Apologising for past events

[ANGELFIRE1]

Posted on this the other day, but my post has disappeared into cyber space, it's gone, departed, lost and I cannot find it. It was a very simple post, offending no one but it is no more. How does that work?.

 

Angel1

[Shef1985]

Posted on this the other day, but my post has disappeared into cyber space, it's gone, departed, lost and I cannot find it. It was a very simple post, offending no one but it is no more. How does that work?.

 

Angel1

 

Well, what did you actually put? Maybe it was deleted in error. Just reiterate it

[ANGELFIRE1]

Well, what did you actually put? Maybe it was deleted in error. Just reiterate it

 

I assume it was removed, and did not want to cause any agro over it. The post I replied to had gone as well.

 

I wonder if I have had a bad dream and dreamed it all up.

 

Angel1

[Lex Luthor]

Indeed. Has Japan apologised to China for the war crimes they committed in the 1930's? Or to the Korean women they forced to be prostitutes for the Japanese army?

 

My late father was a Japanese PoW in WW2 and if anyone should be apologising it's the Japanese. Their treatment of prisoners was inhumane. Bombing the Japanese was absolutely the right thing to do. An invasion of the Japanese mainland would have been long and bloody. Dropping the two A-bombs let Japan know that it was all over and they had best surrender pdq.

 

Whilst I totally see where you're coming from, I do think that deliberately bombing civilians no matter on what scale is wrong. There's nothing wrong in nations apologising for their part, even though their former adversaries haven't. What Obama has done is truly a wonderful thing, but I do wish he would have apologised.

[I1L2T3]

I'm vehemently anti nuclear weapons but I'm pretty sure that when they dropped those two bombs in 1945 the USA had no real idea what the impact on a civilian population would be. It was a mix between an experiment using two different types of atomic bombs against cities and a means to more quickly end the war.

 

The Americans by 1945 were bombing and strafing at will over Japan. They had established forward air bases and could have carpet bombed any Japanese city at almost any time. They could have slowly destroyed cities one by one over the course of years and killed millions of Japanese civilians in the process. Even after that they could have invaded and still faced millions of fanatical Japanese defenders. I hate that the weapons were ever used but it is easy to see why the Americans determined that using them was the best way to end the war.

 

The full horror of the atomic attacks was only brought home to the American public by John Hersey's journalism in 1946. If anybody ever needs to understand what happens when a city is attacked with an atomic weapon then they need to read Hersey's work on Hiroshima. It is powerfully written and it really brings to life the pain and terror of being caught in an atomic attack. It's all free to read and it's available here:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

[Eater Sundae]

Individuals shouldn't apologise for past actions by other individuals.

 

A representative of an organisation (such as the state or, for example, a police authority) should apologise on behalf of that organisation for its past actions, but only if those actions were wrong at the time they were committed. We should not use a modern viewpoint when deciding whether past actions were wrong.

[Nagel]

Whilst I totally see where you're coming from, I do think that deliberately bombing civilians no matter on what scale is wrong. There's nothing wrong in nations apologising for their part, even though their former adversaries haven't. What Obama has done is truly a wonderful thing, but I do wish he would have apologised.

 

For anyone who hasn't seen it, watch Lesson#5 from the Oscar winning documentary "The Fog Of War: Eleven Lessons From The Life Of Robert S. McNamara"

 

It's the one about the firebombing of Japanese cities during WW2 which Robert S. McNamara was involved in, but it's really about proportionality in warfare.

 

It's only 3 minutes long, but very powerful stuff -