On the role of honor in the use of arms, there was a time it was tolerably clear to every schoolboy. Men kill in war to disarm the adversary, to render him unable to harm innocents. When the end can be reached without killing unarmed civilians it should be. To kill the defenseless and unarmed, or to kill for spite or to "break wills" or see men grovel, is shameful, not honorable.
It was honorable to offer the terms actually required politically to end the war, and it was wanton to reject that proposal and insist instead on things not wanted for consistency or prestige, when hundreds of thousands of civilian lives were at stake. None of your obscene desire to "break" a people justifies taking one civilian life; only a necessity to prevent further killing can do so. You allege a necessity but then reject the principle, as well as a way of conforming to that principle. You state your own clearly enough - men may slaughter civilians wholesale until their enemies grovel, the political ends of the war be damned.
You don't seem to notice that is precisely the principle you are condemning Japan for acting upon. But I do.
Additionally, the position I am taking is the one that was not only agreed to by the person you have held up as a paragon of morality - Secretary of War Stimpson, but actually enacted by him, with his complete agreement as to it's severity in it's unexpected use against a mostly civilian population.
So why would you choose Stimpson, of all people, to bathe in your adulation? You claim it's because after the war he wrote that he advised against the use of the bomb as opposed to offering Japan qualified surrender based on leaving their emperor intact, and so this position makes Stimpson some sort of ignored hero of morality.
But you ignore the fact that Stimpson - in reality - went along with the bombing. He didn't resign. He didn't refuse participation. He didn't argue for a lesser impact. No - he thoroughly involved himself in the most savage use of the bomb possible.
And he did it twice.
Why? Because, as I have explained, he was convinced that the position of morality that you are espousing was wrong, because it was based on faulty premises. It was pointed out to him, with the massive backing of the known Japanese atrocities at the time, as well as their collective rule under Bushido, that the Japanese people were not to be considered as a free people. That the collective mindset was so complete, so compelling, so utterly devoid of any acceptence of compassion, and so absolutely cut off from personal morality, that unless the entirety of that collective will was broken, the people would still follow the collective imperative, no matter what surrender document was signed.
Of course, you are well aware of this fundamental premise, and you have been all along. It's why you started your latest post by saying: "The Japanese people is an abstraction, guilt is personal." For you know that, under normal conditions, your statement is a truism. But you also know that the very root of the argument for the need for the bomb was that, for WWII Japan, you statement was exactly wrong. For the Japanese of the time, collective guilt WAS personal guilt. And conversely, personal guilt had the potential to be collective - which is why people committed suicide for their personal guilt, to protect the collective from their personal taint.
And that was the entire damn MORAL problem - the personal had become collective, but - as YOU point out - the collective is, in fact "an abstraction." So, to reach the real people, the abstract collective had to be broken.
What you are also well aware of is that many, many people have considered these issues - I am not arguing anything new. But you have unceasingly defamed me for taking my position, right up to your latest post, with your latest poison being to declare me "worse... than the assassin."
More typically, however, you flood me with insults, most recently: tolerably clear to every schoolboy... to kill for spite or to "break wills" or see men grovel, is shameful... your obscene desire to "break" a people... your own clearly enough - men may slaughter civilians wholesale until their enemies grovel... You don't seem to notice.... All quite satisfying to you, I'm sure.
Yet - do these insults, these defamations, apply to your noble Stimpson, who actually gave the orders to drop the nukes? No! Somehow he is exempt, because he gave a half-assed mea culpa two years later, and found protective bedfellows in the likes of you who refuse - absolutely refuse - to address his overwhelming involvement and support of the bombing of Japan.
I've thought a lot about why you would take such an aggressive position in this issue, and refuse even a modicum of reasonableness in understanding morality of the opposing viewpoints, given the circumstances of the war. Hell, even the Japanese people are more understanding than you are, especially since they admit the bombings saved millions of their lives that would have been taken during an invasion.
But I think you are arguing to protect something else, and that something else is what is driving you. Nuking Japan was morally required because the Japanese people had allowed themselves to become a mind-locked collective. This psychological condition changed the extremity of what was morally required to stop them, by increasing it dramatically. The warfighters of the day, politcally incorrect as they were, recognized this and dealt with it as it needed to be dealt with. But people like you want to undermine that clarity by denying the non-personal collective force that America was really up against, in order to hide the level of aggression necessary to fight ANY collective.
So filth pours out of your mouth, and you claim a moral high ground that Moses couldn't climb, and you sneer about morality and quote literature about cretins who claim to be human.
But it's all just a big dustcloud you've created to hide the reality of a collective mindset, and need for it's total destruction in order to have any chance of freeing those caught in it's hold.
However, it's too late, you know. Too many people understand what is going on now - the internet has badly damaged the ignorance necessary to keep your game going. I know that has nothing to do with whether you will continue to flail away, because your motive is collective. But it is precisely the difference between collective activity and personal activity that is becoming very much a part of people's thinking these days. And the application of morality towards these two very different human psychological models will never be again as hidden as people like you need them to be, in order to successfully argue for the protection of monsters.