Alelou wrote:Frankly, the more I learn about the Japanese in WWII the less I sympathize with those who didn't think we should have used the atomic bomb. It's horrible and brutal math, but it saved not only a lot of American lives, but a lot of Japanese lives too (AND Chinese). That government was going to make its people fight to the end. Hell, they didn't even give up after the FIRST bomb.
As my Constitutional Law teacher used to say: It justifies it, but it doesn't legitimize it. Never mix the two things.
Silverbullet wrote:Based on History here on Earth, Humans are more likely to forgive and forget.
After WWII there was much revealed about the atrocities made by the Japanese and to an extent by the Germans. But in a half cetury it has all been erased. today there are Japanase and German Products, and culture in the U.S. and no one blinks. Right after the war there waas a great deal of Hatred towards both countires.
I believe that the Humans could get over Vulcan hatred and distrust if given half a chance. Not sure about the Vulcans. Do they carry a grudge?
Well, yes. In a way, forgiveness, or more likely, the capacity to change is a very Human trait. As Soval told Forrest in "The Forge": "There are those on the High Command who wonder what humans would achieve in the century to come."
On the other hand, Humans and Vulcans are in different stages in the war, and no, I'm not talking about the fact that Humans seem to be winning. See, the war lasts now around 75 years. For Vulcans that means that there have been people who have fought it from the beginning. V'Lar remembers the First Contact. So although war is more personal for them in some way, in another way it's easier for them to stop, because they remember what they lost and all the suffering the war is giving.
Humans, as they're concerned, are around the third or the fourth generation into the war (since Human average life span in "Mirage" is the same or even less than at the present.) One day I heard something interesting: in all the revolutionary fights, political wars and things of the like, if they last more than one generation, the first mostly fights for ideals, but in the second generation there are no ideals, just violence. Humans don't remember why they are fighting, only that they are fighting. Yes, they can reel all the evil things Vulcan did off parrot-fashion (and somehow Trip will), but they don't remember them, not in the way Vulcans do. They have a "idealization" of the war and it's much easier to manipulate people that think things are in a way and they're the purest and the most perfect and anything that isn't achieving that ideal world is betraying it. They can't give in. It seems a contradiction, but what I mean is that for the generations that didn't start the war there is no blood lake deep enough to achieve what they want, which isn't the ideals their parents had (peace), but to eliminate the enemy because... because it's evil, damn it.