Big Red - I understand what you mean, but I'm not sure "evil" is exactly the right word for it. It's more mundane than that...disunity, fear, ambition, greed, manifest destiny...things like that. Very few aggressors see themselves as evil. Quite the contrary. The USA has many times been an aggressor (ask the Indians and the Mexicans, among others), as have virtually all powerful nations in their time. That doesn't mean I write off the USA as "evil".

You are right that as long as humanity is in a state of great fear and disunity (which it still is), then a certain amount of military preparedness is necessary for any given nation. It will take time to change that situation.

Yankee Gal - Marvellous, Yankee Gal...

Thanks for completely missing the point, and for so beautifully demonstrating the divisive "us and them" psychology that leads to all wars and invasions in the first place, including those perpetrated by the Japanese and the Nazis.

Terrific. You've given me my laugh of the day on Mudcat. :-D Then, upon reflection, I got kind of irritated about it. So, here's your explanation...

My advice was toward all humanity (as a unified whole), not toward Americans exclusively. If all humanity had a little more sense and awareness of what a human life is worth...then millions of Germans and Japanese would not have given their support to militarist and authoritarian governments...and Hitler and Tojo would never have come to power.

You see...it's knee jerk reactions...the old us and them psychology...that was motivating the patriotic young men who enthusiastically enlisted in the German and Japanese forces in the 30's and 40's. Most of them had absolutely NO idea that they were serving a wrongful and destructive regime. Most of them were dead sure that they were defending their country from some form of vile and unjustifiable threat from some "enemy", foreign or domestic. The Japanese public, for instance, thought that the Chinese had attacked them first when the China war began. The typical result of domestic propaganda.

If you can't imagine that, then you are one naive gal.

Now, once the actual fighting starts...it takes its own inevitable course, like any fight...so get this:

NO, I AM NOT SUGGESTING THAT "we" (meaning Canadians and Americans, I presume...) "should have allowed the Japanese to continue to rape Chinese women and to allow Hitler to wipe out all the Jews." (to use your words) War was inevitable once the first shots were fired, by either Hitler in Europe or the Japanese in the Pacific.

(Furthermore, it would be damned naive to assume that the USA went to war to save any Chinese women from being raped...they haven't gone to war to stop the Indonesians from raping and killing thousands of ethnic Chinese in much more recent times. Indonesia, you see, is no threat to American interests on the world scene at present.)

So don't make up something really incredibly stupid, and logistically inconceivable under the historical circumstances, and suggest that it's my idea. Where did your brain go?

We don't have power to alter the past, but we do have power of choice in the present. I am suggesting that here and now and henceforward ALL human beings on this planet start putting their efforts into peace and international cooperation, and stop idolizing organized murder in the form of war and romanticizing it...and stop spending vast amounts of money on the weapons and infrastructure of war. I think it's about 40% of the budget in the USA. I suggest that's 30% too much under our present circumstances.

What I am suggesting is just what Jesus, Buddha, and Gandhi recommended, by the way. They didn't see the world as divided into "us and them" either. It's just us here on this planet, period. There is no them.

- LH