From: John Grigg (starman2100@lycos.com)
Date: Sun Oct 20 2002 - 18:02:41 MDT
Mike Lorrey wrote:
One man with a gun can neutralize an entire government. Just look at
one lone nutjob running around the greater DC area is doing right now.
He has the population paralyzed and the police perplexed, paralyzed,
ineffectual and irrelevant. Imagine if there were a few thousand (out
of a population of several million) such individuals doing what he is
doing at the same time, each acting as individuals. Organized armies
used by tyrants are entirely ineffectual against such insurgencies when the insurgents are made up of the native population.
(end)
Mike, you are definitely right up to a point. Yes, for example the French partisans in occupied WWll France did create a lot of damage to the Nazi's(especially as the Allies were closing in and they needed the German infrastructure hammered hard), but the Germans were very adept at terrorizing the population into submission with interrogations, torture, natives turned into informants, and public executions.
Despite this, there were French men and women who refused to be cowed and fought as partisans. But on the other hand there were innocent people who were shot as "revenge" for German troops killed by partisans.
If the Japanese had successfully occupied parts of the American west coast during WWll, one can only shudder to think what they would have done to us considering the crimes they committed in China! Japanese occupying troops would have probably killed hundreds of thousands of non-belligerant American citizens to try to quell a rebellion. They would have made U.S. rebels realize for every Japanese soldier killed or target bombed, dozens or hundreds of Americans would be publicly executed.
Of course considering the American tendancy for war and retaliation, the Japanese would have found themselves in a nightmarish situation with no escape but to retreat from North America or surrender.
The resulting legal actions resulting in death sentences against the defeated occupiers might have made the Nuremburg trials look tame by comparison.
Actually, the nation which I always thought really fortunate in not having being invaded by Imperial Japan was Australia! The Japanese would have carried out a great deal of horror there before Allied forces could have rooted them out. I'm just glad it never happened.
On the tv news program "60 Minutes" they had a segment about how the Japanese today view the war. Amazingly, they have a whole literary and film genre built around it! They seem to enjoy books and films which show it as a glorious adventure. lol A film I would love to see even shows THEIR take on the Pearl Harbor attack. A small part of the film was even shown which had pilots shouting gleefully as they rained bombs down on U.S. warships in harbor!
Hopefully nations over the longterm will move beyond this sort of behavior. I realize some of you may say the possible U.S. invasion & occupation of Iraq is comparable to what I have written about. But I think you will find the Iraqi people to be very relieved to have a certain murderous and parasitic tyrant & his thugs removed.
best wishes,
John
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