Pessimist, you're behaving like a child. A child caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
We'll leave commentary on the labored sarcasm and personal attacks alone below, even though they comprise the majority of your response, because they tend to prove, if anything, that you're not only wrong, you KNOW you're wrong.
I share a membership with many persons of distinction who opposed the usage of nuclear weapons then as I do today!
Arguments neither gain nor lose credibility by who makes them. If the "persons of distinction" are talking nonsense, then all their "distinction" is in vain.
That doesn't sound to me like Ike was ready to use the bomb on Hitler at all.
You haven't presented any evidence of what Eisenhower would have done in Europe at all. You have shown that in a situation where he was completely out of the loop, with no influence on the decision, he was willing to express a polite dissent. If this piece of evidence were pointing in the opposite direction, you'd be saying it was simply Ike engaging in CYA.
And if Eisenhower was so allergic to atomic bombs, he must have had a truly interesting time as President and Commander in Chief when he oversaw, among other things, the addition of deliverable hydrogen bombs to the American nuclear arsenal. He went along with that, when he could have suspended or cancelled the program. What seems evident is that Ike had a good idea of how he wished to appear before history, and an excellent cosmetic sense. Smedely Butler he wasn't.
Now, the racism angle. Your reply there was utterly irrelevant to the remarks made. What does the internment of Japanese have to do with whether racism affected the decision to drop the bomb? It remains unarguable that the bomb was conceived to be dropped on white people, developed to be dropped on white people, and intended to be dropped on white people. It is also unarguable that the chief proposed target of atomic and hydrogen weapons for all the years of the Cold War was the USSR, a nation of... white people.
And what do the opinions of Eisenhower and Leahy have to do with racism? We might better say that in effect, if not in intention, THEY were the ones that wanted to wipe out the Japanese race by blockade, starvation, and disease.
You might also be careful about using the Dresden figures too uncritically, lest you wind up in bed with David Irving. He appears to have added about 100,000 to the true death toll, largely so that he could use the deaths in the raid to denigrate the Holocaust.
And frankly, your attempt to equalize the food shortages that occured in Japan immediately after the war with the famines that would have resulted from another six months or year of blockade is ridiculous. Remember that some of us know people who were living in Japan at that time. It wasn't fun, but it wasn't Biafra either. It was NOTHING like the way it would have been in the winter of 1945 in an unsurrendered Japan. Why do you lie when you can so easily be caught?
And you are unprepared to do anything....
Frankly, what you're doing is pissing in the well. I hope none of the freepers sees your rant, because despite their limited intellectual capacities, they'll shoot it to ribbons. Why give them cheap victories they don't deserve?
Keep arguing this way, with this sloppy dishonesty, and you may get bunker-buster nukes built all by yourself.
Posted by sagesource at August 6, 2005 09:28 PMPessimist has to be on crank. It's OK, dude, you'll come down in a few days.
Posted by sf at August 6, 2005 11:09 PMGee, Pessimist. Your description of post-war Japan makes it look 100x worse than today's post-war Iraq. And looked how the Japanese turned it around once they let Freedom reign.
Thanks for the update.
Posted by muckdog at August 7, 2005 12:00 AMi spent most of my life believing truman did the right thing...now i am not so sure
the bomb was dropped on civilians..women and children..japan was a defeated nation....certainly the inhabitants of hiroshima and nagasaki..were no threat to us...was it absolutely necessary?..i think not
Posted by dennis at August 7, 2005 03:52 AMDennis, me too.
Posted by Judith at August 7, 2005 06:32 AMI'm not really on one side or the other with this A-bomb issue since I find it to be irrelevant in the end; I'm no professor of ethics or war, and I lack the patience and energy to look up quotes and statistics that support the conclusion I've already decided on, but the one thing that keeps me leaning in favor of its usage is that it was a new weapon. Just a weapon. Nuclear weapons today have evolved beyond mere weapons to something illusory and downright sadistic, probably because of the mentality we gained during the Cold War, that we could all vaporize in an instant. Back in 1945, that wasn't a concern: It was a bomb. A big bomb, to be sure, one which, during development, was feared to start a chain reaction that would swallow up the planet, but in the end, just a bomb. A tool to be used. The mentality of "it's a bomb; it's meant to blow up" was probably there. Yes, it required an executive decision to, but I would think all new weapons need that so the finger-pointing when it screwed up would be much more efficient and easier.
And remember that terrorism to one is freedom fighting to another. The colonists fighting off the British used terror. Several armies in history have used terror. It's a legitimate tactic designed to attack enemy morale, reducing their effectiveness and willingness to fight, hopefully making the war shorter. Now, targetting civi's in order to influence government decisions (which is the more common definition of terrorism) is wrong.
...except that's what we did. But then, weapon use is permissible in war, but that would...
...
I think I just tied up my brain in a knot. On the fence I shall remain.
Posted by DukeRevolution at August 7, 2005 06:35 AMSomething in the post quoting the Catholic priest triggered this thought:
Pro-War = Anti-Christ
Posted by Sharon at August 7, 2005 06:44 AMWow, pess - you really got everyone worked up in a fit, didntcha?
The good news is that at least for the most part, it was a coherent fit, and it we got later read some exteremely high-quality posts from your blog-mates. Which make it a nice change from the last few weeks. The trolling has gotten so bad that I've given serious thought to quit reading Left Coaster.
These discussions are a good thing. Because I've become convinced that a day will come that someone will use a moderate-yield nuclear weapon again, and will try to justify it. America is at the top of that list, particularly while this Republican administration remains in power.
(Keep in mind low-yield in this case is a weapon with a yield of less than 5 kiloton, (Spratt-Furse) & moderate is a yield 5-20 kilotons , or roughly eqivalent to both 1945 bombs.)
Posted by idiosynchronic at August 7, 2005 07:29 AMWere those in America of German or Italian descent interned during WWII? No - only the Asians from all over the Americas - North and South.
Pez, you're off-track. Better fix this one before you get completely derailed.
Germans and Italians had been interned durinf WWII. It was not as widespread and not as obvious as that of the Japanese, and only went to the most immediate immigrant generation. There has been a number of books on the subject. One I own is Una Storia Segreta : The Secret History of Italian American Evacuation and Internment During World War II, which was an outgrowth of Lawrence diStasi's similarly named project at Santa Cruz. But I've seen at least a half-dozen books on the subject at a local Barnes&Noble and Borders.
One interesting point to make is that the Brits also tried to round up German and Italian citizens early in the war. But the quickly realized that most of the people they were getting were recent refugees from the Nazi and Fascisti regimes, including quite a number of Jews. The project was immediately stopped and everyone was released. As a result, they specifically advised Roosevelt against this practice, but to no avail. Well, not quite--the internment project was scaled back significantly from its earliest plans. The book above is quite good, but is not the only word on the subject. Someone even made a list on the subject on Amazon. There is even a mystery novel, Killer Smile, that focuses on the subject--it just came out in paperback.
Posted by buck turgidson at August 7, 2005 07:58 AMI'm really really really glad pessimist only speaks for .001% of this Country. Wow! What a freak!
Posted by at August 7, 2005 08:34 AM