What an epitomy of a USEFUL IDIOT.
Sorry Mark, I just couldn't read passed this point. The disconnect between reality and fantasy for the left is painful to digest sometimes.
"Reading Carroll's bio, one senses it is the author, rather than Americans in general, who have 'subiminal,' 'unconscious' issues to resolve."
I'd say Finkelstein has put his finger on it...
It would have been immoral and unconcionable to allow the Japanese to continue their fanatical war any longer. They had slaughtered far too many people and had a fight to the death mindset not unlike the moslem world today. The war would have been prolonged and many more including my father would have potentially been killed. Guilt! You've got to be kidding me. The Japanese reaped only a small part of what should have come to them for their deeds. I have never had any feelings of guilt over what we did to end their suicidal war mentality.
Obviously, we should have waited until Japan got the bomb (they were close). Then, after they nuked San Francisco and Los Angeles, we would have been justified in using our bomb on them. That would have been a proportional response.
My father was on Leyte in 1945 working as an NCO in a motor pool (he was a skilled mechanic). He'd already been told that with the expected casualty rates from an invasion of the Japanese home islands, he could expect to be yanked out of his mechanic job, handed an M1, and sent to Japan as an infantryman--where his chances of survival were marginal.
So all I have to say is, God bless the Manhattan Project.
}:-)4
If 9-11 happened twenty years ago and this ass-hat wrote this he'd have been run out of town on a rail, even in Boston.
If we hadn't used the atomic weapons, millions more lives would have been lost to conventional warfare to take Japan. It would have been unethical for America to not use them. The secret would have eventually come out and everyone would have asked Truman why he chose to continue the war when he had the chance to end it. Demonstration bombings would have done nothing to stop the fanatical Japanese.
Please, someone correct me if I am wrong. But when the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered, didn't America and Americans - the overwhelmingly majority of them - breathe a sigh of relief that finally, the war was over? At what point did this bs theory of America committing a war crime and should feel shame and guilt, first come about? I have my beliefs that this is some sort of Soviet propaganda bs that the American left has now acceptted as fact. Am I close with that assumption?
He just explained why the Globe hired him: he is a left-wing-nut-job.
A while back I lived in Los Alamos, where the first bombs were built.
The local paper often reprinted stories from other papers, usually but not always from overseas, in which the reporter visits the town and describes the constant sense of overwhelming guilt the residents of the town suffered under. We were apparently all walking around with our shoulders slumped and unable to look a foreign reporter in the eye.
Quite amusing, actually.
The shame would have been having LeMay finished bombing every Japanese city, rail line, port and highway making the fall '45 rice harvest unaccessable to most of Japan. The nation quite literally would have starved in 1946.
Not to mention extrapolating casualties which would have occurred in a homelan invasion.
--"I hate America and Americans and all that they stand for. These acts in Hiroshima and Nagasazki were war crimes, and the US was so totally cruel and immoral to have done such a thing. And I won't let them ever forget it"
--"So help me, I hate all 'Nips (sic) with everything in my heart for what they did to us. That goes for military and civilian, men, women boys and girls, babies too. The only regret I have is that we did not kill even more. Too bad we could not have incinerated another 100,000, I'd be all for it."
--"I have two minds about this. One is the moral of ending a war, which in fact the bomb did as horrific as an act it was, it did actually bring an almost immediate cessation to the endless bloodletting in the Pacific, of which there certainly would have been more. I also regret the deaths of civilians, particularly women and babies in war. If it could have been finished--and the Japanese War Council more quick to act--with even just one A-bomb on Hiroshima only, that would have been better, but history is history and thank God the war is now over and Japanese troops are in Iraq on the US side. Thank goodness it did not take three of these."
I would say most people subscribe to one of these three fundamental viewpoints.
No, actually, it goes the other way. Because of 9/11, I'm waiting for the USA to do a Hiroshima/Nagasaki type payback. I thought Kabul and Kandahar were good candidates, but since we missed the opportunity, I volunteer Damascus, Tehran and Qom for "demonstration" nuclear strikes.
He conveniently became a priest in 1962 after completing ROTC?
The energy of the current anti-war movement comes from those losers who dodged service in Vietnam.
In their consciences, they know they were wrong, but they continue to do the cowardly thing by trying to justify their abandonment of resposibility.
I think that politics for the next 20 years will be defined by the intragenerational conflict between those who did their duty and those who renounced their duty.
I'm proud of Hiroshima.
The left is still POed that Truman dropped the bombs and ended the war before the Soviets could become a full "partner" in the war against Japan. What seems to be forgotten in most stories is that Russia did not declare war on Japan until 8/9/45 and the left was/is always more concerned with Russia than America
Shame....Shame