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| Moral aspects of military action | |
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| Topic Started: Friday, 10. June 2011, 17:51 (2,019 Views) | |
| Mairtin | Thursday, 23. June 2011, 19:59 Post #91 |
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I find it hard to understand why a second bomb had to be dropped, it gives credence to the idea that it was to test a different technology that the boffins and military men knew they would never get the chance to test again - I'm afraid I don't quite share your estimation of military staff, my experience in life has been that experts and specialists too often end up so caught up in their area of expertise that they give little thought to the wider picture. Anyway, I suppose that we should just be thankful that whereas people 70 years ago accepted without second thought the deaths of thousands of civilians, nowadays they get upset and call military leaders to account about the death of 9 civilians when the wrong house is accidentally bombed. Bringing the whole idea of justified violence back to a personal level, if some intruder broke into my house tonight and threatened to rape my wife and kill us both, then i would have to hesitation in fighting him with every resource at hand and killing him if necessary. Something niggles me, however, that in doing so, I would be failing in my Christian duty but there is nothing new there. I think Gerry summed it up well when he said "The way I understand this is that we fall short of the teaching. The "just war" is still evil, but by being in self defense, the evil is less. |
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| Penfold | Thursday, 23. June 2011, 20:09 Post #92 |
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Actually Mairtin in such a case you would be doing your Christian Duty,
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| trying hard | Thursday, 23. June 2011, 20:14 Post #93 |
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of course there will not be absolute proof re bombing dresden but just reading wiki will give you some insight about the issue and in the end everyone will have their own view and God will judge ; my view is experiment and I am sticking to it. If it's pontificating to have a view on history and be prepared to state it when a conversation raises the subject then I will continue to pontificate with everyone else on this forum. my own view on the atomic bombs is mixed but this factor also plays in my thinking again from wiki which again does a decent job of offering both sides of debate. A further argument, discussed under the rubric of "atomic diplomacy" and advanced in a 1965 book of that name by Gar Alperovitz, is that the bombings had as primary purpose to intimidate the Soviet Union, being the opening shots of the Cold War.[116] Along these lines some[who?] argue that the US raced the Soviet Union and hoped to drop the bombs and receive surrender from Japan before a Soviet entry into the Pacific war. However, the Soviet Union, the US and Great Britain came to an agreement at the Yalta Conference on when the Soviet Union should join the war against Japan, and on how the territory of Japan is to be dismembered at the end of the war.[117] Others argue that such considerations played little or no role, the US being instead concerned with the defeat of Japan, and in fact that the US desired and appreciated the Soviet entry into the Pacific war, as it hastened the surrender of Japan.[118] W. Churchill was on vacation on Como's lake, Italy, when the bomb of Hiroshima was launched. Lord Moran, his personal physician, in his memoirs published in 1966 tells a conversation he had had with WSC. He saw the atom bomb as a way to keep Stalin in check. |
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| Penfold | Thursday, 23. June 2011, 20:16 Post #94 |
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It was the threat of the third, non-existant bomb that brought about the Emporer's order to surrender, so the second bomb was needed, thankfully the Emporer did not call the allies Bluff. However it is good that today we are concerned with the deaths of scores not thousands. Alas untill we learn to value a single life we will always have wars. The value of human life were have I heard that before?... but lets not reopen that debate Mairtin. |
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| K.T.B. | Thursday, 23. June 2011, 21:21 Post #95 |
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As a matter of interest, my elderly mum was a teenager at the time of the bombing of Dresden and talks about the unease she felt at the time about the action and its consequences, together with a strong feeling that it couldn't be morally right. |
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| Derekap | Thursday, 23. June 2011, 21:56 Post #96 |
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trying hard wrote: "However, the Soviet Union, the US and Great Britain came to an agreement at the Yalta Conference on when the Soviet Union should join the war against Japan, and on how the territory of Japan is to be dismembered at the end of the war." I seem to remember USSR declared war on Japan on the day they surrendered to the USA and UK or the day before and promptly occupied some Japanese held islands off its East Coast. Edited by Derekap, Thursday, 23. June 2011, 21:56.
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| Derekap | |
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| Penfold | Thursday, 23. June 2011, 22:42 Post #97 |
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A reputed remark by Bomber Harris, Given the bombing of cities and the fact that the V1 and V2 rockets were falling randomly on British towns and cities until near the end of March 1945, most people were suportive of htting back but Dresden did mark a turning point. Harris refused a pearage at the end of the war, the only officer of his rank not to receive one. It is worth however reminding people that in February 1945 the allies were still realing from the supprise attack by the NAZIs in the Ardenne, known as the Battle of the Bulge 16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945 the bombing of Dresden was 13 February and 15 February 1945. In other words the war was not nearly over, although the NAZIs did surrender on the 8th May 1945. 25,000 victims killed in Dresden 29 890 civillians killed in the Blitz on London, I mention this just to put things in a cetain pespective that we were at war, and in war people die, it is horrible and yes it would be better avoided. There is an old phrase, unatributed, which goes. "Those who turn their swords into plough-shares work for those who didn't." |
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| Derekap | Friday, 24. June 2011, 12:21 Post #98 |
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By way of illustrating feelings at the time. My comrades and I of the British army felt very peeved and anxious at the initial success of the German army in the Belgian Ardenne because it was obviously aiming for the Belgian Coast and cut our lines of supply. We may well have become POWs in Germany and the war would have been prolonged. Three colleagues and myself had a relay wireless station (because distance and quality of reception was poor) in a house in a Dutch village within sight of the down road route from the front. To me it seemed that traffic from the front was greater than ever (like homeward traffic on a peacetime Sunday evening from the coast) and I frankly wondered whether we might see the German army at breakfasttimes. In fairness, on New Years Day 1945 a few Luftwaffe fighter planes suddenly appeared with surprise and attacked the RAF airfields in the liberated part of Holland. Since leaving Normandy we had had almost no bother from the Luftwaffe. We saw one fighter crash and another flew over so low I could see the pilot's face. The dutch family's young children enjoyed the excitement but I was anxiously trying to usher them indoors lest a pilot fired his machine gun. I don't know how successful they were because obviously the RAF wouldn't publish the news. |
| Derekap | |
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| OsullivanB | Tuesday, 17. July 2012, 07:29 Post #99 |
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| "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." Herbert Spencer | |
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| valleyboy | Tuesday, 17. July 2012, 11:52 Post #100 |
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The numbers are disputed. Right wing groups claim up to ten times your figure, highly unlikely but the truth is nobody knows the number of refugees sheltering in the city on the evenings of the allied bomber raids. What's certain is the key military targets were well out in the suburbs and remained intact. Even the autobahn, highly significant militarily, was untouched while the centre of the town was reduced to ashes. |
| Liberal, ecumenical, universal and it's my church too. | |
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| Penfold | Tuesday, 17. July 2012, 17:25 Post #101 |
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The death toll at Dresden was well documented at the time with only a few bodies being added to the count following excavations in the 1960s, and 25000 is the top end allowing for some people unaccounted for. In 2004 a commission was assembled to confirm once and for all what the death toll in Dresden had been, in 2008 it gave its preliminary findings. http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/death-toll-debate-how-many-died-in-the-bombing-of-dresden-a-581992.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/onthefrontline/3123512/Dresden-bombing-death-toll-lower-than-thought.html http://www.theage.com.au/world/dresden-bombing-toll-far-fewer-20081003-4tjf.html in 2010 the commission confirmed the death toll as being no higher than 25,000. Any life is one to many, however in the reality of war Dresden was a legitimate Military Target according to the rules of war that applied at that time. This is the thing that has to be remembered when considering history, what may be condemned and outlawed today was not necessarily outlawed at the time. War is a horrific but telling untruths and exaggerating the horrors does an injustice to the brave men and women who defended the freedom we now enjoy. |
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| valleyboy | Tuesday, 17. July 2012, 17:44 Post #102 |
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Dresden's military installations would indeed have been a military target, unfortunately it was the living quarters of the old town that were reduced to ashes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1994-041-07,_Dresden,_zerst%C3%B6rtes_Stadtzentrum.jpg There were certainly too many to bury and many of the corpses not already burnt to ashes, were cremated so numbers are hard to discern allowing ideologists to play with them for their own purposes. The vexed question of terror bombing raged since the 1930s at least, and a number of senior war office figures were squeamish about the tactic. It began in WW2, as you know, when a German raid went astray while attacking Croydon aerodrome and Britain used it as justification to bomb German cities. The Nazis were no strangers to terror attacks, Guernica was in support of Franco's fascists and columns of fleeing refugees were straffed in northern France. The question is whether tit for tat is a moral obligation, or if the military installations and troop bases that surrounded Dresden but remained untouched would have been more effective strike against Nazism than burning civilians to death. Anyway, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all hyperbole falls short of the truth. |
| Liberal, ecumenical, universal and it's my church too. | |
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| Rose of York | Tuesday, 17. July 2012, 21:03 Post #103 |
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Whatever the historical facts (and disagreements about them) about any particular military action, would anybody else like to discuss them in the light of Catholic teaching? Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, a devoted Catholic, who founded and spent his post war life building up the Cheshire Homes, for the care of people incurably ill, was British observer of the bombing of Hiroshima. When asked if he felt guilty about it, his answer was that if it had not happened the war in the Far East would have continued much longer than it did and the final death toll of that war would, in his judgement, have been far higher if the Japanese been able to continue fighting that war by convenional means.
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Keep the Faith! | |
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| Penfold | Tuesday, 17. July 2012, 23:59 Post #104 |
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Valleyboy when you get your facts right you might have something useful to say. |
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| valleyboy | Wednesday, 18. July 2012, 07:33 Post #105 |
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Penfold, browbeating people into submission with your supposed superior knowledge may impress people in this little fiefdom but it won't wash with me. The numbers are disputed with the far right making a meal of them. That's what happens when you let moral standards slip and venture down the means justifies the ends route, it rumbles on for generations. As it happens my wife is in Dresden at the moment, still trying to re-build bridges. |
| Liberal, ecumenical, universal and it's my church too. | |
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8:38 PM Jul 11