Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week at Work. Three Mirrors.

Lex Anteinternet: Mid Week at Work. Three Mirrors.:  

Mid Week at Work. Three Mirrors.

 This blog, as we occasionally note has the intent . . . to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?

Well, okay, clearly its strayed way beyond that, but it's retained that purpose and is focused on the period from around 1900 until around 1920, which makes a lot other things, indeed most things, off topic.

But this past week there were a collection of things we ran across that really do sort of focus in on that a bit, and given us an example of how things have changed.

Taking them in no particular order, we have the story of baseball player Tommy Brown, about whom we noted:

Seventeen year old Tommy Brown became the youngest player in Major League Baseball to hit a home run.  Brown had joined the Dodgers at age 16.

Brown provides a good glimpse into mid 20th Century America.  Nobody would think it a good thing for a 16 year old to become a professional baseball player now.  Moreover, the next year, when Brown was 18, he was conscripted into the Army, something that likely wouldn't happen now even if conscription existed.  He returned to professional baseball after his service, and played until 1953 and thereafter worked in a Ford plant until he retired, dying this year at age 97.  Clearly baseball, which was America's biggest sport at the time, didn't pay the sort of huge sums it does now.

Tommy "Buckshot" Brown as born on December 6, 1927 and January 15, 2025, and gives us a really good glimpse of the world of the late 1930s and 1940s.  He'd dropped out of school at age 12 in 1939 and went to work with his uncle as a dockworker.  Being a longshoreman is a notoriously dangerous job and frankly the occupation was heavily influenced by the mob at the time.  There's no earthly way that you could be hired as a longshoreman at age 12 now, nor should there be.  But life was like that then.  My father's father, who was born in 1907, I think, went to work at age 13.  

People did that.

If you are a longshoreman at age 12, you are a 12 year old adult.

He must have been a good baseball player to be hired on in the Majors at age 16.  If that happened now, you'd have to be one of the greatest players alive in the game. But this was during World War Two, and baseball was scraping.

It was scraping as the military was.  The service had taken pretty much all the able bodied men who weren't in a critical war industry.  We don't like to think this about "the Greatest Generation" now, but by 1944 and 1945, the Army was inducting me who were only marginally capable of being soldiers in normal times.  Men who were legally blind in one eye and who were psychotic were being taken in, and I'm not exaggerating.  The recent incident we reported here of a soldier going mad and killing Japanese POWs makes sense in this context.  It's relatively hard to get into the Army now.  After World War Two men inducted were in good physical and mental shape.  By the last days of the Second World War not all were and we knew it.

Brown's story also tells us a lot about what economic life was like mid century.  Obviously, baseball didn't make Brown rich, and there was no post baseball career associated with sports.  He went to work in a factory.

Going to work in a factory, in the 50s, was a pretty solid American job, and another story we touched on relates to this.

The US War Production Board removed most of its controls over manufacturing activity, setting the stage for a post war economic boom.

The US standard of living had actually increased during the war, which is not entirely surprising given that the US economy had effectively stagnated in 1929, and the US was the only major industrial power other than Canada whose industrial base hadn't been severely damaged during the war.  Ever since the war, Americans have been proud of the economics of the post war era, failing to appreciate that if every major city on two continents is bombed or otherwise destroyed, and yours aren't, your going to succeed.

Having said that, the Truman Administration's rapid normalization of the economy was very smart.  The British failed to do that to their detriment.

Americans of our age, and indeed since the 1950s, have really convinced themselves that American Ingenuity and native smartness caused us to have the best economy in the world in the third quarter of the 20th Century, and that if only we returned to the conditions of the 50s, we would again.

Well, the conditions of the 1950s were a lot like the conditions of the post war 1940s.  Every major city in the world, save for American and Canadian ones, had been damaged, and many had been bombed flat.   It's not as if Stuttgart, Stalingrad, or Osaka were in good shape.  We would have had to nearly intentionally mess up not to be the world's dominant economy and that went on all the way into the 1970s.  The UK did not really recover from World War Two, in part due to bad economic decisions, until the 1960s.  West Germany, ironically, recovered much quicker, but in no small part due to the return of refugee German economists who intentionally ignored American economic advice.  Japan emerged from the devastation in the 70s.  Italy really started to in the 60s.  

Many of these countries, when they did, emerged with brand new economies as things were brand new.  Japan is a good example, but then so is Italy, which had been a shockingly backwater dump until the mid 50s.

Russia, arguably, has never recovered, helping to explain its national paranoia.

The thing is, however, that the myth as been hugely damaging to Americans, who imagine that if we were only whiter and had "less regulation", etc., we'd be back in 1955.  It's not going to happen, and we can't tariff our way back to the Eisenhower Era.

Of course, a lot of that post war era wasn't all that nifty. We had the Cold War, for example, and we often dealt with significant inflation, in no small part to inflate our way out of enormous Cold War defense budgets. . .which is probably a warning of what's to come when we realize we have to do something about the national debt.

Finally, we had posted on women and careers.  Well, sort of.  Anyhow, right after that we saw a Twitter post in which a young woman who posted on TikTok was being discussed for say:

I'm just so tired of living and working and doing this every single day, and having nothing — I don't know how I'm gonna get childcare when I have to work 40 hours a week because I can't even afford to feed my family as is.  I'm having medical problems. I can't even get into the doctor because X rays and MRIs are 500, let alone a colonoscopy and endoscopy that I need. Like, I can't afford anything. My doctors cancel my appointments.

This world is just not meant to be like this, we need to make change for us, for each other. Please.

She's right.

This was under the heading, on her post, of "This world is a scam".

The world?  Well, that's a little too broad.  But the modernized industrialized Protestant work ethic world of the West?  You bet.

Interestingly, one of the things she took flak for was buying some sort of baby bottle washer.  It's been a long time since there were infants here, but when there were, I recall we tended to use sort of a disposable system, not real bottles.  Having said that, I looked bottles up, and I can recall that we had some of the ones that are still offered, so I'm likely wrong.  Anyhow, washing bottles is no doubt a pain.

The irate people, who are probably generally irate simply because she had children, and therefore is not fully lashed to the deck of the economic fraud everyone is participating in, seemed to think that this therefore meant she was rich.  Not hardly.

FWIW, I looked up baby bottle washers too, and they really aren't that expensive.  They no doubt probably save time.  Time is money and of course we need to get those wimmen's out in the workplace where they can serve the machine.

Women only entered the workplace at this level in the first place after domestic machinery freed, or seperated, their labor from the house, where it had previously been necessary.  You don't see women being criticized because their house contains a vacuum cleaner, or a dishwasher, even though this is not intrinsically different.  

Indeed, this tends to be the one area where the right and the left are in agreement, and will yell about how society needs more baby warehouses, um daycares.  The left, of course, goes further and discourages having children at all, and would indeed expand infanticide if it could, one of the issues that gave rise to the culture was and the populist revolve that we're still in.  

At any rate, she's right.  The world is not meant to be like this. We made this horror, and others.  We can fix it.

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, July 3, 1945. Don't use the Bomb.

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, July 3, 1945. Don't use the Bomb.: 

Tuesday, July 3, 1945. Don't use the Bomb.

The first draft of a letter by Manhattan Project scientists urging that the Atomic Bomb not be used was circulated.  Hungarian physicist and biologist Leo Szilard was the scrivener.

This version was not sent, as a new one was worked on in order to secure additional signatures.

This is the second such example of such a letter, the other one from Robert Oppenheimer, that I've posted in recent days.  Clearly something was really going on inside the Manhattan Project itself at this time, and what that was, was a debate on whether to use the bomb or not.

Frankly, the views expressed above comport with my own.  Using the bomb was 1) a huge mistake, and 2) deeply immoral in how it was targeted.

It's interesting, however, that this debate broke out at this point.

That the atom could be split and that it could be done in such away that the massive release of energy would result in a huge blast had been known, albeit theoretically, for some time.  The knowledge did not come about during the war itself, but before it.

The war, however, created an enormous imperative to work the physical problems of constructing a bomb out, in large part out of the fear the Axis would get there first.

The Western Allies, the Germans, and the Japanese all had atomic weaponry programs, although its typically forgotten that the Japanese were working on this as well. The German program was enormously feared.

The German program was also enormously hampered by Nazi racism, as it had the impact of causing Jewish scientists, such as the Hungarian Leo Szilard to flee for their lives.  They weren't alone in this, however, as generally the highly educated class of men that were in the field of physics weren't really keen on fascism overall.  Germany had some top flight scientists, of course, but many of the best minds in science in Europe had left or put themselves out of serious research work if they remained. Some of those who remained in Europe and were subject to the Germans somewhat doddled in their efforts in order to retard the advancement of the efforts.

Japan had a program, as noted, and it had some excellent physicists. Their problem here, however, was much like that of the Japanese war effort in chief.  Japan was so isolated that it had nobody else to draw from.

In contrast, the US effort was nearly global in extent, as the US drew in all the great minds, in one way or another, who were not working for the Germans or Japanese, which was most of the great minds in the field.

At any rate, moral qualms about using the bomb didn't really start to emerge until very late in the war, and not really until after Germany had surrendered.  Nearly everyone working on the Manhattan Project imagined it as producing a bomb to be used against Germany.  Japan wasn't really considered.

And there's good reasons for that. For one thing, it was feared that Germany, not Japan, would produce a nuclear weapon and there was no doubt that Germany would use it if they did.  Given that, producing a bomb, and using it first, had a certain element of logic to it.  Destroy them, the logic was, before they can do that to us.

Working into that, it should be noted, was the decay in the resistance to the destructiveness of war that had started to set in during World War One.  The US had gone to war, in part, over a moral reaction to the Germans sinking civilian ships.  By World War Two there was no moral aversion to that at all and unrestricted submarine warfare was just considered part of war.

The Germans had also introduced terror bombing of cities during the Great War, engaging in it with Zeppelins.  Long range artillery had shelled Paris in the same fashion.  Between the wars it was largely assumed that cities would be targeted simply because they were cities, which turned out to be correct.  The Germans had already engaged in this during the Spanish Civil War and would turn to during the Blitz, which the British would very rapidly reply with.  By 1945 the US was firebombing Japanese cities with the logic it drove workers out of their homes, and crippled Japanese industry, which was correct, but deeply immoral.

By July 1945 there were really no more industrial targets left to bomb in Japan, although the bombing was ongoing.  The only point of dropping an atomic bomb was to destroy cities, and the people within them.

That was obvious to the atomic scientists, but that had been obvious about using the bomb on Germany as well. Targeting would have largely been the same, and for the same purpose.  Allied strategic bombing of Germany has actually halted before the German surrender, as there was no longer any point to it, although the concept the Allies had in mind would really have been to use the bomb earlier than the Spring of 1945.  Indeed, had the bomb been available in very early 1945, there's real reason to doubt that the Allies would have used it on Germany, as Allied troops were on the ground and they were advancing.

Still, with all that in mind, there was a certain sense all along that Germany uniquely deserved to be subject to atomic bombs.  Japan in this context was almost an after thought.

Everyone working on the bomb in the US was European culturally.  To those of European culture the Germans were uniquely horrific, and to this day Nazi Germany is regarded as uniquely horrific.  Many of those working on the Manhattan Project, moreover, were direct victims of the Nazis, with quite a few being both European and Jewish refugees.  Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, by late 1944 people were well aware of what was going on in Nazi Germany and that the Germans were systematically murdering Jews.

The Japanese also were incredibly inhumane and horrific in their treatment of the populations they'd overrun, as well as of Allied prisoners of war. But the nature and extent of their barbarity really wasn't very well known.  Indeed, much of it would not be until after the Second World War, at which time the information was suppressed for post war political reasons.  At any rate, in July 1945, the scientists working on the Manhattan Project did not know of Japanese systematic horrors in China.  Very few people did.

And the Japanese were scene, basically, as victims of their own culture, which was somewhat true.  Japan had not been colonized by Europeans at all, making them the only nation in Asia to have that status.  Therefore, European culture, and standards, had really not penetrated very much.  Japan had adopted Western technology, but Western concepts of morality in war had not come in with it very much. To the extent that it did, it seemed to evaporate with the introduction of increasing authoritarianism in Japan after World War One.

But that wasn't really known to the scientific community.

It was, however, to the military community, which had been fighting the Japanese on the ground.

We'll discuss that in the context of the bomb in a later thread.  

The point here is that by this time, many in the non military community, and some within it, who were aware that the Allies were about to produce an atomic bomb were now against using it.

And, indeed, it should never have been used.

Moscow radio announced that the body of Joseph Goebbels had been discovered in the courtyard of the Chancellery in Berlin.

Also in Berlin, the first U.S. troops arrived for occupation duty.

James F. Byrnes became United States Secretary of State.

The first civilian passenger car made in the United States in three years rolled off the assembly line of the Ford Motor Company in Detroit.  The car was a 1946 Super DeLuxe Tudor sedan and was destined for Harry Truman.

Last edition:

Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.

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War and moral decay. Was originally Lex Anteinternet: Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.

Lex Anteinternet: Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.: 

Monday, July 2, 1945. Advances on Balikpapen.

Maria Michi in Rome, Open City.  She also played the role of the welcoming Italian turned prostitute in Paisan.  Both films were directed by Roberto Rossellini and filmed immediately after World War Two.  Why am I featuring her? See below.

Tokyo's population was down to 200,000 people due to evacuations from the bombed city.

Australian troops took Balikpapan's oil facilities.

American operations conclude on the Ryukyus.

The submarine USS Barb fired rockets on Kaihyo Island near Sakhalin,the first instance of a submarine firing such weapons.

Mountbatten is ordered to launch Operation Zipper, the liberation of Malaya, in August.

The 1945 Sheikh Bashir Rebellion broke out in Burao and Erigavo in British Somaliland against the British.

"The American Farmer" was the cover story in Newsweek.

Louis Till, father of Emmett Till who is remembered for being lynched at age 14 in 1955, was executed by the U.S. Army at Aversa, Italy for two counts of rape and murder.  

The elder Till had married the younger Till's mother when they were 18, over the objections of her parents. The marriage was not a happy one and she divorced him after he physically attacked her.  A conviction from that resulted in his joining the U.S. Army in order to avoid a prison sentence.

While Tills' conviction and execution are debated, the circumstances of the crime, which involved a home invasion and rape, are vile, and it seems that the trial was well conducted.

What's this have to do with the younger Till's lynching?  Absolutely nothing.  The junior Till never knew his father as the relationship had disintegrated when he was a mere infant.

There may be something, however, to take away about the horrors of the postwar world.  Armies are made up of all kinds of people, particularly conscripted armies.  Putting somebody in uniform so they wouldn't go to jail was fairly common.  There was a guy in boot camp with me who was there for that very reason, and I know a very successful person who essentially had the same thing occur to him.

And wars are a huge violation of the moral order.  Invading armies have always been associated with crime, with rape being a particularly common one.  Occupying armies, and even garrison armies, have a fair amount of moral depredation they bring on as well.

This certainly doesn't apply to everyone in uniform in these conditions, and not even the majority of those in uniform, in most modern armies, but it's frankly the case that World War Two created a vast amount of prostitution in Europe, some of it of a massively desperate type as portrayed in Rossellini's Paisan, and discussed in Atkinson's The Day of Battle.  Italy was quite frankly particularly hard hit as its infrastructure was far less developed than that of France or Germany, and it's population lived much more primitively and much closer to the poverty line.  Indeed, the vast bulk of the Italian population even before the war lived in what Americans of the same period would have regarded as poverty.

In these conditions, Italian women became targets.  Many prostituted themselves.  Some entered what might be regarded as a species of concubinage.  A biography of Bill Mauldin notes, for example, that for a period of time both Mauldin and another Stars and Stripes reporter kept girls in their mid teens, something that would have been regarded as a crime in the U.S. given the girls' very young age.  Paisan, as noted, depicts a middle class Italian girl descending into poverty, and then trying to grasp a straw out of it that nearly appears.  The classic The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit depicts a middle class American businessman who was an officer during the war engaging in a secret affair that produces a child while a soldier in Italy.

Concubinage is one thing.  Rape quite another, but murder is beyond the pale even for most whose morals decay in wartime.  But not for everyone.  And of course, we haven't touched on the Red Army, for whom wholescale rape, and then murder, of the women of the countries they overran was routine.  The percentage of Soviet soldiers that went home as rapist likely isn't known, but it was appreciable, and appreciated apparently by Soviet women, which lead to that generations domestic lives being notoriously turbulent.

War changes everything, and most of what it changes, isn't for the better.

Last edition:

Sunday, July 1, 1945. Battle of Balikpapan. The Post War German Map. Blondie.

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Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, March 21, 1944. Dear John.

Lex Anteinternet: Tuesday, March 21, 1944. Dear John.: 

Tuesday, March 21, 1944. Dear John.

The first in print use of the term "Dear John Letter" appeared in a UPI article entitled Hollywood Girls Gain Weight on Tour in Africa.¹   It was clear from the use, which was a quote from one of the increasingly corpulent Hollywood Girls that the term was in the common vernacular at the time.

We've touched on the topic of wartime marriages and breakups several times before, but my ability to link them in is restrained, as I can't find them all.  We haven't done one on wartime romantic relationships in general.  As our Fourth Law of History details, War Changes Everything, but like a lot of things surrounding World War Two, this topic is subject to a lot of myth.  According to one scholarly source:

Marriage rates rose in 1940-41 and peaked in 1942, only to slow down during the war and rise to even higher levels in 1946. Divorce rates followed a much smoother pattern, increasing from 1940 to 1946, then quickly declining in 1947.

World War II and Divorce: A Life-Course Perspective by Eliza K. Pavalko and Glen H. Elder, Jr.  

Frankly, looking at it, the Second World War didn't impact divorce nearly as much as commonly believed.  If it is taken into consideration that World War Two came immediately on the heels of the Great Depression, and that the ages of US troops in the war was higher than commonly imagined, it makes sense.  Consider:

While the Great Depression did lower marriage rates, the effect was not long lasting: marriages were delayed, not denied. The primary long-run effect of the downturn on marriage was stability: Marriages formed in tough economic times were more likely to survive compared to matches made in more prosperous time periods.

Love in the Time of the Depression: The Effect of Economic Conditions on Marriage in the Great Depression, Matthew J. Hill.

Indeed, that short snipped is revealing.

There were a lot of marriages contracted before soldiers went overseas, and some people did marry very quickly, which is probably balanced out by a lot of people who were going to get married anyhow getting married before they would be husband deployed.  Also, according to The Great Plains during World War II  by Prof. R. Douglas Hurt, there was an increase of pre deployment pre marital contact, although the book relied solely on interview data for that claim.  Having said that, a Florida academic, Alan Petigny, has noted that "between the beginning of World War II in 1941 and the inaugural issue of Playboy in 1953, the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled".²

That the war had an impact on behavior in regard to relations outside of marriage is well documented.  Prostitution was rampant in every area where troops were deployed, with it being openly engaged in locations like London.  Examples of illicit behavior aren't very hard to find at all.  The length of the war no doubt contributed to this.  Nonetheless, traditional moral conduct dominated throughout the 1940s and after it, with the real, and disastrous, changes really starting in the early 1950s.

That "Dear John" letters weren't uncommon makes a lot of sense, however. The majority, but not all of them, would have been written by single women to single men, i.e., by girlfriend to boyfriend.  Those relationships were not solemnized and largely unconsummated, if we use those terms.  The war was long and accordingly the separations were as well.  Young women in many instances would have aged a few years, as the men would have also, but in conditions that were dramatically different than the men.  The women were, to a large degree, temporarily forced outside their homes, if they fit into the demographic that would have remained at home, but in conditions that were considerably more stable than the men.  If they went to work, they could have remained at one employer for years, whereas the soldier boyfriend may very well have constantly been on the move. Workplace romances certainly aren't uncommon now, with around 20% of Americans having met their spouses at work (Forbes claims its 43%).  Some large percentage of Americans have dated a coworker.  Given the long separations, a young woman meeting a man at work, or perhaps at church, or in her group of friends, was undoubtedly a common occurrence during the war, as it was never the case that all men were deployed, even though a very large number were.

FWIW, the Vietnam War is associated with the highest rate of "Dear John" letters, even though troops deployed for only one year in the country.  This undoubtedly says something about the change in economic and social conditions from the 1940s to the 1960s.

On a personally anecdotal level, I think I've met three people, now all deceased, who married during the war prior to the husband deploying.  One of those marriages failed, but the other two were lifelong.

The 20th Indian Division completed a withdrawal to the Shenan Hills. The 17th Indian Division was conducting a fighting withdrawal.

The Japanese were accordingly engaging in a very successful offensive in northeast Burma.  The war in that quarter was far from settled.  Be that as it may, as that was going on, the Western Allies were advancing in the Pacific ever close to Japan itself, which Japan was proving unable to arrest.  The Japanese situation, therefore, was oddly complicated in that in order to really reverse the tide of the war, they would have had to taken Indian entirely, and then knocked China out of the war, neither of which was realistic in spite of its recent battlefield successes.

As that was going on:

The Aerodrome: 21–25 April 1944. First Helicopter Combat Rescue: 21–25 April 1944.

We don't think of helicopters in World War Two, but they were starting to show up, and in one of their classic roles.

US and Australian troops linked up on the Huon Peninsula.  

Fighting in New Guinea, while going in the Allied direction, was proving endless.

The Finnish parliament, in a secret session, rejected Soviet peace terms.  Secret or not, the Finnish rejection hit American newspapers that very day.  That the Finns and Soviets were talking was very well known to everyone.

The papers were also noting the German invasion of Hungary, and there were rumors that Hungary was going to declare war on Germany, which proved far from true.  The Hungarian situation must have caused some concern, however, in Finland.

It was the first flight of the Japanese kamikaze rocket plane, the Yokosuka MXY-7 Ohka (櫻花)

The first flight was an unpowered test.

It might be noted that there's a real logic failure with this design.  If you can build a powered rocket suicide plane, you can build a rocket powered drone.

The ice jammed Yellowstone broke over its banks in Miles City, Montana.

The Trappist Monastery of Our Lady of the Holy Spirit was founded near Conyers, Georgia.

Footnotes:

1. The "girls" were Louise Allbritton, an actress who would have been 23 years old at the time, and June Clyde, who would have been 35.

Allbritton married a CBS news correspondent in 1946 and retired from acting.  She remained married until her death in 1979.  Clyde, who was a pre code actress and dancer, was married (1930) and also remained for the rest of her life. She passed away in 1987.

2.  World War One, which was comparatively short, does not seem to have impacted behavior and marriage rates nearly as much, but it did cause a very notable boom in overseas "war bride" marriages anywhere American troops were deployed, including Siberia.

There were, of course, war brides as a result of World War Two, but that's another story.

Related items:

Yeoman's Laws of History

Father Arne and the Greatest Failure of the Greatest Generation

1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, Baby Boom Generation, Great Migration, It was because of World War Two, mehr Mensch sein, trends, World War II (Greatest) Generation, World War Two, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History

Friday, June 19, 1942 . James Dougherty and Norma Jean Baker marry. The Second Washington Conference commenced. The Germans execute Eliáš,

1940s, 1942s, Commandos, Czechoslovakia, Infantry, Marilyn Monroe, Personalities, Rangers, Second Washington Conference, Special Air Service, Special Boat Service, Teenagers, Yeoman's Fourth Law of History

Last prior edition:

Monday, March 20, 1944. Landings, port stops, potential halts.

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Lex Anteinternet: Proportionality.

Lex Anteinternet: Proportionality.: 

Proportionality.

Everyone has the right to defend themselves.  Even Pope Francis, who is on the rather liberal end of many things, agrees with this.

But what is proportional to an enemy who has vowed to murder the populace and demonstrated that intent with murdering babies?

And let us be honest.  The claim, "the majority of Palestinian people do not support Hamas" is pretty much equivalent to "most Germans weren't Nazi's", isn't it?  It's thin.  Indeed, maybe for those in the Middle East today, it has even less credibility.  Certainly here in the US, in spite of separation from the artificial boundaries of the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and the Great War, plenty of Palestinians and their first generation descendants have rallied to the bloody cause as so many Palestinians have in the past, demonstrating that lamenting the results of bad decisions seems to be an intergenerational habit.

Congressman Rashida Tlaib, who was quick to accuse the IDF of rocketing a Palestinian hospital that in fact Islamic Jihad, which would regard her as an abhorrent example of a woman who should be out of government, accidentally rocketed.

But does that matter?

And did it in 1945?

And let us be further honest. The concept of proportionality is a Christian one.  No other culture worries about it to the same extent that Christian ones do, and if it is now a global concept, it's' due in no small measure to Christianity.  Everyone protesting for proportionality does so in hopes that it reaches a Christian audience. The historical global norm, outside of Judaism and Christianity (and I'll confess ignorance on Islam), was for slaughter.

It's the Christian influence that's made it unacceptable.  For pagan people, and non-Abrahamic people?  Well, that was what was done.

So we are left, then, with what is proportionality?

Was destroying Berlin in 1945 proportional to the Nazi genocidal imperial regimes?  Or would it have been better to say, well, not all Germans were Nazis?  Or did that, with a threat like Nazism, not really matter that much?

Questions that have to be answered. And the namby pampy "let's condemn overreaction" have to answer them most of all.

Or does it?

Does staying a hand, display more strength than using it? Turn, as it were, the other cheek?

And can we, even with the descent into liberal secularism, which seems to solely involve what's under our Fruit of the Looms, avoid answering them, in real, bloody, terms, rather than platitudes?

I offer no solutions, or answers.

I'm only posing the questions.  With, of course, the proviso that if you answer wrong, there's blood on your hands, one away, or the other.