{"id":6444,"date":"2010-08-06T10:18:46","date_gmt":"2010-08-06T14:18:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=6444"},"modified":"2010-08-06T10:23:51","modified_gmt":"2010-08-06T14:23:51","slug":"on-this-date-atomic-bomb-dropped-on-hiroshima-japan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/6444\/on-this-date-atomic-bomb-dropped-on-hiroshima-japan\/","title":{"rendered":"On This Date: Atomic Bomb Dropped on Hiroshima, Japan"},"content":{"rendered":"

“He who controls the past controls the future.”<\/em> ~George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four<\/em><\/p>\n

Sixty-five years ago today, the B-29 Enola Gay<\/em> dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.\u00a0 That decision was a no-brainer.\u00a0 After four years of wretched, filthy, excruciating, scorched hellhole-by-hellhole Pacific warfare vividly portrayed by HBO’s recent series The Pacific<\/em><\/a>, American leaders preparing to invade Japan expected one million U.S. casualties, not to mention two million Japanese deaths.\u00a0 Apparently, however, that is of little import to contemporary historical revisionists<\/a>.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The facts simply do not support the revisionists’ self-righteous argument.\u00a0 First of all, conventional bombing of Japanese cities killed over twice as many<\/a> as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 Second, revisionists are wrong to say that Truman could have brought surrender by “demonstrating” a nuclear explosion on some deserted island.\u00a0 After all, the Japanese didn’t surrender even after one bomb had incinerated Hiroshima.\u00a0 They required a second at Nagasaki.\u00a0 Third, would revisionists have been happier with a drawn-out blockade of Japan?\u00a0 How many people would that have slowly starved to death?\u00a0 How many American airmen, soldiers, sailors and Marines would have died through Japanese naval, air and ground attacks in that interim?\u00a0 Fourth, as referenced above, do revisionists contend that an inch-by-inch invasion would have been preferable?\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

This debate is about more than historical trivia.\u00a0 In seeking to rewrite history, as Orwell suggested, revisionists encourage a future where a nation attacked refrains from vigorously defending itself and its ideals.\u00a0 That, in turn, facilitates tyranny.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“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.\u00a0 That decision was a no-brainer.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1667,1665,1671,1300,1666,1670,1669,1668],"class_list":["post-6444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-atomic-bomb","tag-hiroshima","tag-iwo-jima","tag-japan","tag-nagasaki","tag-pacific","tag-truman","tag-world-war-ii"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6444"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6444\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6448,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6444\/revisions\/6448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}