Tuesday, November 19, 2013

TIME LAPSE MAP OF EVERY NUCLEAR EXPLOSION EVER ON EARTH



Insanity ... after all that show of force, we don't seem to have anything of social redeeming value to show for our bomb-making skills.

Watch the whole thing. Don't click it out as repetitious. That would be an act of moral cowardice.

Realize that we Americans and our competitors with our boy toys just couldn't bring ourselves to not light one more ... over and over again ...

Then explain to yourself how and why we think we are the greatest country on Earth because we have the ability to do what with our firecrackers?

And of course some will say there was scientific testing going on. Of course there was.

A consequence of scientific testing reminds us that our own contemorary political and moral American heroes authorized the use of depleted uranium in Iraq to make our bombs and bullets tougher penetrators. Those heroes remain strangely silent about the horrible and enormously large spate of birth defects in the same specific combat zones.

I was asked, "Saving thousands of Japanese and American lives wasn't socially redeeming?"

The comparative ... whose "thousands of lives" are we valuing the most at the expense of the lives of others?

Wouldn't it be fair to ask residents and relatives of residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to see if their unwilling sacrifice redeemed the social good everywhere else?

We could subjectively declare - if we assumed and were insistent that we possessed the higher wisdom and the will and means to impose it - that that the social good of saving all those lives is greater than the loss of life in those two cities.

I find it extremely difficult to rationalize a form of murder as a necessary social good in which the protection of one side's soldiers and citizens at the terrible cost to anyone else is paramount. Such in fact constitutes a social evil.

The precedent established by Mr. Truman and the American government is with us today. Wise or not, we are required to acknowledge that we were the first to use those atomic weapons of mass destruction and we did so in anger and with extreme prejudice ...

We are not noble because we did that and today's reaped whirlwind of atomic terror began with that self-serving "noble" decision that many among us today rationalize.

I believe that when we make that sort of self-serving rationalization, we authorize ourselves to do it again to someone else ... and tell ourselves how much better it is to do it first before it is done to us.

After all, we are, as Geoffrey Perret wrote, A Country Made by War.


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