State of the Union

So what?

 

This is what is most unsettling about what war does to people's minds and what makes some people "pacifists": the ability of some, untouched by war, to make generalizations about groups of other people, present or past, and in particular judgements about what is relatively "benign". Or, this one : "the Civil War (oops, forgot, War Between the States, or, hmmm, shouldn't that be 'among' instead of 'between'?) was the worst war in our history, because more men were killed than in all our other wars combined."

That makes it the worst? And, conversely, Vietnam and WW I and the Spanish-American War and Grenada (oops again, was that a 'police action', or even an 'expedition'?) and WW II and Panama (or was that an 'abduction', when we smoked out Noriega with loud rock n' roll?) and the Mexican-American War and the War of 1812 and the whatever-it-was against the Barbary Coast 'pirates'---each of them was "better" because fewer were killed?

No matter how high the IQ, the mind can't process death, knows it can't and reflexively tries to shut it out by the simple device of escaping to the world of abstractions, numbers, symbols, inferences. No, to be a Muslim man forced to expose his privates to a leering and uproarious female U.S. soldier CAN'T be "as
bad" as John McCain's sleep deprivation. Can it?

Some think about individuals, and about how painful and terrifying the moments up to and including death must have been for each 8-year-old girl, or each 68-year-old grandparent, or each pregnant wife, who knew the shells were raining in, or the soldiers coming down the street door-to-door, just before she or he was disemboweled, or the shrapnel entered the brain, or the hand was blown off.

So far George Bush is responsible for---how many?---upwards of 75,000-100,000 deaths, all of them individuals, perhaps up to half of them non-combatants, heavily women and children. But it is the official policy of Mr. Bush & Co. not to count the non-U.S. casualties of their own war. They'll leave that to others, knowing that an accurate count will not be made, except by the damnable media counting only U.S. losses, and others among the Willing counting theirs. But for the true beneficiaries of all this American largesse: sorry, go out and count 'em yourself.

 

Oh, then how do you know your estimate is even CLOSE to accurate?

 

Threads like these would make a great thesis for some Sociology or Psychology course...

Time and time again the following phrase is being proved correct:

Everything you needed to learn you learned in kindergarten.


When that kid you didn't like got the star for the day, he somehow cheated, was obviously sucking up to the teacher, the teacher was misinformed, heck the INSTITUTION itself was biased such that he could get a star, let's define this star concept anyway, well if we define it like this, he really didn't get a star...

:lol:

 

Hey, you forgot the part where, after the 6th Army was completely surrounded, Hilter promoted Paulus to Field Marshall and then reminded him that no Field Marshall had ever surrendered.

Paulus bucked the trend though and surrendered his remaining 91,000 (out of the original 250K) men. And hey, 5000 of them eventually made it back to Germany. They had to walk.

 

No need to state what is plainly obvious by most of your posts!

:lol:

 

Jack,

You can't compare what the Japanese did to China with what we're doing in Iraq. 30 million people were killed. Heck, the Japanese killed 250K civilians just looking for the American Pilots who landed in China after the Doolittle raid.

I also stated that just because it was comparatively "benign" didn't make it right. It's all wretched. Some was/is just more so.

 

What's funny is you all go off on Hitler as some idiotic far right wing lunatic. Thing is, it wasn't inconceivable that he could have had THE WORLD.

h34r:

 

I'm married to a Cambodian woman who's a refugee of Mr. Nixon's Cambodian incursion (1975) and its aftermath. Her mom and dad were killed by Khmer Rouge by being shot in the head. She doesn't know how her college-attending brother was killed. When her aunt came through her village in the middle of the night (age 17) and grabbed her hand to drag her along toward the Thai border (but not her less lucky 4 sisters), she had already spent three years in a Khmer Rouge forced labor camp---24/7, 16 hours a day in the rice paddies. She had had a year "down" from malaria, with only an IV of coconut milk, since the Khmer Rouge had abolished "Western" medicine. She also has four round scars, two on the back of her neck and two on her temples, from the burning, pointed sticks they twirled into her flesh. She weighed 78 at 5'1"
(tall for a Cambodian female)

She spent three more years in the huge Khao y Dang camp. She had seen Cambodian parents (mostly women) eat their own dead babies, dead from starvation or disease, rather than leave their corpses in the tall grass during the flight-at-night escape, where they'd only be eaten by scavenging animals. Now, in the camp, she had to be hidden a lot of the time from the brutal Thai guards, who raped and stole at their convenience. She came to the U.S. in 1981.

Twenty-five years later, she still has nightmares. And she was one of the lucky ones.

 

So are you saying that he wasn't a far right wing lunatic?

He was being resisted in every country he got his hands on. He was WAY over-extended and would't let his generals conduct the war as they saw fit. The genocide didn't help his cause either but we've already discussed that into the ground.

He got his arse handed to him in N. Africa. He got is arse handed to him at Kursk (which basically spelled the end for him in Russia). He got his arse handed to him in the North Atlantic, over the skies of GB, and eventually on the western front.

The Germans were out innovated on every major technological front with the exception of their late war AFVs. However, they never learned how to mass produce these vehicles so there were always chronic shortages of them.

 

Jack, it’s a heart wrenching story, the more I hear stories as such whenever I am bumping into people who had direct exposure to gruesome war experiences anywhere in the world, the less faith I have in humanity. Thank you for sharing it. It adds another dimension to this whole discussion.
You have probably seen Joffe’s “The Killing Fieldsâ€. A beautifully written script by Bruce Robinson, and a fascinating execution by Roland Joffe. One of the best war films ever made. Your story somehow reminds me of it.

 

Bush majored in History, and finished with a "C" average. Given his well known grasp of geography, the "C" sounds like a gift.

Clinton is a Rhodes scholar of Oxford, and a law graduate of Yale.

 

Nope, just stating an observation...

Not exactly every country. I'll use the Lithuanians as an example, although they might not have been too enthused, they FAR better preferred German occupation to Russian. Off hand, I'm not sure what their level of resistance was, but as I recall, it wasn't that significant in terms of physical resistance anyway...

Although I do agree he was over-extended. Had he not gone into Russia, left England alone, and hunkered down in Europe to re-tool and re-group, I think the possibilities were endless...

No doubt...

This I tend to disagree with, German war equipment was far better than most, although I will agree they never learned how to mass produce, but I think that was a function of being over-extended in the first place...

 

How close is close? There are varying estimates from various online sources. No one knows. My conservative estimate is about 50,000. But admittedly that's because other semi-believable estimates run to 100K.

 

http://www.insidepolitics.org/heard/heard32300.html

 

So, in other words, you have no real idea.

Other than a rough range of 50K from various online sources you've checked out, to 100K from "semi-believable" estimates...

So I'm confused then, why would you state he's responsible for the deaths of 75K-100K persons, leaning towards the higher end of the spectrum, based on admittedly "semi-believable" estimates? One might imagine a bit more conservation when accusing someone of taking human life, basically, weighing towards more believable sources opposed to "semi"... Given such fluid numbers, how do you even reach the conclusion "perhaps up to half of them non-combatants, heavily women and children."?

 

The two women didn't exactly get equal treatment, however -- Cindy Sheehan was arrested, while Beverly Young was simply asked to leave (see http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/02/01/she...rest/index.html).

 

Cindy Sheehan is also a nut job who has proven she isn't beyond pulling "stunts" for attention. I would have kept her out in the first place.

 

Nut Job? She hasn't done anything other than peaceful protest... no violence, no nothing...

Just because her cause is not your own, she's a nut job? And she should be descriminated against wherever she goes?

I thought you, MS, were an advocate against following every law no matter what it is... I see peaceful protesters like Sheehan as a pinnacle of that. You're ok with speeding but think that peaceful protest is a "nutjob?"

 

Thanks for the comment. Yes, we've seen The Killing Fields many times. She can handle it now. Sam Waterston remains a favorite actor on Law and Order.

But a postscript. A week before our wedding, National Geographic came out with a feature on the "killing fields" that was quite graphic, one pic showing a heap of hundreds of skulls. We were in a car driven by her cousin, going shopping. I handed the Geographic to her in the back seat, but continued to talk with her cousin.

When I turned around to ask her something, she was unconscious. Long story short: she had had some sort of seizure, with her eyes rolled upward, and was unresponsive. She spent 3 days in the hospital (I stayed with her, not even knowing if we'd be able to get married) and gradually came out of it. It was from the skulls pic and associated memories. She's never been able to look at that Geographic.

I've never been as much of a complainer since we were married as I was before.
And she's the most good-natured, gentle person you'll ever meet. Got her weight up to the high 90's, too.