Re: Fundamentally arrogant and racist
I'm sorry - are you equating the nationalistic fervour that fuels the will to go to war with the sadistic culture evinced by the Japanese toward their captives and the Nazis toward "undesirables"?
*My* point was that I wasn't going to give arguments such as yours any weight in the "we should feel bad for what we did in WWII - especially the Little Boy and Fat Man events" debate.
For all the stories you can dredge up of bad behaviour by Allied occupation troops, no-one was herded into cattle cars for a Xylon-B shower or starved and beaten to death during forced labour. Dresden burned? So did large parts of London and Coventry. Hiroshima? The Batan Death March and the events in China.
Save your sympathy for those that deserved it.
As for the sadism in Japanese Culture, it predates contact with "WASP" Europe (actually Catholic Spain but let's not split hairs).
But I'll readily concede that many times in the past Britain - England really, hasn't covered its reputation in glory, and that America has a past it would today rather hadn't happened the way it did.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
