Pachipro,
I'm going to preamble this with the statement that I respect you a lot. And I agree that this is a generation of kids raised on soundbites and more interested in anime and pop idols.
I will also state that I am a historian and have studied World War II and many other periods of history. I have been, until recently, knee-deep in the American academic liberal arts world. With that being said, I will now tackle some of your statements.
Firstly:
Pachipro said:
I guess everything I have read and researched about conspiracies and the control of the committee of "they" and the power they have to change public opinion and education is true as no one even mentioned it, not only on this site but a few others concerning Japan that I also visit.
As I said, I have spent a great deal of time in academia--indeed, I have made it my life. The historical community is quite politically liberal. Such voices as Howard Zinn's scathing
A People's History of the United States are much more representative of the social sciences than the output of your standard-issue conservative think-tank. Historians have come to consider the atomic bomb as a horrible sin from which the United States will never be redeemed.
Secondly, I believe people have lost perspective on things. Today, we view the war in a different way than they did during the forties. Indeed, for some reason, the war against the Nazis and the bombing of Dresden are overshadowed by Japan's destruction. I would argue that because the Germans were white Europeans and ostensibly Christian, the wholesale slaughter of German civilians by Allied forces (as perpetrated both by Soviets and the British infantry units, as well as by Allied bombing raids) has been ignored, even though more German civilians were killed than Japanese. Indeed, the Japanese slaughtered more Chinese, Koreans, and Manchurians than the Nazis killed Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals. But because they were not white, liberal arts scholars deem their crimes to have been forgettable in the face of American bombing.
The truth is that it was a war. As a historian, I must attempt to, as Thucydides advised, suppress my political ideologies and seek to demonstrate an event's truth. To that end, I try to regard war neutrally. Civilians have always been casualties in war. It's a sad but true fact. And war is an incredible evil. But sometimes, as the ancients understood well, a bad war is better than a worse peace. All of Chamberlain's proclamations of "peace in our time" in the 1930s were rendered moot by Dunkirk.
You can make these moral pontifications about "history written by the victors", but as a historian, I have to emphasize that statement's fallaciousness. There are plenty of accounts by the losers extant, especially in modern history. And, indeed, although Japan lost, their history books are surprisingly bereft of accounts of the atrocities they committed. In contrast, your average American history textbook for high school elaborates atrocities perpetrated by Americans against Natives Americans and the controversies and crimes of the Vietnam War. Indeed, the so-called "winners" have recently begun to delve into the histories of the "losers" and a deep interest in "marginalized factions" has grown in historical study, with the result of a proliferation of information regarding the deeds and accounts of the "defeated," especially if the defeated were literate societies and left records that were preserved despite the outcome of the conflict.
As a result, we have an obvious picture of what precipitated the dropping of the atomic bombs. However, political ideologies obfuscate the truth of the bombings. I want to point you to
Plain Speaking, a biography of Harry Truman, if you want to know why he bombed Japan--to end the war, plain and simple. Maybe the generals, politicians and other leaders had numerous other reasons. Still, the result was the same--a horrific and destructive war was brought to a sudden and decisive conclusion. The U.S. economy was beginning to suffer from the fighting, soldiers were exhausted, and the casualty projections for Operation Olympic were exorbitant. Nobody cared if innocent Japanese civilians were going to die in the bombings, that much is true. They didn't care because they were at war, a
War Without Mercy (cf. book by John Dower), mutually waged by both sides.
Was the bombing evil? Absolutely. Then again, war is evil, and those who fight wars often do whatever it takes to win. I don't think you, nor I, have much of a right to judge whether or not it was
justified, especially since we were not present at Hiroshima or Nagasaki, nor were we present at Nanking, nor were we waiting to be the first off the landing craft at the beaches of Kyushu (a veritable death-sentence).
And as a final note, the old argument that the bombs were dropped to scare the Soviets is specious since it assumes that the Soviets were a joke (as is often assumed these days) and that the entire Cold War was a political farce perpetrated by the likes of Linden Johnson and Ronald Reagan. These assumptions could not be further from the truth. Stalin had made an alliance with Hitler over Poland--an alliance that Hitler foolishly betrayed--proving his untrustworthiness. The Berlin Blockade and subsequent invasions of southeastern European nations prove that the Soviets were aggressive and belligerent and that the "free world" had cause to fear them. They raped and massacred a bloody swathe through Eastern Germany en route to Berlin, and carried their bloodlust to the Japanese in Sakhalin and other territories previously held by the Japanese Imperial government. You are damn right we wanted to scare the Soviets, because it was quite possible that World War III would be fought against them, and very soon after World War II had just ended.
