We really need to understand that we may not understand other societies. The idea of pre WWII Japanese defying their Emperor was literally unthinkable. As mentioned in another post, this was a "death before dishonor" culture; they literally would have fought to the death (or killed themselves), soldier and civilian alike, before surrendering. Surrender was unthinkable which is why Japanese POWs were so docile: the unthinkable had happened. That's also what made the final surrender possible: the enemy (us) had developed an unthinkable weapon (nucs) which invalidated all the old assumptions.
This begs the question: What do we know about the various Middle Eastern cultures? Are we making a mistake in thinking they view the world like we do? Certainly some of the folks there seem irrational to us. Does that mean they are nuts or does it mean we just don't understand their culture. I offer the example of the Falklands war. Both cultures were pretty similar. But the Britts could not believe that anyone would take part of their empire and not expect war. At the same time, the Argentineans could not believe anyone would come half-way across the world to fight over a chunk rock. Kinda reminds you of the run-up to WWI. -----Original Message----- Curt Raymond wrote on Monday, September 09, 2013 1:20 PM ... If those "innocent people" that we dropped nukes on had said "No don't do this" to their own government we wouldn't have had to make our move. We had to convince the Japanese leadership that we had the biggest stick on the planet ... -Curt _______________________________________ http://www.okiebenz.com To search list archives http://www.okiebenz.com/archive/ To Unsubscribe or change delivery options go to: http://mail.okiebenz.com/mailman/listinfo/mercedes_okiebenz.com
