Edward Gibbon Quotes
A bloody and complete victory has sometimes yielded no more than the possession of the field and the loss of ten thousand men has sometimes been sufficient to destroy, in a single day, the work of ages.
Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776-1789.
Traffic fatalities had been growing ever since the production of the automobile. See Stalin {616657} for another statement about large numbers of deaths. Today, for example, the death of 3 American soldiers in a day produces page one news. An airplane crash that kills 10 people will dominate the news, while on that same day 117 Americans will have been killed in automobile traffic deaths “diffused in time and space”.
The British and American bombing of Germany had become so effective that most of the German industrial system was destroyed. However, early in the War, Germany had violated the Geneva Convention and was indiscriminately bombing London and other part of England. In addition the German Air Force had bombed Warsaw, and many other cities throughout Europe. The German’s had killed over 20 million Europeans. When the Allied bombing produced high collateral damage against civilians, some argued that even though German had deliberately used this tactic, the allies should stop the saturated bombing if there were to be high civilian collateral damage. Others argued that it was unfortunate but a military necessity. There were others like Brenen, who argued that killing German women and children was desirable and just.
At the time, surprising to most people now, the use of the atomic bomb was not an issue of controversy at all. There were no Congressman who questioned it, no newspapers which editorialized against the use of the bomb. There were not even any other counties which protested its use. The blessing of ending the war, even at the cost of less than 200,000 deaths seemed a clearly desirable tradeoff when compared with the many millions of deaths that would have occurred had the bomb not been used. As an example, the conventional bombing of Tokyo before the nuclear weapons were used killed as many Japanese as either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
Edward Gibbon FRS was an English historian, writer and Member of Parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788 and is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its polemical criticism of organised religion.
