In a message dated 7/15/99 5:30:13 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
bensegust@yahoo.co.uk writes:
>
> So even though biological levels are being affected by a war (i.e.
> being killed) this doesn't mean that the entire society is reduced to
> the biological "Kill or be killed" response. I believe that something
> else was at work.
Me:
I agree that my statements are, in general, an oversimplification and that
your argument is basically correct especially the part that a single society
is not the basis for a biological threat. Thanks for your thoughts.
However...
Ben(sorry if it's not your name):
> A nation will seek the means to end the conflict with
> minimal damage to its reality. These "means" are represented in the
> armed forces, diplomats, and weapon scientists. All of these are
> designed to find a resolution to areas of conflict. I don't believe
> that one society forms a "Kill or be killed attitude" against another
> society. Society itself is under the control of its leaders who run it
> on an intellectual level. I believe that it is only on an intellectual
> level that wars between nations are conducted. Yes, they have effects
> upon society, and thus the biological. However, the common man is not
> responsible for a war like World War II occuring. It is a failure of
> leadership. A common man's reaction to a war in which he must fight is
> surely intellectual, social, and biological. "Fight for your country!"
> is appealing to an individual and what that individual values about his
> society. His signing up to fight is not a reaction of a society - but
> one man, an organism.
>
This idea of war being fought on the intellectual intrigues me but I don't
think it is the primary reason for war and it seems clear that war doesn't
operate primarily on this idea. We can say that Montgomery's failed attack
in Operation Market Garden was using the principle of concentrating your
forces in a one-two attack to spearhead an assault to the German Border, but
it's failure wasn't because the German's had an intellectually superior
battle plan. There were social, biological, and inorganic (weather and
ground conditions especially) problems that factored in everything. Each
affected the other in many ways. In the same way, the idea that the common
man was not responsible for WWII is incorrect because the individuals that
made up the societies were created by the societies that practically required
WWII to take place.
And what is the 'common man' anyway? And how is our leadership (today)
supposedly different from the common man?
This part of your discussion seems even further than the truth of what
happened in WWII. It sounds more like a modern evaluation without the true
facts and experience of the 1940s. 'Failure of Leadership' does not stop bad
leadership when it is recognized. A war does not stop when someone says,
'that side is wrong.'
The 'kill or be killed' idea was an oversimplification, but I just wanted to
say that both sides weren't holding things back when they wanted to win. The
use of the Atomic bomb is justified in that you use the weapons that best
reach your objective to win the war within the leadership's best judgment.
It's too big (for me to know all the facts) and I wasn't there (in Truman's
war room). I haven't read that much about the decision to drop the bomb, but
I believe that MOQ allows for dynamic decisions to have a lot of gray area.
Waiting for your counter-argument,
xcto
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