Quote:
Originally posted by Seraph:
quote:
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the greatest human tragedy of the 20th century.
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Way to put Hitler in his place. [/QUOTE]I had feared that I would have to elaborate that one
I called it the greatest human
tragedy, because here people who entered the war to save a civilized world order rather than for personal gain (be it industrial or land), used an unprecedessed tool of destruction as the ultima ratio.
This is the stuff the Greek tragedies are made of: People with good intentions drift into a catastrophy they believe not to be or actually ARE not able to prevent.
Cynical as it may sound to some who can't follow my semantics: A villain butchering his victim is what I consider sad/gruesome/horrible/... but not "tragic".
Calling the holocaust a "tragedy" (and I'm talking about the sense here and not the actual words) is IMHO one of the biggest mistakes still made in my country or Germany. It is fatalistic and suggests that the German people (and especially the active Nazis) had no choices against their doing. It presents this ultimate regress of civilisation as their inevitable fate, which is just not true. These people had choices and made the wrongest ones possible.
This is not a tragedy, it is wrongdoing.
Circumstances may have been deceiving, but at the end of the day everybody has got to take responsibility for his choices (NOT necessarily for his actions).
The US had to make ONE far more difficult choice on the a-bomb matter and took a devastating one which we still don't know about if it was actually "wrong" (as this discussion proves). THIS is tragedy!
[ 02-15-2004, 05:50 AM: Message edited by: Faceman ]