Obama in Hiroshima

Obama in Hiroshima: The Right Thing to Do

By Michael Hoffman

www.RevisionistHistory.org

Neocon super-patriots are outraged that a US President would lament the American massacre of tens of thousands of civilians at Hiroshima and by implication, in the Japanese city of Nagasaki as well (the latter was the capital of Catholicism in the Far East at the time it was incinerated). General Curtis LeMay’s air force, using conventional bombs, had earlier incinerated the largely wooden city of Tokyo, killing some 100,000 civilians. These massacres were supposed to be reprisals for Japan’s attack on an American military base at Pearl Harbor.

The signature alibi for the atomic barbarism is that it “shortened the war and saved American lives.” In 1985, while a reporter working in California and writing a story on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I spoke on the phone with Walter Trohan, a former journalist for Colonel Robert McCormick’s populist newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. Trohan covered the White House. He had been close to all of the American presidents from FDR to Reagan. He knew the lesser fry too, such as Admiral William Leahy, Franklin Roosevelt’s chief of staff. Mr. Trohan informed this writer, with some indignation in his voice, even though the incident he was about to relate had occurred 42 years before, that Admiral Leahy told him as early as 1943 that the Japanese had been trying to surrender to US forces. He warned Trohan that if he printed that classified information before the war ended, Trohan would be imprisoned on a charge of espionage. 

Trohan and his boss McCormick sat on the story until the Sunday in 1945 after Japan had been blasted with atomic bombs and had surrendered unconditionally. Then they printed the facts on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. From 1943 onward the government of Japan had sought a negotiated peace that would leave Emperor Hirohito on his throne and a caretaker Japanese government in Tokyo intact. All Japanese armed forces would be surrendered and American soldiers and Marines would enter Japan without a shot being fired. This was to be the conditional surrender.

After this peace deal was rebuffed by President Roosevelt, tens of thousands of US Marines and sailors, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians were killed, sacrificed on the altar of Roosevelt’s doctrine of “unconditional surrender.”

Franklin Roosevelt was the presidential criminal who had allowed Pearl Harbor to be attacked. He knew in advance that the attack was coming in December 1941. Incredibly, nearly 75 years later much of the US intelligence on Pearl Harbor remains classified and not subject to Freedom of Information Act disclosure. What is “our” government hiding? Much of what can be pieced together was compiled by Robert Stinnett in his indispensable book, Day of Deceit; also worth reading is James Perloff’s report, “Pearl Harbor: Hawaii was Surprised; FDR Was Not,” in New American magazine, Dec. 7, 2015.

The Palestinians in particular and Muslims in general are students of history. They have noted that the U.S. and its Allies resorted to any means available, no matter how monstrous, to defeat what the Allies considered to be their “monstrous” foes, Germany and Japan. Terrorism against German troops (“partisan warfare”) as well as civilian populations (the civilian center of every major German city was bombed, and in many cases fire-bombed by British and US forces), was a routine occurrence. The goal was to exterminate, as far as possible, the men, woman and children of Germany and Japan.

When Palestinians shoot and bomb Israeli troops, or ISIS militants target French theaters and Belgian subway stations, they are merely adopting the same tactics the Allies used during the “Good War.” This is the terror contagion which we, in our boundless arrogance, have spread.

However cynical Mr. Obama’s ulterior motives for visiting Hiroshima may be, the fact is that his visit should serve as a reassessment of the Allied doctrine of justified terrorism inflicted on civilian populations residing in nations with which the US is at war. Otherwise, we can expect no less inhuman treatment from the Sunni Wahhabist/Salafist Muslims who are at war with us and who are following our inhuman example.

Obama’s next conciliatory visit should be in Dresden, Germany, the site of yet another genuine holocaust on par with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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