l do not hold a grudge against the Japanese for their nation’s actions against humanity from the 1930s to 1945. Nor against Germans, Austrians and other Axis citizens and their collaborators during and before Wold War 2.
Accordingly, I do not accept the culpability or guilt that Dick Hall in his Aug. 10 letter to the editor, tried to dump on me and others for what my state and my country did to stop those nations’ heinous crimes against humanity. I also do not, 72 years later, dump guilt on those nations or their people today.
You may visit the sins of the fathers and the mothers (or grandparents) on the sons and daughters, as it were; you may be ignorant of history and the justifications for historic actions such as bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and you may distort the causality and/or reality of culpability. As you like. But you have no right to project your self-righteousness on others. Indeed, in my value matrix, you have a duty not to.
If you would learn what you do not know, or refresh what you have disregarded, I suggest a good encyclopedia. Wikipedia is handy if you are online. Look for: Rape of Nanking; London Blitz; Wworld War II casualties. (E.g. “R.J. Rummel estimates civilian victims of Japanese democide at 5,424,000.” “Gruhl estimates POW deaths in Japanese captivity at 331,584.”) Examine Cold War and MAD. To compare casualties in various horrific World War II bombings: Hamburg, Dresden, Warsaw, Tokyo, and of course Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
Richard Carter
Mountlake Terrace
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