Alison Jane,

I'm sorry to have troubled you, and I suspect this follow-up will also result in nought, but I assure you I do not live in a bubble, nor am I demented.

My original query was based on my, perhaps mistaken, impression that you might care to elaborate on the fundamental question of where we may go from here - in a nuclear-armed world troubled with far more than just Covid-19, an expansionist China, a virtually defunct UN and veto-prone Security Council, a US in financial, government and racial-tension-ed turmoil, and Afghanistan misguidedly releasing genuine terrorists back into circulation in a fragmented Middle-East based on a mistaken, insane and absolutely unreliable so-called Peace Initiative brokered by perhaps the greatest liar ever to present himself as the Leader of the Free World?

Your posting:
"Binoy and the 'cancel culture kids' will never see war, but they will write the propaganda that will deliver, execute and sell future 'righteous China/eco-warrior' wars to the proletariat who will fight those wars for them."

I have to ask Why you may be quite so certain that your 'cancel culture kids' (and the rest of us, presumably) Will (as against 'may') Never see War?

And, who pray tell may in fact be the 'Proletariat' who will fight - or could it be 'instigate' - that, or those, Wars for Them?

Any interest beyond Hiroshima - justified, justifiable, or a crime against Humanity?
In any event, a sad, closed, monument to history's sad record of humanity's decline into a xenophobic 'existential' abyss?
And, without any hope of encouraging a pathway to a nuclear-armed-free-world?

I'm not expecting too much, am I?

Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes of the highest order and the perpetrators have never been brought to justice. Endless mythology has been built up over the years in an attempt to neutralise their horror and justify their deployment ... much of it alive and well here I see.
A whole city and its inhabitants incinerated and irradiated in a world first ... perhaps the Americans didn’t fully anticipate the horrific destructiveness of what they were unleashing on Hiroshima. But by Nagasaki, they knew ... and went ahead anyway ... an unbelievably cruel and barbaric obliteration of human life.
Archived documentation clearly shows the Japanese were making peace overtures well before Hiroshima. These were ignored. Peace was never the West’s objective.

To Bronwyn.

"Peace was never the west's objective."

Sounds like that was programmed into your head by some Marxist professor who despises the society he chooses to live in, Bronnie.

If not, by what reasoned argument have you come to that extraordinary conclusion?

You don't bring about peace by deliberately and unnecessarily incinerating hundreds of thousands of civilians.

The Truman government could easily have held peace talks. The Japanese had already offered to surrender. The only sticking point was their request to spare the life of their emperor. This could have been granted and a nation truly interested in peace would have done so. But no, Truman wanted to demonstrate to the world and in particular to Russia the might and ruthlessness of US weaponry.

I repeat, peace was never the objective. If it was, it would have been achieved without unleashing this evil experiment on innocent people.

Bronwyn, you either young, very naïve or just privileged. The world does not run on wishful thinking and according to the fairy tales we seem to teach in our so-called "university seats of learning".

Resorting to labels (all of which are wrong by the way) only indicates an inability to engage with the issues and to refute the points raised.

Peace is not some hippie dream. It's a state we all aspire to live in. And it will never be achieved through inflicting violence on others.