Everything happens for a reason and Dec. 7th 1941 did not happen as a result of America just happily and ignorantly minding its own business as a nation with an isolationist trade driven foreign policy. Pearl Harbor was the culmination of 20 years of diplomatic sabotage and military sabre rattling and economic embargo. This poisoning of what had been a prosperous and peaceful relationship...even a friendly relationship with Japan started under the anglophile Wilson administration and war was not a consequence but the goal of our policy with Japan. The FDR administration was spoling for a war with Japan and prodded and provoked them into war because at the time it was not possible to start a war with Japan and look like the good guy....that was....until Pearl Harbor.
Quote:9. It is not believed that in the present state of political opinion the United States government is capable of declaring war against Japan without more ado; and it is barely possible that vigorous action on our part might lead the Japanese to modify their attitude. Therefore, the following course of action is suggested:
A. Make an arrangement with Britain for the use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies.
C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang-Kai-Shek.
D. Send a division of long range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
F. Keep the main strength of the U.S. fleet now in the Pacific in the vicinity of the Hawaiian Islands.
G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
H. Completely embargo all U.S. trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.
10. If by these means Japan could be led to commit an overt act of war, so much the better. At all events we must be fully prepared to accept the threat of war.
- H. McCollum (this is the McCollum Memo)
We love to talk about the atrocities committed by Japanese empire in Asia....but how soon we forget about our own imperial designs and the ensuing abuses and butchery that happened in China and during the Philippine "pacification". What does it matter to people if you are a foreign power slaughtering them on their own soil if you are doing it for that vaunted god named democracy or if you are doing it for empire? And after the war...the war that we had fought to save the world from axis imperial aggression....what did we do? Handed over 700,000,000 captive people over to Communism with a handshake and a smile.....these peoples fates were sealed before the war was even over....their lives and in many cases deaths were decided beween 3 men at Tehran and Yalta. The lend lease act that was continued long after Germany was all but defeated allowed Russia to march into the baltic states and central Europe with American equiptment.
And then of course there is Vietnam....what utter and blatant hypocrisy. We fought the war to free asia from Japanese imperial aggression.....and then what....to support French imperialism?....oh I guess it is ok as long as the aggressors have white skin and round eyes. And talk about a people that had been abused by colonialism...then lets talk about the Vietnamese....but I dgress.
Lets go back to WW2. The war was not a humanitarian mission. We did not enter it to save Jews or Chinese. We entered it because we had an anglophile government that also happened to be full of stalin admiring communists.....including FDR. I would think the New Deal would be a big enough tip off that FDR was indeed an authoritarian collectivist....who admired and at the same time was envious of the power Stalin wielded.
We freed the Chinese from Japanese aggression only to all but ensure that the CCP under Mao would take over and slaughter 70,000,000-80,000,000 Chinese.
And how did we help the children of Yisra'el? ohh....by watching as the British chased refugee ships headed for the Palestinian mandate out to sea to be sunk by u-boats (even with all the diplomatic clout that we had accrued through war loans and lend lease), to refuse to set up refugee camps for the jews in North Africa, and give our support to the french colonialist and islamic regimes in North Africa as they dealt with their own jewish popluations...much in line with what the nazis had been perpetrating. We also of course refused to bomb the extermination camps and the railways that led to them. To put a stranglehold on the quotas for immigration and indeed targeting jewish immigrants...radically reducing the number allowed to enter to a rate drastically below pre-war levels. And this attitude was all preceded of course by the refusal to accept 900 jews aboard the St. Louis in 1939.
Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of the Jews, Treasury Department, January 13, 1944: [FDR was] "guilty not only of gross procrastination and willful failure to act, but even of willful attempts to prevent action from being taken to rescue Jews from Hitler."
Yes....we saved the world from German fascism and Japanese imperialism (while of course allowing the nazis to kill as many Jews as possible in the process) so we could hand it over in deliberate and intentional manner to the Communists.
And then lets talk about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So....Japan bombing a universally accepted and recognized military instalation and killing less than 3000 people including 68 civillians equates to destroying 2 cities filled with innocent men, women and children? And let us not forget the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civillians that had died before these bombings...like the roughly 100,000 that died in the firebombing of Tokyo. So we as a supposedly moral nation make a cost benefit analysis where we say that men in uniform brandishing the weapons of war (non innocents) are more important than mothers, children, babies, grandparents and other innocents?....I don't see how that is possible. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not vital industrial military targets....the reason they were picked for this demonstration was because they were infact relatively unscathed due to their relative unimportance. It would be a big show to light up these cities. Furthermore, the industrial center of Hiroshima was located at the outskirts of the city and was relatively (when the rest of the city is considered) unharmed. We dropped that bomb smack dab in the center of the city to cause as much carnage and death as humanly possible. We killed infants, pregnant mothers, young children and their parents, teenagers in the flower of youth, grandmothers, grandfathers, bank tellers, fish mongers, green grocers, peddlers, laborers, travellers, the infirm....and on and on and on. We killed them without mercy and with malice aforethought. We did it out of mercy to the Japanese nation? Where was the mercy at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? We were merciful by murder? I want no part in that kind of mercy. Yes, we all know about the horrors that Japan perpetrated not only on their captive asian populations in China, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines.....etc etc....and what they did to American POWs.. But those people in those cities did not do it. They were not there and the only thing that can be said is that they were beguiled by government propaganda and shamed and persuaded into an unhealthy attitude of patriotism. Yes, they sent their sons to Pearl Harbor, China, Singapore......and on and on.....just like we sent our youth to the slaughter the native americans in the 2 centuries prior, to the Philippines 40 years prior, just like we had sent them to China 20 years prior....just like we sent them to Dresden and Tokyo....and Hiroshima and Nagasaki....and then to Korea and Vietnam....and Afghanistan and Iraq...meddling everywhere and establishing an empire of influence and hegemony. America has been called Babylon among other things...and there is no doubt there is a fair comparisson. But this nation....this Terrorist nation we live in is Assyria....a warrior worshipping...military industrial complex of a nation...where warfare has become a passtime to ward off boredom. we are in the time to come headed for a date with justice and we will have earned it for all we have done, all we do, and what we will do to this world.
But then again perhaps that is not fair to Assyria....they repented with lamentation and sackcloth and ashes and stayed their destruction for 100 years when YHWH sent a prophet to them. We as a nation would berate them, embarrass them, call them insane or dangerous, discredit them, mock them, and then ignore them....and then keep on singing God bless America....with the blasts of bombs and artillery and the staccato of machine guns being the percussion to our favorite song. But then again we do what we do out of compassion and spread democracy and human rights.....right? We don't fight wars for cynical reasons like profit or empire....right?
We used bombs that went boom in a flash and killed more than 220,000 in an instant....and killed tens of thousands more in the ensuing weeks, months and years. What if we hadn't used the bombs. What if we could have ended the war by dropping some sort of magical people bomb....when the bomb drops 100 thousand soldiers emerge from the explosion to shoot, bayonet and burn the populace of a city. To massacre them face to face....ripping infants out of mothers arms to toss them into fires or smash their brains out baseball bat style against walls and tree trunks, ripping open pregnant women, throwing families off the high places to be dashed against the rocks or the pavement, stabbing old men, beheading children, shooting pregnant women, machine gunning patients in hospitals....would that have been a moral way to end the war...should we...could we have ended the war that way if we had been forced to exterminate Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that way? When you fight evil with evil....evil triumphs. And there is no doubt in my mind that evil triumphed. And for what? Unconditional surrender? A principle that prolonged the war and increased the death toll. The Japanese were ready to surrentder in May of 1945. They again sent feelers out to Switzerland in June and once again sued for peace in July at Potsdam...all with the simple request if they would be allowed to keep their (figurehead) emperor....we said no...prolonged the war and suffering by several months destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then we let them keep their emperor afterall. Was it To save the lives of 500,000 - 1,000,000 service men (once again sacrificing the innocent for the benefit of the armed)?...complete and utter propaganda. official internal estimates put American deaths much much much lower (and remember once again not one American would have had to lose their life if we had agreed to any of the several requests for peace that the Japanese offered) than the insane propaganda figure mentioned above. Military leaders like Eisenhower and MacArthur deemed the bombing to be completely unneccessary and inhumane....Churchill...no lover of pacifism (actually outright enthralled with war and destruction) even asked Truman to revise the unconditinal surrender demands. Admiral Halsey said it was a toy of scientists that they wanted to try out. He also said it was "unnecessary" and a "mistake" (I take a bit more cynical approach than the Admiral) (the bomb was not about ending the war...it was about establishing dominance)
Admiral Leahy of the chairman of the JCOS told his secretary,
"Dorothy, we will regret this day. The United States will suffer, for war is not to be waged on women and children."
Leahy also urged the president not to drop the bomb and to revise the unconditional surrender policy.
And it goes on....Admiral Ernest J. King "unnecessary and immoral".....Admiral Chester Nimitz stated that Japan had sued for peace before Hiroshima and before Russian entry into the Pacific theater of operations.
But the simple fact of the matter is that Truman ignored his military commanders and listened to his advisors and specifically his secretary of State, James Byrnes. It was a political calculation not an act of military necessity.
Truman made his Potsdam declaration as an ultimatum for Japan to surrender unconditionally once again because he knew they could not and would not accept it. The Japanese wished to retain the emperor as a symbol of continuity and and order because though they were asking for a conditional surrender they knew America had all the cards. The price of peace would be heavy and odious on Japan and it was believed that the emperor was needed to add a measure of stability in a post war Japan. Truman gave the ultimatum because he wanted to bomb Japan because he had something to prove to Russia. The atomic bomb was going to be his "hammer" and he would prove to the Russians that he was not as enamored with Russian dominance as FDR was. Japan was going to be Truman's demonstration ground come hell or high water.
After Japan was bombed we can only conclude that the unconditional surrender ultimatum (as a cynical political maneuver) had served its purpose and the Japanese were allowed to retain emperor Hirohito....just as they had asked all along.
And now here we are all these years later...having been the only nation ever to use Atomic weapons in the history of the world....up on our throne of hypocrisy judging who should and who should not have a nuclear weapon. The unrestrained preaching restraint. The murderer demanding that that its would be victims have no apparatus of self defense. I hate the Iranian government and I hate Iranian theocracy....I understand just as well as anyone else in this community how dangerous Islam is. But what standing do we have in this world to criticize anyone when it comes to war, aggression, and nuclear weapons. We spent our moral high ground a long long time ago.
And that is why I hate this government I live under and those who rule me. Because they have put me in a position where I actually see where Iran is coming from ( a position I hate to be in....because I also understand that this moral bankrupcy on our part muddies the water and will ultimately lead to immense suffering)...it is always said that muslims only understand strength....are we any different? I think North Korea and Libya illustrate that point very well. With NK this government falls all over itself and begs for peace talks and diplomacy....we stop humanitarian aid...they sabre rattle...we resume afore mentioned aid. With Libya...Qaddafi gave us everything. He quit his WMD program, he reopens diplomatic relations, he gives reparations to the families of the Lockerbie bombing.....and then we kill him....and slaughter those that don't want to live under islamic fundamentalism...what sort of message does this perversion send to the rest of the world? Islam and America.....we deserve each other.
So no...at this point I have not one patriotic bone in my body. I will not be voting in the coming elections.....considering that the people I reluctantly voted for that promised to restore freedom have voted for the NDAA and will be using military drones on the American citizenry.....I figure I have accrued enough vicarious guilt in one lifetime.