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Comment by wewewedxfgdf | Hacker News Reader

Imagine you lived literally in paradise on the most beautiful Pacific atoll - an utterly gorgeous place of peace and serenity and happiness.

Literally heaven, surrounded by the most beautiful ocean, reefs and fish.

Imagine then they turn up, round you up, take you off your island and send you somewhere else to live forever, taking your home from you.

Then they nuke that island repeatedly so it can never be lived on again and is now one the of the most polluted and radioactive and toxic places on earth.

Pristine perfect beauty converted to unliveable toxic hell for humans and animals.

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I'm not excusing or justifying any actions here, but thinking from a 1946 perspective: the second world war had just ended and we all know about the horrible losses that happened there, both military and civilian. This new hugely destructive weapon has just been developed. The Soviet Union is also developing the weapon, with an unhinged paranoid madman as its absolute leader. Everyone can see the outline of an arms race developing (with the second world war very fresh in memory).

In that context, relocating 167 people to another island within the same country/cultural region barely registers.

Again, I'm not justifying anything, but if I had been around at the time, I'm not sure I would have cared either.

> an utterly gorgeous place of peace and serenity and happiness.

Pretty sure the people there had just as much conflict, poverty, and misery as the rest of us.

And were always one cyclone (hurricane) away from extinction.

One's paradise is another one's nightmare

The place looks nice but there is not much there to make human life easy or nice: not much soil for agriculture or herds, not much shade, no fresh water, no resources to build anything, ...

> Imagine then they turn up, round you up, take you off your island and send you somewhere else to live forever, taking your home from you.

This is the story of mankind, even today people want forcibly remove people.

Phrasing it that way makes me think of how the Scots were driven off their land to work in factories.

The Scots were driven off their land by other Scots, though. In addition, comparing subsistence agriculture in a land where you can freeze to death with the absolute abundance of food provided by a tropical island seems a stretch. Having spent considerable time in both the Scottish Highlands -- where my wider family is centered -- and having lived on a tropical island for a few years, it takes a particularly romantic eye to try and make this comparison.

> the absolute abundance of food provided by a tropical island

There is no absolute abundance of food on an atoll. There’s fish, coconuts and precious little ground for anything else to grow. It can be sustainable if the populations are very small, and then turn to hell quickly if they are not.

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

there's plenty of paradise like islands in the pacific. you could move all the canadians to siberia's tundra and they'd probably do well.

devil's advocate: GODZILLA and all the excitement and joy the franchise gave people would not be as much a thing without the US trying to blow bikini atoll off aerial maps.

You are a wicked and despicable human being.

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