roachboy

apparently it was not entirely clear that the japanese were definitely going to surrender before the bombing of hiroshima, but there was no question that they were before nagasaki got levelled.
but there were two types of bombs and on the second day it was thursday and the weather was nice.
so why not, eh?
let's see what this new toy can do...

on the other hand, it was also not entirely evident to folk at the time what the nuclear weapons were that they had fashioned---they were understood before hiroshima as really really big conventional bombs, basically--but that changed after, yes?
you'd think it'd have changed.

btw my stepfather was part of the bomber crew that would have flown a third bomb had it not become REALLY obvious that japan was throwing in the towel. he felt so great about it that he's spent much of the rest of his life doing political work against nuclear power in general.
go figure.


so anyway the two bombs are not the same, the do not present the same problems.

you could accept jazz's arguments concerning the cold-war motive and STILL not understand or accept the bombing of nagasaki. if that sort of thing concerns you--ethics and all that.

i understand the school of "thought" that says war is war and all bets are off--i understand the argument that "terrorists" don't play by the rules so why should "we" play by them--blah blah blah i generally say afterwards--and i wonder what good there is in using these arguments to justify blowing off those few international conventions that make the already barbaric state of war a little more humane, particularly given that the arguments encapsulate exactly the kind of motivations that created the need for such agreements in the first place, and demonstrate why they're important.

it is easy--really fucking easy--to slide down the pathway to barbarism: there's **always** a justification, it's **always** reactive it's **always** "their fault" that "we" have to throw respect for even the most basic norms that make us human beings and not some extremely dangerous and stupid animal out the fucking window.

i know i know war is ugly and people die.....but how on earth does it follow from this self-evident claim that therefore all ways of killing are equivalent and that therefore anything goes?

people say war is about revenge and is about primitive human instincts and i suppose that's true--and it is in the effort to get past a world controlled by these primitive human instincts that the modern world took shape, for better and for worse--and it is strange to consider that the doctrine of total war (clausewitz) and the notion of international law designed to place limits on what people can do to each other are the results of the same modernity, ain't it?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite