The Real War. A multi-cultural response
I think this Mark Steyn article relates to several recent threads-
“The American way of war is to win the war in nothing flat, and then spend the next decade losing the peace.”
and
Mark Steyn on Sir Charles Napier’s role in India’s cultural transformation:
Dealing with suttee — a tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, General Napier’s response was impeccably multicultural:
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. .”
“The American way of war is to win the war in nothing flat, and then spend the next decade losing the peace.”
and
Mark Steyn on Sir Charles Napier’s role in India’s cultural transformation:
Dealing with suttee — a tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands, General Napier’s response was impeccably multicultural:
“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. .”
I love the Stein quotes.
When we imposed American culture on the Japanese, we didn't mean to; we didn't know better, we just followed our "instinct". Fortunately, we had an enemy whose culture, when so humiliated, compelled them to embrace their conqueror's ways, to a certain degree (in spite of their continuation of the war on a new front).
One thing we should learn from history is that we don't always learn from history what we should.