Posted on 05/10/2012 1:56:30 PM PDT by servo1969
LOL
Fritz Weaver, the Chancellor is/was a real life Socialist, I believe.
As Wordsworth told him. “You never learn”.
Sure, Kirk was rougher and tougher than Picard, but that was the difference between the Kennedy-Johnson era and the Carter, Clinton or Obama years. That "tough-minded" liberalism (which got us into Vietnam) withered away, but you can't claim it never existed.
The prime directive of noninterference? Liberal or conservative? Who can say? Those things change when the party in power changes. Today's interventionists in power are tomorrow's isolationists in opposition.
And the party in power will always say that it's not interfering "too much" or expecting "too much" change in human affairs. Countries don't admit to being "world policemen" even when they act like it (and that goes for Kirk and the Federation as well).
Dutch Van Kirk is the last survivng member of the first A-bombing. When asked if he would do it again he said,
“Under the same circumstances — and the key words are ‘the same circumstances’ — yes, I would do it again. We were in a war for five years. We were fighting an enemy that had a reputation for never surrendering, never accepting defeat. It’s really hard to talk about morality and war in the same sentence. In a war, there are so many questionable things done. Where was the morality in the bombing of Coventry, or the bombing of Dresden, or the Bataan death march, or the Rape of Nanking, or the bombing of Pearl Harbor? I believe that when you’re in a war, a nation must have the courage to do what it must to win the war with a minimum loss of lives.”
So after five years of war against an enemy who won’t give up...we nuked them.
Now that’s a lesson that needs teaching in today’s world.
I was pretty surprised. All I did was make an anti-Romney remark amidst a bigger attack on Obama. I even linked my facebook and FR homepage for them to see I wasn’t pro-Obama.
Consider what would have happened had we not dropped the bomb.
How many Japanese (soldiers and civilians), along with US soldiers would have perished had we invaded Japan?
Something else to ponder....you think the Soviets wouldn’t have been involved? And you think the Soviets wouldn’t demand something in return for their involvement in defeating Japan?
Japan most likely would have been divided, like Germany and Korea. And then you would have had a Civil War, just like Korea. And no doubt, the US would have been involved in that as well.
When warfare was thought to be organized and civilized and ranks of men lined up to shoot ball and powder rifles at each other - warfare was a constant occurrence.
When war became brutal beyond imagining with entire cities being laid waste - suddenly the appetite for war diminished.
I read a story about India that made me sad - an “untouchable” ran a successful leather business and got a nice home in a “nice” neighborhood and a new well and satellite dish. His neighbors didn't like it and got together and beat him up and poisoned his well and burned down his house - dish and all.
That would be a lot less likely in America - where people are armed. “Then it would just be an armed conflict” someone told me - but no - being part of a mob enacting social “justice” on some uppity guy you don't like has a certain appeal to the internal animal - while bullets whizzing past at a couple thousand feet per second tends to be a real ‘weenie shrinker’.
I fully support the nuking of an enemy who will not surrender.
Like Dutch said, a country has to have the guts and determination to win.
We can use robots to pump oil under sea, we can use them to pump oil from and pit of blue glass just as easily.
This is all well and good as far as things go. But I would hazard to guess this is what would happen after Kirk & company go.
Eminiar VII and Vendikar do indeed sit down to talks. The Eminiar VII delegation explains how these aliens burned up their computers, so there will need to be an armistice while those computers are replaced, then upgraded to Windows 8 (beta).
This enrages the Vendikarians, who use Linux, the reason for the ancient war in the first place.
I recently saw the Hitchcock film “Rope”, and it dealt with the same kind of thinking. In that film, two young men who are clearly modeled on Leopold & Loeb plot to kill a friend of theirs, inspired by the Shaw-esque philosophy of their former professor, played by Jimmy Stewart.
If you look at the map of 1945 post-war, the Allies (us) we could have OWNED Europe, Scandanavia, Japan, the Korean peninsula, and the top 1/3rd of Africa.
What did we do? The Marshall plan, so that the Europeans could rebuild their OWN countries, and then go on to hate us.
In retrospect it would be fascinating to see what would have happened had we been hard-asses who kept what we won with our blood. Japan would have been fine. But imagine a prosperous, democratic Africa? A grateful republican France, no commie Vietnam, etc.
Keep in mind that this was in the middle of the Cold War, the peacniks and the rise of the counterculture.
Yet Hamner and Coon as well as D.C. Fontana were astute observers of humanity.
As Wordsworth told him. “You never learn”.
The whole thing was very, very well done.
This is also why I am against forcing people to take vaccines.
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