[Vision2020] Bishop: Bombing Hiroshima, Nagasaki Same As Terrorism

[Donovan Arnold]

Ted,

Truman had two choices to end WWII. Kill 50,000
innocent Japanese people with a couple of nuclear
bombs OR kill 500,000 innocent Japanese and innocent
US soldiers in a land invasion.

A land invasion would have cost the US more money and
innocent lives. Not to mention that it would result in
10X as many lives being lost, mostly children and
women committing suicide because they were told by the
Japanese government that US troops would rape them and
kill them.

In addition, many millions more Japanese would suffer
from famine and lack of medical care because the US
would have destroyed all their means of production to
win the war in the land invasion.

Finally, the few that would have survived would have
no jobs, houses, schools, or anything else because the
country would be flattened like Germany.

The United States had already paid a heavy price for
WWII, a war they did not start nor ever wanted to
enter. It did not just pay in financial costs, but it
also paid in blood and pain. To ask Americans to pay
even more, wait longer, and sacrifice more was not an
acceptable alternative at the time. The war needed to
end, lives needed to be saved, and in a way that would
prevent Japan from doing it again. 

The US dropped the bomb not to kill innocent lives,
but to prevent a land invasion that would have
resulted in 10 times as many people being killed and
ruined the country's economically for decades. It was
tragic and sad that all those people died and suffered
from the bombs. And no, those people did nothing to
deserve the bombing, but that action saved millions of
lives.

Comparing the actions of the US dropping the bomb with
terrorism is not clear thinking. Terrorists bomb
innocent people because the people they kill do not
believe as they do. The US bombed Japan because it
started WWII and assisted Hitler as he murdered 12
million people because of their race or disability,
bombed Hawaii unprovoked, raped millions of Chinese
women, stole land, starved US citizens, killed are
boys in uniform all for the purposes of greed and the
desire for world domination. Anyone of those things is
worth the bombing a nation. 

The Bombing a nation to end a world war that has been
going on for nearly twelve years and killed nearly 50
million is not the same a blowing up a bus full of
children because their parents follow Judaism or
Christianity. To suggest such a thing I think shows a
lack of understanding of the situation the US was in
and/or a lack of understanding of terrorism.

Donovan J Arnold

--- Tbertruss at aol.com wrote:

> All:
> 
> We often hear support for the use of nuclear weapons
> against Japan in WWII.  
> The USA had been attacked by Japan, and the quickest
> way to end the war and 
> save US soldiers lives was to use nuclear weapons to
> force a quick surrender. 
> 
> But the ethical reasoning in the War on Terror
> pleads that the USA is morally 
> superior to the "terrorists" in Iraq because we do
> not indiscriminately 
> target civilians.  Then was not our use of nuclear
> weapons against Japan an act of 
> "terrorism?"  
> 
> How is the targeting of civilians in Iraq by
> "terrorists," to fight the US 
> occupation of a country that we bombed and invaded
> with no solid evidence that 
> Iraq had attacked the USA, morally different from
> the targeting of tens of 
> thousands of innocent civilians the US killed in the
> nuclear bombings in Japan in 
> WWII?
> 
> 
>
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Bishop: Bombing Hiroshima, Nagasaki Same As
> Terrorism
> 
> POSTED: 8:25 pm PDT August 3, 2005
> 
> WASHINGTON -- The president of the U.S. Conference
> of Catholic Bishops said, 
> that like terrorism today, the atomic bombs that the
> United States dropped on 
> Japan to end World War II were unjustifiable because
> they failed to 
> "discriminate between noncombatants and combatants."
>  
> 
> Bishop William Skylstad wrote a letter to the head
> of Japan's Catholic 
> Bishops Conference in advance of Saturday's 60th
> anniversary of the bombing of 
> Hiroshima. That atomic bomb and a second one that
> was dropped on Nagasaki three 
> days later killed more than 130,000 people.
> 
> http://www.kirotv.com/news/4807499/detail.html
> 
>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Terrorism and nuclear weapons “fail to
> discriminate between combatants and 
> noncombatants,” wrote Bishop William S. Skylstad
> of Spokane, Wash., in a letter 
> to Bishop Augustinus Jun-ichi Nomura of Nagoya,
> Japan, who is president of the 
> Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Japan. 
> 
> http://www.baltcatholicreview.org/story2.asp
> 
>
---------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Vision2020 Post by Ted Moffett
> >
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