Prompted by a comment on the Today Programme...

[lovingboth]

which said this was the first anniversary of 'the worst day in America's history'. I quickly came up with a few alternative candidates. What do the panel think?

[Poll #59408]

Comments

[lovingboth]

Coo, I thought I was being a sad pinko in either remembering or caring about what they did to neutral Cambodia (and Laos).

One of the problems with doing an equivalent poll for British history is that we have rather more of it than they do, of course :)

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Is that the worst day for America, for Americans, or the worst America-related day?

It's not clear, for example, that bombing Cambodia was bad for American interests...

[jjostm.livejournal.com]

kindly do not forget that perhaps the worst attrocities committed in cambodia were done at the hands of pol pot...against his own people.

-j

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

I think it was the death of the myth of American difference. The idea that, as a country set up against tyranny of an empire, America would not be an empire itself. Of course, arguably with the Monroe doctrine and the Phillippines previously, this had disapperted many years before, but the American public could deny this to themselves until Cambodia.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

colours, I like your answer better than mine. Though actually I'd consider the bombing of Nagasaki (August 9th, 1945) even more shameful - they had to rush to get the bomb dropped before the Japanese surrendered, or they'd never get their test data on the plutonium bomb...

[lovingboth]

True, but without the US bombing killing 600,000 plus civilians - about 5% of the population, say the equivalent of ten million in the US - the rise of the Khmer Rouge would have been a lot less likely.

If your government can't protect you from losses on that scale, the alternatives become a lot more attractive.

[lovingboth]

In context, when conventional raids on Tokyo etc were killing tens of thousands of people a night, and when Operation Olympic (the invasion of Japan) was due to start in two months with a million US & Allied deaths expected, having seen the utterly defeated Nazi Germany fight on to the last Berlin street a few months earlier...

... I don't find using the two atom bombs that bad.

One test is to see what the victims thought at the time, and the Japanese don't seem to have thought it an unreasonable thing to have done.

[paranoidandroid.livejournal.com]

When they dropped the first bomb, they had *no* idea if it would start a chain reaction that might end the world. But they dropped it anyway.

I think there are many Japanese who think it was an unreasonable thing to have done, perhaps the families of the 200,000+ people who died either from the blast or from the effects of the radiation over the following 20 years.

We only have one planet, and you just don't "shit where you eat"

[lovingboth]

Well, I think it's the day you'd least like to have happened in that country's history.

So - as a non-German - I'd say the worst day in German history was 20th Jan 1942, when a group of people sat around a table and planned how to kill millions of civilians, for example.

Nearly half of the participants effectively got away with it, which is not exactly the greatest day for the British, US, French and Russians.