Having stood along with the crowds along the Champs-Elysee on the last day of the Tour, I don't know if I'd call it "riveting".
I definitely agree in general: the final stage is usually a day of photo ops, and a last chance for a sprinter to claim a stage win.
The outstanding exception in recent memory was the 1989 Tour, when the final stage was a 24.5 km time trial and, as it turned out, the decisive stage of the race. I still remember a friend calling and telling me that Greg Lemond had miraculously taken nearly a minute out of Laurent Fignon: the leader by 50 seconds at the beginning of the stage. That was one last day that truly deserved to be called "riveting."
First, with so much misinformation floating around about Japan's eagerness to surrender, it's pathetic that a comment like this is modded as "Funny". Pathetic.
I've heard Japan was going to surrender before we dropped the bomb, but we didn't know due to a translation error. They responded to us "We don't have a decision yet" in regards to the end of the war. Our interpreters translated it to, "We decide no."
First, here's a link to a transcript of the Potsdam Declaration, issued by the Allies on July 26, 1945, calling for Japan's immediate surrender: Potsdam Declaration.
What was Japan's response? The next day, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo advised that "it would [be] extremely impolitic for Japan to reject the Potsdam Declaration", and secured agreement to not publicly dismiss the document. The next day, however, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki did publicly reject the declaration, stating "The government does not regard [the Potsdam Declaration] as a thing of any value; the government will just ignore [mokusatsu] it. We will press forward resolutely to carry the war to a successful conclusion."
Quotes appear in Richard Frank's "Downfall". Frank goes on to comment, "Literally, mokusatsu meant 'kill with silence,' but idiomatically it housed an array of meanings: 'take no notice of it', 'treat with silent contempt', or 'ignore.'"
I had read some accounts that speculated that the Japanese were ready to surrender before the A-bomb, Except for a fanatical faction among the army's leadership
That faction happened to lead both the military and the "civilian" government. Japan was not ready to surrender.
Does having killed millions of innocent civilians, justify killing hundreds of thosands of other innocent civilians?
When the alternative is continued slaughter, then, yes, the justification is there. The killing had to be stopped, Japan's leaders were prepared to push their country towards -- were advocating -- national suicide: they weren't about to fold.
It's not like by 1945, the killing in Asia had stopped. It's not like Japan was causing no significant harm. They were killing 100,000 civilians a month in Asia. Bomb demonstrations were going to have no effect, blockading would have taken months to bring about defeat... and meanwhile the killing would continue.
The bombs couldn't bring back to life the millions already dead. They could, and did, prevent hundreds of thousands of more -- Chinese and Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese -- from being added to the toll.
But, I'm simply trying to make this point: if a bunch of people (like the Japanese army) go and do some terrible things to innocent people...
Innocent people numbering in the millions.
... and then in response, we (i.e. our army etc) go and kill thousands of people, who mostly had nothing to do with the stuff their army did and were for the most part innocent.
It was brutal, it was ugly, it sure would have been nice if Japan had gone some other way in the 1930s, but there it was. Tens of thousands dying monthly due to their aggression; their own citizens at risk of starving; their government so corrupt that they insist it's better for their citizens to die than serve their country as productive adults.
There is no plausible scenario for ending that war that does not result in thousands of Japanese civilians dying. If not by being trapped in an invasion by both the US and the Soviet Union, then by starvation; if not by starvation, then being firebombed; if not by firebombs, then by atomic bombs.
That's all. It bothers me that people think that this is OK. War is hell, and somehow these things occur, but we should not dismiss them so casually.
You mean like making completely false statements concerning the casualties of the aggressor nation, compared to the casualties of the peoples it victimized?
I don't see how that - a complete and apparently intentional distortion of historical fact - is any less reprehensible than writing off the atomic bombings as unimportant.
Slashdot Mirror
I definitely agree in general: the final stage is usually a day of photo ops, and a last chance for a sprinter to claim a stage win.
The outstanding exception in recent memory was the 1989 Tour, when the final stage was a 24.5 km time trial and, as it turned out, the decisive stage of the race. I still remember a friend calling and telling me that Greg Lemond had miraculously taken nearly a minute out of Laurent Fignon: the leader by 50 seconds at the beginning of the stage. That was one last day that truly deserved to be called "riveting."
First, with so much misinformation floating around about Japan's eagerness to surrender, it's pathetic that a comment like this is modded as "Funny". Pathetic.
First, here's a link to a transcript of the Potsdam Declaration, issued by the Allies on July 26, 1945, calling for Japan's immediate surrender: Potsdam Declaration.
What was Japan's response? The next day, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo advised that "it would [be] extremely impolitic for Japan to reject the Potsdam Declaration", and secured agreement to not publicly dismiss the document. The next day, however, Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki did publicly reject the declaration, stating "The government does not regard [the Potsdam Declaration] as a thing of any value; the government will just ignore [mokusatsu] it. We will press forward resolutely to carry the war to a successful conclusion."
Quotes appear in Richard Frank's "Downfall". Frank goes on to comment, "Literally, mokusatsu meant 'kill with silence,' but idiomatically it housed an array of meanings: 'take no notice of it', 'treat with silent contempt', or 'ignore.'"
It doesn't mean "We don't have a decision yet."
That faction happened to lead both the military and the "civilian" government. Japan was not ready to surrender.
When the alternative is continued slaughter, then, yes, the justification is there. The killing had to be stopped, Japan's leaders were prepared to push their country towards -- were advocating -- national suicide: they weren't about to fold.
It's not like by 1945, the killing in Asia had stopped. It's not like Japan was causing no significant harm. They were killing 100,000 civilians a month in Asia. Bomb demonstrations were going to have no effect, blockading would have taken months to bring about defeat ... and meanwhile the killing would continue.
The bombs couldn't bring back to life the millions already dead. They could, and did, prevent hundreds of thousands of more -- Chinese and Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese -- from being added to the toll.
Innocent people numbering in the millions.
It was brutal, it was ugly, it sure would have been nice if Japan had gone some other way in the 1930s, but there it was. Tens of thousands dying monthly due to their aggression; their own citizens at risk of starving; their government so corrupt that they insist it's better for their citizens to die than serve their country as productive adults.
There is no plausible scenario for ending that war that does not result in thousands of Japanese civilians dying. If not by being trapped in an invasion by both the US and the Soviet Union, then by starvation; if not by starvation, then being firebombed; if not by firebombs, then by atomic bombs.
You mean like making completely false statements concerning the casualties of the aggressor nation, compared to the casualties of the peoples it victimized?
I don't see how that - a complete and apparently intentional distortion of historical fact - is any less reprehensible than writing off the atomic bombings as unimportant.
Uh... Minimal qualification would be something that's not commonly mistaken for a virus.