Fw from David McReynolds: Harry Truman and Memory of Mass Murder

----- Original Message ----- 
From: David McReynolds 
To: Socialist Party Members 
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2013 2:45 PM
Subject: Re: Harry Truman and Memory of Mass Murder


To the Edgeleft list. 


  On this day . . .

  David Swanson's piece causes me to reflect. Hiroshima/Nagasaki have always had a personal meaning, since my father served in the B-29 command as an intelligence officer, went on the first bombing raid of the B-29's (over Bangkok, Thailand), and after the war's end went to Hiroshima to gather data on what had happened.

  The War Resisters League had its 90th anniversary this weekend in Washington DC and I'd taken with me "Dwight Macdonald: and the politics circle" by Gregory D. Sumner. It brought back to me the immediacy many felt on August 6, though since I was only 16 at the time (and an enthusiastic supporter of the war) I did not grasp it's meaning until later.

  For Macdonald, as for my mentors, A.J. Muste, Norman Thomas, and others of that generation, the atomic bomb was less a unique event (though God knows, it was that) than a climax toward which we had been building. I think folks can get "The World War" - a remarkable BBC series, more than thirty one hour segments, on line and can watch the war as it developed.

  In the beginning radicals in the US doubted news of the Nazi death camps - it fit too easily into the pattern of war propaganda from World War I. And it was too monstrous to accept as truth - Germany, the home of Bach, Beethoven, perhaps the most civilized of the European countries. 

  But the pattern of German actions soon enough were barbaric - the bombing of Rotterdam, after it was been declared by the Dutch an "open city" (ie., a non-military and undefended target), the bombing of Coventry. And of course in the Far East the rape of Nanking. 

  How swiftly this "good war" degenerated into a pattern of mass murder on both sides. The original German attacks on London, which as a youth I remembered well, the great "blitz", paled into memory as the Allied forces thought they could break the will of the German people by systemic and total destruction of their cities - Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin. We excused our actions as necessary to win against the Nazis, (and even to this day, and as a pacifist, I've never had a good answer to "what do you do about Hitler").

  In Japan the B-29's had been used to level the great cities - more died in the fire storm in the bombing of Tokyo than died at Hiroshima. Civilians became the target. I remember my father, no radical, but a devout Christian who was troubled by the need for the war, telling me that the "bomb" had not been needed, that the air attacks had brought Japan to its knees, destroying the rail and sea transport. (And as we now know the Japanese had begun to send out serious peace feelers before the atomic bomb was used, and we know, as David Swanson suggests, that one reason for using the bomb was as an early warning to the Soviets - the seeds of the Cold War contained in the ashes of World War II).

  And so on August 6th, and again on August 9th, the United States destroyed children, mothers, the elderly - in far greater numbers than any military trapped in those cities. We could have responded to the Japanese peace overtures, but the "child within us" wanted to see if this insane new toy would actually work. And, as David Swanson notes, we were, as a people, racists who saw the Japanese as less than fully human. However remember it was not just that they were Asian - we had long since taken the same view of the Germans, and would soon enough take it of the Russians. 

  We were reduced to players in a terrible new game which had given us death camps in Europe. David Swanson focuses on Truman and I grant that Truman was a racist in his thinking (though to his credit he desegregated the armed forces in 1948). But the problem is much deeper. It was FDR, the great liberal hero, who ordered that all the Japanese on the West Coast be sent to concentration camps for the duration of the war. Human beings were no longer in the saddle, but rather part of the machinery of insanity. We all played our parts, whether it was the infamous Soviet murder of 40,000 Polish officers at Katyn, or the Eichmann's who "only carried out orders", or, as Hannah Arendt pointed out to the dismay of many Jews, the leaders of many of the Jewish communities in Eastern Europe who cooperated with the Nazis to help run the camps more efficiently. Or us, a nation so proud to call itself Christian, which in the flash of seconds destroyed tens upon tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The insane toy worked. And now the toy is in charge.

  Now today we are almost "used to the bomb". How appalling that Israel, whose founders lived through the Holocaust, have armed themselves with such weapons. Or that the Soviet Union, which had been born in a revolution against the old order, should so soon
  pride themselves on having it (for "self defense" of course). And then the Chinese and, in a supreme act of meaningless and petty arrogance, the French and the British.

  Dwight Macdonald felt, as the old order crumbled, that perhaps the best we could do, in an existential way, was to choose between resistance and collaboration. He would have liked to choose revolution (as would I) but that is not on the immediate horizon - not then, and not today. Albert Camus put the matter well when he said we must chose to be "neither victims nor executioners". At whatever cost, and no matter how difficult and lonely, to seek a third camp of people - individuals and civil groups across the world - who would withdraw their support for mass murder, and seek each other out, across borders. Then as now, from the moment we launched upon that "good war" now so celebrated, the end of such good wars is death.

  We cannot set government policy. In political terms we must act within the limits of politics. But we can, as individuals and as groups, say that we want the United States to unconditionally surrender the nuclear weapons, even if no other nation does so. Our politics in this regard is not "realistic" but it is necessary - some things require us to be unilateral.

  David McReynolds, August 6, 2013.


  On Tue, Aug 6, 2013 at 10:08 AM, David Swanson <[email protected]> wrote:

    Harry Truman and Memory of Mass Murder
    By David Swanson
    http://warisacrime.org/content/harry-truman-and-memory-mass-murder-0

    Harry Truman spoke in the U.S. Senate on June 23, 1941: "If we see that Germany is winning," he said, "we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible."

    Did Truman value Japanese lives above Russian and German?  There is nothing anywhere to suggest that he did.  Yet we debate, every August 6th or so, whether Truman was willing to unnecessarily sacrifice Japanese lives in order to scare Russians with his nuclear bombs.  He was willing; he was not willing; he was willing.  Left out of this debate is the obvious possibility that killing as many Japanese as possible was among Truman's goals.

    A U.S. Army poll in 1943 found that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every Japanese person on earth. William Halsey, who commanded the United States' naval forces in the South Pacific during World War II, thought of his mission as "Kill Japs, kill Japs, kill more Japs," and had vowed that when the war was over, the Japanese language would be spoken only in hell. War correspondent Edgar L. Jones wrote in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly, "What kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off  the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers."

    On August 6, 1945, President Truman announced: "Sixteen hours ago an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima, an important Japanese Army base. That bomb had more power than 20,000 tons of T.N.T.  It had more than two thousand times the blast power of the British 'Grand Slam' which is the largest bomb ever yet used in the history of warfare."Hiroshima was, of course, a city full of people, not an Army base. But those people were merely Japanese. Australian General Sir Thomas Blamey had told the New York Times: "Fighting Japs is not like fighting normal human beings. The Jap is a little barbarian…. We are not dealing with humans as we know them. We are dealing with something primitive. Our troops have the right view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin."

    Some try to imagine that the bombs shortened the war and saved more lives than the some 200,000 they took away. And yet, weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan's codes and read the telegram. Truman referred in his diary to "the telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace." Truman had been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs fell, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor.

    Presidential advisor James Byrnes had told Truman that dropping the bombs would allow the United States to "dictate the terms of ending the war." Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in his diary that Byrnes was "most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in." Truman wrote in his diary that the Soviets were preparing to march against Japan and "Fini Japs when that comes about." Truman ordered the bomb dropped on Hiroshima on August 6thand another type of bomb, a plutonium bomb, which the military also wanted to test and demonstrate, on Nagasaki on August 9th. Also on August 9th, the Soviets attacked the Japanese. During the next two weeks, the Soviets killed 84,000 Japanese while losing 12,000 of their own soldiers, and the United States continued bombing Japan with non-nuclear weapons. Then the Japanese surrendered.

    The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that,"… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."  One dissenter who had expressed this same view to the Secretary of War prior to the bombings was General Dwight Eisenhower. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy agreed: "The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender."

    Whatever dropping the bombs might possibly have contributed to ending the war, it is curious that the approach of threatening to drop them, the approach used during a half-century of Cold War to follow, was never tried.  An explanation may perhaps be found in Truman's comments suggesting the motive of revenge:

    "Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, and against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international law of warfare."

    Truman doesn't say he used the bomb to shorten the war or save lives.  He says he used the bomb because he could. "Having found the bomb we have used it."  And he provides as reasons for having used it three characteristics of the people murdered: they (or their government) attacked U.S. troops, they (or their government) brutalized U.S. prisoners, and they (or their government) -- and this is without any irony intended -- oppose international law.

    Truman could not, incidentally, have chosen Tokyo as a target -- not because it was a city, but because we (or our government) had already reduced it to rubble. 

    The nuclear catastrophes may have been, not the ending of a World War, but the theatrical opening of the Cold War, aimed at sending a message to the Soviets. Many low and high ranking officials in the U.S. military, including commanders in chief, have been tempted to nuke more cities ever since, beginning with Truman threatening to nuke China in 1950. The myth developed, in fact, that Eisenhower's enthusiasm for nuking China led to the rapid conclusion of the Korean War. Belief in that myth led President Richard Nixon, decades later, to imagine he could end the Vietnam War by pretending to be crazy enough to use nuclear bombs. Even more disturbingly, he actually was crazy enough. "The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? … I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes," Nixon said to Henry Kissinger in discussing options for Vietnam.

    I just want you to think, instead, about this poem:

    Hiroshima
    by Sherwood Ross

    I am the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto
    A graduate of Emory College, Atlanta,
    Pastor of the Methodist Church of Hiroshima
    I was in a western suburb when the bomb struck
    Like a sheet of sunlight.
    Fearing for my wife and family
    I ran back into the city
    Where I saw hundreds and hundreds fleeing
    Every one of them hurt in some way.
    The eyebrows of some were burned off
    Skin hung from their faces and hands
    Some were vomiting as they walked
    On some naked bodies the burns had made patterns
    Of the shapes of flowers transferred
    From their kimonos to human skin.
    Almost all had their heads bowed
    Looked straight ahead, were silent
    And showed no expression whatever.
    Under many houses I heard trapped people screaming
    Crying for help but there were none to help
    And the fire was coming.
    I came to a young woman holding her dead baby
    Who pleaded with me to find her husband
    So he could see the baby one last time.
    There was nothing I could do but humor her.
    By accident I ran into my own wife
    Both she and our child were alive and well.
    For days I carried water and food to the wounded and the dying.
    I apologized to them: "Forgive me," I said, "for not sharing your burden."
    I am the Reverend Kiyoshi Tanimoto
    Pastor of the Methodist Church of Hiroshima
    I was in a western suburb when the bomb struck
    Like a sheet of sunlight.



    -- 

    David Swanson's books include "War Is A Lie." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for http://rootsaction.org. He hosts Talk Nation Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @davidcnswanson and FaceBook.  
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