“Leahy wrote in his 1950 memoirs that ‘the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.’”
And yet, after the SECOND use of a nuclear weapon, there were elements within the Japanese government that actively sought the overthrow of the emperor rather than surrender. Perhaps Leahy was wrong.
On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the CIA informed the White House that the Soviet Union was a strong, thriving economic success that had a GDP perhaps twice the size of the US.
Not everybody “in the know” actually knows anything.
“... After all, both are pushing little old ladies around.” [sitetest, post 17]
“...Not everybody “in the know” actually knows anything.” [sitetest, post 18]
“...May I ask you to go back and read our remarks again, and see the complete disjunction between what you wrote, and what I wrote?
I did not in the slightest intend what you think. …” [Mrs Don-o, post 23]
A hundred and one thanks to sitetest for wit and clarity. The support is welcome, the moreso for being uncommon. I’ve been berated and belabored, intimidated and condescended to by people with reputations rather more imposing, and egoes rather larger, than what most members of the forum here admit to. But no one takes a back seat to Freepers who bridle with indignation when someone presumes to challenge their orthodoxies.
Mrs Don-o is entirely correct that I don’t know her that well, nor have I known many of the historic personages, nor the modern public persons, whose utterances she quotes in defense of her pronouncements.
My response is that I don’t have to know anyone involved to foresee their reactions, or understand their behavior in terms of organizational dynamics, office politics, and everyday practical psychology.
My conclusions about who people are and why they behave this way or that stem from almost 29 years spent in uniform, working with every rank, every specialty, every armed service, plus encounters with folks from numerous non-military government agencies, and personnel from Allied nations. It was my privilege to know almost all of them, and gain insight not only concerning the modern military establishment and what it does, but to peer through a window into many of the communities and subcultures within American society at large.
On purpose, I’ve kept my conclusions at a low level and as simple as I can, as connected to direct personal observations as I can; after workaday, street-level experiences in leading, following, and inducing individuals to get their acts together and perform as a unit, I concluded that folks aren’t motivated that much, by high, wide, sweeping theories, and the related justifications for this or that form of political organization or societal framework. Such are the stuff for the members of those chattering-class groups I’ve already criticized: church hierarchists, philosophers, academics, journalists, attorneys and the like. They don’t do any real work, and as such are no more than a drag on the rest of us. Parasites. Goes for those purporting to be conservative almost as much as anyone on the Left.
Many forum members will refuse to believe that I take no pleasure in attacking their religious/moral outlook. That’s not what I’ve been doing anyway; they seem to set great store in believing that their religious beliefs have given them answers to “ultimate questions” about life, the universe, ultimate causes, issues of Right and Wrong, codes of behavior, etc. All of those are theories and inhabit an elevated intellectual plane. Theories are not reality.
I am not challenging the accuracy of any of the Timeless Truths they claim to have discovered. It gradually became my home-grown opinion that almost nothing I did on a routine basis was affected by those Ultimate Questions, and that no matter which way the Questions got answered, what I was doing wasn’t affected one way or the other.
And yet the members of those groups - whom I’ve sometimes called our self-appointed moral arbiters - have never granted the courtesy of reciprocal reluctance. Indeed, they seem to look on it as a duty to meddle in what others are up to. And their lack of experience and understanding does not ignite any concomitant caution on their part. They have been wrong about what I’ve been up to, and why I did it, so often that I now laugh at most of what they say. And at length, I came to suspect that if they were so wildly wrong about the petty details (some of which are somewhat above petty, to those of us who toiled in the profession), maybe they were wrong about some of the big stuff, too.
At issue in the current dustup appears to be a disagreement over the value of human life.
I will make the observation that Mrs Don-o and those in agreement with her are coming rather too late to the party, in critiquing those who fought World War Two for us (I was too young to show up for the party) for lacking fine sentiments about any church’s diktats on the sanctity of life. It sounds silly enough when applied to the Axis nations, who weren’t shy about admitting they cared not a fig for the lives of anyone who got in their way; I rather suspect they got a little humor from hearing church hierarchy types tut-tut at them (when they weren’t killing said church functionaries out of hand).
But what truly annoys me is the propensity of various Americans and other members of western civ, who think they are leading us out of some dark swamp of ignorance, barbarism and a-morality, by leveling the same critiques at those in the armed forces of the Allies, who don’t live up to what they’ve told us are Moral Absolutes. The critics and accusers are not balancing the cosmic books by doing what they do; they merely sound absurd. Not to mention ungrateful.
I’m supposed to fall on my face in gratitude, for Mrs Don-o and fellow moralizers, who are dispelling my ignorance of the value of life of an enemy? C’mon.
And I do believe Elizabeth Anscombe was a lotus eater. Anyone who made good in academia, or philosophy, or any chattering-class activity of that sort, after WW2, has led a life of lotus-eating by definition.