over to bombing civilians. The simple fact was, however, that very few of their bombs landed anywhere near the target, and as the target areas were industrial areas in cities, all of those misses landed on the rest of the city. While ball-bearings were a bottleneck for the Germans, they were able to disperse and diversify production and importation. The Allies weren’t even aware of just how much of a bottleneck ball-bearings were for Germany. Your statement that Speer said Germany were down to one week’s worth of ball bearings is incorrect*, and the Schweinfurt–Regensburg mission was an expensive failure for the USAAF with the highest loss rates yet experienced in the war, 60 B-17s were lost and a further 95 damaged, many beyond repair. The second raid conducted two months later fared no better losing 77 B-17s shot down or scrapped as beyond repair and another 121 damaged.
I’m going to disagree. I’ve known people who pride themselves on being badasses and scaring everyone they deal with. Hitler repeatedly reveled in the apparent ease with which his forces killed people and sowed terror and destruction. He scoffed at religion and pacifism, advocated taking advantage of the weak, and explicitly planned to kill large numbers of people for various reasons. I believe he would have laughed at anyone suggesting he was a “good” person.
His work was, you know, if you like that sort of thing. He experimented with technique in some of them, but the subject matter seems to be mostly architecture, which gets old pretty fast.
If I’m reading this correctly, it’s taking a liberal moral outlook (or moral relativism, maybe) to its most absurd possible conclusion, which is that your intentions are all that matters and all that matters is being good according to your own definition of “good.” But Hitler is an example of why that’s ludicrous. At some point you have to think about how your actions affect other people. You can’t be called a good person if you don’t think about that.
Yes. And everybody else would think you were a genocidal maniac, and they’d be right.
You’ve mistaken legality for morality. We don’t consider people legally responsible for things they do if they are unable to understand the consequences of their actions. From a moral standpoint you would be within your rights to feel differently. And how can you be a good person if you don’t do good? If following your own moral code makes you a good person no matter what you actually do and no matter how many people it harms, doesn’t that mean being good is meaningless?
There was a time would I would agree with you but have seen too much. The one that sticks in my memories is a guy from my hometown (pretty rural area) who was very much a badass and seemed to prize himself on it. He despised weakness, thought teachers were worthless and stupid and that most children (except for the worthy people’s kids) should not be educated. He thought homeless should work or starve and even took it upon himself to bust up a food drive. He relished laying off people at the drop of a hat (I can understand having doing so but would rub salt in the wounds making public statements while he did this).
IN other words, the guy was a major ahole.
Well, he caught himself some terminal cancer. Before he died and was still mobile I found myself sitting next to him at a get-together (can’t remember what for) and had to listen to this guy talk about that while he was a hard man he was a good man and did what was best for people. It was soon apparent that this asshole thought he was a ‘good person’.
Delusion runs deep and I could definitely see Hitler talking the same way.
I haven’t read the whole thread, but just to address one point in the OP, while Hitler probably didn’t think he was a bad guy, he was also certainly not basing his actions on “making the world a better place”. Hitler had no interest in making the world a better place. If you had suggested it to him, he would have thought you odd for thinking it important or desirable. Hitler was concerned with promoting Germans (at the expense of others), and, especially, gaining power and proving he was better and smarter than anyone else.
I am not saying that Hitler had no non-evil characteristics, but making the world a better place was very low on his priority lost. And yes, he was a pretty evil dude.