Posted on 12/02/2012 7:09:51 PM PST by winner3000
I just listened to yet another disturbing piece of propaganda by Oliver Stone, the Untold History of the United States. It is about the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As can be expected in a good leftist piece of propaganda, the point made is that the US was the bad guy (including Truman) , who bamboozled poor Japan and Poor USSR during that time. The horrible US dropped 2 atomic bombs on Japan, knowing that Japan was going to surrender without its use within a couple of weeks anyway. Then the laughably improbably logical gymnastics come into play when the propagandist makes the point that although the Japanese did not surrender after the first atomic bomb hit them (makes a laughing stock of the opinion that the Japanese would have surrendered without the bomb having been used), nor after the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria, and they surrendered only after the 2nd bomb was dropped on them, it is the Soviet Union's invasion of Manchuria that finally made them decide to surrender! As you might mention in a pure propaganda movie, only the opinions of leaders who thought at the time that Japan was about to surrender were mentioned. Opinions or evidence to the contrary were totally disregarded, including the actions of Japan alluded above, or its creation of a huge civilian army to repel the upcoming American invasion had the bomb not been used.
This propaganda movie was the second recent "documentary" I watched recently on the History Channel. The first one talked about how the earth made Man. Yes, that's right, Mother Earth's history, including the cataclysms, etc, made Man the way he is through evolution. One examples mentioned in this "historical" documentary was that the hiccup was the remnant of when Man was moving from being a creature that lived in the water, to becoming an amphibian. Of course, we have become unrecognizable from that creature, but hey, for some reason, we didn't evolve out of the hiccup!
The History channel should be ashamed of such pure propaganda, and should at least change its name to the Propaganda Channel if this is the type of programming we can expect. It used to be that the victors wrote the History; unfortunately, it's the liberals who are the film makers, and they are re-writing history...their way!
It’s a good thing nobody takes the “History” Channel seriously anymore.
The new and improved “REVISIONIST HISTORY” channel
The bottom line is this. Even is oliver stone was correct (snowball’s chance in hell of that ever happening) we still were justified in dropping the nukes. In fact, if we had 20 more nukes we would have been justified in dropping them too. Japan attacked us unprovoked. They forfeited all right to exist.
Are you sure the History Channel didn’t bank-role the latest leftist fantasy Lincoln love-fest?
*** and they surrendered only after the 2nd bomb was dropped on them, it is the Soviet Union’s invasion of Manchuria that finally made them decide to surrender!***
Years go (early 1980s) I was listening to RADIO MOSCOW on my shortwave set.
Vladimir Pozner was giving his propaganda broadcast about how it was the Soviet invasion that caused the Japanese to surrender, not the nukes.
But then, no one could believe anything from RADIO MOSCOW at that time.
I saw a show several years back on the History or Discovery channels that speculated that Japan may have tested a small nuclear weapon in a harbor in Korea during WWII. They described the Japanese effort to develop nuclear weapons and they were further along than you might think. Read a little bit about how they treated American prisoners.
Anyone with half a brain knows that the fanatical Japanese would have never surrendered. Hell, they told their men, women and children to fight to the death if Americans invaded mainland Japan. We bombarded the hell out of Iwo Jima for nine months, then lost 7,000 men during the fighting. The Japanese were underground! It would have been the exact same thing if we had invaded the mainland, but a thousand times worse.
I despise leftist/libertarian no-nothings that say the Atomic Bomb was not necessary. It was the only way to end the war without more bloodshed in the hundreds of thousands on both sides.
I have never understood this line of thought about the A-bomb attacks. If we would not have used the A-bomb LeMay would have firebombed those cities and others, probably killing as many people or more before forcing the surrender.
My father went through the european theatre of WWII unscathed; however, he was then slated to go over to the Pacific theatre to participate in the invasion of Japan. The dropping of those two nuclear bombs on Japan ended the war and prevented the probable death of my father in a japanese invasion.
I have a special affection for Pres. Truman's action in that.
Oliver Stone doesn't say more people would have died with a man invasion
Me too. My dad served on an LST in the South Pacific and definitely would have participated in the invasion of mainland Japan. My feeling is that I most likely wouldn’t be here if Truman hadn’t made the decision he did. Thanks for my existence, Harry.
Japan started the war, not the U.S. Actions have consequences.
Those two bombs almost certainly saved my father’s life and the lives of millions of other soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. Look at the battles for Okinawa and Iwo Jima for a vision of what the invasion of Japan would’ve been like. And what’s wrong with “bamboozling” the Japanese and Soviets?
They left out the part that according to MacAurther, there would have been upward of a million casualties to invade Japan.
BUMP
millions I bet
Man it seems like I am in a parallel dimension.
We have switched places with Russia, and we are now the promoters of international socialism, spewing the same propaganda Radio Moscow did in the Cold War...
One thing you can always count on is that Oliver Stone is ALWAYS wrong. Expect that whatever he says is exactly opposite of the truth.
Many, maybe most, Japanese were aghast at the surrender, there was almost a coup over it!
They would have rather fought
I too have a father who was going to be part of the mainland invasion, predicting 80 percent casualties.
Oliver Stone is not just wrong;
He is evil.
Dropping the two bombs saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Maybe if Stone was one of the young Americans waiting off the coast of Japan with the invasion force he would see this differently. Japan would have been bombed for months by B29 bombers before the invasion. The use of firebombs were almost as deadly as atom bombs. They say over a million Japanese would have died in an invasion and America would have had something like 300,000 casualties.
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