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?
Like I said, these things could be debated endlessly (and they are, on FR, starting usually 2 or 3 August and until the end of the month, every year, without fail!) :-)
No idea. But his writing is extremely effeminate.
I suppose the option would have been either to produce more A-bombs and hit Nagoya, Kobe, Okayama, Osaka, Sendai, whatever, or a full scale ground invasion in September of 1945. As it was, the US military arriving by air and sea in 1945 were confronted with a former enemy, laying down weapons, rather than a current enemy, hitting them with weapons.
I'm proud of Hiroshima.
The left is still POed that Truman dropped the bombs and ended the war before the Soviets could become a full "partner" in the war against Japan. What seems to be forgotten in most stories is that Russia did not declare war on Japan until 8/9/45 and the left was/is always more concerned with Russia than America
I get that from lots of people I ask in Taiwan, (and Korea and China for that matter), re: Hiro and Naga :-)
Japan serves as an example of what a defeated enemy is worth. An undefeated enemy is still an enemy.
They got what they wanted (barely). The idea was to have all that Japanese war materiel turned over to the Russians, who would then make it available to Mao, who would in turn use it against the Left's real enemy, Chiang. But the Russians had been burnt by Japan once before in the century, and weren't eager for a repeat performance. Their declaration of war, technical as it was, would never have come against a not-quite-absolutely-defeated Japan.
Guess which President since 1952 shows Truman's character.
It's a perfectly good sentence; the momentum of which he speaks is reflective of the urgency to beat the other war powers to unharnessing the secrets of the atom and the course of the war itself, by the time the bomb was ready, we had seen one major combatant fall leaving only one left to defeat.
To not have dropped it would have created the impression that its existence was fiction.
I suggest every high school student watch the movie called ABOVE AND BEYOND, about what went on behind the scenes of the bombing of Hiroshima. It's incredible that those who have no grasp of history are able to write ridiculous articles like this.
Shame....Shame
Carroll looks like a slimey 'catcher' from the first state to try and legalize gay marriages.
What is it with liberals and their need to carry around all this guilt all the time? No wonder they're all moonbats. They've driven themselves insane.
Didn't mean to set off a firesotrm. And Truman was supposed to be anti-semitic. But he know how to run a war.
Everybody forgets that the Atomic bomb SAVED far more Japanese than were killed because of the ending of the war. Not many people remember that prior to the bomb Tokyo was fire bombed, and more people died in Tokyo (over 100,000) that night than died in Hiroshima or Nakazaki. Had we not dropped the bomb, the Tokyo fire bombing would have repeated itself over every city in Japan, and would probably have caused the near extinction of the Japanese population (the Japanese army was willing to fight to the last Japanese).
We had some fun arguments in class over that book.
Anyone with any knowledge or familiarity of the Pacific war is probably going to come to the same conclusion. Hiroshima didn't come out of nowhere.
Please note that 'the Finkelstein character' wrote the column at NewsBusters posted here EXPOSING the Boston Globe column. The Boston Globe column of which you rightly complain was written by Globe columnist James Carroll.
And by the way, Finkelstein = me, governsleastgovernsbest.
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