The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced the entry of the United States as the world’s unchallenged imperialist hegemon, bullying and dictating terms to all humanity [...]
Later this month, Barack Obama will become the first sitting US president to visit the city of Hiroshima, Japan. The dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima by the American military on August 6, 1945, and the destruction three days later of the Japanese city of Nagasaki, rank among the greatest war crimes of the 20th century.
One would think that after 71 years, the United States would finally be prepared to acknowledge that the incineration of two defenseless Japanese cities, causing some 200,000 deaths, was a militarily unnecessary act.
Nothing of the sort will happen. Obama “will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II,” declared the White House. No apology will be forthcoming.
For decades, the US government has insisted that it was right to carry out the nuclear attacks on Japan, declaring that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the only alternative to an invasion of Japan and the ensuing loss of American lives. Every attempt to question the legitimacy of the bombings has been met with frenzied and dishonest propaganda, such as that which forced the Smithsonian Institution to shutter its exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the bombing in 1995.
Typical of these apologetics is a comment published in the Wall Street Journal by the Reverend Miscamble of Notre Dame University. Miscamble declares, “There’s zero reason to apologize for the atomic bombing,” because “[President Harry S.] Truman authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both major military-industrial targets, to help win the gruesome Pacific War as quickly as possible and with the loss of the fewest American lives—and, as it turned out, the loss of the fewest Japanese lives.”
Echoing these sentiments, the New York Times this week cited those who insist that the “decision to drop the bomb saved tens of thousands of American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Honshu, Japan’s main island.”
These claims are without all credibility. They bear no relationship to the actual content of discussions taking place in Washington and the US military high command prior to the attacks.
By early 1945, the United States had gained total air supremacy over Japan and taken numerous islands within flying range of the Japanese mainland. Around the same time, the US switched from carrying out precision bombings of specific military targets to mass incendiary raids that ultimately leveled 67 Japanese cities, including the March 9–10 firebombing of Tokyo that killed some 100,000 people.
When General Curtis Lemay, the head of the US Strategic Air Command, was asked in 1945 how long he thought the war would last, he said, “We sat down and did some thinking about it, and it indicated that we would be pretty much out of targets around September 1, and with the targets gone, we couldn’t see much of any war going on at the time.”
The rationalizations for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were challenged within the US high command itself, which insisted that the incineration of another pair of Japanese cities had little military significance.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower said that, upon learning of President Truman’s intention to use the bomb against a civilian population, he felt a feeling of “depression” and voiced “my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”
Other high-ranking military officials subsequently made similar statements. Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the US Pacific Fleet, said after the war, “The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.” President Truman’s Chief of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy, acknowledged, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death on April 12, 1945, brought Harry S. Truman to the presidency. This limited and rather ignorant man was dubbed “The Senator from Pendergast” because of his connections with the convicted felon and gambling addict who ran the Missouri Democratic Party political machine.
Truman was completely indifferent to the moral implications of the use of nuclear weapons. One of his advisers later recalled that, when Truman learned of the bombing of Hiroshima, he “was tremendously pepped up by it and spoke to me of it again and again when I saw him.”
By the time Truman decided to use the bomb, the Japanese government had for months been sending strong indications that they were seeking to surrender, insisting only that they be allowed to retain their Emperor. The White House had by this time come to favor retaining the Emperor, but was divided over whether this fact should be communicated to the Japanese. President Truman ultimately decided to drop the bomb first, then let the Japanese government know the terms.
Why, then, did the United States government embark upon a course of action that, while having no military justification, would forever brand it with infamy in the eyes of the world?
As the war was reaching its end, the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was intensifying. In accordance with the terms of the Yalta agreement, the Soviet Union was about to invade Japan, laying claim to territories granted to it in that accord, and was seeking to play a role in post-war Europe commensurate with the losses it had endured during the war.
The use of the atomic bomb was, as two historians recently put it, “America’s first act of the Cold War.” It was intended to send a clear signal to the Soviet Union that, despite Soviet victory over Germany, the Americans were the masters of the world.
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki announced the entry of the United States as the world’s unchallenged imperialist hegemon, bullying and dictating terms to all humanity. Behind the thin veneer of democracy, the United States was signaling that it would do whatever was necessary for the preservation and expansion of its own interests, no matter the scale of the crime or how many people had to die.
In the more than seven decades since the bombing of Hiroshima, the determination of the American ruling class to use military force to defend its interests has only grown. Obama will make his appearance in Hiroshima as part of his participation in a Group of 7 meeting where he will seek to strengthen America’s alliance with Japan against China and facilitate Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s re-militarization of the country.
Even as it demands “nuclear non-proliferation” from every other country, the White House is spending a trillion dollars to modernize the US nuclear stockpile and engaging in a continuous series of provocations against China and Russia that threaten war between nuclear-armed states.
In other words, Obama will go to Hiroshima not to apologize for past crimes, but to prepare new ones.
How can one expect the United States government, which since Hiroshima has been responsible for the deaths of millions of people in Korea and Vietnam—and, over the past quarter century, throughout the Middle East—to apologize for mass murder when it continues to practice it to this day?
But there will come a day in a socialist America, when the atrocities committed by the ruling class will be disavowed, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be acknowledged for what they were: crimes against humanity.
Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.
Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!
Donate to Support Us
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
PrefaceDue to the current conflict in (East) Ukraine (historically known as Russia Minor), the world is more and more becoming informed about the genocide of the Poles, Jews, and Russians on the territory of West Ukraine during WWII committed by Ukrainian Nazi-nationalists (the Banderists). However, at the same time, in the Balkans, parallelly with the Ukrainian case, the organized (sadistic) genocide of the Jews, Roma, and above all the ethnic Serbs were on agenda but the world audience is still not properly informed about the case – the case occurred in the Nazi-shaped Independent State of Croatia.At the very start, ...
“And you know, we have this mad guy [Kim Jong-un], I guess he’s mad, either he’s mad or he’s a genius, one or the other, but he’s actually more unstable, even than his father, …” (Donald Trump, August 2016 during election campaign)What was indelible about it [the Korean War of 1950-53] was the extraordinary destructiveness of the United States’ air campaigns against North Korea, from the widespread and continuous use of firebombing (mainly with napalm), to threats to use nuclear and chemical weapons, and the destruction of huge North Korean dams in the final stages of the war. …. (Bruce ...
July 3, 2019 marks the 40th anniversary of when the United States’ first military assault against Afghanistan with the CIA-backed Mujahideen began. It would be a mistake to treat the present-day conflict as being separate from the U.S. intervention that began in 1979 against the then-government of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan. Afghanistan was not always known as the chaotic, ‘failed state’ overrun by warlords as it is now; this phenomenon is a product of that U.S.-led regime change operation. The article below, originally published on March 30, 2019, summarizes and analyzes the events that transpired during and after the Cold War ...
Just as the Republican convention demonized Hillary (“Lock Her Up”), so the Democrats are demonizing Donald Trump. They refuse to support any policy that he backs, even when he says something progressive.One might think that at least Bernie’s supporters would applaud Trump’s left-wing transformation of the old conservative, pro-corporate neocon Cheney-Bush core of the Republican Party. But nobody had a single good word to say about Trump’s assertions that he would wind down confrontation with Russia, reduce military spending on the grounds that NATO is obsolete, and oppose the TPP and TTIP as well as rewrite NAFTA’s terms.The Democrats are ...
Maybe it is the best agreement ever signed… Maybe by applying it, Greece and the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, will enter an era of great friendship and enormous prosperity…Maybe… The only small detail is the majority of the deputies of the Greek Parliament do not know the agreement is so good. Their parties declared they are opposing the agreement and they won’t ratify it. Even the An.Ell. party, which is the junior partner of SYRIZA in the government, does not know how profitable is this agreement. They said they would vote No to the agreement when introduced in the ...
A lot of dilemmas, lies, and misconceptions are present in Western geopolitical narratives taken without any critical approach by domestic Serbian pro-Western supporters (usually financed by Western agencies and Governments) about the war in NATO/EU-sponsored Ukraine, and Serbian position in newly geopolitical circumstances. This article aims to present the focal Western lie about Serbia trying to give some reasonable arguments regarding some open questions: Serbia must harmonize its foreign policy with the EU and the rest of the West!Serbia, in essence, must not harmonize its foreign policy with the EU for several reasons. First, not all EU Member States harmonized ...
The Serbs stepped again onto the historical scene in the years of the European wars that swept the continent from the forests of Ireland to the walls of Constantinople in the late 17th century. The Turks finally withdrew from Hungary and Transylvania when their Ottoman hordes were routed outside Vienna in 1683. The disintegration of Ottoman rule in the southwest limbered up the Serbs, arousing in them hope that the moment was ripe for joint effort to break Turkish dominion in the Balkans. The neighboring Christian powers (Austria and Venice) were the only possible allies. The arrival of the Austrian ...
Donald Trump, influential billionaire and a candidate for the president of United States, back in the 1999, as a guest of the famous host Larry King on CNN, spoke about that time ongoing topic of the bombing of Serbia.Asked by Larry King, what does he think and what would he do if he was in Clinton’s place, Trump criticized the decision to bomb Serbia.“So, I would do something different and I know it will sound ghastly to everybody. But, look at the chaos which we created in Kosovo. I think, we can say that we lost only few people. Of ...
The worst mistake in U.S. history was the conversion after World War II of the U.S. government from a constitutional, limited-government republic to a national-security state. Nothing has done more to warp and distort the conscience, principles, and values of the American people, including those who serve in the U.S. military.A good example of how the national-security state has adversely affected the thinking of U.S. soldiers was reflected in an op-ed entitled “What We’re Fighting For” that appeared in the February 10, 2017, issue of the New York Times. Authored by an Iraq War veteran named Phil Klay, the article ...
Article by Vladislav B. Sotirovic: „Nationalism and Territorial Claims of the Yugoslavs: Challenge to Re-Map the Balkans in the 21st century. Case Study“, Journal of Security Studies and Global Politics, Vol. 2, № 1, 2017, Islamabad, Pakistan, online: http://sciplatform.com/journals, ISSN (online) 2519-9609, pp. 69−81 (PDF)SaveOrigins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and ...
Destroyed Serbian Orthodox church in Kosovo by local Muslim Albanians after 1999In 2000, when George W. Bush was elected president in a controversial and hotly disputed election, all the experts and pundits predicted that there would be a philosophical sea change in US foreign policy in the Balkans, and in Kosovo in particular. In my 2000 analysis of the election of Bush and US foreign policy in Kosovo, however, I concluded that the George W. Bush Administration represented the same old same old and business as usual. In my viewpoint, absolutely nothing would change in the US foreign policy stance ...
If we start from a premise which understands that Britain and its NATO allies are capable of mounting false flag events in Syria with chemical weapons, then it is entirely possible that British secret services carried out a similar propaganda stunt in England with regard to former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal.We also need to bear in mind that British state intelligence agencies are plausibly running a covert assassination program targeting Russian exiles living in Britain – for the purpose of incriminating Moscow.Over the past two decades, more than a dozen Russian dissidents have met untimely deaths while residing in England, including ...
PrefaceAfter the end of the USSR in 1991, Russia, at that time both weakened and isolated, was becoming a less popular area of investigation and studies compared with the period during the Cold War. However, since the year of 2004, Russia is “back” in the global political arena when Moscow rejected the European Neighboring Policy’s game with the European Union (the EU). Those who argued that Russia was already irrelevant in global politics since 2004 had to realize their error of judgment. Today, Russia is “back” as a military, economic, and political Great Power with tremendous energy resources.[1] Recovering Russia’s ...
Paul Atwood, a Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, provides a concise summary of the history that informs North Korea’s “relations with the United States” and “drives its determination never to submit to any American diktat”.Excerpts from Atwood’s summary are here used as a framework, with other sources where indicated.Atwood notes it is an American “myth” that the “North Korean Army suddenly attacked without warning, overwhelming surprised ROK defenders.” In fact, the North/South border “had been progressively militarized and there had been numerous cross border incursions by both sides going back to 1949.”Part of what ...
I was trying to think a few hours ago – after his shameful, outrageous, insane breaking of a solemn international treaty – just who Donald Trump reminded me of. I used to think about the boastful, gung-ho racist Theodore Roosevelt, the ‘Rough Rider’ who enjoyed war (and threats). But Theodore Roosevelt actually did win the Nobel Peace Prize. And then I realised.The political leader who most resembles Trump is the late Colonel Gaddafi of Libya.The parallels are quite creepy. Gaddafi was crackers, he was a vain, capricious peacock of a man, he was obsessed with women, he even had a ghost writer invent a ‘Green Book’ ...
I travel frequently to the countries which once made up the now defunct Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, satisfying a passion of mine that stems back to my childhood days. For me, the Balkans’ history, its people and its cultures are both enigmatic and magnetic, as they have been, too, for countless others, of many nationalities, over centuries gone by. Accounting for the enchantment of the Balkans, its captivating allure, is a challenge to put into writing. Because no words can truly embellish what is one of the most absorbing parts of the world. To understand and feel what it is ...
The collective West is busy showing what it thinks of Serbia’s determination to conduct an independent policy through an old-fashioned show of force.The weekend of March 27-28, thousands of vehicles from neighboring countries formed lines waiting to enter Serbia. The reason? Vaccines. For free. Lots of them, from both East and West. Sputnik V, Sinopharm, AstraZeneca, Pfizer. More than the rest of the ex-Yugoslav republics combined. And Serbia decided to open its doors to those among its former compatriots who have lost all hope that their Western-approved “democracies” would obtain them in respectable quantities any time soon.So, does this humane ...
According to a number of global mainstream media sources, the Pentagon is covering up a disturbing video that was never made public with the rest of the recent torture report.According to various well respected journalists, including Seymour Hersh, the appalling video was recorded at Abu Ghraib, the notorious US torture dungeon in Iraq that made headlines roughly a decade ago, when the inhumane tactics being used at the prison were exposed.Sadly, it seems that the evidence released years ago was only scratching the surface.While the video has remained under wraps thus far, Hersh says it is only a matter of time before it ...
The following text is a point by point thematic summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky‘s presentation at the Science for Peace Conference, Academy of Sciences, Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur, 15-16 August 2016.IntroductionHistorically, science has supported the development of the weapons industry and the war economy. “Science for Peace” indelibly requires reversing the logic whereby commissioned scientific endeavors are directed towards supporting what President Eisenhower called “The Military Industrial Complex”.What is consequently required is a massive redirection of science and technology towards the pursuit of broad societal objectives. In turn, this requires a major shift in what is euphemistically called “US Foreign Policy”, namely ...
Within 40 years, given current demographic trends, the white population in France and the rest of old Europe will recede, creating a Muslim majority, a French researcher says.Charles Gave, an economist, fund manager and political commentator, published his conclusions this month on the webpage of his think tank, Institute des Libertes. He writes of the “disappearance of the European populations” as native populations shrink and Muslims continue to exhibit a robust fertility rate.Mr. Gave, president of Gavekal Research, acknowledges that his decidedly unpolitically correct view may bring him scorn and possibly censorship. The political left generally protects Islam from criticism. ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu
Nothing of the sort will happen. Obama “will not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II,” declared the White House. No apology will be forthcoming.
As the war was reaching its end, the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was intensifying. In accordance with the terms of the Yalta agreement, the Soviet Union was about to invade Japan, laying claim to territories granted to it in that accord, and was seeking to play a role in post-war Europe commensurate with the losses it had endured during the war.
