Behold, he travaileth with iniquity, and hath conceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood. He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the ditch which he made. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his violent dealing shall come down upon his own pate.
—Psalm 7:14-16
Americans are a profoundly ignorant people. Twenty percent believe the sun revolves around the earth. Forty-six percent are convinced that Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs to church—that is, that Yahweh "created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so." While 73% can name the Three Stooges, only 42% can identify the three branches of the federal government.
Of World War II, Americans "know" that the "the US defeated the Nazis." Except it didn't. The Soviet Union did. Some 80% of German battlefield casualties were inflicted by the Red Army. Americans likewise "know" that the conflict in the Pacific ended only because of the nuclear incineration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Except that is bollocks too.
John Kenneth Galbraith was one of three men picked to head the US government’s "strategic bombing survey" of the effect of Allied air power in WWII. In 1984 Galbraith repeated to Studs Terkel the group’s conclusion on the strategic "necessity" of the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
The bomb did not end the Japanese war. This was something that was carefully studied by our bombing survey. [Indefatigable Cold Warrior] Paul Nitze headed it in Japan, so there was hardly any bias in this matter. The conclusion of the monograph called Japan’s Struggle to End the War was that it was a difference, at most, of two or three weeks. The decision had already been taken to get out of the war, to seek a peace negotiation.
David Bergamini’s Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy, which is not at all favorable to the government of Japan, and which was based on then-unprecedented access to official Japanese government documents, confirms the findings of Galbraith & Co. that Japan was set to surrender before the bombs were dropped. And that, as Galbraith put it to Terkel, "[t]he Japanese government, at that time, was heavily bureaucratic[;] the decision took some time to translate into action."
Then there is Fleet Admiral William Leahy, who wrote in I Was There (which he certainly was):
It is my opinion that 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 because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons.
Leahy also wrote this:
"Bomb" is the wrong word to use for this new weapon. It is not a bomb. It is not an explosive. It is a poisonous thing that kills people by its deadly radioactive reaction, more than by the explosive force it develops.
The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that, in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children. Employment of the atomic bomb in war will take us back in cruelty toward noncombatants to the days of Genghis Khan.
We were the first to have this weapon in our possession, and the first to use it. There is a practical certainty that potential enemies will develop it in the future and that atomic bombs will some time be used against us.
One of the professors associated with the Manhattan Project told me that he had hoped the bomb wouldn’t work. I wish that he had been right.
Last year at this time, the racist rightist noise machine was busy Beating The Negro because United States Ambassador to Japan John Roos had been dispatched to the official Japanese ceremony mourning the atomic obliteration of Hiroshima.
This marked the first time that a US ambassador to that country had attended such a ceremony. And it was perceived by the unsane ululaters as some sort of craven "cave."
As the New York Times reported:
Until Friday, American officials had always skipped the annual ceremony, fearing their presence would renew the debate over whether the United States should apologize for the World War II bombings, which together killed more than 200,000 people in explosions so intense that many victims were vaporized, leaving only ghostly shadows on walls, while others died in agony from burns and radiation sickness.
Yes, there then reigned Great Fear, among the keepers of the nation's delusions, that President Obama, or some designated minion like Roos, might actually render an "apology."
And this would never do. For the Official Position on such matters is that voiced by George I, upon learning that the US had mistakenly blown out of the sky an Iranian civilian airliner with 290 people aboard, including 66 children: "I will never apologize for the United States. I don’t care what the facts are."
No apology, as it developed, was forthcoming. Ambassador Roos did not speak at the Hiroshima ceremony, and the US embassy, in a statement, simply reiterated the Obama administration's over-arching position that "for the sake of future generations, we must continue to work together to realize a world without nuclear weapons," noting that in Hiroshima "it is fitting that we renew our determination to ensure that such a conflict is never again repeated."
There was then, among the Japanese, some hope that when Obama visited Japan that November, he might drop by Hiroshima, even say a word or two there.
A new sense of hope that the world’s nuclear powers, and particularly the United States, may finally share a desire to rid the world of nuclear weapons seems to have permeated this city. In front of City Hall, a large sign proclaimed Hiroshima to be part of an "Obamajority."
But it didn't happen. While safely immured in Tokyo, and pressed on any plans to venture to Hiroshima or Nagasaki, Obama said but "I certainly would be honored—it would be meaningful for me to visit those two cities in the future."
Today there is punditoid speculation that Obama might address the nuclear frying of human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki for No Reason "in his second term."
This year, James Zumwalt, deputy chief of mission at the US embassy in Tokyo, will attend both the Hiroshima ceremony, and the one mourning the nuclear incineration of Nagasaki. Since last year Ambassador Roos skipped the Nagasaki affair, "citing scheduling difficulties," the Zumwalt tour is seen by some Japanese as progress.
Because the United States, as has been true of all dying empires, is sick with uniform worship, people who wear or wore the things, or their relatives, are routinely trotted out to excuse the nation's most nauseating misdeeds.
And so it was that, to counter the Obama/Roos "cave," Fox News secured an interview with Gene Tibbets, son of the man who flew the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.
Tibbets obligingly rended his garments:
"It's an unsaid apology," Tibbets, 66, told FoxNews.com from his home in Georgiana, Ala. "Why wouldn’t it be? Why would [Roos] go? It doesn’t make any sense.
"I know it's the anniversary, but I don’t know what the hell they're trying to do. It needs to be left alone. The war is over.
"This all sounds like, 'Oh, we did you wrong.' That's what it sounds like."
A remark from Tibbets' daughter Kia indicates that the family is not evolving. For in describing what she believed her grandfather's reaction might be to Ambassador Roos’ attendance at the Hiroshima ceremony, she said:
"Embarrassed might be the word, that the government wasn't backing him up anymore," said Tibbets, 35, of Columbus, Ohio. "But then again, that's politics for you."
Best-of-show, however, went to the rightbent UK tabloid the
Mirror, which
interviewed the last surviving member of the
Enola Gay crew—navigator Theodore Van Kirk, 89.
"Do I regret what we did that day? No, sir, I do not," he says. "I have never apologised for what we did to Hiroshima and I never will. Our mission was to end the Second World War, simple as that.
"If we had not dropped that bomb, there is no way the Japanese would have surrendered. We would have had to invade the country and the death toll would have been truly unimaginable.
"They had been taught to fight to the last man and they would have fought us with sticks and stones. We did what we had to do. Not only to save American lives, but Japanese lives as well."
Got that? They killed the Japanese so that the Japanese might live. They destroyed the village in order to save it. (Tibbets, for Fox, had offered his own variation on this Newspeak: "We didn’t slaughter the Japanese—we stopped the war.")
Van Kirk's "sticks and stones" business is a residual reflection of the racism of the era, when it was commonly supposed that the Japanese were savage brutes so slaveringly devoted to their land that they would fight like animals to protect it.
While the British, of course—white people—were admired as staunch, civilized, stiff-upper-lipped defenders of their homeland, when Winston Churchill mouthed his "we shall never surrender" vow:
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender[.]
"Dutch" Van Kirk told the Mirror that the men of the Enola Gay knew they might be on a suicide mission (say what? I thought such things the province solely of folks like Japanese kamikazes and Middle Eastern "terrorists"). And, moreover, one that might result in the death of the planet:
"When the bomb went off, my first reaction was, 'Thank God it worked'," said Dutch. "But there were also concerns about what would happen when it did. Some scientists predicted the explosion would set off a chain reaction in the atmosphere that could destroy the entire world."
But these men flew that mission anyway. In a plane named after pilot Tibbets' mother. After staying up the night before playing poker.
I guess there’s really nothing left to say. Except that it is pretty hard to overstate the corrupting influence of money.
As Lew Welch observed: "'Profit motive' means very simply: you give less than you take. If you give less than you take, you grow mean and stingy. Everybody suffers. Morality is totally impossible."
In the film Chinatown, explaining how it happened to be that he used to wile away the days fucking his own daughter, Noah Cross said that "at the right time, the right place," people are "capable of anything."
So much more true when the "anything" involves money.
So ol' Dutch there, he might be a little bummed that some people think he could be a sort of war criminal. But you know what? So what. For he turned a handsome profit, on what he did.
Most in America see the Enola Gay crew as national heroes, but others view them as mass murderers and Dutch says he still gets the occasional death threat or abusive phone call. "It does make you think for a while—perhaps question yourself," he says.
But he made a small fortune, he admits, by selling off his wartime memorabilia.
His navigator’s log from the Enola Gay fetched more than $350,000.