The girls conscripted as nurses in the article above were as young as 15 - I suppose you don't count them as children? Of course not, it shreds your flimsy excuse of an argument.
Again here http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/o/o k/okinawa_prefecture.html:
The Princess Lilies
Another point of Okinawan resentment is due to that the WWII Japanese military forced school girls to join a group known as the Princess Lilies and go to the battle front as nurses. The Princess Lilies was an organization made up of girl students, 15 to 16 years old, who participated in the battle as nurses. There were seven girl's high schools in Okinawa at the time of WW II. The Princess Lilies were organized at two of them, and a total of 297 students and teachers joined the group and eventually served the Army as nurses. Two hundred and eleven died. Most of the girls were put into caves, which served as temporary clinics, and took care of injured soldiers. There was no medicine, food or water. Many of the young girls died while trying to get water for the wounded soldiers. The Japanese military also told these girls that if they were taken prisoner the enemy would rape and then kill them, and then gave the girls hand grenades to commit suicide with before being taken prisoner. One of the Princess Lilies explains this by saying, "We had a strict imperial education, so being taken prisoner was the same a being a traitor. We were taught to prefer suicide to becoming a captive." --(Moriguchi, 1992) Many students died saying "Tenno Banzai." which means "Long live the Emperor."
The board of education, made up entirely of mainland Japanese, required the girls' participation. Teachers opposed to the board of education, insisting the students be evacuated to somewhere safe, were accused of being traitors.
In October 1944, to further address the manpower shortage, phase two of the heiekiho was effected with implementation of a boei shoshu, or 'Defence Draft.' This law established a boeitai, or 'Defence Force:' a unit made up of male Okinawan civilians.[13] Even with the boeitai the 32nd Army was still short of manpower. This prompted the mobilisation of young men and women from junior high schools, young women's schools, and youth organisations. They were organised into groups with names such as the tekketsu kinnotai, or 'Blood and Iron, Loyalty to the Emperor Unit,' gokyotai, or 'Defence Corps,' giyutai, or 'Loyalty and Courage Corps,' tokushi kangotai, or 'Volunteer Nursing Corps,' and kyugotai, or 'Relief and Rescue Corps.' In the battle zone to the north students from
junior high schools and women's high schools became part of the gakutotai, or 'Student Corps,' and were involved preparing defences or assisting in field hospitals. It is estimated that of approximately 2,300 young students in this gakutotai, more than 1,200 died.
Here is a quote from an a-bomb survivor- "Testimony of Yasuhiko Taketa,
a survivor of Hiroshima": http://www.gensuikin.org/english/taketa.html
Women and children engaged in fire drills, grew vegetables to increase a pitifully inadequate food supply, and practiced fighting with bamboo spears to prepare for a last, fight-to-the-death battle on Japanese soil.
And here http://nikkeiview.com/roots.htm
My mother to this day is reluctant to relive her childhood during the war (her hometown, the Hokkaido fishing town of Nemuro, was also firebombed in the weeks leading up to Hiroshima). When prodded, she'll describe the final days before Japan's surrender, when she and other school girls trained with bamboo spears, preparing for the coming hand-to-hand battle to the death with the invading Americans. She describes these scenes, and shrugs as if they're not important.
And here: http://www.ipc.hokusei.ac.jp/~z00323/classes/histo
This is the very last reply I'm going to make to you, since you've proven to be a liar and revisionist of the worst type. Go wallow alone with your own personal demons, there's obviously something wrong with you that lets you justify your warped beliefs.
From http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?article=22919 among MANY others:
ITOMAN, Okinawa -- The Battle of Okinawa ended 59 years ago Wednesday, but time has not dimmed the memories of survivors of World War II's bloodiest Pacific theater campaign.
Among Japanese and Americans attending the annual memorial at Peace Prayer Park will be survivors of a special group of Okinawans who continue to press their message to the world: "Don't let this happen again."
The memorial honors all the people who died during the 83-day engagement that began April 1, 1945 -- one of the war's fiercest battles involving U.S. troops in the Pacific. More than 200,000 were killed: 12,281 Americans, 110,000 Japanese soldiers and Okinawan conscripts and some 150,000 Okinawan civilians -- a third of the island's population.
Names of all the dead are inscribed on black granite walls arranged like the "V" formations of birds taking flight to the sea. Among the names are those of 123 female students pressed into service as nursing aides during the battle, which has come to be called the "Typhoon of Steel."
Many were classmates of Tsuru Motomura, 79, curator of the Himeyuri Peace Museum in Itoman, near Peace Prayer Park. The student nurses were known as the Himeyuri or "Princess Lily" Girls. Daughters of Okinawa's privileged class, they attended one of two exclusive Naha high schools. Most hoped to become teachers.
Motomura was one of 222 girls from her school pressed into service as Japanese army nurses. More than 100 of them perished.
"It is my duty and the duty of those who survived the war to tell people of the reality of war, the brutality and stupidity of war," Motomura said during an interview at the museum. "It is our duty to speak for our friends who fell in the war and to repose their souls."
Motomura supervised the museum's recent renovation. "The original museum, built 15 years ago by the surviving students, was designed to convey a message of war and peace through displays and the testimony of the survivors, the eyewitnesses," Motomura said. "However, all of us are already over 75 years old and we cannot come to the museum forever to tell our stories.
"The new museum is designed to let the displayed items speak for themselves," she said, "with detailed captions" in Japanese and English.
In March 1945, the girls and 18 teachers were conscripted as nurses' aides and assigned to the Japanese Army Field Hospital in Haebaru village. The hospital was in a series of caves dug into a grassy ridge. The girls had several years of military-type training; hours of indoctrination had replaced subjects such as English; physical education shifted from learning traditional dances to marching in step.
But nothing, survivors said, prepared them for what was to follow. "News of their mobilization to the Army Field Hospital had led the students to believe that they would conduct their medical duties in safe wards flying Red Cross flags," the display states. "The reality was that they were thrown into the hellish war front full of oncoming shells and bullets."
In all, 123 girls and 15 teachers died during the battle, most after being released from duty and abandoned to wander the battlefield. Another 87, who had been allowed to go home, also perished.
Before World War II, 21 junior high and high schools operated on Okinawa. All their students eventually were sent to the front lines. Girls became student nurses; boys became messengers and laborers in the "Iron and Blood Corps."
"As the units that had retreated to the south were decimated, some students were given improvised bombs and were made to perform suicide attacks on U.S. tanks," a display at the museum states.
"given up on China and was retreating to its home islands by this point"
How noble of them, but over 160 million Chinese were still in Japanese occupied areas, and starving like mad. So I guess "giving up and retreating" wasn't going so fast eh?
I guess that they were leaving makes it OK though, so let's not count any of those starving Chinese, because it's "ridiculous" to attribute their situation to aggressors who had been occupying their country and killing them like animals for 8 fucking years...
Orders were given to conscript all civilians over the age of NINE, and these women and children were in fact being trained with bamboo spears to fight the invasion, yes or no?
For the Okinawa campaign, the Japanese army conscripted students as young as 12 into special front line construction and nursing units, which suffered 1200 of 2300 killed, yes or no?
Once the Okinawan battle was clearly lost, orders were issued for all Okinawan civilian men to kill their families then themselves. When possible, they were forced to obey these orders by Japanese troops, yes or no?
The Japanese had hoarded over 6000 kamikaze aircraft for use against the invasion, yes or no? (The Okinawa result was 1 allied ship sunk or severely damaged for every 7 kamikazes attacking)
There were enough holdouts to SPLIT the damn cabinet, for almost a week, even after the *second bomb*, yes or no?
It took the personal intervention of the Emperor to break the deadlock, yes or no?
Even after this expression of the will of the Emperor, there was enough strong feeling in the army that *several* coup attempts were planned or initiated, in order to continue fighting, yes or no?
It is very clear to anyone who can read, hell you don't even have to read between the lines, just look at their ACTUAL ACTIONS, it is very clear that the cabinet was in no way close to actually surrendering before the Nagasaki bomb. Only those who swallow whole the postwar apologia that some of these criminals gushed out could possibly believe differently. And remember "within months" is not close, it is millions of dead Japanese and Chinese away from being "close".
So what, again, exactly, do you propose as a better alternative? Make sure you list the costs of those too, as with any delays there will be substantial additional deaths.
I'm just about done with you, you're clearly in your own self-justifyin fantasy world, and I've found in the past that the "ohhh the USA is sooo horrible, they dropped the eeeevil nuclear bombs and it's soooo much better to be incinerated or die slowly of starvation than from the eeeeevil nukes" crowd just blithers their same vapid revisionist fallacies.
It's just too bad that a couple of greedy or malicious authors lined their purses by pandering to you jokers, as now that crap keeps popping up more and more:(
The common estimate seems to have been 10 million from starvation, latest cite I can find is Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, 1999, by Richard B. Frank. 10 million, 20 million, ok let's just say "many millions".
Using army horses to transport food for civilians - haha now you are in fantasy land. The thought of the Japanese Army of the time releasing horses for transportation of food for mere civilians - c'mon, you can't tell me you seriously believe this.
In late 1945, something like 800,000 tons of food had to be quickly imported to stave off starvation - and this is without the sea blockade and air attacks on food sources and transportation that would have just made it worse during wartime.
OK, Strategic Bombing survey, let's just start with one paragraph here:
There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan's unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan's disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.
Let's see what this doesn't say - that this alternative would be accomplished with fewer casualties or less total suffering. You do understand that "air supremacy over Japan" means continued B29 attacks, like the raids that killed over 100,000 in a single night on Tokyo, and one night figures in the 50-80,000 range on several other cities, right? Great, it's *way* better to be incinerated in firestorms from napalm raids than in eeeevil nuclear blasts.
Shot, starved, incinerated, or irradiated - one way or the other the Allied Powers were determined to force Japan to accept the Potsdam conditions. Japan's public response to the July communication of the Potsdam surrender demand was IN NO WAY "ok fine except for the emperor": In response to the Potsdam declaration, Premier Kantaro Suzuki stated: "As for the Government, it does not find any important value in it, and there is no other recourse but to ignore it entirely, and resolutely fight for the successful conclusion of thie war." (Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, 1995); p.289)
In fact the word Suzuki used for "ignore" was "mokusatsu" - "treat with silent contempt" - yeah, sure sounds like they were real close to accepting. Wasn't it just in June/July 1945 that the closest-thing-to-an-official-peace-feeler to the USSR was still trying to negotiate some sort of settlement with the USSR to split the spoils of the Pacific between the 2 countries? Yeah, real close.
And here about Olympic/Coronet and the partly-fantasy partly serious plans to resist "to the death": http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/war.term/olympic.html
"At a climactic last Imperial Conference, War Minister Anami was still talking about going on with the war, of meting out a terrible blow to the enemy and achieving a good opportunity to end the war. Japan must press forward courageously, seeking Life in Death: certain victory was not assured, but neither was utter defeat. The terrain was working in favor of the defenders, and so was the inflexible national unity. But just in case a massive blow against the enemy proved not possible, it seemed appropriate for the name of Nippon to be inscribed forever in history by the annihilation of her 100 million loyal subjects, etc., etc. And tears welled into the eyes of the earnest War Minister"
Remember, this conference was after the SECOND bomb...
Here:
http://www.westminster-mo.edu/cm/scholar/252001.pd f
And no, the Japanese never communicated a "gee thats all ok except for the emperor" in any way shape or form, so how do you propose accepting a communication that was never offered?
I do regret not saving all the sources from the last time this came up, this all seems to resurface every 6 months or so:(
Yeah it sucked, but what was the alternative?
on
Atomic Veterans Speak Out
·
· Score: 1, Informative
You're correct in that none of those reasons are "good" reasons, but here's the crux of the problem - what course of action was realistically possible at the time that was any better? The a-bomb condemners harp on and on as if there were better zero-cost alternatives - there weren't! Go back and look at the situation as of August, the US *was* planning to invade the home islands. In preparation for that, they were about to start bombing the transportation system, so that Japanese reserves could not be moved to the invasion areas. Problem for Japan - this is the same transpo system that carries the rice to the populated south. Estimate - 15-20 MILLION Japanese die from starvation, even if no invasion actually takes place.
So what do you propose as an alternative? Blockade? Great, millions starving is SO much better than some cities being bombed.
Diplomatic pressure to surrender? This one is the hardest to really dismiss, as *everybody* wishes it had been possible. But for evidence against it, look what was happening. As of August, the cabinet had still not been able to even articulate their terms, or determine even approximately what to have their few, inept peace feelers communicate. Then, even AFTER the first bomb, the cabinet is still split over surrender. After the SECOND bomb, the cabinet still dithers, is convinced only by the personal intervention of the emperor, and a part of the military then even starts a coup to try to overturn the emperor for THAT!
The Russians invade? Augh, I don't know who would consider this to be a benefit - look at the results in the parts of Manchuria that the Soviets captured in 1945. Something like 20% of the civilian population went "missing". Realistically, would they treat the Japanese any better? Plus now Japan is another Korea, divided and ready for Cold War incidents?
Invasion by US/allies? Oh sure, 100,000 allied casualties on top of hundreds of thousands of Japanese. Again, millions of Japanese starve, since transportation system is wrecked.
So yeah, it was an awful thing, but it seems to have been the least awful of the realistic alternatives.
"Within months" was too fucking late. Even without the planned transportation bombing that the US planned to start within a couple weeks had the war not ended, the Japanese rice harvest was bad and the transportation system was already virtually collapsed. The estimate is that over 20 MILLION would starve that summer, simply due to the bad rice harvest and inability to transport it south to the populated areas. And bullshit to your second paragraph, the more I learn about it, and I've clearly learned *lots* more than you, the more I thank God that nothing worse happened.
Get YOUR myths straight, sure it was an awful thing. Lots of awful things happen during wars, but this was probably one of the least awful things that could have happened, unless you go into fantasy land (like dreaming that the Japanese cabinet could get its act together and actually surrender before the Japanese people virtually ceased to exist).
Here's another little tidbit all you "oh it was so awful" ignoramuses leave out - somewhere around 5000 *Chinese* were dying EVERY DAY. You know, those dudes the Japanese invaded and still occupied? How long do you want to let the Japanese dick around with their fantasy "surrender with terms"? "A couple of months" - congratulations genius, there go 300,000 more innocent Chinese, on top of however many millions of Japanese starve to death that summer...
?? It's not universal, it will only occur when releasing energy stored "long ago" (ie burning fossil fuels or releasing nuclear energy). Biomass based systems collect and release "current" solar energy that would have been heat anyway. Ditto with solar electric,passive solar, or wind. This is on an "earth net" scale of course, any type of storage/release obviously has the potential to create local hot spots, so maybe that's what you meant.
In any case, it's kind of a moot point, as the total energy the earth gets from the sun is about 15,000 times as large as the total of all energy produced by humans from all sources...
And how, pray tell, am I supposed to boycott a company like Diebolical? Don't vote?
Don't you dare blame this on the failings of a free market, this is a no-competition situation precisely because Diebold has a government granted monopoly.
I have only been following this sporadically, and not thought very deeply about solutions, but it does seem obvious that it's vital to have competition at the performance stage, not just the bidding stage. It's unfortunate that elections are just once or twice a year, it does make it hard for refinement, "comparison shopping", and feedback.
What would a B.A.F.H. do?
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 1
One line of speculation that has actually given me a little extra paranoia over the last few years, is the Bastard Aliens From Hell:) I first ran across this in an old Analog, the idea being that a competitive species might think it quite rational to, ahh, remove any potential competition before they develop sufficient technology to become a threat. In the story, this was done with relativistic speed kinetic energy weapons - notoriously difficult to defend against because the speed would significantly cut down on the warning time.
So, a young species like our own that has just recently begun emitting detectable amounts of electromagnetic radiation is greeted by a Microsoft-like neigbor with some near light speed "cease and desist" planet busters. We've been emitting since roughly the 1940's - so if one of these is within 30 light years (and expanding, of course), the weapons should be arriving any day now...
Another good one is that there are significant technological dangers along the usual species development path that might cause civilizational level extermination in a large percentage of the cases. Our tech has just started to be powerful enough to do this - global thermonuclear or biological war, nanotech accidents (read up on "grey goo" for some bonus worry), self replicating weapons...
Or, maybe there's something like Vernor Vinge's "singularity" that generally happens to species not much more advanced than we are currently...
Slashdot Mirror
Again here http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/o/o k/okinawa_prefecture.html:
http://www.niraikanai.wwma.net/pages/wildhorse/cha p1-8.html
Here is a quote from an a-bomb survivor- "Testimony of Yasuhiko Taketa, a survivor of Hiroshima": http://www.gensuikin.org/english/taketa.html
And here http://nikkeiview.com/roots.htm
And here: http://www.ipc.hokusei.ac.jp/~z00323/classes/histo
I guess that they were leaving makes it OK though, so let's not count any of those starving Chinese, because it's "ridiculous" to attribute their situation to aggressors who had been occupying their country and killing them like animals for 8 fucking years...
For the Okinawa campaign, the Japanese army conscripted students as young as 12 into special front line construction and nursing units, which suffered 1200 of 2300 killed, yes or no?
Once the Okinawan battle was clearly lost, orders were issued for all Okinawan civilian men to kill their families then themselves. When possible, they were forced to obey these orders by Japanese troops, yes or no?
The Japanese had hoarded over 6000 kamikaze aircraft for use against the invasion, yes or no? (The Okinawa result was 1 allied ship sunk or severely damaged for every 7 kamikazes attacking)
There were enough holdouts to SPLIT the damn cabinet, for almost a week, even after the *second bomb*, yes or no?
It took the personal intervention of the Emperor to break the deadlock, yes or no?
Even after this expression of the will of the Emperor, there was enough strong feeling in the army that *several* coup attempts were planned or initiated, in order to continue fighting, yes or no?
It is very clear to anyone who can read, hell you don't even have to read between the lines, just look at their ACTUAL ACTIONS, it is very clear that the cabinet was in no way close to actually surrendering before the Nagasaki bomb. Only those who swallow whole the postwar apologia that some of these criminals gushed out could possibly believe differently. And remember "within months" is not close, it is millions of dead Japanese and Chinese away from being "close".
So what, again, exactly, do you propose as a better alternative? Make sure you list the costs of those too, as with any delays there will be substantial additional deaths.
I'm just about done with you, you're clearly in your own self-justifyin fantasy world, and I've found in the past that the "ohhh the USA is sooo horrible, they dropped the eeeevil nuclear bombs and it's soooo much better to be incinerated or die slowly of starvation than from the eeeeevil nukes" crowd just blithers their same vapid revisionist fallacies.
It's just too bad that a couple of greedy or malicious authors lined their purses by pandering to you jokers, as now that crap keeps popping up more and more :(
Using army horses to transport food for civilians - haha now you are in fantasy land. The thought of the Japanese Army of the time releasing horses for transportation of food for mere civilians - c'mon, you can't tell me you seriously believe this.
In late 1945, something like 800,000 tons of food had to be quickly imported to stave off starvation - and this is without the sea blockade and air attacks on food sources and transportation that would have just made it worse during wartime.
OK, Strategic Bombing survey, let's just start with one paragraph here:
Let's see what this doesn't say - that this alternative would be accomplished with fewer casualties or less total suffering. You do understand that "air supremacy over Japan" means continued B29 attacks, like the raids that killed over 100,000 in a single night on Tokyo, and one night figures in the 50-80,000 range on several other cities, right? Great, it's *way* better to be incinerated in firestorms from napalm raids than in eeeevil nuclear blasts.Shot, starved, incinerated, or irradiated - one way or the other the Allied Powers were determined to force Japan to accept the Potsdam conditions. Japan's public response to the July communication of the Potsdam surrender demand was IN NO WAY "ok fine except for the emperor": In response to the Potsdam declaration, Premier Kantaro Suzuki stated: "As for the Government, it does not find any important value in it, and there is no other recourse but to ignore it entirely, and resolutely fight for the successful conclusion of thie war." (Stanley Weintraub, The Last Great Victory: The End of World War II, 1995); p.289)
In fact the word Suzuki used for "ignore" was "mokusatsu" - "treat with silent contempt" - yeah, sure sounds like they were real close to accepting. Wasn't it just in June/July 1945 that the closest-thing-to-an-official-peace-feeler to the USSR was still trying to negotiate some sort of settlement with the USSR to split the spoils of the Pacific between the 2 countries? Yeah, real close.
"At a climactic last Imperial Conference, War Minister Anami was still talking about going on with the war, of meting out a terrible blow to the enemy and achieving a good opportunity to end the war. Japan must press forward courageously, seeking Life in Death: certain victory was not assured, but neither was utter defeat. The terrain was working in favor of the defenders, and so was the inflexible national unity. But just in case a massive blow against the enemy proved not possible, it seemed appropriate for the name of Nippon to be inscribed forever in history by the annihilation of her 100 million loyal subjects, etc., etc. And tears welled into the eyes of the earnest War Minister"
Remember, this conference was after the SECOND bomb...
Here: http://www.westminster-mo.edu/cm/scholar/252001.pd f
And no, the Japanese never communicated a "gee thats all ok except for the emperor" in any way shape or form, so how do you propose accepting a communication that was never offered?
I do regret not saving all the sources from the last time this came up, this all seems to resurface every 6 months or so :(
So what do you propose as an alternative? Blockade? Great, millions starving is SO much better than some cities being bombed.
Diplomatic pressure to surrender? This one is the hardest to really dismiss, as *everybody* wishes it had been possible. But for evidence against it, look what was happening. As of August, the cabinet had still not been able to even articulate their terms, or determine even approximately what to have their few, inept peace feelers communicate. Then, even AFTER the first bomb, the cabinet is still split over surrender. After the SECOND bomb, the cabinet still dithers, is convinced only by the personal intervention of the emperor, and a part of the military then even starts a coup to try to overturn the emperor for THAT!
The Russians invade? Augh, I don't know who would consider this to be a benefit - look at the results in the parts of Manchuria that the Soviets captured in 1945. Something like 20% of the civilian population went "missing". Realistically, would they treat the Japanese any better? Plus now Japan is another Korea, divided and ready for Cold War incidents?
Invasion by US/allies? Oh sure, 100,000 allied casualties on top of hundreds of thousands of Japanese. Again, millions of Japanese starve, since transportation system is wrecked.
So yeah, it was an awful thing, but it seems to have been the least awful of the realistic alternatives.
Get YOUR myths straight, sure it was an awful thing. Lots of awful things happen during wars, but this was probably one of the least awful things that could have happened, unless you go into fantasy land (like dreaming that the Japanese cabinet could get its act together and actually surrender before the Japanese people virtually ceased to exist).
Here's another little tidbit all you "oh it was so awful" ignoramuses leave out - somewhere around 5000 *Chinese* were dying EVERY DAY. You know, those dudes the Japanese invaded and still occupied? How long do you want to let the Japanese dick around with their fantasy "surrender with terms"? "A couple of months" - congratulations genius, there go 300,000 more innocent Chinese, on top of however many millions of Japanese starve to death that summer...
?? It's not universal, it will only occur when releasing energy stored "long ago" (ie burning fossil fuels or releasing nuclear energy). Biomass based systems collect and release "current" solar energy that would have been heat anyway. Ditto with solar electric,passive solar, or wind. This is on an "earth net" scale of course, any type of storage/release obviously has the potential to create local hot spots, so maybe that's what you meant. In any case, it's kind of a moot point, as the total energy the earth gets from the sun is about 15,000 times as large as the total of all energy produced by humans from all sources...
And how, pray tell, am I supposed to boycott a company like Diebolical? Don't vote? Don't you dare blame this on the failings of a free market, this is a no-competition situation precisely because Diebold has a government granted monopoly. I have only been following this sporadically, and not thought very deeply about solutions, but it does seem obvious that it's vital to have competition at the performance stage, not just the bidding stage. It's unfortunate that elections are just once or twice a year, it does make it hard for refinement, "comparison shopping", and feedback.
I for one welcome our new spreadsheet masters!
One line of speculation that has actually given me a little extra paranoia over the last few years, is the Bastard Aliens From Hell :) I first ran across this in an old Analog, the idea being that a competitive species might think it quite rational to, ahh, remove any potential competition before they develop sufficient technology to become a threat. In the story, this was done with relativistic speed kinetic energy weapons - notoriously difficult to defend against because the speed would significantly cut down on the warning time.
So, a young species like our own that has just recently begun emitting detectable amounts of electromagnetic radiation is greeted by a Microsoft-like neigbor with some near light speed "cease and desist" planet busters. We've been emitting since roughly the 1940's - so if one of these is within 30 light years (and expanding, of course), the weapons should be arriving any day now...
Another good one is that there are significant technological dangers along the usual species development path that might cause civilizational level extermination in a large percentage of the cases. Our tech has just started to be powerful enough to do this - global thermonuclear or biological war, nanotech accidents (read up on "grey goo" for some bonus worry), self replicating weapons...
Or, maybe there's something like Vernor Vinge's "singularity" that generally happens to species not much more advanced than we are currently...