From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Mar 03 2003 - 19:42:15 MST
> Michael Wiik Wrote:
>
> I think having more video would make everybody much more supportive of
> the war. It should be possible to have a little camera on each bomb or
> artillery shell. In fact, I think the U.S. should personalize each and
> every bomb, give it it's own URL and let children post messages which
> would be printed via some sort of hand-held dot-matrix printer on the
> munition as it's loaded. Combine this with the camera on the bomb
> transmitting it's last image so you could actually match up individual
> dead Iraqis with the bomb that killed them. Then the kids could write
> the Iraqi widows and orphans explaining why their husbands and fathers
> had to die, and it'd all be archived for future historians.
Of all the self-serving load of crap I've ever heard! You wish to
impugn your ideological adversaries with the worst possible set of
motives. This ridicule ultimately will make you look to be he who
is ridiculous. It's as if you have no concept at all of the trade-
offs involved. It's as though you think these decisions are trivial,
and it's simply a question of life vs. death.
Get this: it is a trade-off of death vs. death, now and in the
future. To bow to the will of a tyrant, to let him or any other
megalomaniac amass as many weapons of mass destruction as they
please, to permit him and others like him to hold their victims
under their thumbs, torturing, imprisoning, and killing them
forever---that is what is not an option.
Hubert adds---also taking the easy route of ridicule instead of
engaging in carefully thought-out analysis---
> What a bunch of terrific ideas! Now wouldn't that be fun. Finally we would
> all be happily engaged in a global war game. The American kids counting
> smashed bodies and give the deadly wounded Iraqi babies a remote control
> coup de grace. And finally: Computerized bombs, shells and bullets would
> give us Militant Pacifists (MP) the chance to hack into the system and
> eliminate the bombs on their flight or maybe with some cool hacker tools
> reverse their ballistic curve and direct them straight back to the shooters,
> which I would definitely prefer besides teaching Iraqi children to write to
> the widows and orphans weeping back home in "God's Own Country" and
> explaining how MPs managed to turn a tool of war against the aggressor.
Tell me *exactly* how well you think such toys, depicting the horrible
cruelties of war will sell in the war-mongering vicious imperialistic
United States of your imagination. Let's have the figures! Also
describe to me how war is glorified in the schools, in parades, and
in mass rallies in the U.S.
You are perfectly and absolutely correct to keep in mind all the funerals
that will attend the many thousands who will die. This is the reality!
Joseph Stalin for once in his life said something very wise: "The death
of each Russian soldier is a tragedy, but the death of a million is a
statistic." What we must never forget is that however difficult it is
for our puny imaginations, a million tragedies is exactly a million times
worse that one.
Future history depends on us, just as surely as past history depended
on our predecessors. Had they not had the courage and good sense to
make intelligent (though often painful) decisions, we'd be living under
the tyranny of a Hitler or Stalin or Mao Zedong even now.
The parallels to World War II are completely inappropriate in almost
all ways. But in 1936 some officers in the French army---some of those
"right-wing lunatics, super-patriots" that you would be so quick to
denounce---said, "The Germans are re-arming, and they're now under
a crazed dictator. Let's go get them NOW!"
And in 1936, nothing, absolutely nothing could have stopped the
French army, vastly, vastly more powerful than the German one,
from taking Berlin in a matter of days. But did anyone listen
to these "crazy war-mongers", these "super-patriots" who felt
their country to be in danger? No! It was necessary to obtain
"peace in our time". No price was too great to pay for reward
of peace. No risk was too great to take for the sake of peace.
And no one in any position of authority in France listened to
their arguments, or had the good judgment to see that they were
exactly right. And the world lost 55 million lives as a result.
That's FIFTY-FIVE MILLION. Get it? That's exactly a thousand
times as many as needed to be. Think of those millions of funerals
yourself, and imagine the calumny with which you would probably
be attacking France at this very moment, as it (instead of the U.S.)
took out crazed dictators building weapons and threatening the
democracies. You would never forget France's "imperialism", and
how they had snuffed out socialism in Germany, and the courageous
leader who had dared to resist the imperialists.
Next think about the MILLIONS that ARE GOING TO DIE inevitably
in the near future as terrorists and nations sponsoring terrorism
perfect their weapons, and sense the weakness of the democracies.
Think of the funerals of those *millions* of people, and then
remember that we have a chance, just as those French politicians
did once so long ago, of delaying, perhaps forever, the truly
frightful holocausts.
Lee Corbin
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