In the May 2, 2011 edition of The Nation, John Nichols explains that not all Democrats cowered after being called “socialists.” His article features this vignette regarding Harry Truman:
[C]onservative Republicans, led by Ohio Senator Robert Taft, announced in 1950 that their campaign slogan in that year’s Congressional elections would be “Liberty Against Socialism.” They then produced an addendum to their national platform, much of which was devoted to a McCarthyite rant charging that Truman’s Fair Deal “is dictated by a small but powerful group of persons who believe in socialism, who have no concept of the true foundation of American progress, and whose proposals are wholly out of accord with the true interests and real wishes of the workers, farmers and businessmen.”
Truman fought back, reminding Republicans that his policies were outlined in the 1948 Democratic platform, which had proven to be wildly popular with the electorate. “If our program was dictated, as the Republicans say, it was dictated at the polls in November 1948. It was dictated by a ‘small but powerful group’ of 24 million voters,” said the president, who added, “I think they knew more than the Republican National Committee about the real wishes of the workers, farmers and businessmen.”
Truman did not cower at the mention of the word “socialism,” which in those days was distinguished in the minds of most Americans from Soviet Stalinism, with which the president—a mean cold warrior—was wrangling. Nor did Truman, who counted among his essential allies trade unionists like David Dubinsky, Jacob Potofsky and Walter Reuther, all of whom had been connected with socialist causes and in many cases the Socialist Party of Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas, rave about the evils of social democracy. Rather, he joked that “Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all, out of our rise to world leadership, the Republican leaders have learned nothing. Confronted by the great record of this country, and the tremendous promise of its future, all they do is croak, ‘socialism.’”
Savvy Republicans moved to abandon the campaign.
Harry Truman officially ushered in the Dark Ages for the United States of America with the order to destroy two Japanese cities with atomic bombs. Harry Truman's legacy is one of a mass murderer, and on his hands is the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent people – the "workers, farmers and businessmen" cited in this article as well as children, housewives, elderly couples, fishermen, school teachers, etc.
On being called a Socialist Truman joked that “Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all,…". Better life for all? Now that's the real joke but it's not funny, not at all.
In 1945, Harry Truman officially ushered in the Dark Ages for the United States of America with his order to destroy two Japanese cities with atomic bombs. With one stroke of Truman's pen, the USA lost any moral high ground gained in WWII. Harry Truman's legacy is one of a mass murderer, and on his hands is the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent people – the "workers, farmers and businessmen" cited in this article, as well as the children, housewives, elderly couples, fishermen, school teachers, etc.
On being called a Socialist, Truman begins a "joke" by stating, “Out of the great progress of this country, out of our great advances in achieving a better life for all…".
Fact: Two cities destroyed and 200,000+ civilians dead from instant incineration and eventual radiation poisoning. "A better life for all"? Now that's the real joke -but it's not funny, not at all.
It's easy to second guess decisions like that in hindsight. I'm afraid I find all the moral outrage about Hiroshima and Nagasaki questionable at best. Those two explosions ended the war. While personal annecdote is usually suspect, I once had opportunity to speak to a man who had been a child living not far from Hiroshima and asked him how he felt. After a pause, he said "Many of us were glad. The war ended. Our leaders were going to kill us all."
What's the difference between these and the firebombing of Tokyo or Yokohama other than the type of weapon used? Massive civilian casualties, massive devastation through razing, the obliteration of vast population centers. We can rehearse the strategies all we want, but that war was a total war involving everyone. We like to pretend that atomic weapons are somehow worse, morally, than any other weapon, and maybe that's a good thing to pretend, but in every age we have had weapons "too powerful to use" and in every age we have found reason and avenue to use them. This is a game we play that has as one result a kind of moral calculus that validates the use of "lesser" weapons by putting them in categories.
Operations Olympic and Cornet, the invasion of mainland Japan, were estimated to produce casualties in the millions, both military and civilian. You;re suggesting that would have been preferred?
Slinging the label "mass murderer" around is something that ought to be done with more caution. You should make comparisons, study the pros and cons. It would have been better if Hitler had never invaded Checkoslovakia, too, then perhaps the whole thing might have been avoided, but with the concentration camp blood of 11 million on his hands and the subsequent revelations of Stalin's murders pushing upward of 20 million or more and the atrocities on the Japanese part of Nanking, Singapore, and the Philippines, the only question in my mind is, who acted to end it?
Mark states, "Operations Olympic and Cornet, the invasion of mainland Japan, were estimated to produce casualties in the millions, both military and civilian."
And what crystal ball was used to peer into this possible future and foretell the number of imaginary casualties? Who was this mystic seer?
I'm afraid you have eaten, and regurgitated, the shit of the bull here. This "we bombed to save millions of US soldier deaths" was a clever and effective bit of post hoc revisionism, pure US Government propaganda used to justify and excuse the killings of hundreds of thousands of civilians. It was damage control, deliberately crafted to soothe (and extract forgiveness from) the US populace for the horrors committed in their name.
I'm sorry – possible and imaginary future deaths do not justify immediate killings. That's insultingly flawed logic.
Mark states, "What’s the difference between these and the firebombing of Tokyo or Yokohama other than the type of weapon used?"
No difference in my mind. I don't care what weapons were used. Pre-meditated, targeted mass exterminations of entire populations of cities cannot ever, under ANY circumstances, be justified. These are primitive, semi-conscious, sub-human acts of malice. I say sub-human because it's simply to hard to believe that 20th Century Homo Sapiens were, and still are, capable of such atrocity. It's embarrassing.
You say, "Slinging the label “mass murderer” around is something that ought to be done with more caution. You should make comparisons, study the pros and cons." No, I refuse. This to me is clear…the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were murder on a mass scale. You are free to accept the government's official justification of this act, or spin it any other way you choose.
Mike M. writes:—"I’m afraid you have eaten, and regurgitated, the shit of the bull here. This “we bombed to save millions of US soldier deaths” was a clever and effective bit of post hoc revisionism, pure US Government propaganda used to justify and excuse the killings of hundreds of thousands of civilians."
I don't know you, Mike, and you don't know me, so we'll let the personal part pass. You may well believe the numbers are revisionism, but it's part of military strategy to derive estimates of casualties from actions and they've been pretty good at for a long time. It's on record about the preparations the Japanese were making, American soldiers already knew what kind of resistance the Japanese could mount and were willing to mount during the island hopping, so it likely was not a far-fetched estimate. Take that for what it's worth. Not all history is white-wash.
If you wish to take the position that both the firebombings and the atomic strikes were unacceptable, fine. It's a luxury of after-the-fact moralizing. The only time such assessments are worth a damn is before the shooting starts, especially in regards to WWII, which was pretty much total war.
For a long time after the 30 Years War, European states developed a "civilized" posture on warfare, namely that armies would meet away from civilian centers and duke it out and the loser would pay reparations. Napoleon reverted back to ravaging anything that got in his way, but after him they tried to be civilized about it again. But that was only in Europe. WWI began it and WWII finished the idea of ever again entering major conflicts thinking civilian centers could be spared. Your nation goes to war, you go to war. Better not to start it at all.
But once you're in it, that goes out the window, and you fight to win it.
Yes, I think the decision to drop those bombs was made based on a calculus of casualties, and to claim that wasn't part of it is either disingenous or maliciously judgmental. So to avoid the "horror" of one set of losses you would have accepted the greater losses of a conventional invasion? Must be nice to have such moral certainty. Of course, you then said:—
"You say, “Slinging the label “mass murderer” around is something that ought to be done with more caution. You should make comparisons, study the pros and cons.” No, I refuse."
You refuse. In that case, to blindly refuse to even look at it, I can only conclude that you're being a willful idiot. Understanding is the only—the ONLY—tool we have to become better and to do that you have to feed that understanding by looking at all of it.
Mark, Let me be more clear. I refuse to "study the pros" of the intentional slaughter of 200,000 innocent civilians. Why do I refuse such a request? Because in my mind there is no "pro" side to this horror. If you can discover the pros of these bombings, well, let me just say I find that appalling on many levels.
You state, "So to avoid the “horror” of one set of losses you would have accepted the greater losses of a conventional invasion? Must be nice to have such moral certainty."
I would answer by saying that you apparently find 200,000 actual and real innocent deaths more acceptable than your imaginary "greater losses"; 200,000 historical deaths are more acceptable to you than potential deaths that never happened. Very strange.
Allow me to present 2 rather graphic hypothetical scenarios and some questions:
To guarantee the end of WWII, do you think Harry Truman would have agreed to personally, by hand, slit the throats (or shoot to death) 200,000 Japanese men, women and children? Why not? I suspect he couldn't do this because it would be too unimaginably horrific and revolting, uncivilized, and a searing testament to evil. But do you realize that Truman accomplished the same end (200,000 dead civilian bodies) with a couple phone calls and a signature? You see, he was able to exterminate these hundreds of thousands of people by divorcing himself from the deed itself, by being physically (and emotionally) removed from the killing act. He ordered what he could not imagine doing personally.
Hypothetical Scenario #2 (a cognitive exercise in empathy):
Visualize in your mind a random group of Japanese people, from newborn infants to seniors, and every type in between. Imagine a vast arena, filled with 200,000 of these people. Look at each face as you shove them, one by one, into a red-hot incinerator. As you do this, with each person pushed into the incinerator, continue to repeat this mantra; "I am doing this to end the war. I am doing this to possibly save lives. I am doing this to end the war. I am doing this to possibly save lives. I am doing this to end the war….etc" Do this 200,000 times. If that is too painful, do this visualization for 10 Japanese people (but always remember the 190,000 in the waiting room).
How did that make you feel? Did the visualization of shoving these people into the fire feel intuitively good, and necessary, and right?
Or did it feel nauseating, primitive, and wrong?
Mike M.
When I say "pro" in this context, I mean that there are always more than one aspect in need of examination. You keep saying "imaginary deaths" as if they were always some kind of a fantasy. I'll quote one G.I. who had served through the European theater and was set to ship to the Pacific after Germany's surrender. "We knew we were going to die, so when we hit the beach we were going to kill everyone."
Rather than "imaginary" try "potential." And both potentials are quite real, depending on which course you choose. A madman has your family (for the sake of argument let's say this includes a wife and three kids) and he tells you quite sincerely that he will kill either your wife or your kids. Now, you can stand there and pretend these are imaginary deaths all you want up until he pulls the trigger, but you know that's bullshit.
Fact one: there is no UP side to a war. It is nothing but a continual forced selection of bad choices. (Was Churchill a mass murderer because of Coventry?)
Fact two: whatever choice you make, people will die. How many and where are the only options you have if you happen to be in a command position.
Fact three: because of fact two, you do not have the luxury to play semantic games with "imaginary" deaths—rather, you have to treat all potential deaths as real, or you will guaranteed make the wrong choices.
Fact four: there will always be someone, somewhere who will armchair quarterback your choices and you cannot afford to consider this at all.
You are welcome to make such calls all you want, but I believe you should do so only when you are in possession of as much fact as is available. What gets me in these sorts of debates is that it tends to force some people into defending something they ordinarily would not, namely war.
Given that you have entered hell, it's cheeky to bitch about the lack of a thermostat.
It may not be much, but the difference between Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini on the one hand and Roosevelt, Churchill, and Truman on the other is that once a territory surrendered, "our" side stopped killing people, they did not. Not much, perhaps, in the light of such moral certainty, but to my mind enough. Truman, and Roosevelt before him, along with Churchill, attacked cities, towns, factories, as well as armies in order to sap the will of the enemy to wage war. The pair of atomic bombs did it to Japan, with a final loss of 200,000 + lives. An absolutely horrible decision to have to make. But had he held back—as some people believe Roosevelt would have—and those "imaginary" deaths had occurred, the debate we're having now might well be why didn't he drop them.
I am suggesting that you are exhibiting just a bit of self-righteousness at the expense of historical realities it sounds like you haven't grappled with.
Wow. What a turn this thread has taken.
Mike M. – have you ever served in the military? Have you ever been in a position of leadership that required you to make a decision that would mean life or death for the people you were charged with leading?
If the answer to the first question is no, and you insist on asking "what crystal ball was used to peer into this possible future and foretell the number of imaginary casualties?" I'll ask if you have any frame of reference at all for your question and your own post-hoc armchair judgment ("a clever and effective bit of post hoc revisionism, pure US Government propaganda used to justify and excuse the killings of hundreds of thousands of civilians").
1) "Crystal ball"? How about hundreds of experienced military planners and strategists. Every day plans are made, "what ifs" explored, options weighed. The problem facing today's military leaders is that the game has changed so much that they can't plan for specifics anymore…they have to plan for "we really don't know what will happen next." Not so in the waning days of WWII. The conventions had changed some, yes, but the slight deviations from the known were understood by that point. As were the facts of the recent campaigns on Okinawa and other islands, as well as the experience at Normandy. The analysts had considerable data to consider in their projections. To think of the planning and strategizing as consulting a crystal ball tells me you have absolutely no idea what goes into that planning and analysis. If you haven't done it, you need to step down from your soap box. You know not of what you speak.
2)"I’m sorry – possible and imaginary future deaths do not justify immediate killings. That’s insultingly flawed logic." Wow. How naive is that? Not to mention flawed in its own. Four years of war as an active participant were not enough to "imagine" the casualties that could result for the alternatie course of action? Forty years of Pacific Rim aggression, conquest, occupation and hints at atrocities that were only revealed to the West after the fact were not enough to establish the mass psychology of imperial nationalism? The pattern was well established, the empire growing, the industrial machine finely tuned and had tremendous capacity, and the experience of actual war (Sino-Russian) coupled with the successful conquests of Korea, Nanking, the Philippines, and other island countries and the attack on Pearl Harbor clearly demonstrated the potential for further expansion and conquest.
I lived in Korea. I talked to people who lived through the occupation – forced to changed their names to Japanese names, forced to only speak Japanese, who watched as artisans, craftsman, (and women) were taken to Japan to work for the empire (you can imagine what "work" meant for the women.) They well knew the capacity of the Japanese of the time for ruthless aggression. I say this because if you do not know what it was the allies were fighting in the Pacific, then you either need to stop summing up the entire war and Japanese national identity in two cities or actually go read some of the history of what was going on. And even then, you probably won't understand – the Western mind can't understand. I was in Korea when there was a huge outrage over the Japanese government issuing a revisionist history middle school textbook of their own, in which they completely disavowed any of the atrocities committed during their conquest years, claiming that their work (the recipients of that work would call it subjugation, murder, rape, etc.) on the Pacific Rim benefited Asians by driving out the Western influence. That was in the early 2000's, 60 years after the war. It says a lot – of the leaders – just as the orders of the campaigns near the end of the war said a lot about those leaders.
But I've digressed enough. If you haven't bothered to understand the scope of the situation at the time, this foray will serve little purpose.
3) On leadership, if the answer to that second question I asked at the top is also "no", and you have never seriously imagined yourself having to make those decisions, then your armchair pontification and moral grandstanding is without merit. You can't know what it is like. That's evident from your two thought experiments. I found both offensively absurd and demonstrating a clear lack of understanding of hierarchical leadership of the military, its functions and the incredibly difficult role of the President of the United States in having to make that decision. Perhaps Truman did imagine himself doing that and imagined the alternatives. After all, Truman was not a general, having grown up in the business. He probably would have thought of the consequences more than say Grant or Jackson. Eisenhower saw first hand the costs of a full scale assault on a foreign land, so the decision for him might have been more clear.
Here's the nub: Truman did not make the decision that put us at war. But, he was in the position to make a decision that would likely end the war. "Likely" because there was no knowing until it was over. But there was more than enough reason – and analysis for comparative courses of action – to believe that "likely" was more probable than not. And an atomic weapon, more destructive than any other prior, was just another weapon. Attaching anything more to that (there's that armchair morality again) is a rather pointless exercise. Would the same outcome resulting from dropping 20,000 tons of T.N.T. been smarter? Never mind, I know where the argument will go on that.
A decision had to be made. Was it the right one? Well, as it worked, history can judge it as so. Given that we cannot know how any alternate courses of action might have turned out, we're back to armchairing in retrospect, and while those military strategists with their crystal balls and imaginary casualties actually do deconstruct the past to determine options for future engagements, the bottom line is that an incredibly small number of men have held a position where such decisions had to be made. Until you are one of them, possessed of all the information given to them, surrounded by many thinkers (and an occasional socio/psycho-path, I'll wager), you can't judge. The only person who really knows what he/she is getting into with that job is the one who already holds it. Look how any president seems to have changed his position after assuming the office. Knowledge does that.
Here's a what if thought experiment: might it be possible that the dropping of Little Boy and Fat Man served as a deterrent to future wars? After all, here were demonstrated results, horrific and heretofore unseen. Had that decision not been made, someone might have decided in a future war that it would be…when the weapons were more destructive and plentiful. Of course, those would be imaginary casualties that were averted. The socio-historians can analyze that; the military planners have a tougher job that is real.
Crying "mass murderer" 70 years after the fact? Well, we do write our own histories. I have an interesting book ("History Lessons" by Dana Lindaman and Hyle Ward) in which the authors surveyed history textbooks from other countries to see how events considered significant in American history are viewed from those countries' perspectives. The Japanese textbooks offer theories that the U.S. needed to justify the expense of developing the weapon, or that the U.S. wanted to have an edge over the Soviets in the post-war politics. Despite my reference to the white-washing of the past above, there are at least a few Japanese textbooks that acknowledge that the Japanese government ignored the Postdam Declaration and urged its people to fight to the finish. That same text also notes that only after the two bombs did the government try to secure the continuance of the imperial system before surrendering. A Philippine text relates the event clinically, but used the phrase "[w]hat finally brought Japan to her knees…" A Canadian text outlined the role Canadians played in the development of the bomb, and went into detail about the effects of uranium on the aboriginals hired to transport it. A British text described the dropping to the bombs on the Japanese as "ending their fanatical resistance…" An Italian text noted that the kamikaze attacks and suicidal defenses "demonstrated that a true victory would have caused even more losses." But the text further explores that the effects following use of the bomb were unknown, and that "[w]hat seems certain is that the show of force, made indiscriminately at the expense of unarmed people, increased the United States' weight in the post-war tensions and decisions, especially concerning the Soviet Union."
None of the text extractions addressed the Japanese actions against the unarmed people of Nanking, Korea, etc. But then, that wasn't the question asked.
"I realize the tragic significance of the atomic bomb… It is an awful responsibility which has come to us… We thank God that it has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes."
—President Harry Truman, August 9, 1945[60]
"A person who is fundamentally honest doesn't need a code of ethics.
The Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount are all the ethical
codes anybody needs."
Harry S. Truman
Source:Remarks, july 10, 1958
“The atom bomb was no 'great decision.' … It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.”
~Harry S. Truman (1884–1972), U.S. Democratic politician, president. Seminar, April 28, 1959, Columbia University, New York City.
And a U.S. Army Official Poster:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anti-Japan2_Uni…
http://purl.umn.edu/76583
(This is just an appetizer. My full response is forthcoming).
Mike M., do you have a source for that seminar of April 28, 1959? I was curious and wanted to find the context, as that quote is one of those repeated on numerous quote sites but no sites of substance. I found a couple of references to the lecture of that date, but the couple of quotes cited are not the one found all over the net. Do you have a copy of "Truman Speaks…" and would it be in there? I checked the local libraries and they don't have a copy, so I'm out of luck…not sure if the college libraries around here will have it.
Jim, It looks like Truman made that 'no great decision' comment in April 1959 at the conclusion of the 1st of his three lectures at Columbia University, during the Q&A session. It was part of Truman's reply to the question, "What was the most difficult decision you had to make as President?" (his answer – "To go to war in Korea.")
~As quoted in 'The Buck Stops Here: The 28 Toughest Presidential Decisions and How They Changed History', Thomas J. Craughwell, Edwin Kiester Jr., Quarry Books, 2010, p. 178.
Also, was Harry Truman an Anti-Semite? I'll let you decide:
'Had ten minutes conversation with Henry Morgenthau about Jewish ship in Palistine. Told him I would talk to Gen[eral] Marshall about it. He'd no business, whatever to call me. The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed. When the country went backward — and Republican in the election of 1946, this incident loomed large on the DP [Displaced Person] program. The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DP as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.
-Exerpt from Harry Truman's Personal diary 6:00 P. M. Monday (21 July 1947)
Mike M.—Boy, you have a real jones for Truman, don't you? Was Harry an anti-semite…
How do you prove that he wasn't talking from antisemtism rather than from political reality? After all, the last part of that—
"Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."
—clearly has no specific ethnic group in mind. Underdogs. And given that, look at what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians for sixty years and just consider it from that standpoint.
This is where P.C. fails, when we are constrained from discussing realities for fear of offending labels. The poster you put up about the Japanese during WWII, codifying as it does a U.S. propaganda campaign to stir animosity against the so-called "Yellow Peril" is a case in point. An odious piece of racism, no doubt, but it should be used to prevent discussion of what was really happening in the Pacific. The Japanese military machine was a horrific instrument of racial superiority. The Japanese of the day made no bones about their belief in their own right to lord it over "lesser races"—like the Chinese, the Koreans, the Pacific islanders, and anyone else they could defeat in battle. They thought Americans and British soldiers were innate cowards because they surrendered and subsequently treated their P.O.W.s like shit because in their code they were not obligated to show consideration to anyone who had demonstrated that they were less than human by Japanese standards, hence the terrible conditions in Japanese prison camps and the failure of aid organizations to make them understand the principles of something like the Geneva Convention. Do we not talk about this because we fear being labeled racists?
I suppose your use of that poster is intended to suggest that dropping the Bomb on them was an inevitability of our racism rather than a calculation of war. I suggest if that's your intention, then you haven't done enough work on the realities of the period.
Let me recommend a few books for you. To begin with, you have to start before the war was officially declared. So, "The Dark Valley" by Piers Brendon. I would also recommend Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking."
Dealing directly with Japanese POW policy and the experiences of allied soldiers, "Conduct Under Fire" by John A. Glusman and "Surviving the Sword: Prisoners of the Japanese in the Far East, 1942-1945" by Brian MacArthur.
For an excellent overview, "A World At Arms" by Gerhard L. Weinberg.
Was our propaganda campaign during WWII racist? Yes, it was, and our treatment of American Japanese was unforgivable. Does this in any way mitigate the fact that the Japanese military junta was an evil, destructive, malign creature that needed killing? Not at all.
Did President Truman believe his decision to drop the atomic bombs was a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy?
Truman wrote about the atomic bomb, “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.”
What did President Truman think of the Japanese people? Did you think Truman's demonization of the Japanese helped guide his decision, or soothe his conscience?
'Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.'
~Truman quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman (New York: Harper and Row, 1980) pp. 55-56. Truman's writings are in the public domain.
Please, Mark, please tell me you're not serious. Please tell me you're being disingenuous.
Harry Truman wrote these words in his own diary:
'The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. …
The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DP as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog.'
Anti-Semitic statements, or not? I'll just float this out to the DI jury pool.
And yet he backed the creation of Israel when most of the rest of the world thought it was illegal, immoral, and stupid.
And again, one word: Palestine.
You have to ask if he was talking about them as a racial entity or a political/cultural entity, which is what I mean about the abuse of P.C.
But by all means, let the DI jury weigh in.
Mike M writes:—"What did President Truman think of the Japanese people? Did you think Truman’s demonization of the Japanese helped guide his decision, or soothe his conscience?"
His demonization? That poster you linked to was replaced in 1944, which puts it under Roosevelt. There were earlier examples. It was Roosevelt who signed the order for the detention of the California and Hawaiian Japanese Americans.
If you are going to make moral judgments about those times and actions, you don't get to single out anyone—the country, by and large, was that way and the entire administration was geared toward defeating the Japanese and Germans.
You don't have to approve in order to understand the psychology involved.
I return, though, to your "imaginary" deaths. It's arguable that Roosevelt would not have dropped the Bomb. Had he lived, those million plus casualties likely would have occurred during the invasion of the Homeland. The question afterward might then have been "We had a weapon that could've stopped the war with less than a fifth of those casualties. Why didn't we use it?" But then, I suppose, we'd be talkign about "imaginary" survivors.
Mike, let me ask you something. Do actions serve to justify the approbation or opprobrium of history? You seem to think so with regards to Truman and the atomic bomb. Does it work both ways? Did the actions of the Japanese before and during the war deserve a negative judgment of history or are you just picking on Truman because his actions don't conform to your ideal of moral judgment?
I wrote:—"hat poster you linked to was replaced in 1944"
I meant released, not replaced. Frakkin' typoes.
Mark, 'The Dark Valley' sounds like an excellent primer – I'll start with that one. Big Mutha, though, looks like a heavyweight in more ways than one. Funny too, when I scouted this out on amazon.com the book listed right below it was this biography: "Dark Valley Destiny: The Life of Robert E. Howard" by L. Sprague de Camp. As a young pre-adolescent I cut my literary teeth on the Conan books..read 'em all one after the other.
I'll let you know what I thought of 'Dark Valley' (the Brendon one) after I finish it.
Mark asks, "His demonization? That poster you linked to…"
I wasn't referring to that poster specifically, but rather this diary entry in which Truman calls the Japs savages:
‘Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop that terrible bomb on the old capital or the new.’
Mark writes, "I return, though, to your “imaginary” deaths. It’s arguable that Roosevelt would not have dropped the Bomb. Had he lived, those million plus casualties likely would have occurred during the invasion of the Homeland. The question afterward might then have been “We had a weapon that could’ve stopped the war with less than a fifth of those casualties. Why didn’t we use it?” But then, I suppose, we’d be talkign about “imaginary” survivors.
Yep, sorry Mark -that's all conjecture and "best guesses". Many "what if's" and leaps of presumption there. But I think I do understand the point you're making.
You say, "If you are going to make moral judgments about those times and actions, you don’t get to single out anyone—the country, by and large, was that way and the entire administration was geared toward defeating the Japanese and Germans. You don’t have to approve in order to understand the psychology involved."
I agree 100% here. Absolutely with you on this point.
You ask, "Does it work both ways? Did the actions of the Japanese before and during the war deserve a negative judgment of history or are you just picking on Truman because his actions don’t conform to your ideal of moral judgment?"
My reply would be Yes, Yes and Yes. For sure I'm picking on Truman, but Hitler, the Japanese Imperial forces, Hirohito, Stalin, Churchill, etc are subject to the same scritiny and moral microscope (and yes, judgement) for their wartime acts. No one gets a free pass here. I just didn't want to compose "The Dark Valley II" here on DI. Space restrictions, you know.
(ps – did you try my 'red-hot incinerator' hypothetical thought exercise? It has value I think. Seems to open up some neural receptors which may tend to get dusty from neglect).
Mike M. writes:—"Yep, sorry Mark -that’s all conjecture and “best guesses”."
Hmm. So to bring it to a more personal level, going back to my scenario with the madman and your family. Assume that he is threatening to kill them and you, because you can, shoot him first. Kill him.
Are you then guilty of first degree murder with no possible mitigating circumstances? Because, after all, he hadn't actually killed your family, that was only conjecture that he might. You really didn't have any grounds for your action.
Yeah, the incinerator game is an old one, been there. It side-steps a lot of the context of the problem, plus you put me in that position of trying to make a moral argument for war, which I said I wouldn't do. There is no moral justification for war. War is a great big ugly million car pile up on a freeway no one can get off of. The only action that matters is that which brings it to a halt as soon as possible, because the one guarantee—which we should have learned by now—is that the longer it goes on, the more people will die. Is that concrete enough? Not imaginary deaths, but guaranteed deaths the longer the conflict continues. It is one of those circumstances in which correct action has little moral justification other than the end game of ending it. It is, as they like to say in the military, a clusterfuck and when you start throwing around accusations of moral turpitude it gets very dicey. Yes, there are circumstances in which a case can be made that a crime has been committed, but the components of that accusation are difficult. The killing of surrendered soldiers and civilians, certainly—which is why My Lai was prosecutable and why we tried the Nazis. But between active combatant populations, it's far from clear-cut. I objected to you singling Truman out at the starting point of a new "dark age" because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Surely the dark age began long before that with the decimation of Poland by Hitler, the slaughter of 11,000,000 people in his death camps, the slaughter and enslavement of Chinese and Korean populations by the Japanese, and so on. Truman's actions ended the war. Bandy semantics all you like, but without that, the war would have continued and more deaths would have occurred, because that's what happens in war.
I'm starting to repeat myself. I've said my say.
Yeah, "The Dark Valley" is a big muthah, but fortunately Mr. Brendon is an excellent writer and it reads very smoothly. He covers a tremendous amount of ground in it and really brings out just how screwed up the whole world was in the 1930s.
I wonder where the demonization of Truman – socialist to mass murderer to anti-Semite – will take us next.
Hey Jim- Harry Truman managed to demonize himself, all on his own, with his very own words and deeds. I simply shined the flashlight on 'em.
But I owe you some real and hard answers to your previous questions. I'm working on it. Stay tuned.
Jim,
Here's what some military experts had to say about "the necessity" to drop the atomic bombs in order "to save American lives."
I hope these two men qualify as credible military sources under your strict requirements.
1. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force
Eisenhower also went public with a statement about the Hiroshima decision. Recalling the 1945 moment when Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson informed him the atomic bomb would be used against Japanese cities, Eisenhower stated:
"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, attempting to surrender with a minimum loss of "face". . . ."
2. Admiral William D. Leahy, five-star Admiral, US Joint Chiefs of Staff
Admiral William D. Leahy went public with the following statement:
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender . . .
Leahy was not what one might call a typical critic of American policy. Not only had the five-star Admiral presided over the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff (and, too, the Combined American-British Chiefs of Staff), but he had simultaneously been Chief of Staff to the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy, serving Roosevelt in that capacity from 1942 to 1945 and Truman from 1945 to 1949. Moreover, he was a good friend of Truman's and the two men respected and liked each other; his public criticism of the Hiroshima decision was hardly personal.
Something clearly had caused Leahy and Eisenhower to break the unwritten rule that requires high officials to maintain a discreet silence in connection with controversial matters about which they have special knowledge.
But Leahy and Eisenhower were not the only military figures who broke the rule. And less than a year after the bombings an extensive official study by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey also published its conclusion that Japan would have surrendered in 1945 without atomic bombing, without a Soviet declaration of war and without an American invasion.
Excerpted from:
The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb
by Gar Alperovitz
http://www.ncesa.org/html/atombomb.html