Inhumanity

This post made me think.... I remember once looking up the Life Magazine that covered the Hiroshima bombing, just to see what people in 1945 thought about it. There is a charming article, with color photos, showing two American soldiers using flamethrowers to successfully set afire a Japanese soldier hiding behind some tropical foliage. It was pretty clear that Americans, of the settled sort that routinely read Life Magazine, considered Japs to be no more than infuriating animate insects. War does terrible things to one's fraternal sense of humanity. In 1945, however, we had a more robust sense of honesty about what we were doing than we do now. We didn't lie as much then, although people like George Orwell could sense the shape of the future to come. Long live Big Brother! (sorry, Little Brother - I wasn't talking about Jeb!)