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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (132136)	5/7/2004 11:02:20 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

You recall with an oddly distorted sense of time. The Dresden firebombing was February 13-15, 1945; the Tokyo firebombing started February 23, 1945. The first intentional firebombing raid seems to have been on Kobe, Japan, on Feb. 3.

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (132136)	5/8/2004 1:43:45 PM
From: cnyndwllr	Respond to of 281500

It was a fairly common explanation that the Japanese tortured more than most soldiers because physical punishment was a top-down feature of their conduct. Officers could beat underlings and underlings could beat prisoners.... I think you make a good point. It seems obvious that some cultures will more readily accept torture than others; both in the sense of the number of their citizens who will torture and the number who will endorse it. I suspect that we're one of the "good guys" when this relative scale is used. Having acknowledged that, however, I think it's also clear that given the right leadership or left improperly supervised, a significant number of our fellow citizens will not only torture, they'll do it with gusto. That's the nature of human beings given great power over other human beings. If the authorities have control and want a cowed and broken prison population, all they have to do is ask or look the other way. I doubt that we'd want to see pictures of what we did in WW1, WW11, Korea, or Vietnam in order to get information from prisoners. That doesn't surprise me; what surprises me is that a nation can be so unsophisticated and be so patriotically indoctrinated that it would believe that "American soldiers don't do things like that." It's especially hard to hear it from those directly in charge who MUST have known that the "singing canary" prisoners weren't all having sudden changes of heart and from those in Congress that should have been smart enough to know better. I think we're seeing a ritual dance from those "leaders." My reason for believing this is because I always assumed we were torturing prisoners and I was curious to know whether our techniques were more, or less, extreme, did we "outsource it," and whether the means we used were chemical, physical, or mental? It turns out we did at least some of it in-house and that, of course, left us "twisting slowly in the wind" when the truth started to emerge. I recall American reluctance to fly on runs that firebombed Dresden and Hamburg, then later they killed over 100,000 in the same kinds of raids over Tokyo. Four years of war changed things. I think a factor in "guilty conscience" is the knowledge that if your deed were to be discovered, the people you respect would abhor you. After 4 years of war the American public had seen a lot of their sons buried in faraway lands. The patriotic fever was probably high and the government's propaganda machinery was well oiled. The men that dropped the atomic bombs on Japanese cities were seen as heroes, not as killers of women and children. That's what war does to perceptions of right and wrong, or good and evil AT HOME. Imagine what it does to distort those same values in those who are fighting against men who are killing them and their buddies? In such places the opinions of "your public" are the men who serve, fight and die with you. Historically there were some pretty loose standards for right and wrong when it came to destroying the villages and populations that sheltered and aided the enemy. Iraq will, if we stay long enough, present the same choices to our soldiers. When George W. Bush, and Cheney, and Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz, and Perle and many of the others were so anxious to get the war in Iraq going, they had little personal knowledge of what it was that they were starting and where it would lead. That's a shame because the words, "war is a last resort" ought to actually mean something.

To: Gordon A. Langston who wrote (132136)	5/8/2004 4:20:22 PM
From: Ish	Respond to of 281500

<<It was a fairly common explanation that the Japanese tortured more than most soldiers >> I have coffee with a guy who's 16 year old brother and another local 16 year old enlisted. His brother was killed just after his 18th birthday on the Bataan march. The other kid lived through it but still has many scars from being stabbed with bayonets. What's sad is my friend wanted to buy a cemetery plot and put in a ground level plaque for his brother. No body, no plaque.