Month: August 2015

The struggle over the Iran Agreement reminds me of the seventeen years I spent as editor of Present Tense, a liberal Jewish-oriented magazine, published by the American Jewish Committee.

In 1990, we featured a detailed investigative piece, "Speaking for the Jews." Our cover blurb read: "A growing number of American Jews, including many inside the Jewish establishment, are fed up with the hard-line views of Jewish leaders whom they did not elect and who, in any case, do not speak for them." Some members of The Lobby were quite upset and Present Tense was shut down soon after for debatable reasons. Even so, the article’s writer, Robert Spero, and the magazine’s editors, were absolutely on target in 1990 and even more so today. In short, the Israel Lobby doesn’t speak for American Jews.

In addition to the fabrications and fantasies concocted by PM Netanyahu’s Israel and endlessly repeated by his followers, it is that for the first time in memory a foreign country – Israel – is publicly fighting an American president’s foreign policy on American soil. Israel’s allies include Obama-hating Republicans, intimidated, largely Jewish, Democratic politicians, and Bibi-supporting Jewish and Christian Zionist lobbies – none of whom have ever offered any lucid or rational alternatives, and many of them empowered by a few mega-rich and hawkish American Jews.

Continue reading “Iran, Israel, and American Jews”

At 8: 16 AM on August 6, 1945 – 08:16:02 to be precise, Hiroshima time – Little Boy exploded. When President Harry Truman learned of the successful detonation of the atomic bomb and the destruction of the Japanese city, he said, "This is the greatest thing in history" (Richard Rhodes: The Making of the Atomic Bomb. Simon and Shuster: New York, 1986, p. 734).

When future historians convene to compile an account of the 20^th century – if there is enough of a future after global warming and nuclear proliferation – they may very well agree with Truman.

The effort and enterprise and science that went into the development of nuclear weapons embraced most of the greatest scientific minds of the generation, and the ability to unleash the immense forces within the basic building blocks of nature represented an astonishing culmination. If there is any single and irreplaceable watershed in the history of human intellectual accomplishment, the success of the Manhattan Project represents it.

And if there is a watershed in the history of human morality, the cataclysms caused by Little Boy over Hiroshima and, three days later, by Fat Man, the second atomic bomb used in warfare, over Nagasaki, are at the top of the heap.

Continue reading “Intelligence, Morality, and the Atomic Bomb”

The dropping of those bombs and the explicit threat ever since to drop more is a crime that has given birth to a new species of imperialism.

On Aug. 6 and 9, millions of people will mark the 70th anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in those cities and at events around the world. Some will celebrate the recent deal in which Iran committed not to pursue nuclear weapons and to comply with the Non-Proliferation Treaty with requirements not imposed on any other nation.

Yet, those nations that have nuclear weapons are either violating the NPT by failing to disarm or by building more (U.S., Russia, U.K., France, China, India), or they have refused to sign the treaty (Israel, Pakistan, North Korea). Meanwhile, new nations are acquiring nuclear energy despite possessing an abundance of oil and/or some of the best conditions for solar energy on earth (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, UAE).

Nuclear missiles containing more than the entire bombing power of World War II in a single bomb are aimed by the thousands at Russia from the United States and vice versa. A 30-second fit of insanity in a US or Russian president could eliminate all life on earth; all the while, the United States is playing war games on Russia’s border. The acceptance of this madness as normal and routine is part of the continued explosion of those two bombs, begun 70 years ago and rarely properly understood.

Continue reading “Hiroshima-Nagasaki: 70-Year Nuclear Explosions Not Done Yet”

Hiroshima, Japan — August 5, 2014 — On the 70th Anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings (August 6th and 9th), Paul Kawika Martin, the policy and political director of the United State’s largest peace organization, Peace Action, released the following statement from the official commemoration in Hiroshima.

“Here in Hiroshima, on the 70th Anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of this city and Nagasaki, we remember the hundreds of thousands of casualties caused by the most basic of nuclear weapon designs and know that we never want another populous to suffer from such a bomb. Even worse, today’s nuclear weapons are several to hundreds of times more destructive.

Clearly, these horrific weapons are no asset to any country. The current U.S. plan to waste $1 trillion over the next thirty years modernizing, maintaining and replacing delivery systems must be stopped.

Continue reading “Peace Action Statement from Hiroshima On 70th Anniversary of the US Atomic Bombings of Japan”

This week marks the 70th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Harry Truman’s acts of mass murder against the Japanese in August 1945. Some 90,000-166,000 individuals were killed in Hiroshima on Aug. 6. The Nagasaki bombing on Aug. 9 killed 39,000-80,000 human beings. (It has come to my attention that the U.S. military bombed Tokyoon Aug. 14 – after destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito expressed his readiness to surrender.)

There isn’t much to be said about those unspeakable atrocities against civilians that hasn’t been said many times before. The U.S. government never needed atomic bombs to commit mass murder, but it dropped them anyway. (Remember this when judging the official U.S. moralistic stance toward Iran.) Its “conventional” weapons have been potent enough. (See the earlier firebombing of Tokyo.) Nor did it need the bombs to persuade Japan to surrender; the Japanese government had been suing for peace. The U.S. government may not have used atomic weapons since 1945, but it has not yet given up mass murder as a political/military tactic. Presidents and presidential candidates are still expected to say that, with respect to nuclear weapons, “no options are off the table.”

Mario Rizzo has pointed out that Americans were upset by the murder of 3,000 people on 9/11 yet seem not to be bothered that “their” government murdered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in two days. Conservatives, ironically, were among the earliest critics of Truman’s mass murder. It’s also worth noting that the top military leaders of the day opposed the use of atomic bombs.

As Harry Truman once said, “I don’t give ’em hell. I just drop A-bombs on their cities and they think it’s hell.” (Okay, he didn’t really say that, but he might as well have.)

Some people still see the A-bombs as the only alternative to invasion, which would have cost many more civilian lives. Now there’s the fallacy of the false alternative in dying color. Why couldn’t the U.S. military have called it a day and gone home? Why the assumption that the state must destroy and conquer its “enemy”? Why demand unconditional surrender? (To back up a step, why go to war against Japan at all? Pearl Harbor was the result of systematic, intentional provocation – as Herbert Hoover and others pointed out at the time) – perhaps with complete Roosevelt’s foreknowledge. A government less concerned with a rival to its and its allies’ colonial possessions might have not gotten involved.)

Rad Geek People’s Daily has a poignant post here. Rad says: “As far as I am aware, the atomic bombing of the Hiroshima city center, which deliberately targeted a civilian center and killed over half of the people living in the city, remains the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of the world.”

Other things to read: Anthony Gregory’s “Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the US Terror State,”David Henderson’s “Remembering Hiroshima,” and G.E.M. Anscombe’s “Mr. Truman’s Decree.”

Finally, if you read nothing else on this subject, read Ralph Raico’s article here.

Sheldon Richman is a Research Fellow at The Independent Institute, which is based in Oakland, California. This originally appeared on his blog, Free Association.