[Peace-discuss] An instructive life

Sun Jun 13 13:44:10 CDT 2010

Since when does one need an explanation for an opinion or even a justification for having one?  It never stopped you (or me or Carl or anyone else).  Most people typically make flat statements until someone asks them for an explanation or justification supporting the substance of their opinion.  Did anyone ask her for an explanation?  When I read the story, I thought that there were several implicit reasons why she held the opinion that she did (although you might not finds her implied reasons compelling) as to why she felt that China was better than the US and held out a better hope for the future than the US.  As for her opinion on the Cultural Revolution experience as quoted in the article, she does not offer any justification or explanation as to why she supported it (although others can and have offered a number of very good reasons for supporting it or why it was needed or beneficial) except to say it was a "terrific experience" and that is the only reason she needs.  Moreover, she does not need to explain why she found it to be a "terrific experience."  

I must have missed something in the discussion,  Who is this Alice that Wayne brings up?

From: John W. 
Sent: Sunday, June 13, 2010 3:27 AM
To: E.Wayne Johnson 
Cc: Peace-discuss List 
Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] An instructive life

On Sat, Jun 12, 2010 at 7:34 PM, E.Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag> wrote:

  Alice says that China is better than the USA when asked.

  Alice offers no explanation for her flatly stated opinion.  (Zhongguo hao.) 

I found the article merely interesting until I got to the final sentence:  "Of course I was 100 percent behind everything that happened in the Cultural Revolution — it was a terrific experience.”

Good Lord.

  ----- Original Message ----- From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
  To: "Peace-discuss List" <peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>

  Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2010 10:58 PM
  Subject: [Peace-discuss] An instructive life 

  [In 2005 Hinton wrote, “There are two opposing superpowers in the world today:
  the U.S. on one side, and world public opinion on the other. The first thrives
  on war. The second demands peace and social justice.” --CGE]

  # The New York Times
  June 11, 2010
  Joan Hinton, Physicist Who Chose China Over Atom Bomb, Is Dead at 88
  By WILLIAM GRIMES

  Joan Hinton, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed
  the atom bomb, but spent most of her life as a committed Maoist working on dairy
  farms in China, died on Tuesday in Beijing. She was 88.

  The cause has not yet been determined, but she had an abdominal aneurysm, her
  son Bill Engst said.

  Ms. Hinton was recruited for the Manhattan Project in February 1944 while still
  a graduate student in physics at the University of Wisconsin. At the secret
  laboratory at Los Alamos, N.M., where she worked with Enrico Fermi, she was
  assigned to a team that built two reactors for testing enriched uranium and
  plutonium.

  When the first atom bomb was detonated near Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945,
  she and a colleague, riding a motorcycle, dodged Army jeep patrols and hid near
  a small hill about 25 miles from the blast point to witness the event.

  “We first felt the heat on our faces, then we saw what looked like a sea of
  light,” she told The South China Morning Post in 2008. “It was gradually sucked
  into an awful purple glow that went up and up into a mushroom cloud. It looked
  beautiful as it lit up the morning sun.”

  Ms. Hinton thought that the bomb would be used for a demonstration explosion to
  force a Japanese surrender. After the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she
  became an outspoken peace activist. She sent the mayors of every major city in
  the United States a small glass case filled with glassified desert sand and a
  note asking whether they wanted their cities to suffer the same fate.

  In 1948, alarmed at the emerging cold war, she gave up physics and left the
  United States for China, then in the throes of a Communist revolution she
  wholeheartedly admired. “I did not want to spend my life figuring out how to
  kill people,” she told National Public Radio in 2002. “I wanted to figure out
  how to let people have a better life, not a worse life.”

  In China she met her future husband, Erwin Engst, a Cornell-trained dairy-cattle
  expert, who went on to work on dairy farms as a breeder while she designed and
  built machinery. During the Cultural Revolution, they were editors and
  translators in Beijing.

  Ms. Hinton applied her scientific talents to perfecting a continuous-flow
  automatic milk pasteurizer and other machines. For the past 40 years, she worked
  on a dairy farm and an agricultural station outside Beijing, tending a herd of
  about 200 cows.

  Joan Chase Hinton was born on Oct. 20, 1921, in Chicago. Her father, Sebastian
  Hinton, was a patent lawyer who invented the jungle gym in 1920. Her mother,
  Carmelita Chase Hinton, founded the Putney School, a progressive coeducational
  secondary school in Putney, Vt., which Joan attended and where she excelled as a
  skier, qualifying for the United States Olympic Team that would have competed in
  the 1940 games had they not been canceled.

  After earning a bachelor’s degree in natural science from Bennington College in
  1942, she enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a doctorate
  in physics in 1944.

  At Los Alamos, teams were assigned to theoretical and practical work. Ms.
  Hinton, assigned to practical work, piled beryllium blocks around the core of
  the site’s first reactor and constructed electronic circuits for the counters.

  According to Ruth H. Howes and Caroline L. Herzenberg, the authors of “Their Day
  in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project,” she then helped design and
  construct the control rods for a second reactor.

  In her spare time, she played violin in a string quartet whose members included
  the physicists Edward Teller and Otto Frisch.

  After the war she studied with Mr. Fermi as a fellow at the Institute for
  Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago and then left for China, where she
  met and married Mr. Engst, who had been in the country since 1946 teaching
  agriculture and dairy-herd management.

  Mr. Engst died in 2003. In addition to her son Bill, of Marlboro, N.J., she is
  survived by another son, Fred Engst of Beijing; a daughter, Karen Engst of Pau,
  France; and four grandchildren.

  During the McCarthy era, Ms. Hinton’s name surfaced as a possible spy and
  spiller of nuclear secrets after she spoke at a peace conference in Beijing.
  Rear Adm. Ellis M. Zacharias denounced her in a 1953 article for Real magazine
  titled “The Atom Spy Who Got Away.”

  An illustration depicted her as a furtive blonde in a trench coat, taking notes
  as she observed a nuclear test. There was never any evidence to show that Ms.
  Hinton passed secrets or did any work as a physicist in China.

  She and her husband remained true believers in the Maoist cause.

  “It would have been terrific if Mao had lived,” Ms. Hinton told The Weekend
  Australian in 2008 during a trip to Japan. “Of course I was 100 percent behind
  everything that happened in the Cultural Revolution — it was a terrific experience.”

  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/12/science/12hinton.html?scp=1&sq=hinton&st=cse

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