On Sun, Dec 28, 2014 at 11:34 PM, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote:
> On 12/28/2014 3:08 PM, Jason Resch wrote: > > > I learned more about US history in those 10 episodes than >>> throughout all of high school. >>> >> >> I haven't seen the series because I made a special effort not to, so I >> really shouldn't comment about it, but I will say that in general it would >> be wise not to believe everything Oliver Stone tells you. >> > > That advice goes for any source. Adding new sources of information never > hurts so long as you bear that in mind. > > > Wrong "information" hurts when it is given credence. > I doubt much if any of it is wrong, regarding the documentary: "This has been fact checked by corporate fact checkers, by our own fact checkers, and fact checkers [hired] by Showtime. It's been thoroughly vetted...these are facts, our interpretation may be different than orthodox, but it definitely holds up." > > > > >> >> >>> > It was the Russians declaring war against Japan that concerned them >>> the most, not the bomb. >>> >> >> There are lots of theories but we will never know if the Japanese would >> have surrendered without the bomb or the invasion but I do know one thing, >> it wasn't unreasonable for the American's to expect that they would not, >> and it wasn't unreasonable for the American's to expect that a invasion >> would cause a gargantuan number of casualties. >> > > The estimates were in the tens of thousands, which is high but still a > small fraction of those killed by the bombs. > > > The estimates were in the hundreds of thousands - and that's among U.S. > servicemen. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall they > obviously would have also killed a lot of Japanese defenders. > The estimates were continually revised upwards, from the initial estimate of 30,000 (perhaps in an effort to retroactively justify the bomb's use). > > Japanese casualties from Nagasaki and Hiroshima totaled about 200,000. > Suppose U.S. casualties in an invasion had been only 10,000 and Japanese > casualties only 20,000; do you think Truman should have sacrificed 10,000 > of his own citizenry to save 180,000 of the enemy? I can assure you that > the U.S. electorate would not have agreed with such a calculation. > > So how high do you think the ratio of dead foreign civilians to dead domestic soldiers can get before its no longer politically acceptable? 100:1, 1000:1, 10000:1? At some point it becomes de facto genocide. Jason -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
