Apologizing for the bomb this close to Memorial Day is roughly equivalent to talking about the Queen again on Independence Day.
Bill Whittle reminds you that we'd have a whole lot more people to remember this Memorial Day if we hadn't used them. Maybe a million more. A lot more Japanese would have died in the event of a conquest of the mainland, too.
Also, that they were warned five days before the bombing. He has the text from the leaflets we dropped warning people to flee, and promising peace if they would remove the military government and pursue peaceful relationship with us.
It takes some gall for a President with as much blood on his hands as this one, through his acts of omission in Iraq and Syria and his acts of commission in Libya, to shame a President who saved as many lives as Truman.
UPDATE: See the comments for a link to the text of a speech, as well as a debate about whether or not this speech constitutes an apology. Our own MikeD rules that it was not, in his opinion.
12 comments:
Not the way NPR tells it:
"President Obama did not offer an apology on this visit; Japan has said it did not seek one."
I took a course where students were asked to give their opinions on whether or not the Bomb should have been dropped. Most of the opinions were along this line. "I FEEL we shouldn't have dropped the Bomb." I replied that we shouldn't have dropped the Bomb, so that the US and the USSR could have together invaded Japan and then divided Japan between themselves. No one in the class expressed any alarm at my statement.
Unfortunately, after Ben Rhodes' echo chamber, you can't believe anything the major parts of that echo chamber say about anything at all. NPR was a major part of that, taking big donations from Rhodes' (and Iran's) ally the Ploughshares Fund, and denying a platform to Iran deal opponents.
So if the President wants to say that 'he didn't apologize,' the fact that all the media repeats it just means that the echo chamber is operating again. He won't have used the word 'apologize,' but there are plenty of ways of apologizing without using the word.
Here's the text of the speech. You can decide for yourself if it was an apology, especially compared to the facts laid out by Whittle's account. Is it portrayed as a justified act of war, or a horrible thing that was not fully justified, must somehow be atoned for, and must never happen again?
Both my father and my brides father were combat infantry, training in the Philippines for the Japanese invasion. Thanks to the bomb, they both came home.
IMO, the Japanese were lucky as hell they were dealing with a compassionate western foe. They did not have to deal with a occupation by tyrants. Imagine what Stalin would have done to their fair isle?
I would be willing to bet NONE of the apologists ever spent time in a line combat unit.
Here's the text of the speech. You can decide for yourself if it was an apology, especially compared to the facts laid out by Whittle's account. Is it portrayed as a justified act of war, or a horrible thing that was not fully justified, must somehow be atoned for, and must never happen again?
After reading it, and coming from an expectation of it being a veiled apology, the worst I can say about it is that it doesn't lay the blame for the bombing on the Japanese leadership. Oh, sure, it's full of preening pretensions about "we must do better, like I tried to do", but really, it's pretty neutral. He doesn't portray it as a war crime, or even a morally questionable act (save for one part where he says something about technological advancement requiring "moral advancement"), but as a part of war and "war is bad".
And to be fair, even though the dropping of the bomb at Hiroshima and the one at Nagasaki were the direct consequence of the Japanese government's attack on Pearl Harbor, and regardless of the fact that dropping the bombs probably DID spare countless lives (American AND Japanese)... it would be more than a little rude to point that out to them standing in Hiroshima. I do not believe the President should have gone to Hiroshima. But having done so, he could have done a lot worse than he did. I give it a B and rule it "not an apology".
I've updated the post to reflect your ruling, and to invite people to discuss the question. That's fair, I think.
I have to agree with Mike on this. (I know, Mike, pick yerself up off the floor.)
I fully expected Xerxes to consider this the coup de' grace on his Grand Apology Tour. I didn't see it in the transcript. Fwiw, I also didn't see any use of the pronoun "I" in the speech either. Another first for the Unclothed Boy King....and I read it twice to prove it to my lyin' eyes.
I don't see it as an apology, although I can see how people may read it that way, depending on their opinions of the President.
I also think he should not have gone, for the very reason that people could read it as an apology.
Yeah, I'm not as impressed with it. To me it reads: 'Oh, what a horrible thing was done here.... it must never happen again.... my country should give up nukes.... humans are vicious, though, and 'every religion' is murderous....'
On the other hand, if I'd given the speech it would have been along the lines of, "Well, aren't you glad in retrospect that we didn't just leave you to Stalin?"
I just read through it, & thought it pretty dull and clichéd.
Bland generalities: the nature of man from his beginning has been to war on each other. War is a bad thing. Bad men lead nations into war. We can do better. The bombing of Hiroshima shows us the devastation and human cost of nuclear war. We have to get away from nuclear war. It's a bad thing. The children, they were confused. Yadda, yadda.
No blame on Japan for its warmaking; no blame on U.S. for bomb.
raven
IMO, the Japanese were lucky as hell they were dealing with a compassionate western foe. They did not have to deal with a occupation by tyrants. Imagine what Stalin would have done to their fair isle?
Which is why I was so surprised when my endorsement of no-bomb but Russian invasion and occupation got no response from the peace-loving "We shouldn't have dropped the bomb" students in the class. One conclusion is that they lacked the knowledge and intellect to realize what a Russian invasion and occupation would entail. Just as they lacked the knowledge and intellect to make a decent judgment on whether to have dropped the bomb or not.
One conclusion is that they lacked the knowledge and intellect to realize what a Russian invasion and occupation would entail. Just as they lacked the knowledge and intellect to make a decent judgment on whether to have dropped the bomb or not.
They would have just signed a drone bomb order like Hussein does, without looking at the intel or names, and then got the Emperor of Japan killed as a result of a bomb. And then Japan would be occupied by the Soviets, then they would blame Reagan for it several decades later on. The usual pattern.
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