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?
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.
--"I hate America and Americans and all that they stand for. These acts in Hiroshima and Nagasazki were war crimes, and the US was so totally cruel and immoral to have done such a thing. And I won't let them ever forget it"
--"So help me, I hate all 'Nips (sic) with everything in my heart for what they did to us. That goes for military and civilian, men, women boys and girls, babies too. The only regret I have is that we did not kill even more. Too bad we could not have incinerated another 100,000, I'd be all for it."
--"I have two minds about this. One is the moral of ending a war, which in fact the bomb did as horrific as an act it was, it did actually bring an almost immediate cessation to the endless bloodletting in the Pacific, of which there certainly would have been more. I also regret the deaths of civilians, particularly women and babies in war. If it could have been finished--and the Japanese War Council more quick to act--with even just one A-bomb on Hiroshima only, that would have been better, but history is history and thank God the war is now over and Japanese troops are in Iraq on the US side. Thank goodness it did not take three of these."
I would say most people subscribe to one of these three fundamental viewpoints.
Thank you for saying that. My dad worked on the Manhattan Project.
No, actually, it goes the other way. Because of 9/11, I'm waiting for the USA to do a Hiroshima/Nagasaki type payback. I thought Kabul and Kandahar were good candidates, but since we missed the opportunity, I volunteer Damascus, Tehran and Qom for "demonstration" nuclear strikes.
My first thought was that he is a homosexual. Is that the case?
I don't fit any of those three.
My stepfather-in-law's father (grandstepfather-in-law? sheesh) worked at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, TN for many years. They're justifiably proud of their role down there.
}:-)4
He conveniently became a priest in 1962 after completing ROTC?
The energy of the current anti-war movement comes from those losers who dodged service in Vietnam.
In their consciences, they know they were wrong, but they continue to do the cowardly thing by trying to justify their abandonment of resposibility.
I think that politics for the next 20 years will be defined by the intragenerational conflict between those who did their duty and those who renounced their duty.
If the Japanese had surrendered after only one bombing, I think it would have been possible to wonder if the bombing were truly necessary. But as they chose to go on after the first bomb, had we not used the second, what on earth WOULD have stopped them??
Probably the last one who did.... Can you imagine anyone in the Democratic Partry today who would make such a decision?
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