The cowards are at it again.

[bwphantom]

Geneva What???

May as well throw it away. Useless piece of paper for modern Warfare.

[nomadjack]

On reflection I've changed my position on the military not deliberately targetting civilians. On top of the nuclear examples of Hiroshima and Nakasaki, there is the allied carpet bombing campaign against Germany during ww2. Bremen and Cologne in particular were completely destroyed with the loss of upwards of 60,000 civilians in each city. In terms of cowardly abhorent acts where does an 18 year old bomber pilot who knowingly drops his bombs on a civilian target sit in comparison with a suicide bomber who blows up a market?

[bwphantom]

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23206940-2,00.html


They thrive on fear!!!

When it could happen on our doorstep, does this make them courageous??

So ANZAC day Pies Vs Dons 95000 people at the G. You and your family are there, your kids and wife are killed but somehow you survived.
Afterwards are you going to reflect about how courageous they were??

No just mad as hell and you want revenge.

[stui magpie]

[HAL]

How did it get there?

[nomadjack]

Okay Stui. So on that logic I presume a Palestinian terrorist who bombs a market trying to free his homeland of Israeli invaders is no more or less cowardly than an RAF pilot who bombed German civilians in order to help bring the war to an end. Glad we cleared that up.

[stui magpie]

You're taking it to a different place the Nomad, but I do see your point.

A soldier in a war between two nations does his/her job. A bomber pilot is given coordinates and told to release a bomb, not told the reasons behind it or who may be hurt.

My understanding of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings were that Germany and the other countries at war had already finished. Treaties had been signed. Japan held out and refused to negotiate. They were warned what would happen, preferred collective death over Surrender (at least that was the political answer given back to the americans) so the yanks followed through. Who really killed those Japanese civilians, the yanks or the Japanese government who sacrificed them?

It was done to end a war.

Who speaks for the people in the market place in your example? Who offered them up as sacrifices?

Palestine isn't a nation. It's a religious/cultural issue. What are they trying to achieve? What will blowing up people in a market achieve?

To use your logic, you condone the Bali Bombings and September 11 as being justified.

Terrorists use suicide bombers to spread terror to promote their ideals.

Germany started WWII. They set off a chain of attrocities from the Jewish concentration camps and genocide to the razing of Poland, the occupation of France etc. They bombed civilians in London, The British bombed Berlin.

You can morally justify actions that are normally innapropriate as being for the greater good. To fight a war against another nation to stop them from killing defenceless people is not wrong. To sit back and let them do it is.

To fly a bomber plane over a target with fighter planes and flak bursting around you takes courage of a great magnitude.

To walk into a marketplace and detonate explosives killing innocent people I don't find courageous as the poor £$%$ers doing it are brainwashed.

[HAL]

What's your favorite part of Germany?

[Piethagoras' Theorem]

I thought Darwin was raised in England? Damn you Wikipedia!!!

I never did agree with his "evolutionary theory" anyway

[HAL]

Is that a fact.

[nomadjack]

A pilot being given orders and told to drop bombs on civilians is no different to a terrorist being given the same orders. By the way, the 'I was only carrying out orders' defence was used by nazi war criminals at Nuremberg and was thrown out.

British and American bombing of German cities was carried out from 1941 until the end of the war in 1945. From 1943 onwards in particular, German civilian centres were targeted as a means of putting pressure on the German government to end the war. How is this any different morally to terrorists targeting civilians in order to pressure occupying goverments to withdraw?

Palestine is an autonomous state by international law that is trying to free itself of Israeli influence and interference.

By the way, I'm not condoning 7/11 or the Bali bombings at all, and it's your logic I am using. You're the one that argued that the answer to differentiating between an air force pilot and a suicide bomber 'lies in what they are trying to achieve with their actions' not me. I'm simply pointing out that in both cases what they are trying to achieve is almost identical.

As for morally justifying actions that are normally innapropriate in the name of the 'greater good'. Who decides what's in the greater good? I'm betting suicide bombers and air force pilots would both argue thier cause is just.

Agree with you on the brainwashed bit. The suicide bomber is usually brainwashed by either religion or hyper-nationalism. But so is the pilot isn't he? What else but brainwashing could make someone complete a tour or sometimes 2 or 3 tours knowing you had only a 20% chance of survival?

[stui magpie]

OK, I'll give you the Palastinian.

Plug an al queda suicide bomber into that equation. What are they trying to achieve?

[Zakal]

Interesting to mention the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were done to end a war (i.e. lives of residents of those cities weighed against the potential lives lost if the war continued)....what i was surprised to learn on this point a few years ago was that the only reason the Japanese government surrendered, was because it thought the 2 bombs were the tip of the iceberg of the American nuclear arsenal.

Had they known it was the only two bombs they had, and would have taken up to a year to build more, they apparently would not have surrendered, meaning regardless of the justification to "end the war" it would have simply been a complete waste.

Mind you, Dresden killed more people in one night than both those cities combined, and the funny thing is, ive never once got the impression either in Germany or Japan that either of these two incidents are still weighing heavily on peoples minds...and certainly not being held against the nations responsible....maybe we apologized to them without 50 conditions attached. hehe

[Dr Pie]

Stui, there has always been an alternative explanation on Hiroshima and Nagasaki besides the widely accepted theory that the US bombed the cities to force a reluctant Japan to surrender and thus saved thousands of Allied and Japanese soldiers lives.

There have been persistant suggestions over the years that Japan had already indicated to third parties that it was willing to surrender but the Truman Government wanted a quick surrender because it wanted the surrender to be to the US only. Russia declared war on Japan in July 1945. Prior to that it had only been involved in the War against Germany.
The European War had ended with Germany divided between the USSR and the West. The Yanks did not want that to happen in Japan so they were anxious that Japan surrendered before Russian troops set foot on Japanese soil. Hence the dropping of the bombs on a country that had indicated it was considering surrender.

I can't prove any of this with documentary evidence but it was widely believed, particularly in Asia during the 1960s