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11:02am
from Rad Geek @ Rad Geek People's Daily 09 Aug 2008 12:02 pm Damn the facts—full speed ahead!
from Rad Geek @ Rad Geek People's Daily 24 Mar 2008 2:33 pmAs far as I can tell, Jamie Kirchick, assistant editor for The New Republic,[*] has devoted most of his young professional life to becoming exactly the sort of bright boy at the The New Republic whom Randolph Bourne had in mind when he wrote The War and the Intellectuals, and who, decades later, would make the best and the brightest
into a bitter national joke. In any case, here’s something from his latest, a TNR blog post on Barack Obama’s relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and his recent speech on race:
Finally, what concerns me most about the Wright controversy isn’t the Pastor’s racist statements or even his unhinged views of Israel. I don’t think Obama agrees with any of that nonsense. What concerns me is the sort of comment that Wright made about Harry Truman’s ending World War II, that
We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.This smacks of the Howard Zinn/Noam Chomsky/Nation magazine wing of the American left that Democrats serious about this country’s security (and winning in November) should not want within 100 miles of the next administration.—James Kirchick, The Plank (2008-03-21): Thoughts on a Speech
Let’s set aside, for the moment, Rev. Wright’s confusion about personal pronouns. I didn’t bomb Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and I don’t think that he did, either. But that’s apparently not what Kirchick has a problem with. What he has a problem with is what such statements about the U.S. government smack of.
But, Mr. Kirchick, no matter what it may smack of
to mention it, isn’t it true that the United States Army bombed Hiroshima?
No matter what it may smack of
to mention it, isn’t it true that the United States Army bombed Nagasaki?
No matter what it may smack of
to mention it, isn’t it true that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed somewhere around 210,000 civilian men, women and children — about 70 times the number of civilians killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon?
As far as I can tell, nothing that has provoked Jamie Kirchick’s outrage here is actually, you know, false. Perhaps he thinks that these are facts which it is rude to mention in public. But if being taken for serious
about this country’s security
(which is TNR-speak for this government’s wars
) requires not mentioning them—that is, if being taken for serious
requires silence or dissembling about the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people for the sake of a shared vision of American power
, then it is well worth asking just who the hell these assholes are who we’re supposed to prove our seriousness
to. And what their notion of seriousness
really amounts to. And why anyone should think she has to prove a damned thing to them.
(Via David Gordon, via Lew Rockwell 2008-03-23.)
* You may remember Kirchick from an earlier piece he published in TNR during the late unpleasantness. ↩
Refuge of Oppression #5: Twofer Tuesday edition
from Rad Geek @ Rad Geek People's Daily 14 Feb 2008 12:11 pmHere’s two pieces of correspondence that arrived within three hours of each other, on this past Tuesday. The first comes to us from Stasi
[sic!] in reply to GT 2008-01-28: The tall poppies, part 3, my recent article on the spread of opium poppies as a cash crop for impoverished farmers in southern Iraq:
From: stasi
To: Rad Geek
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008 1:45 PM
Subject: You Must be High: Tall Poppies, IIIHow can you even think that raising opium plants is a suitable way of making money to raise your family out of poverty. The only to benefit from drug trade are the high powered, high financed drug cartels.
Additionally, drug use (opium, heroin, etc) has been proven to have detrimental effects on individuals, families, and SOCIETIES. Let’s ALL start raising drug inducing plants to make money.
You MUST be high to think in such terms.
Well, I’m convinced.
Remember, impoverished farmers who grow opium poppies may think that growing a lucrative cash-crop and trading pain-killers to willing customers benefits them more than would starving themselves to grow unprofitable crops that meet the approval of U.S. narcs. But whatever they may think, the Stasi knows that the only people to benefit from the drug trade are high powered, high financed drug cartels.
How foolish of Iraqi farmers to think that the ability to provide for your family, rather than starving for the sake of U.S. government narco-diplomacy, would be a benefit worth counting. The Stasi certainly knows what their families want and need better than they do.
Later in the afternoon, I received this from the starr,
in reply to one of my posts on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in which over 200,000 Japanese civilians (about a third of the population of Nagasaki, and more than half of the population of Hiroshima) were burned alive, crushed to death, or otherwise killed, in a deliberate use of terror-bombing on heavily-populated city centers intended to force the unconditional surrender
of the Japanese government. Apparently my objection to this deliberate act of nuclear terrorism — the first and the only two cases in the history of the world — is the result of historical ignorance.
From: the starr
To: Rad Geek
Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2008, 4:23 PM
Subject: Atomic BombI read your article on the Atomic Bomb, and I must say, you don’t understand World War II at all. The use of the bomb was ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. The Japanese were a brutal and evil empire and it had to be stopped. They slaughtered countless innocent people, not to mention Pearl Harbor. We urged them to surrender, but they wouldn’t. And they wouldn’t stop killing. The war would have continued for who knows how long and thousands upon thousands of more people would have died. The bomb was our only choice. You said that it killed thousands of innocent people. That’s true. But were the Japanese not doing the same? Did they not slaughter thousands of innocent people by invading other countries, including the completely un-called for attack on Pearl Harbor? There is no morality in warfare. It is foolish to try and equate them. You may want to do a little more research before you criticize the government’s carefully calculated decision.
If only I had understood World War II better before I wrote that post. I would have seen that, even though the Japanese military had already long been stopped
from any further expansion, and indeed broken, long before August 1945, absolute geopolitical triumph over the Japanese government, and the territorial conquest of Japan, was far more important than the irreplaceable lives of 200,000 or more innocent non-combatants. Indeed, it was important enough to justify or excuse deliberately targeting those 200,000 or more innocent non-combatants in order to force somebody else (the dictatorial clique tyrannizing Japan) to make the necessary political concessions. And little did I know that the Japanese
were all invading other countries and killing thousands of innocent people and refusing to surrender. I had foolishly thought that it was a small and unaccountable minority of the population of Japan who were extorting and tyrannizing the rest through the armed power of a military dictatorship. But since more research would have revealed that those 200,000 dead civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (not to mention the hundreds of thousands of dead civilians from the over 100 Japanese cities that the U.S. Army attacked with low-altitude firebombing and conventional
high explosives) weren’t actually non-combatants after all, but were all running around with The Japanese as a whole, invading other countries and killing thousands of innocent people, well, I guess that’s that.
Normally, I would also have thought that if you have a true statement of the form There’s no morality in that,
that’s as good a reason as you could possibly find to draw the conclusion that you have an unconditional moral obligation to forswear ever engaging in that. This is another sure sign of my folly, ignorance or vice. One man’s reductio …
and all that; no doubt had I carefully calculated
like the Masters of War in the U.S. government, when the antecedent of that
is War,
it would become clear that what you actually have is a military obligation to sometimes forswear engaging in morality.
My bad.
Moral standards
from Rad Geek @ Geekery Today 27 Sep 2006 5:13 pmHere’s part of a recent reply to my post on the use of the phrase moral relativism
. The original post discussed a controversy over whether or not Harry Truman should be called a terrorist
for knowingly and willingly slaughtering civilians — orders of magnitude more civilians than Osama bin Laden (et al.) slaughtered in the attack on the World Trade Center — for the sake of military and political strategy. Here’s how Jamie DeVries tried to make the case that we cannot draw any moral parallels between the two figures
:
Here is the question we ought to ask ourselves: )Did Truman have the ability and power to incinerate each and every Japanese citizen, even after a surrender was declared? The answer is: yes. Did he or the U.S have the WILL to do so? The answer: of course not.
Well, that was mighty white of him.
In all seriousness, how much lower could the bar possibly be set for rulers of the Allied governments in World War II? Is there absolutely any atrocity in the name of unconditional surrender
that the Court Intellectuals and their countless acolytes would not rush to defend, or at least to excuse? I wish this were merely a bit of pointed rhetoric. But actually I’m asking it as a serious, open question.
One man’s reductio
from Rad Geek @ Geekery Today 01 Sep 2006 3:14 pmHere’s widely-published, reportedly libertarian columnist Walter Williams on the need for political will in the War on Terror:
Does the United States have the power to eliminate terrorists and the states that support them? In terms of capacity, as opposed to will, the answer is a clear yes.
Think about it. Currently, the U.S. has an arsenal of 18 Ohio class submarines. Just one submarine is loaded with 24 Trident nuclear missiles. Each Trident missile has eight nuclear warheads capable of being independently targeted. That means the U.S. alone has the capacity to wipe out Iran, Syria or any other state that supports terrorist groups or engages in terrorism — without risking the life of a single soldier.
Terrorist supporters know we have this capacity, but because of worldwide public opinion, which often appears to be on their side, coupled with our weak will, we’ll never use it. Today’s Americans are vastly different from those of my generation who fought the life-and-death struggle of World War II. Any attempt to annihilate our Middle East enemies would create all sorts of handwringing about the innocent lives lost, so-called collateral damage.
Such an argument would have fallen on deaf ears during World War II when we firebombed cities in Germany and Japan. The loss of lives through saturation bombing far exceeded those lost through the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
—Walter E. Williams (2006-08-23): Will The West [sic] Defend Itself?
I’d like to thank Mr. Williams for helping to illustrate an important point about logical inference.
Two of the most important rules of inference are the modus ponendo ponens (p → q. p. ∴ q) and the modus tollendo tollens (p → q. ~q. ∴ ~p). Something that people often don’t realize is how the very same reasoning could be used to set up either a modus ponens or a modus tollens in the last step. Here’s an example drawn from real life. Walter Williams argues:
But someone or another just might use the same line of inferences that Williams drew in order to establish a different conclusion:
For some people’s argumentative purposes the Allied war effort in World War II is not so much just as the paradigm for justice itself; like the meter stick in Paris, it doesn’t even make sense to say that it is just, because the possibility that it even might have been less than just is simply unintelligible. Those who have a less reverent view of the single most destructive total war in the history of the entire world may not share the same premises. And thus may draw quite a different conclusion. I’m just sayin’.
I’d like to thank the War Party for offering yet another opportunity for an important lesson on informal logic.
Update 2006-09-02: Commenter Adam B. pointed out that the full Latin name for modus tollens is the modus tollendo tollens, not modus ponendo tollens as I’d originally written. This has been fixed in the text.
11:02 A.M.
from Rad Geek @ Geekery Today 09 Aug 2006 12:02 pmThis is a recording of Oppenheimer (1997), by the British composer Jocelyn Pook. The voice that you hear at the beginning is Robert Oppenheimer, in an interview many years after the war, talking about his thoughts at the Trinity test
of the atomic bomb, on July 16th, 1945.
War and manhood
from Rad Geek @ Geekery Today 31 Jul 2006 7:08 am(Links via Dulce Et Decorum Est 2006-07-31 and comments on Tennessee Guerrilla Women 2006-07-30.)
Here is a view of war and manhood from the bottom of the ranks.
I came over here because I wanted to kill people.Over a mess-tent dinner of turkey cutlets, the bony-faced 21-year-old private from West Texas looked right at me as he talked about killing Iraqis with casual indifference. It was February, and we were at his small patrol base about 20 miles south of Baghdad.
The truth is, it wasn’t all I thought it was cracked up to be. I mean, I thought killing somebody would be this life-changing experience. And then I did it, and I was like,All right, whatever.He shrugged.
I shot a guy who wouldn’t stop when we were out at a traffic checkpoint and it was like nothing,he went on.Over here, killing people is like squashing an ant. I mean, you kill somebody and it’s likeAll right, let’s go get some pizza.At the time, the soldier’s matter-of-fact manner struck me chiefly as a rare example of honesty. I was on a nine-month assignment as an embedded reporter in Iraq, spending much of my time with grunts like him — mostly young (and immature) small-town kids who sign up for a job as killers, lured by some gut-level desire for excitement and adventure. This was not the first group I had run into that was full of young men who shared a dark sense of humor and were clearly desensitized to death. I thought this soldier was just one of the exceptions who wasn’t afraid to say what he really thought, a frank and reflective kid, a sort of Holden Caulfield in a war zone.
But the private was Steven D. Green.
When Tilghman met Green, Green was angry and disillusioned about the war. He seethed about the old men’s demands for restraint (We’re out here getting attacked all the time and we’re in trouble when somebody accidentally gets shot?
), and about the meaninglessness of this war:
See, this war is different from all the ones that our fathers and grandfathers fought. Those wars were for something. This war is for nothing.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Green was wrong about the wars that our fathers and grandfathers fought.
Or any other war fought by men in the name of the National Manhood. Meanwhile, here is another view of war and manhood, from the top of the ranks:
The Wars Our Fathers and Grandfathers Fought
Aftermath of the Tokyo firebombing, 10 March 1945
Aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 6 August 1945
Nagasaki railroad station
Iwakawa-machi residential neighborhood, Nagasaki
Aftermath of U.S. bombing of Snuŏl, Cambodia on 3 May 1970.
AUSTRALIA intervened to stop key US military strikes against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq, fearing they might constitute a war crime.
Major General Maurie McNarn, then a brigadier and commander of Australian forces in Iraq, on several occasions played a
red cardagainst the American plans, which included hits on individuals. His objections drew anger from some senior US military figures.In one instance, Major General McNarn vetoed a US plan to drop a range of huge non-precision bombs on Baghdad, causing one angry US Air Force general to call the Australian a
pencil dick.However, US military command accepted Major General McNarn’s objection and the US plans were scrapped.
The revelation of how Australia actively and successfully used its veto power in the 2003 invasion of Iraq is contained in a new book on the US-Australian alliance, The Partnership, by The Weekend Australian’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan.
… The book reveals that Major General McNarn — now the head of the Defence Intelligence Organisation — delivered a
great shockto the US when he first used the red card and then put his objections to the proposed US military strike in writing.
Shit,exclaimed one American when he saw the document.What if this leaks?Major General McNarn replied that if the US did not take the illegal action, it would not matter.As coalition forces prepared plans to take Baghdad, Major General McNarn vetoed three of five proposed US Air Force weapon systems — mostly huge bombs — on the grounds that they were not accurate for a radius of less than 16m and, as a result, were unsuitable for use in a built-up area.
—Cameron Stewart, The Australian (2006-07-29): Aussie veto stopped US war crimes
There are of course two stories here. The first story, the one emphasized by the news report, is that the Australian general halted the U.S. generals’ plans to indiscriminately bomb Baghdad—which would have made the war even more of an abattoir for Iraqi civilians than it became even with the more restrained
bombing. The second story is that the U.S. generals made plans to indiscriminately bomb Baghdad. Plans they were invested in, and plans they were enraged to see blocked.
