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Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Tojo, Pol Pot and their followers were simply misunderstood people with a different point of view? They weren't evil? Ah, the joys of moral relativism. And, of course, we (the U.S.) are as culpable as any despot on this planet's surface. Why? Because we have engaged in war and war-like activities ourselves. Although I've always thought that that was done in our society's defense. As far as I know, Bin Laden was never targeted by us before he started killing our citizens who had the misfortune to work in one of our embassies or on one our ships or in an office building in New York. Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the War in the Pacific. Because of the two atom bombs, we didn't invade the Japanese mainland. MacArthur estimated we would have suffered one million casualties in Kyushu and Honshu alone. Given the incredible ratio of Japanese casualties to ours, it's possible that Japan as a nation would have ceased to exist. In Okinawa, there were somewhere between 170,000 to 200,000 Okinawan and Japanese killed to 12,000 Americans. In August 1945, my dad was sitting in a army post in Kansas waiting for orders to ship him to the Far East. He had just completed a tour of duty in France and Germany with the Third Army. Those two bombs allowed him to come home alive. I'm thankful for that. In free societies, we can, if we want to, pray in the direction of Mecca several times a day, not drink alcoholic beverages, cover our bodies with ugly and uncomfortable clothes (if female) so not even our face is exposed, and wipe our ass only with our left hand. In Bin Ladin's world, there is no choice. Gary Hagland Okinawa, Japan -----Original Message----- From: Jeroen Nijman [mailto:jeroen@pi*.nl*] Sent: Saturday, September 15, 2001 6:18 PM To: techdiver@aquanaut.com Subject: Bloodstains on the sand First of all I do apologize for posting this off topic note, but given the earlier notes I felt I had to write these things down. Most of it really boils down to one thing: There is no good or evil, only people with different points of view. Jeroen This remainder of this note is split up in three sections. I wrote the first one, the second and third ones I copied from elsewhere. The first section is meant as food for thought on: Bombing states that harbored terrorists. What is terrorism? The cowardly attacks. The partying Palestinians. The second section contains a proposal for an amendment to the constitution to protect against terrorism. (If you want to know where this proposal came from, send me an offlist mail and I'll tell you.) The third section is an essay on war and weapons of mass destruction, written in 1998. suggest that one study the histories of World War I, World War II and other "regional conflicts" that the U.S. has been involved in to familiarize themselves with the use of "weapons of mass destruction." Remember Dresden? How about Hanoi? Tripoli? Baghdad? What about the big ones - Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (At these two locations, the U.S. killed at least 150,000 non-combatants - mostly women and children - in the blink of an eye. Thousands more took hours, days, weeks, or months to die.) -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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