At 02:01 PM 4/20/99 -0400, Louis wrote: >In WWII, we bombed Dresden which had no military value. This atrocity was >dramatized in Vonnegut's "Slaugherhouse Five". We firebombed Tokyo to >spread terror among the Japanese civilian population. We then topped that >off by dropping A-Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the Japanese had >already given signals that they were ready to make peace. Why? As Stimson >put it, we wanted to teach the Russians a "lesson". This is the kind of >lesson we are trying to teach them today, by the way. The US rules the world. This is what happens when harvard and yale intellectuals are in the business of war making. Material victory ain't good enough for them - they also want to make a more general point i.e. "teach a lesson." That reminds me a Calvinists anecdote about a boy who was convicted of blasphemy and thoroughly educated so he could understand the full nature of his deed, and only then put to death as a punishment. As someone observed, intellectuals have more power than they think, but not nearly enough as they would want to have. Beware of that crowd. Wojtek
