General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Hiroshima - quit lying to yourselves [View all]MisterP
(23,730 posts)TO THE YALU and that Operation Olympic wasn't ready until spring 1946, and closeted talks with the Emperor could've happened way before even Operation Coronet) the biggest change of WWII (and magnified a thousandfold in Arms Race) was that no matter which human side believes it's "won" in a war, it's the machines who win and the humans lose: in the name of this or that doctrine and strategy, the soft, loving, fearing, hating creatures produce machines that can kill a plurality of multicellular life and surrender themselves to the machines: they think like the machines they create and they create military bureaucratic structures that can come to agreements that absolutely none of the members want--that, in fact, nobody on both sides wants: it produces depravities that torture cannot, and allows for fully absconding responsibility via bloodless, sanitary technocracy
machines are made to be used, and their use is their justification: you're supposed to push the Button
machines are amoral and see people as numbers
machines do not cry for those they kill: they deserved it because they're dead (not even because "they started it by not overthrowing Hitler/the Kwantung Army camarillas"
this is what drives most significant immediate postwar SF: Pynchon, Vonnegut, Kubrick (see http://books.google.com/books?id=r5p4Ko4oP2cC)
of course, I'm a historian from an Allied-Axis family, so I know about total war from all sides