Subject: Soviets 50, Americans 1 - 
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2003 17:30:23 -0800




Subject: Re: Shock'N'Awe


John Foster wrote:

> >bombing, 77 persons have died in Baghdad.
>
>Does it not bother you, John, that all your judgments
>concerning
>"unevenness," concerning civilian deaths, concerning guilt
>and innocence in
>this whole matter, rest on a completely skewed reading of
>Heidegger?
>
>No, I am watching CBC NewsWorld and those are the
statistics
>cited. America is strictly liable for those 77 deaths and I
>feel no guilt on my part.

I wasn't asking whether you feel guilt on your part. I was
asking whether it
bothers you that your whole worldview, which skews your
judgment into
bizarre statements like the US was not instrumental in
winning WWII,

Anthony, I am sorry but I believe that you have me confused
with some one else. I simply state facts: both from primary
and secondary sources (I was an undergraduate history major
once). On that note it should be obvious that the US was not
instrumental in ending the second world war at all. In fact
95% more German soldiers died on Russian soil than they did
in the firing range of US troops which had entered the war
late in 1942.

"We forget much too easily that 'until mid-1944, almost 95%
of all Nazi ground forces were engaged on the Eastern Front.
where Germany suffered 10 million of its total 13.6 million
casualties; and that 50 Soviet citizens died for every one
American. Even after 40 years, no 'historical truth' is more
important in Soviet minds," Stephen Cohen observes, however
insignificant all this may seem to American commentators who
urge us to dismiss "the pretense that the Soviet Union
helped us to liberate Europe" and the idea that "we could
not have won the war without the help of the Soviet Union."
[New Statesman, Feb. 8, 1985; Amos Perlmutter, op-ed, NYT,
April 30, 1985]

The Yanks did really not make that much difference, but they
did speed up the end of the war. Nothin instrumental nor
decisive about that fact.

jf









or that
a war is unjustified if there are ANY civilian deaths AT ALL
(which rules
out WWII, with or without Hiroshima and Dresden, so I assume
you think that
it wasn't a just cause) - whether it bothers you that this
determining
worldview rests on the mistaken assumption that it has some
kind of
ontological justification, beyond mere ontic justification?
Because if you
have is ontic justification, then you can no longer claim
the enlightened
position that you think you have.

Anthony Crifasi


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