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Posts Tagged ‘Hiroshima’
August 11th, 2010 at 7:39 pm
An Encore for Obama’s Apology Tour
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Last week, CFIF’s Timothy Lee did a terrific job laying out the justification for President Harry Truman’s decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 65 years ago this month to bring about the end of World War II.

As I mentioned in this space during President Obama’s visit to Japan back in November, the President doesn’t seem to appreciate the significance of that historical moment. At the time of his Asia trip, Obama was unwilling to close the door on attending an anniversary ceremony to commemorate the bombings — something no previous American president had even considered.

While we can be thankful that Obama himself didn’t make the trip (Michelle probably couldn’t get a connecting flight from Spain), the U.S. Ambassador to Japan, John Roos, is attending as a member of the official delegation — another unprecedented display of undue deference. Translation: same groveling, less press stateside.

Writing in the Korea Times, former Scripps Howard editor Dan Thomasson gives blistering rebuke:

The military-industrial complex that brutalized much of Asia for more than a decade, killing millions, had loosed the furies that in the end brought about the horror that was visited on these two cities and their residents. The dead and dying there were victims of their own government, not the United States.

No matter what revisionists would have us believe, without that ultimate retribution, America and its allies faced the loss of up to a million men and women in the invasion of the Japanese home islands where the fanatical leaders were prepared for whatever it took to resist, including the immediate murder of prisoners of war. President Harry Truman had little choice other than to give the order that ultimately would change the world and its balance of power.

There might have been some justification for the appearance of an American official at these ceremonies had there ever been such an official presence from the Japanese at any Pearl Harbor memorial or any admission of guilt in the horrendous atrocities committed on the Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and Burmese.

The mass beheadings and rapes at Nanking are only one small example. As far as I know, no official Japanese wreath has been laid at the tomb of the U.S.S. Arizona where American sailors rest, true victims one and all.

It’s bad enough that the president is abandoning American greatness in the here and now. But it’s entirely intolerable for him to dishonor the memories of those who have secured it in the past.

August 6th, 2010 at 10:18 am
On This Date: Atomic Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima, Japan
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“He who controls the past controls the future.” ~George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Sixty-five years ago today, the B-29 Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.  That decision was a no-brainer.  After four years of wretched, filthy, excruciating, scorched hellhole-by-hellhole Pacific warfare vividly portrayed by HBO’s recent series The Pacific, American leaders preparing to invade Japan expected one million U.S. casualties, not to mention two million Japanese deaths.  Apparently, however, that is of little import to contemporary historical revisionists.  Pontificating from the comfort of their armchairs and coffeehouses, they sanctimoniously second-guess President Truman’s decision and imply a false moral equivalency between the Japanese and American war efforts.  Imagine the misery of Iwo Jima multiplied by forty (we suffered 25,000 casualties at Iwo Jima), because that’s what such sophists suggest as the more humane alternative.

The facts simply do not support the revisionists’ self-righteous argument.  First of all, conventional bombing of Japanese cities killed over twice as many as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.  Would revisionists prefer that instead of ending the war more quickly with the atomic bombs, we should have burned Japan to the ground city-by-city, causing even more Japanese deaths?  Second, revisionists are wrong to say that Truman could have brought surrender by “demonstrating” a nuclear explosion on some deserted island.  After all, the Japanese didn’t surrender even after one bomb had incinerated Hiroshima.  They required a second at Nagasaki.  Third, would revisionists have been happier with a drawn-out blockade of Japan?  How many people would that have slowly starved to death?  How many American airmen, soldiers, sailors and Marines would have died through Japanese naval, air and ground attacks in that interim?  Fourth, as referenced above, do revisionists contend that an inch-by-inch invasion would have been preferable?  Not only would that have cost millions of American and Japanese lives, but it would have left Japan nothing more than a heap of dust.

This debate is about more than historical trivia.  In seeking to rewrite history, as Orwell suggested, revisionists encourage a future where a nation attacked refrains from vigorously defending itself and its ideals.  That, in turn, facilitates tyranny.  In the name of those who gave their lives in defending this nation, and in the name of future generations, our current generation cannot allow that to happen.