Date: Fri, 15 Apr 2005 20:42:42 -0400 (EDT)
From: dicconf <dicconf at radix.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: M*A*S*H and other TV shows.
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

On Fri, 15 Apr 2005, Cathy Green wrote:

> It was my understanding that WWII technically is still
> going on as well, since Japan and the USSR never
> settled things because of the dispute over the
> Kuriles/Sakhalin Island

It would just be going on between them, then.  (Wonder if it can still be
considered to be "going on" now the USSR has been shitcanned?)  But for
obscure reasons probably explainable by the fact that lawyers set the
rules up, declarations of war need to go both ways.  Thailand declared war
on the US shortly after Pearl Harbor, but we pronounced that the
declaration had been forced out of a puppet government (it was) and
refused to declare back, so from the Thai point of view Thailand and the
US were once at war and from the US POV they weren't.

This need for an exchange between recognizable governments, of course,
also explains why the Civil War was never declared: to declare war would
have been to recognize the Confederate States of America as a separate
nation, which was exactly what we weren't about to do.

-- Dick Eney