I generally agree with the thrust of Chomsky's politics. But... I will just pick out one aspect of his argument here and that is the evergreen bogey -- the atomic bombs. Einstein himself contacted Roosevelt immediately after the US entry into the war and broached the subject of the possibility of developing a nuclear weapon. And Einstein was well known for his humanity to man and the cause of the greater good for the greatest number. It should be well known that well before August 1945 when they were dropped the incendiary bombing of Dresden by the RAF had already occurred -- and if anyone's heard a description of how those particular tens of thousands of civilians died (being burnt alive), the precise method of killing tends to get lost in a pointless contest of which is more immoral. Mention should be made too of the conventional bombing of Tokyo early in 1945 -- when an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 were killed in one raid. Was Franco's use of the Luftwaffe to bomb civilians at Guernica in 1937 as a deliberate terror campaign, any the less immoral for resulting in a few hundred deaths? For deliberate depraved brutality and insult to humanity it is hard to go past the oh-so-proud highly-trained Bushido warriors who in 1937 would line up six Chinese civilians in a row and disembowel them in one stroke (Shanghai/Nanking). The American military commanders, under stress, went for the callous executioners rather than enthusiastically cruel: people like Tibbets and LeMay, who afterward never regretted or even thought twice about their mass killings.
@altschmerz There's no telling how much destruction was really "necessary". I guess the US (and Britain and France and the other allies) wanted to make a point as loud and clear as they could as soon as they could to stop destruction on all sides. If the Allies had asked Japan and Germany, say once a week, "Ready to cry uncle?" while the Allies used minimal, ineffective force merely for defensive purposes and just to deflect direct aggression (and just live with half the world being under a fascist yolk) and you added up all the civilians, death camp prisoners, and military men who died each week in the meantime until the aggressors were "happy"... Well, I'll leave it to someone else to make the estimates and calculations of how many on ALL sides in all countries would have died before WWII ended (i.e. ran out of steam, or people).
A bit of history to think on: (is it racist or was one group overall worse) something under 700 Germans convicted and executed for war crimes in WWII and about 6k Japanese convicted and executed for war crimes.
@altschmerz And at least one Japanese scientist/doctor who injected thousands of, mostly Chinese, but some American, prisoners with diseases and worked on vaccines. He would have been a war criminal and convicted had he not coded all his research and saved it for the Americans who hid him in Wyoming, I believe. His story was uncovered in the early 70's.
And assuming the numbers, 700 and ~6000, are correct, a reply requires comparing the charges filed against the Germans with those filed against the Japanese. I will suspend judgment (i.e., close the history book).
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