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I agree that the nuclear bombings of Japan were terrorist attacks, albeit justified ones. The purpose of those attacks was to cause so much devastation that the enemy became completely demoralized and surrendered. Not all terrorist attacks are cowardly and unjustified, at least by definition. I think the decisions have to be viewed in context of the alternatives, however, where hundreds of thousands of poeple were going to die no matter what at the close of WWII.
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The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error. ~John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
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