Beeb say sorry for Stephen Fry A-bomb quip The BBC and Talkback Thames have apologised for Stephen Fry's description of double A-bomb survivor Tsutomu Yamaguchi as "the unluckiest man in the world". The QI presenter - himself described by Julie Burchill as "a stupid person's idea of a clever person" - offended delicate Japanese sensiblities during a December outing of …
How many people survived two A-bomb blasts for any length of time at all, and this fellow lives a full lifetime.
The Japanese need to get over it. They would have willingly died by the hundreds of thousands in suicide charges to defend the beaches on Honshu and then any survivors would have gone on to take their wives and children and jump off the nearest cliff when they could no longer fight.
The museum needs to have some of the film of the cliff jumpers on Okinawa.
but that this caused offense baffles me. Especially when at the ground-zero museum in Hiroshima there is precious little mention whatsoever of Japan starting the war against the US, or any of the atrocities committed by the Imperial Army. The anti-war attitude of the museum is fine, but the overall picture is rather unbalanced.
Julie Burchill - a hopelessly out of touch champagne-socialist's idea of a clever person.
For many others - an utterly nauseating waste of oxygen and newspaper copy who has somehow managed to get her pious ideas published despite the comprehensive pointlessness of almost all of them.
Fry - yes, not as clever as many think, judging by his misunderstanding on many technical issues he chooses to comment on, but at least he does have some purpose in this life.
...Regaining her religion. Oh, wait, it's a different religion, this week, isn't it, Julie? (It's a bit like being an agnostic, except Burchill is incapable of agnosticism, since she is incapable of doubt.) In fact the only truth is, that Burchill is right - even if what she is being right about, today, is diametrically opposed to what she was being right about, yesterday.
Champagne Socialist? More of a cocaine socialist, really. It must be great, being the sort of working class person, who can retire from £300,000 a year, because of a 'lack of ambition'.
"However on this occasion, given the sensitivity of the subject matter for Japanese viewers, we understand why they did not feel it appropriate for inclusion in the programme."
Well fuck-a-doodle-do. Japanese sensitivity? Maybe, instead of jokes next episode, they can give a litany of the inhuman crimes committed by the Japanese government, and a significant section of its people, during WWII. Oh, I don't know, the medical experiments, comfort women, forced labour camps, etc. Maybe devote a special to describing exactly what happened then.
We know all about Germany's actions during WWII, but Japan was just as bad; I say "fuck their sensibilities".
What makes it worse is that the Japanese for the most part barely acknowledge the things they did (They didn't have to as part of the American take over)
It also wasn't just the war their Colonial occupation of Korea was monstrous, and many woman and children from Korea were taken as "comfort women", while huge numbers were taken to Japan and work as force labour.
That's before we get onto the joys of Nanjing.
Despite all that I'm still big on both Japan and China, go figure. I mean the rest of the West weren't exactly pleasant with their various occupations of the Far East pre ww2
AC: "...the rest of the West weren't exactly pleasant ..." You what?? Take a gander at what the Japanese are keen to keep quiet:
"Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel."
"Prisoners of war were subjected to vivisection without anesthesia.Vivisections were performed on prisoners after infecting them with various diseases. Scientists performed invasive surgery on prisoners, removing organs to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were conducted while the patients were alive because it was feared that the decomposition process would affect the results.The infected and vivisected prisoners included men, women, children, and infants."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
If the Japanese are going to get all twitchy then perhaps we can remind them of their war crimes? The crimes for which it took so long to get reparations and apologies for, not just for the Europeans who were subjected to brutality, but the local populations on the east of mainland Asia who are still fighting to get apologies and compensation.
Tell you what, perhaps we all take the things said in the vein they were actually said in? We all grow up and perhaps, just perhaps, the world would be a better place.
You have to go a long way to be offended by a TV program that is as tongue in cheek as can be, is seen as amusing in a culture different to your own, shown in a language different to your native tongue, in another country 6000 miles from your own AND, as others have pointed out, your society perpetrated some rather nasty things on the world, and the country where the program is shown in particular..
Sheesh.
Considering what passes for television comedy in Japan simply doesn't have any concept of satire or irony, then along comes QI with its gentle wit involving - oh look - satire and irony - and you have a recipe for a massive cultural misunderstanding which IMHO makes the Japanese (or at least the particular section of Japanese society who are up in arms about this*) look very silly indeed. Perhaps if Fry et al. had been blacked up it wouldn't have been such an issue.**
* I get the impression that this is just as manufactured as the constant torrent of cringeworthy "what must the rest of the world think of us?" Daily Mail style outcries here in the UK, and that a significant proportion of Japanese folk are intensely embarrassed about this. The ones I know are anyway.
** Yep, folk are still getting blacked up for laughs on Japanese TV.
That he was the luckiest person alive.
Not having access to the full context of the joke it's hard to say much, but I would have thought that a man that survived World War 2 and lived to 93 AND had two atomic bombs dropped near to him (obviously not directly on him) would have to count as pretty fortunate.
Many other people were far less lucky then him.
ttfn
That was a joke response also masqurading as a dig at AO. I suppose I should have 'joke Alert'd it but the dig at AO forced my hand into selecting FAIL. I know you are free to read any of el'reg but I was inferring that sometimes it must really feel like busman's holiday, and after dealing with 'us lot' especially so...Profuse apologies, for any offence.
humbled commentard.
PS whatever happened to that gameshow?
Either your showing your age, and your a lot younger than I thought... or its a cunning ploy to not show your age. in which case well done!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busman's_Holiday_(game_show)
Geeze if your main job is not moderating then sheesh they work you hard! I guess with a title like moderatrix one makes assumptions.
I agree with the Moderatrix as there has been no mention of Fry's addiction to all things Apple and 'i'. Nor has there been anything about Facebook, Penguin fanciers, anti-virus companies, Uber-Google, etc. etc.
Burchill, however, has somehow omitted the additional 'Luckiest man in the world' that followed.
If anything it is the champion of all things total bollocks who is trolling.
In the whole of history only two nuclear weapons have ever been used in anger against populated targets*.
Mr Yamaguchi was under both of them.
I call fair comment meself. People who get struck by lightning more than once are often referred to as being rather unlucky, yet there are thousands of lighting strikes in the world every day. I'd say the only thing Steven Fry is guilty of here is understatement; "Unluckiest man in the whole of recorded history" might be better here.
*Tinfoil hatters? YMMV.....
I saw this episode of QI, and remember them discussing this. Yes, it was mentioned that he could be the unluckiest person in the world for being in both cities when they were bombed, but they also turned it around and pointed out that the fact that he survived both blasts could also have meant that he was, in fact, the luckiest person in the world. Sounds balanced and the poor man in question certainly wasn't made the butt of any poor taste jokes that I remember.
Perhaps this is just my own naivety, in which case I apologise, and I know that I'm anything but "high-brow", but I don't see anything to be getting offended about - perhaps someone could (politely) explain it to me - I am legitimately confused by the reaction. Granted there may be some ... sensitivity ... over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, understandably so, but surely you can't cause offence by implying someone is unlucky to have been hit by two nuclear devices?
Perhaps I should brace myself for boos and downvotes...
from the same episode, St Stephen of Fry also noted that the rail links to Hiroshima were back in place just 24 hours after the bombing, allowing Tsutomu Yamaguchi to make the trip to Nagasaki.
All the Japanese military would have need to cripple the British rail system would have been a small snow maker near the East Coast mainline.
Nothing - nothing shows how retarded the whole PC thing is more than this. The BBC which stood as a bastion of freedom flying its very flag daily from 39-45 now acts like a giant pile of stinking shit on a daily basis.
The japanese still don't apologise for their actions. They still hide WW2 and their atrocities from their own children. They deserve no apology. Period. If they want apologies for anything in WW2, they have a serious amount of apologising to a lot of people before they open their mouths.
They still refuse payments in compensation to people they held in inhuman condition in the camps in WW2. Its disgusting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements_issued_by_Japan
I take it that you're from the USA from the way you end one of your sentences. Period. I guess that the bias of your post is because of this. But your statement that the Japanese haven't apologised just doesn't wash, as a very quick web search confirms. I did a parallel search on US apologies for bombing Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but it turned up nothing except people (up to US presidents) basically saying "why? we have nothing to apologise for".
As someone who has spent some time living in Japan, I have, as you might expect, some sympathy for the plight of the Japanese in being the only country in the world to have had nuclear weapons used on them. You might think that the US has nothing to apologise for, but there is a fairly clear sentiment, particularly among older Japanese, that dropping the second bomb on Nagasaki was totally disproportionate and unnecessary. This is to say nothing of the horror of the use of nuclear weapons in the first place (to say nothing of the US firebombing campaign, but that's another issue). Perhaps you think that both bombings were necessary, and maybe even just, but I'm afraid that I, like many, just don't see such moral clarity in those actions.
Dropping the first bomb was totally unnecessary, in the light of evidence disclosed since WW II.
Japan was under a total sea/air blockade - firestorms from bombing in Tokyo, no industry.
Read (for example) The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire by John Toland.
I was going to comment that I found the comment rather funny, and sympathetically taking the mick rather than saying anything nasty.
But then I remembered my country has never had two atomic bombs dropped on it, killing several hundred thousand people directly and indirectly over later years and causing untold psychological trauma.
So maybe I should just shut up.
It is fairly clear to anyone with any knowledge of the latter stages of WW2 that in actual fact the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan saved more lives than it took.
Not just Allied lives, but when you see the behaviour of the Japanese at places like Iwo Jima (fanatical fight to the death) or Saipan (20,000+ civilian suicides) it is obvious that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would have resulted in horrendous numbers of Japanese military and civilian deaths.
To echo other posters' sentiments on this, I think that it is unacceptable for the Japanese government to get all prissy about references to acts against them in WW2 when they still refuse to accept the well documented and incontrovertible proofs of dastardly acts perpetrated by their own forces. Germany have managed to deal with their part quite reasonably so it cannot be that difficult.
The Japanese were already in the process of negotiating a surrender. The atomic bombs were dropped for the sole purpose of demonstrating the devastating effectiveness of this new weapon. Sparking the cold war between America and the USSR and ensured the rise of the military industrial complex later warned about by President Eisenhower. So whilst Governments in Europe were looking to improve the lives of their citizenry with free health care and social services for the poorest members of society the two super powers competed to spend it's citizens tax money on inventing fiendish way's to wipe humanity of the face of the planet.
So no not a good thing at all.
you're in IT with those views ?
get real - do some research
demonstrating the effectiveness - they weren't even 100% sure the damned things would go bang
I presume you do not use computers; do not use plastics; nylon; rayon; kevlar;
Free health care ? why the f do you think taxes are so sodding high; TANSTAAFL - some one pays for it - normally people who work for a living and have far better things do with their hard earned money
And I see no sign of social care coming out of Brussels - just a power grab of AXIS proportions
anyone making light of anything could be taken as offensive, both to myself and to others.
Therefore, if everyone could just shut up, break the silence only to apologise to me, then to everyone else, and then shut up again, permanently, I think we can all agree that everyone would be a lot happier.
or lucky, depending how you look on it. If you saw the actual program as I did, you would at most smile at the wry irony of fate in this man's past. In my opinion, they did not make light of the war or the bomb, they just pointed out an extremely unlikely (and unfortunate) series of events.
I think the witty and playful "bucket of sunshine" moniker properly belongs to an H-bomb, i.e. fusion weapon. Sunshine is ultimately a product of H+H => He fusion in the depths of the sun, whereas the two WWII weapons were uranium and plutonium *fission* devices, respectively (can't remember which way round). Even H-bombs don't achieve H+H fusion, of course, they need deuterium oxide a.k.a. heavy water.
"Even H bombs produce most of their energy from fast fission, not fusion."
Er no. the fission is used as a detonator for the fusion reaction, (fusion requires High Temp and Pressure) fission cannot get anywhere near the yield of fusion.
Largest A bomb = 500Kt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_King)
Largest H Bomb = 57,000 Kt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba)
Note that Tsar was a 100MT design but was scaled down to 50% for testing.
The Register continually link Julie Burchill to anything Fry related. Apart from the fact she is a woman and has a name I can't think of anything else about her I want to know. Certainly not her commants and views as she is a bit moronic if you ask me.*
Stephen Fry has his own credits including being cleaver, funny etc but if you watch QI there are plenty of things he doesn't know and he is gullible like everyone else when guests mock him etc. He is a good host and makes the show a good thing to watch.**
When Japan apologises, I will care what they think.
*Can my comments be linked to in every register article that utters the phrase "Julie Burchill"
**Something that is very rare on the BBC nowadays.
What annoys me isnt' that people are offended, that's fine, or even that people complained, that's up to them, what annoys me is the way people always bend over and take it with their "oo I'm so sorry... we'll never do it again" garbage.
The problem is even worse with the BBC as they don't just taking a quick shafting and then get on with business as usual, they decide that after an extended shafting, they'll go and shaft themselves by messing around with their rules, and crippling comedy on the bbc even more, I mean it's pretty much dead atm as it is.
It's why I like channel 4, someone complains and they go "live with it, see you in court"
There was no "never do it again", though...all I see is a classic non-apology "apology", saying sorry for the way other people feel rather than for their own behaviour (which is plainly not regretted). So I'd say they're pretty much guaranteed to do it again.
Reg, can we have a nice "No BBC tax" icon, please?
Compare and contrast:
Stephen Fry makes a fairly innocuous comment that someone who was A-bombed twice was unlucky. BBC apologises
Frankie Boyle makes "jokes" at the expense of an 8yr old disabled child and Channel 4 defend the recovering alcoholic (strangely an area that he doesn't find funny) as being challenging, although they didn't add the more apt adjectives offensive and hypocritical.
I really don't understand the BBC bending over backwards to apologise for something which was never seemingly intended to offend and wasn't flippant on the issue of dropping nukes on Japan and slaughtering thousands of civilians that I can recall.
By my definition he fits both the "unluckiest" and "luckiest" categories well. That's simply fact, there are no sensitivities about it. I really don't understand how the Japanese are "offended".
If Japan's out of the running, I guess we need to find someone who lived on the Ruhr, survived the allied attacks and moved to Dresden. Oh wait ...
I'm no Japan expert, but I did live there for 10 months. I found the lack of understanding of WW2 incomprehensible. I understand that all countries have their myths about their history. As an American, my people probably have more than most, but the Japanese I spoke with about "the war" seemed to believe that the Japanese were quietly tending their rice paddies and then one day an atomic bomb dropped out of the sky, then three days later another one dropped, for no apparent reason. If comments like this cause problems, I'm afraid that they're probably still thousands of years away from dealing with this part of their history.
It's just Lester Haines trying to sound like Orlowski - who apparently wants to sound like Julie Burchill!
So Lester wants to be Andrew, while Andrew wants to be Julie... It's nice to have an ambition, isn't it? Something to aspire to? Don't you think?
(As for Julie, well, she writes for the Independent, these days, so I can only assume these remarks about stupid people and clever people must date from a time when people still read what she had to say!)
It's interesting to read all the anti-Japanese comments in this thread. Perhaps it's worth remembering that the objections to this programme originated from a few Japanese ex-pats living in the UK who complained to their embassy. It was hardly a statement released on behalf of the Japanese government, so I don't see why it's necessary to assume all Japanese think this way. It's akin to extrapolating British national feeling from the rantings of a group of angry Daily Mail readers. Let's keep things in perspective people.
does it not?
I have been in Japan twice, like many of the people I met there, found them courteous and helpful, but I do feel many of their official positions on the events in the war are very biased indeed, as I explained above. There are many Japanese individuals who distance themselves (politely) from the official line, but the official line does seem to be very much "don't mention the war!" This is a pity, as Japan would gain a great deal of respect if they owned up to the wrongs that were committed in the past.
As should every imperial(ist) power.
Speaking of apologies, I can't remember the US apologising for two of the greatest acts of genocide on civilian populations in history. As to those that claim the dropping the atom bombs was a necessary evil, that saved rather cost lives, I wouldn't be so sure. Take a look at some quotes of the US leaders of the time:
DWIGHT EISENHOWER
In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
ADMIRAL WILLIAM D. LEAHY
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
"The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children."
- William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.
HERBERT HOOVER
In early May of 1946 Hoover met with General Douglas MacArthur. Hoover recorded in his diary, "I told MacArthur of my memorandum of mid-May 1945 to Truman, that peace could be had with Japan by which our major objectives would be accomplished. MacArthur said that was correct and that we would have avoided all of the losses, the Atomic bomb, and the entry of Russia into Manchuria."
Gar Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, pg. 350-351.
GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR
Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."
Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Army forces in the Pacific, stated on numerous occasions before his death that the atomic bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view: "My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender."
General Curtis LeMay, who had pioneered precision bombing of Germany and Japan (and who later headed the Strategic Air Command and served as Air Force chief of staff), put it most succinctly: "The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war."
http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
No, the real reason the bombs were dropped on Japan was as a show of force to America's new enemy - Russia.
And neither did the Japanese need to tie up Dutch soldiers who had already surrendered in wicker cages weighted down with stones, and throw them in the sea. Hatred begets hatred, atrocity begets atrocity. QI did not imply the bombs were a good idea, nor do most posts in the forum. Japan can however not solely be portrayed as the victim in this case.
"No, the real reason the bombs were dropped on Japan was as a show of force to America's new enemy - Russia."
If that is true, and history tends to see through rose coloured 20-20 glasses with respect to whatever point the rememberer is trying to make, then it seems fairly safe to assume that dropping 2 nukes on Japan prevented full global thermonuclear war between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies. Probably about the Cuban Missile crisis time I would suggest.
As there would certainly have been US bases in Japan then there would have been much more than two small yield atomic devices winging their way rising-sunwards in that conflict.
Also, as a quick history lesson, one of the reasons for WW2 was that the German army was allowed to march home intact after WW1, rather than in disgrace as a conquered army. This gave rise to the German belief that Germany was betrayed [by the Jews] rather than defeated militarily - pretty much guarantee the same thing would have happened in Japan if they had been allowed anything short of decisive unconditional surrender.
And there is no way the US population would have gone for it, not after so many deaths and atrocities. This would have been reflected in the ballot box which may well have led to the election of a warmongering psychopath as US president, and a re-ignition of hostilities, but with 1950s killtech rather than 1940s.
"one of the reasons for WW2 was that the German army was allowed to march home intact after WW1, rather than in disgrace as a conquered army."
The Treaty of Versailles restricted the German army to 100,000 men and drastically limited military production, so hardly "intact" and Germany was forced to admit guilt and sole responsibility for starting the war, this after they'd laid down their arms and accepted the Armistice proposal based on Woodrow Wilson's "Fourteen Points" which was considered a betrayal of their honour.
Oh and of course WW2 was nothing, of course, to do with the crippling reparations that were demanded by France and its Allies which let the Nazis use the rallying cry of "Freedom and Bread" to raise support for their cause...
As for nukes, McArthur wanted to use them in Korea and it was only because Russian had managed to make their own atomic bombs that he wasn't allowed to.
I suggest you need to do some more research.
You are correct in your statement that Germany was punished through having to admit liability, pay reparations and have the only well trained and adaptable professional army in the world. However bad this would have been in itself was compounded in the German Psyche by the fact that at the end of the war the German army was still in France and was allowed to march home as a fully armed and equipped body.
This caused feelings of resentment and paranoia amongst many ordinary Germans - they knew their army hadn't been defeated on the battlefield so they must have been betrayed right? This then made it easy for the Nazis to use these feelings of national hurt and betrayal to rise to power and commit many of the atrocities they did (on Jews, Communists, Eastern Europeans etc.) with the support of their population.
As for McArthur, I suggest that one of the main reasons that people around that time didn't lob nukes at each other is not so much that the other side had them too, but more that everyone had seen what they were capable of. Without Hiroshima and Nagasaki the true effects of nuking a large city would have been a matter for speculation only. It is reasonable to assume that at some point the world was going to get a first hand account of the power of the bomb - and so it is very fortuitous that they were dropped when they were.
There are some very good books out there on the cause and effects of WW1 and WW2, you might want to get a few and have a quick read.
"I suggest you need to do some more research."
Why? Because I pointed out that your "explanation" for WW2 was simplistic and overlooked major causative factors?
As for your suggestion that people weren't lobbing nukes because "everyone had seen what they were capable of", I suggest *you* look firstly at the US use of Napalm in Korea (far more than was used in Vietnam) which in large quantities had effects very similar to a nuclear strike and secondly consider that MacArthur wanted to use them to blockade the border between North Korea and China to prevent them getting supplies and reinforcements by using radioactive cobalt in a "scorched earth" policy, risking potential like-for-like retaliation against US targets.
Had there not been that risk of retaliation, that war and the world could be a very different place.
It cannot be stressed enough that the cuban missile crisis in reality was a turkish missile crisis and that the Russians were only too happy to take their tails between their legs and their missiles with them - 48 hours _after_ the americans had taken their nuclear missiles out of turkey ...
By the way: the japanese surrender was _not_ unconditional. They were along the lines the japanese had sought for weeks before those two foul deeds.
This post has been deleted by its author
Stephen Fry must be the most serial dummy around - heard his description of how GPS works - none of his verbal diarrhoea is worth commenting on. A real dummies dummy.
No doubt the inmates were happy to see him leave after three months in Pucklechurch Prison - luckily for Fry, alive. (See: < https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Stephen_Fry >)
If the BBC wants somewhere to cut - start with Fry.
How long has it taken for them to see these and then complain!?
I would have thought they were pleased the man had achieved such celebrity outside his own country. As has been said numerous times previously, if you don't like what is on the television, then turn it off. I don't see any apologies required for those makers of documentaries about the Nanjing massacre. Comparably I don't see any apology for the deprivation of food, summary execution, application of torture and enslavement of captured allied troops during the war?
Quid pro quo please from the land of the rising sun. Celebrate your heroes and acknowledge the dark chapters from your past. I for one will continue in my enjoyment of Mr Fry's program and the band of merry makers who make it worth turning on the television, noting the television was probably made in Japan (or another country very near by!).
Must say I don't understand the Japanese sensibilities.
I have been to the Kwai festival at the bridge over the river Kwai, and Kanchanaburi (the town near the bridge and hellfire pass) several times, and its a popular visiting spot with Japanese tourists. Even taking into account the Asian habit of hiding embarresment/discomfort with smiles and such it always seems to be more treated as a jolly holiday than anything.
Never asked one of them about it, though I have been tempted.
Now I want to hear the joke and decide for myself. If I was a survivor of something awful, and I was described as unlucky, I would simply agree. On the other hand, if the surrounding tirade was coarsely constructed and insensitive, I would probably decide whether it was insensitive based on whether or not I hurt myself laughing.
(Beer, because, uh, because I like beer?)
if we had lost the war, we would have been tried as war criminals. (I paraphrase)
To the british posters who feel that mass murder of civilians is justified by someone elses war crimes:
a) take a look into the diplomatic relationship between the japanese and british empires in the half century leading up to the second world war
b) brace yourself for a loss of ignorant innocence and take a thorough look into british (and dutch, as they are the other perennial moralists) colonial history
c) if you need a practical example, recall that the british retreat from India in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was one of the fastest retreats ever successfully executed in military history. Motivation for this unbritish haste might be found in your research into b)
d) Let's not even get started about the paragons of democracy killing 10% of the Vietnamese population (over 2 million) in less than 10 years - many of those by the time-honoured anglo-US practice of air war against civilian population.
To this continental, part of anglo-US moral superiority seems to come from a combination of closed files and ignorance where thoses files accidentaly are not closed.
Maybe the japanese are over-sensitive - it is certain that quite a few posters are under-sensitive.
The BBC used to have some backbone. Now somebody only has to hint that they are offended and they roll over apologise and wind up the self censorship another notch. This is symptomatic of a much deeper malaise within the BBC. I am offended, very offended, by the damage that the BBC is doing to freedom of expression and suppression of knowledge about anything that anybody might find offensive. It is long overdue that censorship in the BBC was based on evidence of harm instead of evidence of prejudice.
I remember the episode when it was aired. If I remember correctly, Fry actually said something along the lines of 'the luckiest man alive or the unluckiest, depending on how you look at it'.
It was a heart warming story anyway and has stuck in my mind.
On another note, how do the Japs get QI so soon when the UK has to wait over two years for an episode of 24?
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