Mr. Truman's Degree, by Elizabeth Anscombe 

I've always felt that the bomb was justified, however this has brought up many things I haven't thought about. Great video!

There's an itty-bitty little thing here that is easy to overlook. This is the issue of passive hostility, the hiding of hostility towards an individual under the cover of something that is socially or morally acceptable. What does Elizabeth Anscombe (who I only heard about a few days ago) do here? Not only does she criticize Truman, but she says that Truman should be deprived of something he has arguable otherwise earned - an honorary degree - because of aI suspec controversial decision he has made. Yes, Truman and his cohorts can be criticized, and he and they have been widely criticized. Does that mean that the only way that the criticism of Truman can be expressed is through depriving him of something material? We have a name for that today. We call it cancel culture. In transactional analysis, what passive-aggressive behavior means is doing something unacceptable under the guise of doing something that is acceptable. I have wonder, would Anscombe have been so harsh in her judgement if the person who had made the decision to use the atomic bomb had been from the American patrician class, as Franklin D. Roosevelt had been. I seriously doubt it. She still would have voiced the same criticism, but I doubt she would have considered that man to be quite as morally depraved as she painted Truman as being. The argument she is making, actually, is the argument in favor of limited warfare. That raises a problem. How do you deal with an enemy who is willing out of the gate to wage unlimited or total war? I understand why the Allies demanded unconditional surrender. They wanted the war to end in way that made it impossible for the German and Japanese nationalists to later come back and start to say that somehow it had all never happened. Even so, there are some around who try to say that. Truman was the last American president who had never gone to college. Maybe An scombe, with her elite education, just didn't like him. Better if she had just said so. Virginia Woolf was a little crazy on this issue, but at least she was forthright in her disdain for the lower orders. Anscombe should have been as forthright.

Weak people hide behind three things: 1. Rules, 2. Hierarchies, and 3. Morals. Words are how people lie.