It's Hiroshima Day
I almost forgot, its August 6th, the day the first atomic bomb was dropped on a populated city 65 years ago. I understand that a US diplomat and the UN Secretary General attended the service in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park for the first time. I wondered if Google would mark the anniversary in the letters on their web site. They didn't. Neither did Bing post a beautiful front page picture of the city today. Too soon, I guess. It may always be too soon.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Duh, both of those are American sites, what did you expect?
But hey, America helped with that Hiroshima Peace Memorial thing right oh wait
http://whc.unesco.org/archive/repco96x.htm#annex5
The United States is dissociating itself from today’s decision to inscribe the Genbaku Dome on the World Heritage List. The United States and Japan are close friends and allies. We cooperate on security, diplomatic, international and economic affairs around the world. Our two countries are tied by deep personal friendships between many Americans and Japanese. Even so, the United States cannot support its friend in this inscription.
The United States is concerned about the lack of historical perspective in the nomination of Genbaku Dome. The events antecedent to the United States’ use of atomic weapons to end World War II are key to understanding the tragedy of Hiroshima. Any examination of the period leading up to 1945 should be placed in the appropriate historical context. The United States believes the inscription of war sites outside the scope of the Convention. We urge the Committee to address the question of the suitability of war sites for the World Heritage List.”
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#1. I would fully support a picture of the city today without any commentary. Why not? I don't feel shame for what was done and I think the wealth and prosperity the city has returned to is a good thing.Originally Posted by Supermarioman
Duh, both of those are American sites, what did you expect?
But hey, America helped with that Hiroshima Peace Memorial thing right oh wait
http://whc.unesco.org/archive/repco96x.htm#annex5
#2. Not sure about the quote and whether it should be on the World Heritage list.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
#1 America has a nasty habit of burying the shameful bits of it's history under the rug. That goes for it's corporations as well.
I think they should have run a picture today, but they won't because they don't like talking about it.
#2 I don't see how anyone could debate it being on the World Heritage list, it's one of the most important sites in modern human history.
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Before continuing any debate on this, are you aware of Japan's more heinous actions that it committed during WWII?
. . .
Yeah, Japan's government at the time was a crazy murderous dictatorship.
What does that have to do with the thousands of random civilians in Hiroshima?
Japan being bad at owning up to it's failures doesn't excuse the U.S from owning up to it's own.This being stated in a discussion about Japan is just hilarious.
I enjoy blank walls.
This being stated in a discussion about Japan is just hilarious.
Automatic TRIPLE FAIL. -1000 points.
You have bad grammar, and I think you're either trolling or you may be an idiot. Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a shameful act. I don't know anyone who thinks so besides you.
Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war against Japan and saved millions of civilian and soldiers' lives. But you don't like reading history books, so continue with your revisionist idiot parroting librulz conversation.
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<mod hat>
Dial it back a few notches please, Agamemnus. No need to get this personal and hostile on your entry into the discussion.
</mod hat>
Last edited by Wraith; 08-09-2010 at 09:37 PM.
Not the first time. Wont be the last. The other places are miles better.
Your weird frenzy to make this political point notwithstanding, the common denominator among these things is positivity. See the full list at the bottom of this post. Big powerful weapons first detonation would have to be squashed pretty hard to fit in. Even if you did it, you would be filling the letter and not the spirit.
Im not familiar with the full list of sites, but do they include similar things? E.g man on the moon, the holocaust, the manhattan project, human genome mapped? Because really, Hiroshima only really affected things for 50 or so years. A miniscule blip in world history. Now everyone has nukes and its a big yawnfest.
Selection criteria:
- to represent a masterpiece of human creative genius;
- to exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town-planning or landscape design;
- to bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared;
- to be an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural or technological ensemble or landscape which illustrates (a) significant stage(s) in human history;
- to be an outstanding example of a traditional human settlement, land-use, or sea-use which is representative of a culture (or cultures), or human interaction with the environment especially when it has become vulnerable under the impact of irreversible change;
- to be directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance. (The Committee considers that this criterion should preferably be used in conjunction with other criteria);
- to contain superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance;
- to be outstanding examples representing major stages of earth's history, including the record of life, significant on-going geological processes in the development of landforms, or significant geomorphic or physiographic features;
- to be outstanding examples representing significant on-going ecological and biological processes in the evolution and development of terrestrial, fresh water, coastal and marine ecosystems and communities of plants and animals;
- to contain the most important and significant natural habitats for in-situ conservation of biological diversity, including those containing threatened species of outstanding universal value from the point of view of science or conservation.
"Son," he said without preamble, "never trust a man who doesn't drink, because he's probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They're the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They're usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they're a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can't trust a man who's afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It's damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he's heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.
Looking at that full list Spawnie quoted, I have to agree, it's pretty hard to fit the dome into that. You might, with a great deal of effort, manage to fit it into 4. and 6., but if it's that hard to justify, it's probably not something that fits the intent of marking World Heritage sites.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
Does everyone having lightbulbs make Edison inventing them less important?
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Well, you've certainly won that argument. I'm giving you a gratis round of applause for your sterling work. Keep it up.
"Son," he said without preamble, "never trust a man who doesn't drink, because he's probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They're the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They're usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they're a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can't trust a man who's afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It's damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he's heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.
[2 cents] Ending the possibility of all out warfare for the forseeable future is a pretty big deal, especially when you consider how horrific all out conventional warfare had become. /[2 cents] (But should the Manahattan Project / Los Alamos be honored for that or should the first city to get nuked?)
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
Er, well, as for positivity Auschwitz is on the list innit
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/31
Yep.
Your joking aside, Spawnie, prevalence != irrelevance.Well, you've certainly won that argument. I'm giving you a gratis round of applause for your sterling work. Keep it up.
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It even lists how it meets the criterion. Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not. The only reason you continue on with this is because these two cities were destroyed and the people within killed by a unique type of bomb.
. . .
You think it doesn't meet the criteria.
The world opinion is that it does.
Are we quite finished here?
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If the world claimed 2 + 2 was 5 they would still be wrong. As would you.
I'm not even certain you understand why Auschwitz is on the list and why it meets the criteria, while Hiroshima and Nagasaki do not.
. . .
Auschwitz is kinda in the boonies too, why couldn't the site remembering Holocaust be more conveniently in Berlin
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
Yeah, pretty much.
The carpet bombing is indeed the crux issue; since it was deemed necessary, the use of the atom bomb per se isn't any more or less horrific. Except for the fallout damage, which is unique to this kind of warfare.
The real moral dilemma, in my eyes, is whether the use of the nukes was necessary in the atmosphere directly before the Cold War. Many historians have argued that Soviet Russia cooled relations and started the Cold War due to perceived hostile acts from the West; whether that is hogwash or not, it is an interesting question whether or not it was necessary to kill all those Nips just to show Russia that this is the shape of things to come. The Allies had already committed to mass murder in the name of freedom, so one technique over another is somewhat irrelevant; the geo-political climate that came after is the true heritage of the atom bomb.
It was discussed in the days before the bombing of Japan whether it'd be sufficient to simply stage a show-bombing of a deserted island, in view of diplomats from Nippon, Russia and so on. The political climate of the War didn't allow for that, but it's an interesting dilemma nonetheless. Certainly Stalin didn't care one whit about the dead Nips, the display of force (of which he was cognizant beforehand) was what pushed the Soviets into the arms race.
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
I'd take the writing of historians covering the origin of the Cold War with a pillar of salt; most of them have a lot of bones to grind. I've never seen any convincing evidence to demonstrate that A) the US dropped the nukes to scare the Soviets, or B) that the Soviets were actually scared off by the dropping of those nukes. For point A, if the US was so intent on limiting Soviet influence in 1945, why allow them to occupy so many countries? The US was in a position of strength, and could have twisted Stalin's arm to withdraw from most of them. For point B, Stalin was unwilling to fight the US at that time because his resources was drained and he didn't think he had a shot of winning. He didn't think particularly high of nuclear weapons, and thought their impact would be no worse than a surprise attack (there's also the fact that the capacity to build nukes was very weak). He was scared by America's industrial capacity and fresh boots on the ground in Western Europe, not by a few nuclear weapons. And the memoirs of the likes of Truman certainly didn't emphasize this revisionist arguments. Some times I wish the historians would professionalize and stop using selective documents to support their highly ideological viewpoints.
Stalin was a conservative; he was not as good at anticipating the future as you think. The foreign policy he pursued was a 19th century foreign policy: occupations, grand bargains, temporary peaces, deals with enemies, etc. What he cared about after WWII was rebuilding the Soviet industrial base, and then rebuilding the military. To do that, he wanted a major buffer in Europe. He wouldn't say no to half of Japan if offered, but he certainly didn't think it a priority.
Hope is the denial of reality
A "what if...?" scenario is left to writers of fiction. They could have dropped it on some deserted islands, and the Japanese might not have surrendered; thus, it would have prolonged the war and cost even more lives, since they needed time to build more bombs, I think.
There's no point in second-guessing, nor is there any real point in analyzing whether they should have bombed a deserted island or not, beyond historical interest. Unless, of course, the US is faced with the exact same situation again and could have learned from analyzing what it did... but, that is doubtful, barring various science-fiction-esque events.
In light of Nessie's remarks, I just don't get that objection.
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
I don't stand in judgement inasmuch I tried to illustrate the attitudes present at the time. The opinions of the scientists who worked on the Manhattan project certainly weren't uniform, and down the road Edward Teller found himself branded a hawkish lunatic by many of his peers due to his unwavering desire to create weapons of even greater magnitude.
The rest of your questioning seems to hinge on an unreasonable implicit assumption that some civilian target needed to be hit before the Cold War could germinate; I conveyed a sentiment in my earlier writing, from the people working on the problems of the time, at the time, that this need not be a necessity, and it seems your counter is "nuh-uh!"? I do not understand.
Furthermore, I don't care for your simple-minded implication that "an arms race" has existed since the dawn of the human species. This is a null hypothesis and a red herring. Of course there is and always has been a "race" to ensure the safety of some arbitrary group of people with more and more pronounced means of focusing energy, but this does not mean that advances in technology have not altered the shape of warfare and as a result human culture several times in profound ways. The invention of the various metal forging technologies, the long bow, gun powder, the Blitzkrieg, and finally the atom bomb all decided the fates of nations, and the way humanity waged war and perceived war. It is trivial to note that it is equally possible to explode ordinary TNT everywhere on the globe where your planes can fly; the ability to store so much energy to be released by a single device changed the shape of the world. The rocket technology that both parties of the Cold War "salvaged" from the ruins of the Reich in the shape of scientists created a situation unique in human civilization; a group of less than a hundred men, sealed away beneath mountains of stone stood forever on the brink of the choice, whether to end human existence or not. That this is the logical procession from sticks and stones has little to no bearing on the reality of the situation, it only underlines a physical truism, focusing energy into smaller locales is more efficient in creating ruin.
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
But this ultimate focussed energy weapon is so terrible nations are afraid to provoke their use thus ending the upward cycle of ever more horrible war and ushering in an age of comparative peace and respect for life. Ruin, indeed. Pshaw.My Friend Ness it only underlines a physical truism, focusing energy into smaller locales is more efficient in creating ruin.
The Rules
Copper- behave toward others to elicit treatment you would like (the manipulative rule)
Gold- treat others how you would like them to treat you (the self regard rule)
Platinum - treat others the way they would like to be treated (the PC rule)
I didn't imply (or intend to imply) that Hiroshima was THE catalyst for the cold war, in fact I thought I did the opposite with my null red herring. My intention was to convey the belief that the A-bomb would have been used on human targets (military or otherwise) at some point in the intervening years if it had not been used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That belief is based as on the Pandoras Box scenario and the ever important "human" element, we are dangerous creatures, some more than others (Edward Teller for example) and we have an incredible ability to learn by a myriad of different means, but by good luck or bad we often learn by experience - which includes what we simplistically call mistakes.
Hiroshima was a lesson, clearly we learned it well and I believe (simplistically) rightly or wrongly that if not for that lesson we would have had to learn it elsewhere in another conflict (take your pick of any conflict since 1945). The US had the bomb, inevitably others would get it, the only variable would be the timeline. I don't think you are claiming that the bomb could have been shelved, without first "experiencing" it - are you?
I think essentially we agree on most of this (I certainly don't feel like I was disagreeing with you), but I was being too simplistic for your liking.
I am just a man that forges metal and makes weapons after all - simple folk we are.
Such is Life...
I'm pretty simple-minded too
We're still kind of dancing around the issue of whether a show-bombing of a deserted island and surrounding empty fleet could've conveyed the destructive force to the Soviets. Sufficiently to both create a Cold War and keep it cold, I mean.
If we accept the idea that Stalin did not care about the dead Japs (a likely prospect but let's take it for an axiom), then it should not matter whether the bomb levelled a real city or a mock one; the point was the potency of the new technology.
And from a purely moral standpoint it is kinda heinous to think that all those (arguably awful) Japs had to die just so we could have the Cold War in the first place, instead of a limited and primitive atomic exchange. As a European I do appreciate it, this'd all be a glowing wasteland if there had been an exchange in the late 40's, but I'm also not convinced that's an ethical argument for annihilating all those lives in Japan. If the ends don't always justify the means, how on Earth could we accept that results do?
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
All the above is only relevant if you take as fact that Truman made the decision to drop the bomb to impress the Soviets.
I'm not so sure I can swallow that as the only reason.
Brevior saltare cum deformibus viris est vita
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