Posted on 08/07/2006 6:22:41 AM PDT by governsleastgovernsbest
by Mark Finkelstein
August 7, 2006 - 09:10
Because of shame over their sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans were actually awaiting payback along the lines of 9/11. You say you were unaware of any such feelings? That's only because your feeling was 'subliminal.' Your shame was 'unconscious.' Well, that, or the fact that you just don't have the same exquisitely refined sensibilities of Boston Globe columnist James Carroll.
Here's how Carroll spelled it out in his column, The Nagasaki Principle:
"Thus, what I am calling the Nagasaki principle consists in momentum, which obfuscates responsibility before the fact, and denial, which prevents a necessary moral reckoning afterward.
"This may seem like airy theorizing, but the psychologically unfinished business of the Nuclear Age, dating to the day after Hiroshima, defined the American response to the trauma of Sept. 11, 2001. The nation had lived for two generations with the subliminal but powerfully felt dread of a coming nuclear war.
"Unconsciously ashamed of our own action in using the bomb, we were waiting for pay-back, and on that beautiful morning it seemed to come. The smoke rising up from the twin towers hit us like a mushroom cloud, and we instantly dubbed the ruined site as Ground Zero, when, as historian John Dower observes, the only true Ground Zeros are the two in Japan."
Reading Carroll's bio, one senses it is the author, rather than Americans in general, who have 'subiminal,' 'unconscious' issues to resolve:
"James P. Carroll is best known for his work, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us (1996), about the conflict between his father and himself over America's role in the Vietnam War. His father was General Joseph Carroll, the director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency during most of the war in Southeast Asia.
"James Carroll, spent a year in the ROTC program at Georgetown University and was honored as ROTC Cadet of the year in 1961. The following year Carroll decided to become a priest, entering the novitiate of the Paulist Fathers. In early 1969, he was ordained in New York by Terrence Cardinal Cooke, the U.S. military vicar. At the speech he gave at his first mass, the next day, he quoted a biblical passage from the prophet Ezekiel, referring to death and bones "burned by time and by desert wind, by the sun," and he added, "and by napalm." The addition of those words would cause an unresolved rift between him and his father."
Could Carroll's column be a classic bit of projection of his own Oedipal issues?
Boston Globe/NewsBusters Oedipal-projection ping to Today show list.
No. It seems like rantings from someone who hates western civilization.
You start a war: We finish a war.
Idiots.
WTF!?
No sin, but rather dire necessity. Otherwise we'ld still be fighting Japan.
I feel no shame.
God bless Truman for nuking Japan.
What a tool. My grandfather's ship was kamikazied during the Battle of Okinawa. He had hundreds of his shipmates die. And this unmitigated idiot has the gall to believe that anyone with a brain feels any shame about dropping the bomb to end the war? The bomb saved millions of American AND Japanese lives by bringing the war to an end without the need to invade the home islands.
Of course, this jerk also probably thinks a cease-fire in Lebanon would lead to peace and few lives lost. Stupid is, if anything, consistent.
It's August, and do I detect the rumblings of another 'let's debate Hiroshima and Nagasaki' thread continuing on to 400 posts, here on FR, one of our annual summer rites of passage.
I'm going to go with that since I don't have any unresolved issues over Hiroshima seeing as it was the right thing to do.
Every single one of Carroll's columns is just like this.
Without question, he is the biggest pussy in New England.
What a frickin' idiot!
Airy theorism? Is it even a sentence?
The only thing 'unresolved' about September 11th is that it was more or less a by-product of eight years of Clinton, steeped in abject lack of national preparation and flavored with American moral decay widely detested around the Islamic world, combined with external subjective global impressions of our incontrovertible weakness (again due to Clinton) which set in wheels the actions of the 19 hijackers and those who issued the orders.
Just for the record, this American is not ashamed, and remembers feeling quite proud as a kid that we had decisively put an end to the Japanese threat.
I also remember "Unconditional Surrender"
Don't care if he was a democrat, Truman knew what he was doing>
Only guilt ridden liberals feel/felt this way.
And as all liberals do, they project their own distorted feelings and reasoning on to others.
It was a damn shame that we had to drop the bomb. But the responsibility lies with Japan. For me, sadness for the innocents does not translate into guilt.
I finally figured out why liberals have such an affinity for arab terrorists. You know how they march in the street whipping themselves bloody with chains? That's what libs do to themselves emotionally, and wish they had the nerve to do physically.
PEARL HARBOR was our invitation. Any logic beyond that is skewered.
""Thus, what I am calling the Nagasaki principle consists in momentum, which obfuscates responsibility before the fact, and denial, which prevents a necessary moral reckoning afterward."
I'd feel guiltier if I could figure out what this meant.
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