"Last Train from Hiroshima" author says he was duped
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Some people in my neighborhood are going to get dragged over the coals tomorrow morning (again) for the first five words of this quote.
However! This kind of coinage dates quickly. In 2000-2001, people started using "Nasdaqed" as a verb for "dropped precipitously." (http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2002/msg00256....). It died after a while, even though the Nasdaq is still below where it was when people started using the term.
I often hear that, regardless of whether or not I agree with any particular war, the world needs more men willing to "stand up for freedom". I think the world needs less men who are willing to kill just because someone else told them it was for freedom.
There are rather a lot of Chinese and Koreans who are alive today because we ended that regime as quickly and decisively as we could. Granted, we did that mostly to save the lives of our own people and so we wouldn't have to do it again, but that doesn't diminish the overall set of benefits.
Didn't we keep supplying oil (something like 70-80%) and steel to Japan throughout the first half of their China campaign?
What point are you trying to make?
"We" aren't a dictatorship, "we" don't turn on a dime and immediately decide to destroy another country. "We" tend to try diplomacy first, "we" had to learn that lessor measures wouldn't work (e.g. the Flying Tigers) and that Japan's behavior towards adversaries had changed since WWI or perhaps was different than it had been with Western ones (e.g. Russia), "we" also included the U.K. and Netherlands (other majors sources of steel and oil).
You're trying to create a moral equivalency that I can't quite figure out this early in the morning but that doesn't make any sense to me, so for now I'll just point out that you want perfection, you're not going to find it in international diplomacy and war.
ADDED: Ah, are you trying to say that because our behavior prior to the war was imperfect, we didn't then have the moral standing to end it in a way that ensured we would be able to make sure it didn't continue in due course, as with WWI -> WII?
FURTHER ADDED: Also remember that at the time we the US were responsible for the defense and general well being of the Philippines and that the costs of any war our action provoked with the regional power would inevitably fall more heavily on its inhabitants.
Our reaction to Imperial Japan's aggression was necessarily not a simple thing.
You might even say full, unabashed praise of it isn't possible without several caveats, while still praising it on the whole.
It was only after the war that the American public learned about Japan's efforts to bring the conflict to an end. Chicago Tribune reporter Walter Trohan, for example, was obliged by wartime censorship to withhold for seven months one of the most important stories of the war.
In an article that finally appeared August 19, 1945, on the front pages of the Chicago Tribune and the Washington Times-Herald, Trohan revealed that on January 20, 1945, two days prior to his departure for the Yalta meeting with Stalin and Churchill, President Roosevelt received a 40-page memorandum from General Douglas MacArthur outlining five separate surrender overtures from high-level Japanese officials. (The complete text of Trohan's article is in the Winter 1985-86 Journal, pp. 508-512.)
This memo showed that the Japanese were offering surrender terms virtually identical to the ones ultimately accepted by the Americans at the formal surrender ceremony on September 2 -- that is, complete surrender of everything but the person of the Emperor. Specifically, the terms of these peace overtures included:
* Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
* Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
* Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea and Taiwan.
* Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war.
* Release of all prisoners of war and internees.
* Surrender of designated war criminals.
The authenticity of the Trohan article was never challenged by the White House or the State Department, and for very good reason. After General MacArthur returned from Korea in 1951, his neighbor in the Waldorf Towers, former President Herbert Hoover, took the Trohan article to General MacArthur and the latter confirmed its accuracy in every detail and without qualification.*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombings...
I've never had anything but respect for such men.
Ah, Bartleby.