A Bomb

An Atomic Lie

Mark Noonan22 Comments

Got into a very long debate on X about the morality of the use of the Atomic Bomb. It is seriously gotta be the biggest engagement post I’ve ever had there: as of this moment, 56,600 views, 358 reposts, 3,100 likes and 474 comments. In strict X parlance, I have been “ratioed”. This means you have more comments than reposts and usually means you’ve said something ridiculous. Not in this case. If you clicked on it, you’ll see that my post was a picture of my Dad as a young Marine, the notation that he was waiting on Okinawa to invade Kyushu in November of 1945 and finishes up with a small, editorial comment about those who say that A Bomb was bad.

Some of the comments are bad faith but most, in my view, simply betray ignorance. Some times well meaning ignorance, but ignorance nonetheless. And that actually has me a little worried. If you go through the comments you’ll see that several times I pointed out the four options available to Truman in July, 1945. They are, sometimes very briefly stated:

  1. Blanche at the cost of finishing off Japan either by nukes or invasion and agree to negotiate a peace which would force Japan to surrender their Empire, but leaves in place the Japanese Ruling Class which waged the war…and that Ruling Class now convinced that their suicidal fight to the death got us to blink. That they are our moral superiors and just need better material for Round II. In other words, this end almost certainly means another war – and maybe a nuclear war as Japan did have a nuclear weapons program. So Pearl Harbor Two might have been Los Angeles and San Francisco getting nuked.
  2. Starve Japan to death. The Japanese were incapable of feeding their population from domestic food production. Like Britain, it was import, or starve. Japan had no means of obtaining resources of any sort as our command of the sea was absolute. We could have just stood off and let starvation kill Japanese until they quit. This would have been up to tens of millions…and they might not have quit. Once their population dropped to sustainable levels, they might have still refused.
  3. Invade Japan. This is a very well known option and all post-War analysis indicates this would have been a horrific affair with maybe a million American casualties and untold millions of Japanese deaths.
  4. Drop the Atomic Bombs and so instruct the Japanese that we could kill them with no loss to ourselves; that any future dying would only be Japanese and to no avail.

As I also pointed out at various points, commanders in war, civil and military, are besieged by a host of information arriving all at once from every point of the compass. Some of it is false. Some irrelevant. Some flat contradictory with other information arriving at the same time. Out of this morass of data, the commander must tease out the correct information or lose. This is not an easy task. It is not a neat and tidy exercise as it can sometimes appear in a history book. This is why when looking back, caution must be taken. We weren’t there. We weren’t under those particular stresses. We benefit from hindsight no matter how much we try to set that aside. In my view, Truman made not just the best of a bad situation, but the correct moral decision. The intention was not to massacre Japanese, it was to end the war by the swiftest means…to end the effusion of blood, Japanese as well, as quickly as possible. And it was done; in the end, no matter what else, it worked. And if you want to call it wrong, you simply must come up with an obvious, superior option which was known to the decision makers at the time. There simply wasn’t any beyond these four. None of them were perfect, all of them posed risks: Truman chose the best one.

Do keep in mind that the comments condemning Truman as a monster issued from both Left and Right. People are getting united in a shared insistence that there was simply no justification at all for dropping the Bomb. What this tells you is that the general propaganda line has worked. And, of course, we know that propaganda does work. But this is doubly disturbing this propaganda issued to condemn the Bomb originated in the Soviet Union to denigrate our effort in WWII – to make out that we were bad, and so excuse Soviet actions. This line was picked up by Nazi-apologists as a means of getting around the Holocaust. But now it has morphed into a general belief that America is morally tainted. When added to slavery, it is being used to make out that America is the bad guy in the world. That we’re the nation that has to be destroyed. And the Right is participating in this – going along with it. And from what I can tell, they are doing it mindlessly…just so they can have something they agree with the Left on. A “see, I hate that, too” moment.

When we combine this with the “anti-colonialist” attitude of the Left and the increasing number of people on the Right who are condemning Israel’s war in Gaza, we can see our problem: basically, our entire civilization is in the dock and it is being found guilty. That it is ignorant people making the ruling is neither here nor there: ignorant jurors get a say. And the USA is being found guilty.

This is worrying not just for the fate of our nation, but for the fate of anything resembling civilization. Islamists savages went on a rape/murder spree and that’s in the Memory Hole while college kids riot on campus in favor of the savages. We’re being told we have to save Democracy in Ukraine even though elections have been suspended there. The Free World we defend with NATO arrests people for misgendering. China buys whatever influence it wants – and our open border and drug addiction may very well be a Chinese op. But we’re not allowed to fight against it because we’re the bad guys…the people who held slaves and who cruelly and needlessly nuked Japanese children. You see?

We really have to win this November. Not for Trump. Heck, he’s not even the guy we remotely need right now. He’s just massively the superior of the alternative. But we, the Americans – those of us who are left – have to take control of our country. Or we simply won’t have one – it’ll be falsified out of existence. We must find the ways and means of getting the liars out of all power and influence and simply re-instructing an ignorant population on what America actually was, and can be again.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan17 Comments

I hear the Barbie movie is a woke-fest – but it is making huge money, likely because they didn’t push it as a woke-fest. Gotta say that’s some clever marketing…Barbie, of course, having huge market just on the name so large numbers of little girls and their parents would go see it if they thought it was just a Barbie movie. We’ll see how it does long-term as the woke comes out.

The other big movie release is Oppenheimer – which I am suspecting is a good movie based on Nolan directing; he usually doesn’t disappoint. I bet, though, it will have all that nuclear weapons angst which Soviet propaganda generated during the Cold War to make sure the USA never pressed its overwhelming advantage in nuclear weapons. The other aspect to look for is just how much they explore Oppenheimer’s Communist connections. I figure if Oppenheimer, himself, had been a Commie that would have come out some time after the end of the Cold War…so, he probably wasn’t a card-carrying member. But his social and professional connections were shot through with Commies. Of course, part of that was the times: the intellectual class, which has always been a little stupid in practical affairs, fell hook, line and sinker for Communism in the first half of the 20th century. A portion of them woke up about it but not before the damage was done – not just in allowing spies to run wild, but also the deep infiltration of American institutions, public and private, by Communists.

We’ve talked about atomic bombs before so I’ll just briefly re-state: it is just a big bomb. The only legitimate hesitation in using one is the immense amount of death and destruction it causes. That is, do you need to destroy that city and end all those lives? In a lot of war situations, you simply would not have to and so use would be gratuitous and immoral. But in the context of Japan in 1945, there was at that point no other way out for us or the Japanese. It was either fight it out conventionally at the cost of millions of lives (mostly Japanese but quite a lot of American and allied as well) or blow up a couple cities at the cost of a couple hundred thousand lives and end it. Whether or not we and the Japanese should have got ourselves into that predicament is an entirely separate issue – and not just in Japan’s decision to attack, but our decision to demand unconditional surrender in 1942…my view is that we should never have done that and should have opened negotiations in 1943 after the Battle of the Philippine Sea for a peace deal which got Japan out of the Philippines and China proper but left the Japanese Empire intact as a counter balance to Russia and China.

But, such wasn’t to be. And because we had Commies and because we got ourselves jammed with Japan…we were pretty much prevented from using nukes during the Korean War when the obvious best way to get the Chinese out of Korea was an ultimatum to get out or Shanghai gets nuked.

The latest trope in the Reparations issue is the insistence that “black people built America”. I see it more and more often – so, you see, we owe it! As I’ve discussed before, there is an injustice here which can be corrected without inflicting a new injustice – that is, out of the national wealth (public lands and mineral rights, mostly) provide funds to the descendants of slaves in order to help them catch up given their ancestors were illegally prevented from building wealth at all from 1776 to 1865 and then hampered in it from 1865 to 1965. But the concept that slaves built America is not just a lie, it is a stupid lie. Slave labor is a moral abomination and lousy economics.

The South was economically and intellectually backwards by 1861 – not just behind the North but massively behind and falling back further year by year. The Southern leadership thought they had the talisman of power in King Cotton but the fact of the matter is that by 1860 the agricultural products of free labor in the North were more valuable than what the whip could drag out of Southern soil. The whole project of the Confederacy was a con – I’m willing to concede that some of the leaders of the Confederacy conned themselves along with the mostly middle class soldiers who did most of the dying (that is North and South, by the way), but it was still a con. A stupid, regressive idea who’s only possible beneficiaries were the tiny class of wealthy slave drivers (who weren’t all that wealthy; they were heavily in debt because the costs of keeping slaves was very high). The leaders of the South would have been better off – and cost a lot less lives – if they had just freed their slaves and hired them.

But the main point here is that there was no building of America by slaves. Having slaves was probably a net economic loser for the USA as a whole. But if it did generate any net wealth, it was small and all of it was burned down in the Civil War. And you’d think black radicals would want to understand that slavery doesn’t work…but what they’re essentially saying is that it was the most effective economic system ever.

This is because they’re very, very stupid people.

Little bit of shift out there, guys. We dumped Bud Light and their sales are down like 30% or some such. The Left tried to shut down Jason Aldean for his latest song…and all it did was drive the tune to number one. We can win this. The more insane the Left gets, the harder it is for them to defend themselves and attack us.