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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Solon who wrote (42165)	1/11/2002 1:17:52 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 82486

Keep in mind what the Assistant Secretary of State said to Stimson way back on June 17, 1945: "there were no more cities to bomb, no more carriers to sink or battleships to shell; we had difficulty finding targets." That was an exageration. We dropped more tons of bombs on Iraq then Japan. But we had plenty of targets left in Iraq even without trying to level cities. I can imagine that the highest value targets where getting pretty scarce but we did not wipe out their industrial production. Germany which had faced similar heavy bombing attacks kept up production until it started to lose big chunks of territory. You pretend that the delay in surrender of up to 19 weeks is due to a lack of civilians having been killed. I made no such claim. What I said it that it is illogical to think that the reports conclusion that the war would have ended by the end of december without the atomic bombs or an invasion, also included the unstated assumption "without continued bombing and a continued blockade of Japan". as you have insisted that the surrender is dependent on as many or more civilians being killed as were killed in the radiation bombing I have insisted no such thing. I did insist that the report did not say that the surrender would have happened without the bombing and blockade. I also gave my personal opinion that a surrender would not have happened quickly had the bombing and blockade not continued. I also said it was quite possible that the bombing and blockade could have killed more people then the atomic bombs. In fact they could have killed a lot more. But they also may have killed less, there is to many factors to consider to be have a strong confidence in any specific estimate. As I said, chances are there would have been almost no starvation--even in the worse case scenario of an America sabotaging the goal of a surrender agreement by insisting that their Emperor God must be profaned. So a country on the brink, without adiquate supplies for its people, its industry or its military, facing almost 5 months of total blockade and continueing bombing which could almost completly wipe out its infrastucture would face no significant amount of starvation?!? Anyhow, send me the authoritative source where you picked up the 5:1 figure. evaluated it, and decided to add it to our discussion. I've seen any number of "authoritative sources" proven to be wrong again and again. Even about verifiable facts, let alone projections and estimates and guesses like this. For example if you add up the official statistics the world as a whole runs a trade deficit. Maybe we should stop trading with those wily Martians. None the less if it was a specific factual detail (rather then a projection or guess I might give some respect to data from "authoritative sources"). It is not unreasonable to think that a worst case scenario of a large nation being relentlessly bombed for 5 months and facing a near total blockade would not have over a million deaths. It could easily have been greater then 5 times as many deaths, remember we were talking about a worse case scenario not a best case. If you want more of a best case scenario it could also have been only a very small amount of starvation and only a few thousand people killed by the bombings (If the war ended by before the middle of September and during that time the US made some effort to minimize civilian casualties, and Japans government did a good job of using the limited resources it had to keep its people alive. The worst case (or more accuratly the worst case within the limits provided by the report's conclusions) is something along the lines of the war ending at about the end of the year with the US not giving a shit about Japanese civilian casualties and Japan's government not doing a good job with its limited resources to keep civilians alive during that time but instead focusing everything on the military even though militarily their cause was hopeless) You have no idea what saviours and saints might spring from the ripples of Hitler's life. You have no clue what demons and monsters might have sprang from the ripples of someone he killed. That is a good answer. I did of course say something along the lines of "if I knew that nothing as bad or worse would be caused by Hitler's death", but of course in reality we could not know that. You talked about someone who would kill Hitler in that situation as acting like a god. Well if you did have supernatural abilities such as time travel (which was assumed by the question) but also the ability to know the result of your actions and you knew that there would be no major negative consequences from killing Hitler would you do it. Yes we can't know in reality even if we did have time travel, but then you are dealing with both uncertainty and the imorality of the killing. If you could drop the uncertainty would the immorality of murdering one person prevent you from stopping his later murder of millions. If anyone else is actually following our series of long posts back and forth rather then getting board and ignoring us <g>, I would also appreciate their perspectives on the question. I myself do not have an answer yet. When you add in the uncertainty I don't think I would do it, and even without the uncertainty I think it would still be an immoral act (you could try to justify it as a defensive act to protect Hitler's future victims but it seems a stretch to call it defensive when you are killing an innocent person who has not yet attacked anyone) Tim