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"[...] All societies have a dream and a nightmare. And our nightmare has been, I think, our racism. We practically comitted genocide on the people who were here -- the Native Americans. We enslaved another race of people, the Africans. And then we dropped the atom bomb on Asians. We would never have dropped that bomb in Europe, in my view. And I think that's what proves the racism of it.
"That's the nightmare of America. The dream of America is enunciated in the great speech by Martin Luther King -- 'I Have A Dream'. The dream is that there is no country on Earth that has tried to actually embrace all the people that we have tried to embrace. All you have to do is walk through New York City to see that -- or any of our cities. And not a few of our countrysides at this point. We could be called the most racist, or we could be called the least. We are both. And it always remains a tension and a question, as to which side of us -- the good side or the bad side -- will win out in the end. I think that's true for every society."
-- Thomas Cahill, on the the PBS television program Bill Moyers Journal, aired 2007-11-09 (in response to the question, "What would be, as of now, the defining characteristic of the American society you would write about in the 20th and 21st Centuries?")
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Circular reasoning, anyone?
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As far as I can see, we didn't drop the bomb on Germany entirely because we didn't have the bomb until after Germany surrendered.
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Yeah, that's doubtless why there are more languages spoken in Toronto than in any other single city on the planet... It's a big world out here. It's a damn shame that most Americans don't give a damn about more of it.
For what it's worth, I actually agree with his conclusion about the atomic bomb, while also agreeing that the logic he used to get there was rather spurious. Counterfactually speaking, in a situation where the US had gotten the bomb before Germany surrendered, would an atomic US drop the atomic bomb on Berlin? Judging by the discourse surrounding the Nazis and the Japanese respectively (check out most of the propaganda depictions of Nazis vs "Japs"), and the huge number of domestic Nazi sympathisers and cryptofascists in the US, many of them quite wealthy and powerful (Henry Ford, the DuPont family, and Prescott Bush spring to mind), I'd have to say no. Someone might have thought it would be a good idea, but they would have been suppressed one way or another, I think. Further, particularly drawing attention to the discourse issue, is that demonstrably racist? Absolutely. And so were a lot of the people with their hands on the levers of power, not just in the US, but in other countries as well.
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Good point about Canada, though. Even the UK isn't as integrated as Canada is.