[Loy]

TStone-as always, your thoughtlines are always worthy of following through. But I do have to appologise about one fact I got wrong-Walker and Bush's business were actually shut down DURING the war for laundering money for the Third Reich, and not beforehand. I looked over what I wroite, and realised I didn't make that clear. It really has little to do with this whole spiel, but I figured I'd appologise for getting a minor fact wrong.

As for your historty lesson, it reminds me of a book called "The Lucifer Complex". The basic hypothesis put forward was that the agresiveness within our genes don't date back to our ape days, but even further back to the single-cell days. The author also made a point about the transference of agresive natures to something more beneficial, and he used the ongoing war between the US and JApan. Ongoing war? Yes. After the end of "hostilities", Japan decided to kick our asses on the economic/industrial/technological level, and the amount of competitiveness between the two sides could be seen as a war (albeit, one sans weapons and death, but just as much about dominance), and asked which war was better in the long run. Alot of it I still have problems with, but it's an interesting read nontheless.

As far as why I'm debating this at all....the point I was trying to make was that, whilst it was true that Germany had designs on us, the Germans weren't the reason we went to war in the first place, and that the feeling of appeasment/camraderie between certain factions of US citizens and the Reich were extremely high. What I'm trying to point out was that, hiustorical revisionists aside, we were extremely close with the Nazis, and that it was only AFTER the war that we've distanced ourselves from them. Call it my urge to dredge up hidden history, but to call the war "inevitable" is one of many ways we take history out of context and revise it into "grand mythology", which, as everybody knows, is another word for "denial".

Asurai-You know, you can keep repeating "the bomb saved more lives than it killed" to yourself over and over again, however it just don't make it true. And just out of boredom, I went through a bunch of my history books and found an interesting fact-apparently after the war, Truman got a bunch of people to calculate exactly HOW many lives (on both sides) were actually saved. They figured that we saved the lives of 187 american soldiers (not to mention the 50 that would've went MIA because of the enemy, and the 300+ that would've just gone AWOL) and 50 Japanese lives. So therer you go, 50 less Japs died because we dropped the bomb on them.

And as far as saying the Japanese instituted the state of war....please stop misreading facts and cheryy-picking details (whilst ignoring the rest). It makes for bad form. However, your whole post actually shows what I was talking about when people talk themselves into not seeing civilians on the other side, so thank you.