111 Replies to “The Ruins Of War”

  2. “International law.
    Isn’t that an oxymoron?”
    Only to uneducated people who are unfamiliar with political science. When all the states on the globe voluntarily sign a treaty to enforce a position, that position has become international law.
    It was not forced on soveriegn states, they worked together with other states to all make a law.
    An example would be the Geneva Conventions against torture which most states have agreed too. It is international law because states recognized that is is moral and a good law to enforce.

  3. Joey W,
    “When is the last time that the US Navy landed on foreign soil? I believe you’ll find that in order to effect an invasion, Marines and/or the Army go ashore.”
    I was talking about a blockade without any invasion.
    “So now you make assumptions, but have no basis for them.”
    Sorry, I didn’t realize you wanted me to provide documentation for a plan I made up off the top of my head.
    “How would these shipyards have been put out of commission? Aerial attack, at the cost of how many planes, men (and civilians)? Naval bombardment, which would have killed many civilians in the area, because it is imprecise?”
    Yes, that’s right.
    “And I would hope that any reasonably intelligent person knows radar cannot track submarines underwater.”
    I meant sonar, sorry.
    “And finally you just wave the whole idea off with ‘if they really wanted to do it, atomic bombs wouldn’t have stopped them’. In that case, we needn’t have bothered to fight the war at all; if they really wanted to win, we wouldn’t have stopped them, so we should have just surrendered.”
    No, not at all. I think we should defend ourselves to the best of our ability, without committing atrocities.
    “What is there about the word “war” that you don’t understand?”
    So if Iranian agents flew planes into the World Trade Center in wartime, it would have been okay with you?
    “My, you like twisting words. There is no ‘right’ to, as you posit, nuke Israel.”
    If you claim it’s okay to do something (such as nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki), then logically you’re saying that there is a right to do it.
    “But when war is declared between powers with nuclear arms, it’s going to be a nuclear war. Because the idea of war is to use the arms you have in an effective manner – the general idea being to win the war. (That’s what most people tend to feel the goal is, at least. I realize you disagree.)”
    So if your goal is to be a millionaire, it doesn’t matter what you do to achieve that goal?
    “Did I not specifically cite the Geneva Convention?”
    But the Geneva Convention forbids the killing of non-combattants. So you cite the Geneva Convention, but otherwise disregard it?
    “I said that because Chamberlain and his fellows tried to deal with people like Hitler in as a reasonable person, assuming that he would keep his promises, they were led into war. They didn’t need to DO anything immoral – but they needed to consider that the world IS an immoral place, and that others must often be treated as dangerous and immoral.”
    I think it was clear to everyone in 1945 that the Japanese were acting immorally. But that doesn’t mean we should act immorally ourselves.
    “Childish and chickish, childish and chickish, childish and chickish.” [With regard to a question about pushing people down stairs for money]
    I guess people should watch their backs around you.
    “That tends to make it a bit tough to support the notion that self-defense is an allowable exception to killing. It’s either right or wrong – YOUR words. But in any case, the idea of ‘double effect’ is, to put it simply, just philosophical BS. It’s a way of rationalizing killing someone.”
    No, not at all. If you’re trying to rationalize killing someone, that is, if your intention is to kill them and you’re trying to find an excuse to do it, then double effect doesn’t apply. It can only apply if you don’t intend to kill that person.
    “You’re starting from a logical fallacy; that your right to live is greater than that of someone else.”
    No, it’s based on the right to repel attacks against your person.
    “What irritates me most is that you talk about self-defense being acceptable, but a war fought on your terms would be suicide for the countries on your side.”
    So the Americans were losing World War II before the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I don’t think that’s the case. It’s possible to win a war honorably.

  4. Joey W – “And I would hope that any reasonably intelligent person knows radar cannot track submarines underwater.”
    Hamilcar – “I meant sonar, sorry.”
    No, you meant radar (or should have). Radar was a very important detector of submarines in WW2 because submarines spent most of their time on the surface. Sonar had a much shorter range and would likely be ineffective in enforcing a blockade against submarines without being used in conjunction with radar (and air patrols).
    Joey W – “(Don’t bother with a reply. I’ve had enough of this.)
    As you can see, that’s not the way it works. If you remove yourself from an argument you don’t get the last word. Also: nyah.

  5. Hamilcar: In case you don’t know the history, almost all states capable of doing so bombed civilians extensively during WW II: Germany, UK, US, Canada, Japan.
    Mark
    Ottawa

  6. Mark – “In case you don’t know the history, almost all states capable of doing so bombed civilians extensively during WW II: Germany, UK, US, Canada, Japan.”
    And where the targeting was deliberate it was wrong for each of those states. I never had the impression Hamilcar was limiting his criticism to America. Obviously a thing or two has been learned since WW2 since none of those states are deliberately targeting civilians as a matter of policy anymore.

  7. M4-10: “a thing or two has been learned since WW2 since none of those states are deliberately targeting civilians as a matter of policy anymore”: at least not since the great increase in ballistic missile accurancy (CEP) in the 1970s-80s.
    The point I was making was that targeting civilians was not new with atomic weapons. They simply did much more effectively what had already been done for some time (and sometimes with death tolls in the same order of magnitude: Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo–the Germans and Japanese never got very good at causing massive aerial bombardment casualties).
    If the civilian issue is what moves one, Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be end point of one’s argument, not the focal one.
    Some sources say the German bombing of Belgrade on April 6, 1941, killed 17,000 people but I suspect that figure is quite exaggerated. Other gruesome figures at this site: “Death Tolls for the Man-made Megadeaths of the 20th Century”
    http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/battles.htm
    Mark
    Ottawa

  9. small dead animals: The Ruins Of War

    Back on August 6th, many marked the 60th anniverary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. small dead animals: The Ruins Of War has pictures, but not of what you would think. Take a look. Joey W had this to say in the comments

  10. The left is very adept at rewriting history without giving a second thought to factual reality. Amazing. Orwell keeps coming to mind.

  11. I’m astonished at these fool lefties who think that it’s some kind of brilliant discovery to realize that deliberately killing civilians is morally wrong. Of course it is. That’s why we don’t want to get into wars, you see. Because war is about what is necessary, not what is moral, and you wind up doing things you know are wrong because you have to win the war.
    Since I don’t define my identity in terms of the purity and intensity of my hatred for Americans, I don’t see any reason to look for reasons to hate them, and therefore I see no point in considering whether it was right or wrong of them to use the bomb. I expect it was just about as wrong as everything else they had to do to win the war. I suspect they agree with that, since they haven’t needed to do anything like that to win a war since, and they haven’t in fact done anything like it again. If they really thought dropping the bomb was actually a good thing, they’d do it every week.

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