Kamfrenchie wrote...
GimmeDaGun wrote...
Greylycantrope wrote...
Dropping nukes is actually a very bad comparison from a historical perspective just to let you know, I really wish people would stop using it. For the record the scientists understood only to some degree what they had unleashed but even they underestimated it's effects. The political/military leaders didn't give a hoot about it, not until Russia got the bomb and suddenly it could have been used against them.dreman9999 wrote...
How are the ending poorly written?
Think about it? You brought to a state where you have to sacrific yourself or you morals to stop the reapers. An event that after would have you questioning if you did the right thing. This is an issue many leader of wars have to ask themselves. You don't think the leaders of the US during WW2 did not have conflicts with themselve over dropping a nuke on Japan?
That is the very concept ME is trying to illustrate, the difficulty of choices vs the extreme.
If your issue is the catalyst, he is only there for you to understand the reapers, he has no control over the situation, that why he ask you to choose.
If you understand the nature of the catalyst the ending is much more clear.
The point here is that we are ask a quetion in regarde to moral vs logic. Our morality vs the reality of what we have to do to stop the reapers. The catalyst is only there to tell us how it started.
Sorry for the off topic, but I can't help but put a few historical facts straight here.
Before the US dropped those nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki they already knew that the blast would be devastating: by the Trinity bomb test in New Mexico (July 16. 1945.). That's where Robert Oppenheimer's (a theoretical physicist and professor of physics who was one of the fathers of the atomic bomb) famous qoute came from: "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds...".
The US government knew perfectly what it had at its disposal and how devastating an effect would it have on a city full of civilians. They dropped the bomb on Hiroshima on the 4th of August 1945. They could witness the effects of the hell they unleashed with their own eyes...hell they even made video footage of the whole operation. Not like it was enough for the US government: they had to drop another prototype (a bigger one) on the town of Nagasaki on the 9th of August, 1945.. Now here they really had no excuse to do so - not like the first one could be justified in any way.
Yes, the Soviets had a nuclear weapon program of their own at the time (though they were allied with the US at that point), but it was unsuccesfull due to the lack of resources (lack of uranium ore for one) and knowledge - thus they used espionage (succesfully I must add, but it payed off way later). The first Soviet atomic bomb test happened on the 29th of August 1949 (four years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings)!
The N.a.z.i German Reich had no real nuclear weapon program: Hitler never believed in it, so they concentrated on tactical interballistic rocket technology instead (V2).
During the Hiroshima-Nagasaki bombings Japan and all the Axis-nations (icluding The Third Reich) were losing the war, and the Allied forces were on the offensive. So there was no need to drop two nukes on two towns which did not really have any military value.
They didn't drop it on Europe because they didn't dare to destroy Euoropean cities for their history and potential as later allies (and even americans haven't forgotten where they came from... it was their civilization too). So they dropped it on Japan right under the nose of the Soviets, but instead of dropping them on an island without civilians or on a military base, they chose two towns full of civilians.
Lets face it: those two bombs were experiments on humans and pure calculated genocide - not any better than those the n.a.z.is or Soviets or anybody else (e.g. the British at the Drezda bombing) - commited in that war. There was only two reasons behind these bombings: getting across the message (especially to the rising Soviet empire): the US has the world's most devastating weapons, and the other one was the aforementioned human experiment (the one which aimed to have a field test with the nuke... and wanted to examine the effects it had on human physiology and the nuclear fallout).
So much for American heroism. No offence intended, but history knows no heroism, it's ruthless politics and tactics no matter how fancy the wrapping it is shown to the common folk. Also we have a saying about wars
here in Europe: there are no guilty amongst the victorious, only among the defeated.
You have a very one sided view of things. Japanese were being completely unreasonnable and were telling their own civilians to die for the chance of killing an american soldiers.
Japanese troops were barbaric for the whole war. At least most of the whermarcht respected the rules of war. And treated most prisonners in a decent way.
Japaneses would shoot unarmed medics so much that the crosses had to be painted green because red made them easy targets. They used kamikazes tactics.
The bomb being dropped was a logical decision, meant to save american soldiers lives.
It's the fault of the emperor and his generals for not surrendering earlier.
And before anyone tell me i think USA are heros, I don't, I'm french, I know they just abused bombings and "recon by fire" on our cities, but the A-bomb use was justified.
And that saying is wrong, Stalin was obviously guilty
OFF:
Sorry, but I don't see how my view is one sided. Dropping the two nukes was clearly one of the greatest war crimes of modern times' history. Period.
The Wermacht might have treated your soldier and ours, Hungarians', and all those nations' who joined and signed the Geneva Convention well, but take a look at the way they treated those outside of the jurisdiction of the Convention (the Soviets never signed it: this affected the Russians, Ukrainians, Mongolians, Causian nations etc.). They treated them like animals or worse.
Wrong: Stalin was an ally of the US and all it's western allies (GB for instance) during the war (without them the war most probably would have been won by the Axis powers) and it was them who provided the Soviets money, resources and technology in order to upgrade and make the Red Army a potent modern military force to reckon with (at that time it might have been out of desperation and ignorance, but they helped to reenforce and unleash the devil of Soviet terror in Central-Eastern-Europe). So, no Stalin wasn't considered a war criminal at all: not at the time nor later. He had become an enemy of the Western powers and was considered being a dictator, yes, but never considered being a war criminal even if the Soviet terror outlasted and surpassed everybody else's crimes in magnitude (yes, even the Reich's crimes). But a war crime or a crime against humanity remains a crime no matter its magnitude or by whom it was committed.
Thus the US nuclear bombs were crimes of war and a crime against humanity. If I wanted to express it with a more sentimental manner: it was an evil deed which the US as a country shouldn't be proud of... more like should be ashamed of. And I'm not trying to be a hypocrit or anything: many nations committed crimes in history - yours and mine too - but genocide is genocide and mass destruction is mass destruction which only a few nations happened to commit (and here I'm not saying that the members of those nations are the ones responsible or should feel guilty), but they should not forget about it or try to justify it. There's no way it could be justified.
So saying that the Japanese had different and more brutal fighting methods is not a good reason my friend to destory two cities of peaceful civilians, even if the Emperor didn't capitulate by that time. Simply: no. This is double standard and very one dimensional.
But you know how it goes - and here's another saying which is "wrong" objectively of course, but still is true: history is always written by the victorious.
Modifié par GimmeDaGun, 27 septembre 2012 - 11:04 .
Retour en haut
). Damn, they have a monument of Victory (with the Soviet emblem on it) in the heart of Budapest (ironic enough that the square is called "Freedom Square" and is only a two hunder meters away from the Parlament). A city where they oppressed the greatest revolution and freedom fight of the 20th century, in a city which they devastated twice. And Hungarian diplomacy can't do anything because the Russians were considered victors and liberators at the time. History is a ****. 
