Posted on 08/18/2005 5:38:03 PM PDT by forty_years
August 6th marked the 60th anniversary of Americas use of an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. While some still argue that President Trumans decision to use the A-bomb was controversial, they are afflicted with the scourge of our time, the loss of a sense of moral proportion and certainty. Unfortunately, those with relativistic morals will lead us to see the day when nuclear weapons are used again this time to end once and for all the barbaric savagery of Islamism.
Green Left Weekly (GLW) calls the U.S. putting a swift end to WWII using atomic weapons the worst terror attacks in history. These moral relativists and historical revisionists claim,
A tiny group of US rulers met secretly in Washington and callously ordered this indiscriminate annihilation of civilian populations. They gave no explicit warnings. They rejected all alternatives, preferring to inflict the most extreme human carnage possible. They ordered and had carried out the two worst terror acts in human history.
GLW advocates the capitalist conspiracy theory: the U.S. wanted to dominate the world economy, so its real intention in dropping the A-bomb was terrorizing everyone, especially the Soviets, into utter submission.
GLW is, of course, an extreme example, but not unusual. According to the BBC:
On the 60th anniversary of the destruction of Hiroshima, new questions are being asked about whether it was necessary to drop the atomic bomb - and whether the bomb was really responsible for the Japanese surrender.
Now, a new book offers the most radical re-interpretation of these events. In Racing the Enemy, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, professor of history and director of the Center for Cold War Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, blames both Stalin and Truman for not doing more to negotiate a surrender.
He also claims that it was the Soviet entry into the war against Japan, just after Hiroshima, which really worried the Japanese and which made them give up.
Mr Hasegawa says that Stalin rejected peace feelers put out by Japan because he was determined to win spoils from joining the war.
And, he suggests, the Americans ignored the feelers - which they knew about from breaking Japanese codes - because they did not like them.
Truman refused to modify the "unconditional surrender" demand because he wanted revenge for Pearl Harbor, courted popularity at home and needed to demonstrate strategic power.
Thus, Mr Hasegawa claims, opportunities were lost. The myth that it was only the atom bomb which could have ended the war was invented in order to assuage "Truman's conscience and ease the collective American conscience".
Is that how it really happened? Mr. Hasegawa is nothing more than an amateurish historical revisionist, apologizing for crimes which he knows his own people committed, and for which he feels very guilty.
Why is the left-wing, like GLW, so eager to harp on Hitlers atrocities, but sweep those of the Japanese under the rug? It is just white guilt.
Caucasian American and European leftists, living in safety and economic prosperity, feel guilty about their cushy lifestyles. They want a quick and easy fix to the worlds ills, without sacrificing their safety and comfort, or taking the time for rational political action. Of course, this mix causes further emotional consternation, as the end result is unattainable like having your cake and eating it, too.
Here is an example of extreme white guilt, published yesterday in Dayton City Paper. The author is upset with New York Times writer Thomas Freidman because can never accept suicide bombings as part of a nationalist struggle:
Friedman can only accept gigantic, systematic, white-skinned wealthy American crimes, not the smaller retaliatory crimes of dark-skinned impoverished people. Suicide bombings and terrorism are tactics, like night attacks or ambushes.
The author makes short shrift of non-white crimes, which takes us back to guilt-driven attempts at rewriting the history of the Japanese in WWII. Far earlier than Hiroshima, the Japanese were busy committing unspeakable atrocities.
In 1937 and 1938, Japanese soldiers massacred approximately 300,000 Chinese in an and around Nanking. They raped between 20,000 and 80,000 Chinese women. The Japanese beheaded, burned, bayoneted, buried alive, or disemboweled during their orgy of evil.
Question to the leftists: Can the Rape of Nanking be rationalized because non-whites were killing other non-whites?
Nanking is just one example of Japanese war crimes. The leftists would edit Pearl Harbor, the unprovoked slaughter of 2,500 Americans, from history. They would press the delete key on documentation of the
Bataan death march beginning April 9, 1942, during which 72,000 exhausted Filipino and American defenders of the Bataan peninsula were marched for four days a distance of 50 miles without food and water, while Japanese soldiers shot or bayoneted hundreds of stragglers.
The liberals would have you forget that 12,000 Americans were killed and 38,000 Americans injured in the battle for one island, Okinawa. They would edit Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima, and Luzon from history.
The leftists would forget the kamikazes. They would forget the ferocity and insanity of Japanese soldiers during the Pacific campaign and the images of Japanese civilians jumping off cliffs rather than surrendering to American soldiers.
To end WWII, President Truman and his advisors were faced with ordering thousands of American soldiers to their deaths in taking the Japanese mainland. How many men would we have lost? 250,000? 500,000?
American soldiers who fought in Europe were tired. After cleaning up Hitler the battles of the Bulge, Anzio, Normandy how much more could we have asked of these men? Men like my father. He and his compatriots were certain they would have been killed in an invasion of mainland Japan. They read Stars and Stripes. They knew that thousands of Americans were killed taking tiny Pacific islands.
Its us or them. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe this saying is true when you are fighting for survival.
What are we to expect in our war to preserve civilization the war against Islamo-fascism? The choice should be clear, but because of human nature, it is not. God forbid, but it just may come to scorched earth again.
In one scenario, we will continue fighting a half-hearted, Vietnam-style, war of attrition our war on terror and things will never seem to get better Until the Islamist savages do something horrendous on an unimaginable scale: set off a dirty bomb in downtown Chicago; use a suitcase nuke in Moscow; unleash a canister of cyclosarin in Tokyo or Paris.
Then the wrath of the West will be finally awakened. ENOUGH!, the people will cry. We fight and fight, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Then an American, French, British, or Russian cold-war missile will be aimed and fired on Tehran, or Medina, or Lahore. If this does not convince the Muslim world to give up terrorism, one more nuke will. Just like the second bomb on Nagasaki convinced Hirohito to surrender.
Of course, this scenario is completely avoidable if we finish the fight sooner rather than later. Whether the Western world has the resolve to do so remains to be seen.
http://netwmd.com/articles/article1126.html
One need not be a leftist or certainly not a relativist to object to the purposeful bombing of civilians. It's pure sensationalism to think it started in America with Hiroshima...Dresden and Tokyo came before that (A-bombs were just more efficient), or really, Fredericksburg, Vicksburg, Petersburg and of course Atlanta.
It is simply morally abhorant to target civilians, period. To try to argue otherwise ends up being a utilitarian RELATIVIST argument.
I am a very conservative (bordering on libertarian) Christian, and have no leftist sympathies at all....but that sure doesn't mean America (and I am an 11th generation American) has always done the right and just thing, even when fighting right and just wars. To not acknowlege our past sins, means we're just likely to repeat them in a worse way in the future.
Factories are in cities.
They are manned by civilians.
They are producing ball bearings.
Ball bearings are a major component in military equipment.
Should you bomb the city?
If you do not how do you justify to yourself the loss of the lives of your solders?
The Great Christian Soldiers of 1000 years ago did not seem to get wrapped around the axle like so many self described "Christian moralists" do today. Personally, I view many modern "Christian moralists" as out and out utopian, modernist intellectuals behind a Christian facade. I mean let's face it, saying something like "oh no, ye shall not catapult the castle, there are civilians there" would have been considered sedition, in the day. And you know how they handled such things, in the day ...
Well you are simply incorrect.
It depends on the alternatives available. They made the best choice because it resulted in fewer American and Japanese lives being lost. So a relative rather than absolute analysis was necessary to make this decision. I doubt it took much time nor should it have. Even a democrat saw this as a no-brainer. It's a lesser of evils. Its like voting for a Republican rather than a Democrat.
"I will not be neutral as between the fire and the firemen." Winston Churchill
However in my personal opinion, even today, after 50 years of loosening, Japanese culture is very tightly organized, and civilians there could easily organized into an effective fight force - including men, women and children. 100 million of them.
It is not unreasonable to believe that (especially the battles for Iwo Jima and Okinawa), that millions of Japanese civilians would have fought an invasion of the Japanese main land. The Japanese were already using suicide bombers (you know them as Kamikaze pilots) towards the end of the war. Instruction of civilians as human bombs was beginning in anticipation of invasion when th e war ended.
I love Japan, and the Japanese.
I honestly don't believe that there would be a Japan as a country today, if not for the atomic bomb. It would still be a battlefield.
If we had just used to bomb on Iraq from the beginning, nearly 2,000 of our best and brightest would still be alive.
I am sick of all this perpetual hand wringing and self-loathing on the part of the sob sisters who are all too eager to condemn the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but have few if any tears for the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
It's been 60 years since Japan was brought to it's knees and forced to surrender unconditionally, and if they regret what happened in August of 1945 when they woke up to find atomic hell raining from the skies, they should have thought twice before unwisely choosing to take on Uncle Sam.
As for all this "we must confront and confess our sins" claptrap, let those who feel the compulsive need to weep and wail go to their damn priest or preacher and confess it all, just pour out their guilt, and don't stop until it feels better.
As for the majority of Americans, the rest of us will get on with our lives and quit second guessing events of more than half a century ago.
Nuclear weaponry is absolutely a fierce and terrible method of waging war, but after the atomic bombings on Japan, those same fierce weapons helped keep the peace for 46 years until the Soviet Union finally collapsed after Ronald Reagan tightened the screws on 'em.
And should through some fluke of fate, the Islamofascists obtain, and should they be foolish enough to use a nuclear device against the United States, we will hopefully have someone in the White House when that happens that will have the same amount of spine as Harry Truman, and anything and everything on this planet that beckons to "allah" will be converted into green glowing glass.
I wouldn't count on it. Call me a conspiracy kook, but it seems are betters have determined to bring America's prestige as a nation down a few notches. Evidence the surrendering of our borders, the transfer of our manufacturing capabilities to other countries, out-sourcing, which turns ours into a service economy. Farewell to the American superpower. God save America.
Thanks very much for your post.
I do not have your personal experience in Japan. However, I have read a great deal on this subject including information that has only just been revealed.
It agrees with your assessment: Hiroshima and Nagasaki resulted in less suffering for the allies and for the Japanese.
It is a hard and violent equation, but war consists of these.
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