More on Operation Paperclip

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[Excerpted from a letter to a friend regarding Operation Paperclip]

I think you might benefit as I have from reading this book. The CIA made public a book review on it:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol-58-no-3/operation-paperclip-the-secret-intelligence-program-to-bring-nazi-scientists-to-america.html

It wasnt just rocket scientists, it was much more than that, and complicit is not the word. In many cases these are the leaders of the projects that killed 10s of thousands of slave laborers (100s of thousands?). I am not aware of the Manhattan project being even close to what happened in Nazi Germany. We are talking about some of the worst people of the Nazi regime when it came to such things as medical experiments with a 99% death rate on non consensual subjects. And it was after the fact and we hired these people because we did not believe that we could compete with the Russians with their German scientists any other way. I say, bullshit.

I dont think that the Manhattan project makes us equivalent to the Nazis even a little bit, in any way, whatsoever. I could argue this persuasively for 100,000 years and some people could not hear me, so I suggest we dodge it. They dont want to hear what went into the decision to drop those bombs, what went into the decision to stop dropping those bombs, and so forth. It is way beyond their capability to put themselves into the mindset of those who were there. Even the simplest historical issues are beyond their capability to hear. If it were me, I would not have dropped the bombs directly on those cities, I would have deliberately dropped it offshore, for example. The city would have been wrecked, many people would have died although not as many who did, and the point would have been made. But would the Japanese leadership have heard the message if they had done that? I dont know, but I know that the people who were there and whose job it was to save American lives did not think that it would. Hiroshima was not a civilian target, not even a little itsy bitsy bit. Some scholars wrote a nasty letter a few years ago (10?) comparing Hiroshima to the beautiful and innocent city of San Francisco not realizing how insanely stupid and ignorant their argument was (and these were people who studied the subject), because even a stupid moron who studied the war in the pacific would realize that San Francisco was one of the eseential cities in our war in the Pacific. Perhaps people in academia in this subject are by definition stupid, I dont know, but they sure did not enhance their credibility in this discussion.  The Manhattan project is one of the great achievements of our civiilization and really is not comparable in any way with the use of Nazi scientists who deliberately killed people in their charge.

There is an important issue here: we can not trust our government to uphold our morals. We must realize that we must take action and at the very least punish those who, for example, by government policy use torture to achieve policy goals. We have used torture in our nations past, but never by policy to the best of my knowledge. Is this an important point, yes I think it is.
We are all complicit today in the destruction of our government and the murder of innocent people, whose number we will never know because unlike the Nazis we deliberately do not keep and destroy the records (see EPA and Gestapo/ICE). Every day that Trump is in power, every day that McConnell puts right wing nuts in the court system means our system failed. The courts need to be sanitized at once, failure to do so means that we live in an oppressive right wing dictatorship. There is nothing those people wont do to achieve their bizarre right wing goals over the wishes of the majority of the people in this country (which is obvious to everyone in the world except maybe Americans in denial).

The game is over. Its time for a new government.