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Revisionist Hiroshima History

The Real Reason America Dropped The Atomic Bomb. It Was Not To End The War

By Arjun Walia
Collective Evolution

March 19, 2016

On August 6, 1945, the world, sadly, entered the atomic age. Without warning, a single nuclear bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima killed about 90,000 people instantly and injured many others — who then died from radiation sickness. Three days later, a second atomic strike on the city of Nagasaki killed some 37,000 people and injured another 43,000. Together the two bombs eventually killed an estimated 200,000 Japanese civilians.

“The Library of Congress adds roughly 60 million pages to its holdings each year, a huge cache of information for the public. However, also each year, the U.S. Government classifies nearly ten times that amount – an estimated  of documents. For scholars engaged in political, historical, scientific, or any other archival work, the grim reality is that most of their government’s activities are secret.” – Richard Dolan, historian, author (source) (you can read more about what is known as the “black budget” here)

The point above is significant. How can we really know anything about American history if a considerable portion of it remains classified? That being said, how can we really know anything about American history when we have so many examples of dishonesty and misinformation? What will the history books say about 9/11? We will have to wait and see, but what our history books tell us about the atomic bomb and why it was dropped seems to be a complete lie, at least according to some very credible sources.

We are often taught that the use of the atomic bomb was necessary to end the war with Japan at the earliest possible moment, but judging by the statements of many high ranking political and military personnel, this is simply not the case.

General/President Dwight Eisenhower discusses this in his 1963 memoir, The White House Years: Mandate for Change, 1953-1956 (pp. 312-313). When he was informed in mid-July 1945 by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson of the decision to use the atomic bomb, he was deeply troubled.

“I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to [Stimson] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face.’ ” (source)

“The Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing… I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”(source)

Given what I mentioned at the start of this article, I think it’s also important to note that Eisenhower also said (in his farewell address) that:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. . . . Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful message and goals.”  (source)

Did this “misplaced power” influence the decision to drop the atomic bomb? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it seems absurd to not consider the possibility.

“Since I entered politics, I have chiefly had men’s views confided to me privately. Some of the biggest men in the U.S., in the field of commerce and manufacturing, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive, that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.” – Woodrow Wilson, from his book The New Freedom(1913)

Another great example comes from General Douglas MacArthur, who sent a 40-page memorandum to President Roosevelt that clearly outlines five different surrender overtures from high ranking Japanese officials. This memo was also revealed on the front page of theChicago Tribune and the Washington Times on August 19th, 1945.

Again, the memo unequivocally states that the Japanese were offering to surrender. What is even more eye-opening is the fact that the surrender terms were practically identical to what was ultimately accepted by the Americans after the bomb had dropped. The memo (source) stated these terms:

  • Complete surrender of all Japanese forces and arms, at home, on island possessions, and in occupied countries.
  • Occupation of Japan and its possessions by Allied troops under American direction.
  • Japanese relinquishment of all territory seized during the war, as well as Manchuria, Korea, and Taiwan.
  • Regulation of Japanese industry to halt production of any weapons and other tools of war
  • Release of all prisoners of war and internees
  • Surrender of designated war criminals

Japan also made multiple attempts to end the war through Sweden and Portugal, who were neutral at the time. They also approached Soviet Russia’s leaders “with a view of terminating the war if possible by September.” (source)

Here is a quote from Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Ellis Zacharias:

Just when the Japanese were ready to capitulate, we went ahead and introduced to the world the most devastating weapon it had ever seen and, in effect, gave the go-ahead to Russia to swarm over Eastern Asia. 

Washington decided that Japan had been given its chance and now it was time to use the A-bomb. 

I submit that it was the wrong decision. It was wrong on strategic grounds. And it was wrong on humanitarian grounds. ()

Similarly, Admiral Leahy, Chief of Staff to presidents Roosevelt and Truman, later commented:

It is my opinion that the use of the 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 … 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.(source)

There have also been some disturbing remarks like this one:

On September 9, 1945, Admiral William F. Halsey, commander of the Third Fleet, was publicly quoted as stating that the atomic bomb was used because the scientists had a “toy and they wanted to try it out…” He further stated that “the first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment” and that it was“a mistake to ever drop it.” (source)

He said this despite the fact that most prominent scientists were completely against it. The scientists involved with the Manhattan project even wrote to the Secretary of Defense to try to encourage him not to drop the bomb.

So ask yourself, why did they really drop the bomb? A number of theories have been proposed;history.com outlines how it could have been dropped to demonstrate a new weapon of mass destruction to the Soviets, ultimately serving as a show of military strength. In 2005, New Scientist alluded to the same thing, claiming that it was done to kick start the Cold War.

“The conventional wisdom that the atomic bomb saved a million lives is so widespread that (quite apart from the inaccuracy of this figure, as noted by Samuel Walker) most Americans haven’t paused to ponder something rather striking to anyone seriously concerned with the issue: Not only did most top U.S. military leaders think the bombings were unnecessary and unjustified, many were morally offended by what they regarded as the unnecessary destruction of Japanese cities and what were essentially noncombat populations. Moreover, they spoke about it quite openly and publicly.” – Gar Alperovitz, University of Maryland Professor of Political Economy, former Legislative Director in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate, and Special Assistant in the Department of State (source)

Continue reading…

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

בעד קדמות ספר הזוהר

מה בדבר רבינו יצחק דמן עכו על פגישתו עם ר.משה דילאון על כתבי הזוהר וייחוסו לרשב”י

מה בדבר טענתה של אשתו של ר.משה דילאון שכתב את החיבור מבלי שהיה ספר מונח לפניו

תשובה:

שלום רב

הפולמוס סביב קדמות ספר הזוהר ימיו כימי עולם ואינני בקי די הצורך בפרטיו. גם יצק דמן עכו חזר בו במהלך השנים כמה פעמים מדבריו. מבחינתי קדמות ספר הזוהר מוכחת מכך שרבינו האר”י הקדוש שלמד מפי אליהו הנביא את כל תורתו כפי עדות כל תלמידיו, קיבל את ספר הזוהר כאמת מוחלטת, וכך כל גדולי ישראל שאחריו ובראשם הגר”א מוילנא, למעט קבוצת שוליים ממש מיהודי תימן, שגם בקרב בני תימן היו דחויים עקב כך. נמצא, שהמפקפקים בקדמות הזוהר הם כולם חוקרים שאינם שומרי מצוות ואינם בקיאים בתורה ובטח לא מבינים את הכתוב בזוהר הקדוש, ואילו גדולי ישראל בכל הדורות קיבלו ספר זה כאמת מוחלטת.

מי שנגע בנושא בארוכה הוא היעב”ץ – רבי יעקב עמדין, בספרו מטפחת סופרים, כל הספר שם עוסק בקושיות והראיות לכאן ולכאן וכדאי לעיין בו.

יש ספר בשם קבלה וחסידות של הלל צייטלין שמוכיח בארוכה את קדמות הזוהר אבל הוא אינו תחת ידי לעיין בו.

מאתר דין, כאן.

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Rethinking the State

Mises Daily Friday: The Truth About Politics

FEBRUARY 5, 2016

The very first votes of the 2016 presidential election season were cast this week in the Iowa caucuses. This is supposed to fill us with happy thoughts about self-government, civic virtue, rational deliberation, and about politics as the way the people’s will is put into effect.

But to the contrary, we should spurn what the establishment would have us celebrate. Politics operates according to principles that would horrify us if we observed them in our private lives, and that would get us arrested if we tried to live by them. The state can steal and call it taxation, kidnap and call it conscription, kill and call it war.

And yet we are taught to fear capitalism, of all things.

But what, after all, are capitalism and the free market? They are nothing more than the sum total of voluntary exchanges in society.

When we engage in a voluntary exchange — when I buy apples for $5, or when you hire someone for $25 per hour — both sides are better off than they would have been in the absence of the exchange.

We can’t say the same for our interactions with the state, since we pay the state under threat of violence. The state sure winds up better off, though. That’s for sure.

Business firms that increase their profits thanks to some new innovation cannot rest on their laurels. Other firms will adopt the innovation themselves, and those abnormally high profits will dissipate. The original firm must continue to press forward, striving to devise still newer ways to please their fellow men.

The state operates under no such conditions. It can remain as backward as it likes. Other firms are typically prohibited from competing with it.

The state’s priorities arbitrarily override your own. Ethanol “is important for the farmers,” one candidate says. So because the state has decided some interest group’s foolish and economically nonsensical pet project is “important,” what you yourself would have preferred to do with your money is simply set aside and ignored, and you are forced to subsidize what the state seeks to privilege.

Our schools and media portray corporations as sinister, and government as benign. But who wouldn’t rather take a sales call from Norwegian Cruise Line than an audit demand from the Internal Revenue Service?

Or imagine if a corporation fabricated a web of untruths, used them as a pretext to launch a violent attack on a people that had never caused Americans any harm, and brought about as many as a million deaths and millions more internal and external refugees. That corporation would be broken up and never heard from again. It would be denounced ceaselessly until the end of time.

Now all those things did happen, but they were carried out by the state. And as we all know, there have been no repercussions for anyone. No one has been punished. In fact, the perpetrators earn six-figure speaking fees. The whole thing is shrugged off as at worst an honest mistake. Some people are still outraged about it, but even they seem to take for granted that there’s really nothing that can be done about behavior like this on the part of the American regime.

Imagine there were a corporation that was somehow so entrenched that despite being responsible for a staggering death toll, it evaded all responsibility and simply carried on as before. The outrage would be deafening and overwhelming.

But so relentless has been the propaganda, ever since all of us were children, about the state’s benign nature that many people simply cannot bring themselves to think as badly about the state as they have been taught to think about corporations — even though the crimes of the state put to shame all the misdeeds of all existing corporations put together. Meanwhile, opponents of the state are routinely portrayed as incorrigible misanthropes, when in fact, in light of the state’s true nature, we are mankind’s greatest advocates.

The market brings people together. People of divergent and sometimes antagonistic racial, religious, and philosophical backgrounds are happy to trade with one another. Beyond that, the international division of labor as it exists today is the greatest and most extraordinary example of human cooperation in the history of the world. Countless firms produce countless intermediate goods that eventually combine to become finished consumer products. And the entire structure of production, in all its complexity, is aimed at satisfying consumer preferences as effectively as possible.

The state, on the other hand, pits us against each other. If one of us wins a state favor, it comes at the expense of everyone else. For one group to be benefited, another must first be expropriated. At one time or another the state has pitted the old against the young, blacks against whites, the poor against the rich, the industrialists against agriculture, women against men.

Meanwhile, all the anti-social effort devoted to extracting favors from the state is effort that is not available to produce goods and services and increase the general prosperity.

The market is about anticipating the needs of our fellow men and exerting ourselves to meet those needs in the most cost-effective manner — in other words, by wasting the fewest possible resources, and making what we offer as affordable as we can for those we serve.

Ah, but we need the state, virtually everyone tells us. Whether it’s “monopoly,” or drugs, the bad guys overseas, or the scores of other bogeymen the state uses to justify itself, we’re constantly being reminded of why the state is supposed to be indispensable. To be sure, these and other rationales for the state sound plausible enough, which is why the state and its apologists use them. But the first halting steps toward intellectual liberation come when someone considers the possibility that the truth about these things might be different from what he hears on TV, or learned in school.

The small minority of people who administer the state with funds expropriated by the productive private sector need to justify this situation, lest the public become restless or entertain subversive ideas about the real relationship between the state and themselves. And this is where the state’s various platitudes about the people governing themselves, or taxation being voluntary, or government employees being the servants of the people, enter the picture.

Think for a moment just about this last claim: that government employees are our servants. These people staff an institution that decides how much of our income and wealth to expropriate in order to fund itself. They will imprison us if we do not pay. And we are to believe that these people are our servants?

For those not gullible enough to fall for such a transparent canard, the rationales become mildly more sophisticated. All right, all right, the state may say, it’s not quite right to say that the people govern themselves. But, they hasten to add, we can offer the next best thing: the people will be represented by individuals chosen from among them.

As Gerard Casey has argued, though, the idea of political representation is not meaningful. When an agent represents a business owner in a negotiation, he ensures that the owner’s interests are pursued. If the owner’s interests are defended only weakly, ignored, or downright defied, the owner chooses different representation.

None of this bears any resemblance to political representation. Here, a so-called representative is chosen by some people but actively opposed by others. Yet he is said to “represent” all of them. But how can this be, when he can’t possibly know them all, and even if he did, he’d discover they have mutually exclusive views and priorities?

Even if we focus entirely on those people who did vote for the representative, is their vote supposed to imply consent to his every decision? Some of them may have voted for him not for his positions or merits, but simply because he was less bad than the alternative. Others may have chosen him for one or two of his stances, but may be indifferent or hostile on everything else. How can even these people — who actually voted for the representative — seriously be said to be “represented” by him?

But the idea of political representation, while meaningless, is not without its usefulness to the modern state. It helps to conceal the brute fact that, despite all the talk about “popular rule” and “governing ourselves,” even the “free societies” of the West amount to some people ruling, and others being ruled.

When the results are announced this primary season amid cheers and celebration, then, remember what it all represents: the triumph of compulsion over cooperation, coercion over freedom, and propaganda over truth. The civics textbooks may write with breathless awe about the American political system, but this is by far the worst thing about the US. Rather than celebrate the anti-social world of politics, let us raise a glass to the anti-politics of the free market, which has yielded more wealth and prosperity through peace and cooperation than the state and its politicians could with all the coercion in the world.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

From Mises.org, here.