The story of Anne Frank is tragic. If not for the words that she wrote in her diary, she would be a digit of history. Her diary is relatable, and the thoughts that collected inside her being during a horrible time in history gives the reader an idea of who she was. She is immortalized because of the little things that she wrote, not because of any great deeds recorded by others. As a victim of tyranny she is remembered as an innocent murdered. She is a story found inside the numbers. Thanks to her diary, we have a human figure to know and mourn, despite the mechanized bureaucratic...
hiroshima
Child Killer
“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”- Howard Zinn It is hard to imagine that a healthy mind would consider the murder of a child to be a justifiable action. It is the frightening action of monsters, the child killer. Not much is more pariah in a civilized society than such a being. As one series of wars slowly wind down, the drums beat to the distant call of likely more wars. It is the routine conduct of some nations to always be in a state of war, always to be "over there." And no matter how many innocent are killed, how many children are...
American Historians Misjudge American Presidents
"They adored him as no man in a democracy deserves to be adored,” Walter Lippmann wrote, describing progressive worshippers of Theodore Roosevelt in 1916. American historians suffer from the same malady, a predisposition to hero-worshipping chief executives (T.R. included). What causes this persistent love affair? Is it a preference for studying big changes and swift actions, which occur most often under muscular presidents? Is it a sympathy for big government and the men who implemented the policies liberal historians themselves prefer? Whatever the cause of this fondness, the resulting...
Who Opposed Nuking Japan?
"The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." —Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower "In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. ... The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent. During his recitation of the...
Economic Sanctions Are State-Implemented Terrorism
Efforts to restore American and Iranian compliance with the 2015 nuclear deal—formally called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA)—are at an impasse. President Biden has declared there will be no relaxing of smothering economic sanctions on Iran unless the country first returns to full compliance with the deal. Iran, which began exceeding nuclear enrichment thresholds in response to America’s total withdrawal from the deal under President Trump, wants the United States to begin easing sanctions first. As that chess game continues, there’s something missing from op-ed pages,...
9/11/20 Josiah Lippincott on the Wholesale Slaughter of Japanese Civilians in WWII
Scott interviews Josiah Lippincott about the conventional narrative surrounding the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II. The common argument, says Lippincott, is that the U.S. had no real choice but to drop the bombs, since the alternative would have been a ground invasion that ultimately would have cost many more lives. In reality, he explains, the Japanese had been willing to negotiate for months, but the American government, insisting on an unconditional surrender, wouldn't concede Japan's only demand, which was to let the emperor remain on the throne. Ironically,...
8/7/20 Brett Wilkins on the False Dichotomy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Brett Wilkins discusses the story about Hiroshima and Nagasaki that everyone learned in school: the U.S. was forced to drop the atomic bombs, because the alternative would have meant a ground invasion of Japan that would have cost a million American lives. In reality, Japan was already making moves toward negotiating a surrender, especially after the USSR declared war on Japan earlier that summer. What's more, seven out of eight U.S. generals at the time, including Eisenhower and MacArthur, agreed that the bomb was unnecessary. Scott and Wilkins go on to talk about the state of the...
Hiroshima: ‘You dig two feet and there are [still] bones.’
Burn in Hell, Harry.
7/31/20 Greg Mitchell on the Real History of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Scott interviews Greg Mitchell about The Beginning or the End, his new book that tells the story of the making of the 1947 film of the same name. The movie was conceived as an exposé on the horrors of America's use of the nuclear bomb against Japan, partly at the urging of former Manhattan Project scientists. But it was quickly co-opted by the U.S. government, forcing many changes to the film's structure, and eventually resulting in what amounted to a piece of pro-military propaganda. Mitchell's book explores much of the history of this period, revealing the true circumstances of Japan's...
8/27/19 Gar Alperovitz on America’s War Crimes in Japan
Historian Gar Alperovitz shares the history of America's use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Contrary to what most of us learned in school, many of the top military officers and intelligence officials were adamant at the time that use of the bombs was unnecessary to get the Japanese to surrender, which they expected to happen as soon as the Soviet Union invaded. The bombs were used instead as a political maneuver to intimidate the Russians, but which of course only led to the disastrous arms race of the cold war. Discussed on the show: "The War Was Won Before Hiroshima—And...