Lyle,

Enter "John Brown slave revolt" in google and you will learn who he was and 
how he, too, led an unsuccessful slave revolt which was, as I pointed out, 
well supported by the good-hearted US citizens who were opposed to slavery.

Another, purely racist act that resulted in "mass murder" was Andrew 
Jackson's enforced removal of the Native Americans from their lush lands in 
the East to a western desert, with starvation and attrocities against the 
hapless victims all along the "Trail of Tears". I'm sure you will come up 
with some sort of justification for that racist act, as you did with the 
other examples of "mass murder" that I proposed. Yet, if you study the 
colonial history and pre-contact history of Native Americans, you will learn 
that it was NOT the Native way of wagin war to kill off women and children. 
The innocents were rounded up and "enslaved" to the victors, such slavery 
being somewhat less onerous than the slavery enacted against 
African-Americans in that the "slaves" were allowed to assimilate and marry 
into the tribe and take their place as members of their new family. It was 
only after the white men showed the Indians that warfare was best conducted 
with mass murder of men, women and chidren, that the Indians adopted that 
means of warfare to the detriment of those who invaded their lands on the 
"frontiers".

While much deliberation went before the bombing of the Japanese cities, I 
suspect that more Japanese were killed and maimed than there were American 
soldiers who were "saved" by this attrocious act.

And, to my way of thinking, bombing and killing innocent Iraqi's and raise 
the death toll above that which Hussein already enacted, is not a good way 
to do away with a despot. Do a comparison of the numbers, as much as we know 
them, of the Iraqi killed by Hussein to establish his power, and the number 
of Iraqis killed by our effort to depose him (and we are still killing 
innocents even though the despot is now dead).

I'm am not nearly as certain as you seem to be that war is "justified" on 
such a broad basis.

Anne


Anne Pemberton
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http://www.erols.com/apembert
http://www.educationalsynthesis.org