[airspirit]

*sigh*

MadDogMe, there is a fundamental difference between who the Japanese were at this time and the American people at any time during American history. This difference is both philosophical and cultural. The difference was that almost as a whole, the Japanese people stood behind their deity/emperor, believing both politically and religiously that his actions were pure and without reproach, and that anything he did HAD to be correct and right, and that mandate was passed down in almost a feudal manner to his representatives in the military. To NOT follow the mandates of the Emperor would be worse than treason, but it would dishonor both the individual and the individual's family.

I agree with you on one thing, though, that nearly everybody who has the ability to make it to the top of a political system such as ours is almost guaranteed to be unfit to lead. The nature of our election process, where the more money that is spent and the more you obfuscate your stand on issues in order to appeal to the greatest amount of people is absurd. It guarantees us politicians that are bought wholesale by the rich and powerful corporations, and leads to politicians that are incapable of positive action due to the fact that they are no more than puppets and vote whores.

I choose not to vote because every contest is a matter of choosing the lesser of two or three evils. If I found a candidate for any elected position who actually stood for something (not just saying they stood for everything good and against everything bad, wtf is that crap?), I would throw my every effort into helping that person get elected.

If every politician in the US would spontaneously combust, I'd be tickled pink, because it would mean that real people with real convictions would get to make decisions that might actually help us rather than sell us to the highest bidder. The politicians at the time of WW2 were probably the last of the true patriots that ever were in office. The fact that they could make these hard decisions is testimony to the fact that they could do what is right regardless of how it would appear in history books, and I wish we had more people in office like that today.

When I see losers like the Clintons, Dole, McCain, and some of the others that are up there selling us down the river for money, votes, and power while letting us go to hell in a handbasket, it makes me sick.

In America, while atrocities were committed against the natives, slaves, women, and just about any other group at one point or another, there was always a vocal opposition that could be considered innocent of the sins of the ones committing that crime. Similarly, we as a society have risen above those actions for the most part, and tried to atone for them in the best way we can. To justify ones actions by saying that somebody else had done it before is crazy. It would be like me saying that it is alright to rape and kill people because Ted Bundy did it. It wouldn't be unique to me, but it would be a horrible crime nonetheless.

If, for example, a foreign entity had stepped in to defend the natives against us, we would have got what we clearly deserved. Similarly, if by foreign mandate we were struck down for slavery, that would be justified. The difference in nuking one of our cities would be that in anyplace in the US there were vocal dissenters on all of the issues that plagued our society that worked to correct those wrongs, and to take them out as well would be heinous. When we bombed those cities, we bombed cities that were filled from the grass roots with people that wished to further the atrocities that the Japanese Empire was committing.

In Japan there weren't dissenters. As a cultural rule, there, it would be unthinkable to argue against their Emperor God.

It is easy to say that a populace is innocent because they couldn't control the actions of their government. That would be correct if even a small portion of the populace dissented against that rule, but in this case where the Japanese people stood wholeheartedly behind their govenment and strove to further the crimes it was committing, what you are saying is a fallacy.