Posted on 08/07/2006 6:22:41 AM PDT by governsleastgovernsbest
by Mark Finkelstein
August 7, 2006 - 09:10
Because of shame over their sins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans were actually awaiting payback along the lines of 9/11. You say you were unaware of any such feelings? That's only because your feeling was 'subliminal.' Your shame was 'unconscious.' Well, that, or the fact that you just don't have the same exquisitely refined sensibilities of Boston Globe columnist James Carroll.
Here's how Carroll spelled it out in his column, The Nagasaki Principle:
"Thus, what I am calling the Nagasaki principle consists in momentum, which obfuscates responsibility before the fact, and denial, which prevents a necessary moral reckoning afterward.
"This may seem like airy theorizing, but the psychologically unfinished business of the Nuclear Age, dating to the day after Hiroshima, defined the American response to the trauma of Sept. 11, 2001. The nation had lived for two generations with the subliminal but powerfully felt dread of a coming nuclear war.
"Unconsciously ashamed of our own action in using the bomb, we were waiting for pay-back, and on that beautiful morning it seemed to come. The smoke rising up from the twin towers hit us like a mushroom cloud, and we instantly dubbed the ruined site as Ground Zero, when, as historian John Dower observes, the only true Ground Zeros are the two in Japan."
Reading Carroll's bio, one senses it is the author, rather than Americans in general, who have 'subiminal,' 'unconscious' issues to resolve:
"James P. Carroll is best known for his work, An American Requiem: God, My Father, and the War That Came Between Us (1996), about the conflict between his father and himself over America's role in the Vietnam War. His father was General Joseph Carroll, the director of the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency during most of the war in Southeast Asia.
"James Carroll, spent a year in the ROTC program at Georgetown University and was honored as ROTC Cadet of the year in 1961. The following year Carroll decided to become a priest, entering the novitiate of the Paulist Fathers. In early 1969, he was ordained in New York by Terrence Cardinal Cooke, the U.S. military vicar. At the speech he gave at his first mass, the next day, he quoted a biblical passage from the prophet Ezekiel, referring to death and bones "burned by time and by desert wind, by the sun," and he added, "and by napalm." The addition of those words would cause an unresolved rift between him and his father."
Could Carroll's column be a classic bit of projection of his own Oedipal issues?
Boston Globe/NewsBusters Oedipal-projection ping to Today show list.
No. It seems like rantings from someone who hates western civilization.
You start a war: We finish a war.
Idiots.
WTF!?
No sin, but rather dire necessity. Otherwise we'ld still be fighting Japan.
I feel no shame.
God bless Truman for nuking Japan.
What a tool. My grandfather's ship was kamikazied during the Battle of Okinawa. He had hundreds of his shipmates die. And this unmitigated idiot has the gall to believe that anyone with a brain feels any shame about dropping the bomb to end the war? The bomb saved millions of American AND Japanese lives by bringing the war to an end without the need to invade the home islands.
Of course, this jerk also probably thinks a cease-fire in Lebanon would lead to peace and few lives lost. Stupid is, if anything, consistent.
It's August, and do I detect the rumblings of another 'let's debate Hiroshima and Nagasaki' thread continuing on to 400 posts, here on FR, one of our annual summer rites of passage.
I'm going to go with that since I don't have any unresolved issues over Hiroshima seeing as it was the right thing to do.
Every single one of Carroll's columns is just like this.
Without question, he is the biggest pussy in New England.
What a frickin' idiot!
Airy theorism? Is it even a sentence?
The only thing 'unresolved' about September 11th is that it was more or less a by-product of eight years of Clinton, steeped in abject lack of national preparation and flavored with American moral decay widely detested around the Islamic world, combined with external subjective global impressions of our incontrovertible weakness (again due to Clinton) which set in wheels the actions of the 19 hijackers and those who issued the orders.
Just for the record, this American is not ashamed, and remembers feeling quite proud as a kid that we had decisively put an end to the Japanese threat.
I also remember "Unconditional Surrender"
Don't care if he was a democrat, Truman knew what he was doing>
Only guilt ridden liberals feel/felt this way.
And as all liberals do, they project their own distorted feelings and reasoning on to others.
It was a damn shame that we had to drop the bomb. But the responsibility lies with Japan. For me, sadness for the innocents does not translate into guilt.
I finally figured out why liberals have such an affinity for arab terrorists. You know how they march in the street whipping themselves bloody with chains? That's what libs do to themselves emotionally, and wish they had the nerve to do physically.
PEARL HARBOR was our invitation. Any logic beyond that is skewered.
""Thus, what I am calling the Nagasaki principle consists in momentum, which obfuscates responsibility before the fact, and denial, which prevents a necessary moral reckoning afterward."
I'd feel guiltier if I could figure out what this meant.
""Thus, what I am calling the Nagasaki principle consists in momentum, which obfuscates responsibility before the fact, and denial, which prevents a necessary moral reckoning afterward."
I'd feel guiltier if I could figure out what this meant.
He sees poetic beauty in the attacks of 9/11.
I can say that Mr. Carroll's column sounds like one of the most idiotic I've ever known to issue from an American news outlet. Given the competition, that's impressive.
Oh, for crying loud. Not this crap again.
The atom bombs dropped on Japan saved the lives of at least 500,000 American servicemen and several million (yes, several MILLION) Japanese, most of them civilians.
Yeah, that about covers it.... : )
These people are generally the ones you find in East Village bookstores, with their Che T-shirts on, reeking of B.O. (especially the unshaved female types), smoking pipes, in their Birkenstocks, and reading boring, socialist tomes one after the other. No real word releveance to anyone here reading this thread this morning.
My dad was Army Air Corps, back from overseas at the time but waiting to be sent out again if it hadn't been for Hiroshima and the Japanese surrender.
I once asked him his opinion on Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb. He said, "If word got out that he had a weapon that could have ended the war and chose not to use it, someone would have killed him."
like I said, here comes the usual "It's August on FR" endless commentaries on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'll wager it will continue at least for 300 posts.
Exactly.
Having the bomb in 1945, and not using it, would have been an act of insanity.
What an epitomy of a USEFUL IDIOT.
Sorry Mark, I just couldn't read passed this point. The disconnect between reality and fantasy for the left is painful to digest sometimes.
"Reading Carroll's bio, one senses it is the author, rather than Americans in general, who have 'subiminal,' 'unconscious' issues to resolve."
I'd say Finkelstein has put his finger on it...
It would have been immoral and unconcionable to allow the Japanese to continue their fanatical war any longer. They had slaughtered far too many people and had a fight to the death mindset not unlike the moslem world today. The war would have been prolonged and many more including my father would have potentially been killed. Guilt! You've got to be kidding me. The Japanese reaped only a small part of what should have come to them for their deeds. I have never had any feelings of guilt over what we did to end their suicidal war mentality.
Obviously, we should have waited until Japan got the bomb (they were close). Then, after they nuked San Francisco and Los Angeles, we would have been justified in using our bomb on them. That would have been a proportional response.
I had heard some Japanese say "well, now they know the feeling", but that is about as far as it went and I never knew anyone per say who glorified over the 9-11, but only wished the US the best.
That Finkelstein is a freakin' genius, I tell ya!
PS: Governs = Finkelstein!
My father was on Leyte in 1945 working as an NCO in a motor pool (he was a skilled mechanic). He'd already been told that with the expected casualty rates from an invasion of the Japanese home islands, he could expect to be yanked out of his mechanic job, handed an M1, and sent to Japan as an infantryman--where his chances of survival were marginal.
So all I have to say is, God bless the Manhattan Project.
}:-)4
If 9-11 happened twenty years ago and this ass-hat wrote this he'd have been run out of town on a rail, even in Boston.
Yes, he would have teeth in the single-digits.
If we hadn't used the atomic weapons, millions more lives would have been lost to conventional warfare to take Japan. It would have been unethical for America to not use them. The secret would have eventually come out and everyone would have asked Truman why he chose to continue the war when he had the chance to end it. Demonstration bombings would have done nothing to stop the fanatical Japanese.
Please, someone correct me if I am wrong. But when the atomic bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered, didn't America and Americans - the overwhelmingly majority of them - breathe a sigh of relief that finally, the war was over? At what point did this bs theory of America committing a war crime and should feel shame and guilt, first come about? I have my beliefs that this is some sort of Soviet propaganda bs that the American left has now acceptted as fact. Am I close with that assumption?
AMEN, brother!
Boston Globe + James Carroll = Commie dingbats
He just explained why the Globe hired him: he is a left-wing-nut-job.
A while back I lived in Los Alamos, where the first bombs were built.
The local paper often reprinted stories from other papers, usually but not always from overseas, in which the reporter visits the town and describes the constant sense of overwhelming guilt the residents of the town suffered under. We were apparently all walking around with our shoulders slumped and unable to look a foreign reporter in the eye.
Quite amusing, actually.
Count on the Globe to provide space to leftist self-loathers.
The shame would have been having LeMay finished bombing every Japanese city, rail line, port and highway making the fall '45 rice harvest unaccessable to most of Japan. The nation quite literally would have starved in 1946.
Not to mention extrapolating casualties which would have occurred in a homelan invasion.
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