November 11th 2008
The Lies They Teach: #4 And #5
L
arry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School) is continuing to infuriate me, which is a good thing.
I’m providing quick summaries of the lies, but the book is rich in detail and I strongly suggest you read it.
The title is almost self-explanatory. Let me just add that it is a review of college-level history text books. Here are lies four and five:
Lie #4: Harry Truman ordered the atomic bombing of Japan to intimidate the Soviets with “Atomic Diplomacy.”
Truman agreed with [James] Byrnes that use of the bomb would permit them to “out maneuver [sic] Stalin on China,” that is, negate the Yalta concessions in Manchuria and guarantee that Russia would “not get in som much on the kill” of Japan or its occupation. – Arnold Offner, “Another Such Victory,” 1999
The theory that Pres. Truman used the bomb to intimidate the Soviets instead of conquer Japan is a theory, Schweikart shows, that only an academic could concoct.
The revisionists start by revising the estimates of U.S. war deaths that would occur Operation Olympics by first declaring the stated estimates wildly over-estimated – the “casualty myth,” they call it – then conjuring up their own, lower, estimates based on numerous false assumptions. They also reject actual documents in Japanese and Soviet archives in favor of their own conclusions – even the Japanese deputy chief of staff of the Japanese Army General Staff, who wrote, “There is nothing we can do about the … atomic bomb. That nullifies everything.”
Schweikart didn’t go into it, but I believe this lie is fired by elitist fires. Truman had the misfortune of assuming office, unelected, following the most elite of all elites, FDR. This haberdasher from the Midwest could not be allowed to do anything right, and liberal elite historians have worked hard to miscast him.
Lie #5: John F. Kennedy was killed by LBJ and a secret team to keep him from getting us out of Vietnam.
This is another of the lies Schweikart includes not so much because it is dwelt on in college texts, but because liberal profs, fearful of being called part of the education establishment, frequently let students go to sources beyond the required text books – books like Barr McClellan’s Blood, Money & Power: How L.B.J. Killed J.F.K.
I’m sure I don’t have to re-hash this for C-SM’s audience; suffice it to say that Schweikart presents five different JFK myths and quickly dispatches them all in a flood of big facts and juicy details, including good stuff on Jack’s real position on Vietnam vs. the recasting of that position for the benefit of Bobby.
Previous in this series:
Posted in America, Higher Education, Leftism | 17 Comments » | |
Trackbacks/Pings
Leave a Reply
[The "Comment Box" is WYSIWYG except that you have to double space between paragraphs!
Type it the way you want it to look -- Just remember to double up those line spaces.]
You must be logged in to post a comment.
November 14th, 2008 at 10:19 am
November 20th, 2008 at 7:22 pm
November 21st, 2008 at 8:37 am
Comments
November 11th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
I watched a C-SPAN forum where the topic was the JFK myth and the reality behind it. One of the first audience members to speak brought up Kennedy’s support for Vietnam and he was immediately shot down since Kennedy was definitely going to end Vietnam. There were no supporting statements, just this stated as fact. Even though the forum was stated as moving beyond the myth of JFK, they weren’t going to let it happen.
November 11th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
One of my favorite books is Paul Fussell’s “Thank God for the Atom Bomb.” In it, he explains (and subsequently released historic documents establish) that the main reason for dropping the bomb was to save American lives. By July 1945, it was obvious that Japan would lose the war, but it was equally obvious that the Japanese ethos would not allow surrender, but would force Americans to continue fighting for every foot of soil, as they had all through the Pacific. Truman’s advisors told him that they anticipated that this final fight would see at least another 30,000-40,000 dead American troops. That simply wasn’t a price Truman was willing to pay when, with one or two bombs, he could end the war instantly and save tens of thousands of American lives. End of story.
Except, for me, it was the beginning. Had the war lasted any significant amount of time longer, my mom, who was a prisoner in a Japanese concentration camp in Java, would have died. I’m here because Truman dropped that bomb.
Our modern sensibilities simply cannot comprehend the kind of war that is so intense that days can mean the difference between thousands of lives, nor can we comprehend (or at least soft brained people cannot comprehend) the concept of a true enemy that wants to destroy you — so you have to destroy him first.
November 11th, 2008 at 11:20 pm
Bookworm, I’m glad that your mother was able to survive and thus, for you to be born. But that fact means that you have absolutely no objectivity on the issue whatsoever. There are longstanding military rules of engagement that preclude soldiers and governments from targeting civilians specifically. Members of Truman’s cabinet and the Pentagon, who believed in those rules, pressed the President, Admiral Nimitz and others to drop the first atomic bomb in the harbor so as to demonstrate its power without killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. The powers that be at the time refused. Who knows exactly why. Perhaps because they wanted to minimize US casualties by ending the war faster by maximizing the demoralizing impact of the bombing. Perhaps to prevent the Soviets from splitting Japan with the Allies, as had happened in Germany. Indeed, the argument against “Liberal Lies” assumes a false dichotomy between these two objectives that isn’t really there: a quick victory would not merely avoid US casualties, which most any competent historian or military expert would have put in the tens of thousands assuming conventional warfare, but also would have ensured surrender before the Russians could amass an army on its eastern front. Truman himself never thought twice about dropping the bombs on Japan, noting that he slept well having given the order, and having stated publicly that “[dropping] the atom bomb was no ‘great decision.’… It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness.” Yet it can also be viewed as an example of mass terrorism, since it employed weapons of mass destruction employed to achieve political ends by striking fear into the hearts of an enemy. And it certainly violated those long-standing rules of engagement that were violated by Nazi bombings of civilians in London (Blitzkrieg) and the Allies’ utter destruction of Dresden, which was not a military or infrastructure target. The collateral damage of those cities pales in comparison to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, given the number of casualties from the blast (not to mention the cancers still occurring to this day). Unless you subscribe to the “might makes right” or “our side is always right” theories of war, it is hard to justify killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians to avoid the losses of tens of thousands of soldiers. Just war theory and military codes of engagement certainly preclude such an instrumental view of civilian casualties. Importantly, it is hardly settled historical fact that the Japanese would not have surrendered quickly without the two bombs or the mass invasion. It is a fact that the Japanese had already sued for peace in July 1945, but they would not accept a surrender that required them to renounce their emperor–a deified figure as important to them as Jesus is to most Americans. What might have been avoided if the US had acquiesced on this issue? How many Americans would agree to renouncing God or Jesus to avoid total destruction? How would we view an victorious enemy that required that of us? This statement regarding destroying “true” enemies (whoever they are) before they destroy you is puzzling to me because it really doesn’t say what the right strategy was for ending the war; the Japanese by the late stages of the war was no longer a threat to the US, so what level of destruction was appropriate? Bookworm offers no answer other than absolute destruction. Maybe we should have killed every last man, woman and child in Japan to ensure that they would never emerge as a threat. Perhaps that would satisfy her statement, but I think the right answer is a bit more nuanced than that–my soft brain notwithstanding. And I wonder how our potential enemies process the fact that the US remains the only country to have deployed atomic/nuclear weapons against another country. Somehow, that probably cannot abate their desire to renounce such weapons themselves as a deterrent against their enemies, which may or may not include the US. Just a final note: my wife’s aunt recently died of cancer that she has battled for some time now, and which her oncologist, GP and many friends and relatives believe she received as a three-year old living in Osaka when the bombs went off in nearby Hiroshima and Nagasaki; my wife’s aunt was never able to conceive children because of her illness and died at a far younger age than all of her relatives. My view on the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were settled long before I met my wife and, therefore, unlike Bookworm, I actually have formulated them objectively rather than subjectively. However, I offer up that personal anecdote only to illustrate that for every Bookworm, whose life was made possible by the atomic bombing of Japan, there are at least ten people like my wife’s aunt who died prematurely or were never born as a result of the decisions made.
November 12th, 2008 at 12:50 am
A professor once used that Russian intimidation line the first week of a US history course. I immediately called BS on it and told him that it was a complex issue with complex reasons and that you couldn’t just whittle it all down to something as shallow as nuclear intimidation of Russia. He said again, that it was the only reason for the dropping of the bomb.I promptly dropped the class.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:13 am
DG, those rules would apply, of course, if the Japanese, like the Palestinians, hadn’t militarized the civilian populations. That’s pretty much the end of the story for rules of engagement, isn’t it?
November 12th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
Bookworm, your thought process, as always, is somewhat simplistic. But I’ll play along. Please tell me how a three-year old girl like my wife’s aunt was militarized. Please tell me what the difference was between a Japanese woman working in a bomb-making factory in Osaka and one doing the same thing in Chicago, IL. Your definition of militarized populations could apply to the US war effort–regarded as heroic as much as to the Japanese one. And the horrors of war were brutal on both sides, with the Japanese committing war atrocities in China that included sporadic incidents of cannibalism, but the American soldiers taking Japanese body parts as trophies and killing POWs at much higher rates than seen in the European theater (with at least some of this difference due to clear racism). And regarding the actual atomic bombings, last time I read Hershey’s unsurpassed account of events, the people who were literally melted on the ground at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were going to work or arriving at school at 8:00 in the morning when the Little Boy exploded above that city of 300K and at 11am when the Fat Man was dropped on a city of 200K. There is a brief explanation of the bombings on the US Department of Energy website (see http://www.cfo.doe.gov/me70/manhattan/hiroshima.htm), which also reinforces the theory that one of the motivations for dropping the bombs was to avoid Russian invasion of Japan. Strange that a conservative Bush White House would propagate that “liberal lie,” if it really is one… Bookworm, as I said before, you hardly have objectivity on this issue, and now you are analogizing to the Palestinian conflict (as a Jewish person). How much more personalized are you going to make your arguments??? It would really help if one could stick to some semblance of historical objectivity and balance by providing evidence that the Japanese civilians were militarized in a unique way that differed from other countries’ citizens involved in the conflict, and that this militarization somehow justifies the use of a weapon that uniquely decimates civilian populations and maimes through multiple generations. These are pretty complicated issues, but somehow with you it is reduced to good versus evil, black versus white, etc. Very disappointing.
November 12th, 2008 at 1:43 pm
Huge diffence, DG. The Japanese trained their citizens to defend the homeland – trained as Japanese train, with systems, leadership, the issuance of weapons, many primitive. Children and grandparents were issued bamboo spears and taught how to fight with them. I don’t think your young woman in Chicago ever experienced that.
You are arguing against a massive, documented record here, DG. You might do well to recognize that you have been the victim of leftist doctrinization and stop fighting this one. Our reasons for dropping the bomb had everything to do with Japan, what Japan was saying, how Japan was fighting, what Japan was doing, and very little to do with Russia.
And since you’re attacking Bookworm the way you are, assuming that roots and personal history instantly marginalize one’s objectivity, I’ll disallow further comment from you on Prop 8.
November 12th, 2008 at 3:51 pm
Laer is correct about the actual militarization of Japanese “civilians.” In addition, the Japanese military was prepared to pull back into civilian arenas — as is done in Palestinian territories, and as Hezbollah did in Lebanon. I pity the poor people whose military uses them as protection, but to transfer pity into inaction means that, the moment a bad actor nation hides behind its own civilians, the other side must instantly lay down its arms and surrender. Sometimes life is just awful — and its awful when your own army uses you as camouflage.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:12 pm
“but that fact means that you have absolutely no objectivity on the issue whatsoever.”
Well, dg, by the same rules your family story shows that you have even less objectivity on the issue. So why are you lecturing us from your high horse?
November 12th, 2008 at 8:13 pm
“Bookworm, your thought process, as always, is somewhat simplistic. But I’ll play along.”
Thanks for continuing the sneering tone. Classy.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:19 pm
dg, it was more than “they would not accept a surrender that required them to renounce their emperor”. They wanted to retain their government. In other words, they would not have been truly defeated but only set back and would have been able to rebuild and rearm and not make the same mistakes the next time. America had just finished defeating a Germany that was not fully defeated in WWI, and did not want to see the same thing happen with Japan, especially considering just how vicious and evil Japan was.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:20 pm
“And the horrors of war were brutal on both sides”
That’s a rather pathetic attempt at moral equivalence. Please try sticking to the facts of history.
November 12th, 2008 at 8:24 pm
“Unless you subscribe to the ‘might makes right’ or ‘our side is always right’ theories of war, it is hard to justify killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians to avoid the losses of tens of thousands of soldiers.”
Tens of thousands? Try hundreds of thousands. Maybe even a million. The bombs were dropped in the hope that killing a couple hundred thousand could save far more.
“Just war theory and military codes of engagement certainly preclude such an instrumental view of civilian casualties.”
If your understanding of just war theory is as faulty as your understanding of history I would suggest that you take a break from lecturing us to educate yourself.
November 13th, 2008 at 10:30 am
Laer, first, you don’t know me. I’m not gay, am happily married for nearly a decade, and have two small children. I am as objective as you on the issue of gay marriage and the use of the atom bomb during WWII, unlike Bookworm whose life is owed, as she herself asserts, to the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. I am not attacking her, but pointing out an obvious subjectivity and over-simplification of her arguments (and, yes, I have a history of blogging with her that is less than satisfactory, but not worth going into here other than to say she displays a pattern and thought process that is rather predictable and uncompelling). Second, that the Japanese issued bamboo spears to old people and children might be part of the “massive, documented record,” but it hardly constitutes a militarization of the population that would threaten our soldiers, much less a reason to incinerate them indiscriminately. Those spears would be little match for WWII GI’s with firearms, grenades and the like, but you want to use that mere fact as an excuse to justify mass killing of many who most certainly were not armed (which that mass historical record also shows). Interesting logic. By that logic, the British during our Revolutionary War would have been justified in indiscriminate, mass-killing every man, woman and child in our nascent country. I wonder if you agree with that logic when applied to our own nation… There is a big difference between shooting civilians because there are soliders hiding among them, or because the civilians are also wielding arms (a situation more analogous to the urban warfare seen in Bosnia, Palestine, Northern Ireland, and Baghdad, et. al.), on the one hand, and the dropping weapons of mass distruction on highly populated areas where civilians outnumber armed combatants 10 or 20 or more to 1. And the fact that radioactive weapons cause damage to germ cells and thus to unborn generations makes the use of such weapons predominantly against civilians particularly reprehensible. Those facts are glossed over in favor of your curiously minor point that some old people and children carried bamboo spears. By the way, many Americans on the Pacific Coast were issued guns because the government feared an invasion or attack from the Japanese navy. But I guess California’s militarization doesn’t count, since conservatives claim American exceptionalism to nearly everything (for example, said one of my conservative friends who publishes and appears on TV regularly, when I asked her what foreign policy mistakes the US has made in its history: “none.”). pst314, if you read more carefully, you would see that I stated clearly that I had formulated my view on the issue, which has not changed, long before I met my wife; hence, my subjectivity on the issue occurred only when I met my wife, unlike Bookworm, whose lack of objectivity dates back to her birth, per force. Your point regarding “sneering” is interesting–please tell me how to critique an argument as overly simplified with non-sneering words, and I will use those instead. Your historical facts on why Japan would not accept surrender before August are not correct; the emperor sent a letter to his generals forcing them to accept unconditional surrender because the emperor was not as important as the preservation of Japan; he did not speak of government but the sanctified emperor. This is a clear indication that the emperor’s status as a deity was a major concern of the generals and a key reason for the delay in surrendering. You are arguing against a point clearly made by leading Japan scholars, like Rosovsky and Craig, et. al., who likely know more than you on this bit of history and whose works are readily available for you to read. Also, to say that the acts of war were brutal on both sides is not to say they were morally equivalent; rather, it just means that I (nor you) likely would have wanted to be involved in the conflict on either side. Again, the simplistic, dichotomous thinking is so limited…you should be careful about that (see http://web4health.info/en/answers/border-dichotomous.htm). Finally, Just War Theory includes the concept of proportionality, for which I do not believe the atomic bombings qualify. I have not seen any qualified expert make the claim that the US would have lost 2.5x as many soldiers invading Japan as they lost in both theaters of WWII by August 1, 1945. Could they have lost around 100K? Perhaps, but more than 500K Japanese civilians have died as a result of the atomic bombings, and that is a conservative estimate because it only accounts for losses from radiation within 5 years of the bombing; the real number is likely much higher. You’ll have to explain the proportionality of that, as well as your particular brand of Just War Theory, to convince me of such a claim. And, by the way, I’m not lecturing you. You can believe whatever you want, but if you want to challenge my arguments and maintain your beliefs in a public debate credibly, then you’d better have a little more data and evidentiary support. It is very disappointing when blogs shift from being places where people use logic and evidence to joust, learn, evolve their thinking and come a little closer to objective truth, to places where they do not tolerate alternate points of view, fail to substantiate claims with sound logic and real evidence, and refuse to admit when they have their logic or facts wrong in order to hold onto pre-conceived notions that may be hugely incorrect. Bookworm prefers to run the latter kind of blog. Hopefully, Laer will defend the former environment, as I have enjoyed the go-arounds with him on both global warming and the gay marriage debate…