poli-sci (06/02/82)
>From JoSH@RUTGERS Tue Jun 1 17:15:36 1982
Poli-Sci Digest Tue 1 Jun 82 Volume 2 Number 138
Contents: the Bomb (4 msgs)
$1000000000
Progressive Literature (2 msgs)
Leftists Agonistes (3 msgs)
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Date: 29 May 1982 1918-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject: A bombing Japan
Please folks, lets keep this discussion on Arms-D OR Poli-Sci, NOT both.
Jim
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Date: 28 May 1982 17:19:21 EDT (Friday)
From: David Mankins <dm at BBN-RSM>
Subject: Facts are simple and Facts are straight
I want to apologize to those of you on ARMS-D who have already
sent this message, but I'd like to head off a lot of groundless
flaming as possible.
I've noticed a lack of real references in the debate on the decision
to drop the bomb on Japan ("I read somewhere..." "Come on! Everyone
KNOWS the Japanese were militarist savages and weren't going to
surrender...", etc., etc.) so I thought I'd throw in these little
tidbits:
All from \Postwar America: 1945-1971/, by Howard Zinn
(Bobbs-Merrill, 1973):
[pp 14-15]:
That this [the decision to drop the bomb] was not "the only reasonable
conclusion" is evident on the basis of only one additional fact, which
Truman knew at the time he made the decision on the bomb. He knew
that the first invasion of Japan would be on the island of Kyushu,
that American casualties there were expected to be about 31,000, and
that the Kyushu assault was not scheduled until Novermber--allowing
three monghts for the wobbling nation to surrender. Japan was already
beginning to press for peace through her emissary in Moscow, [it
should be recalled at this point--June or July of 1945--the Russians
had not yet declared war on Japan (which is important later)] as
Truman and the American high command also knew through the
interception of Japanese capbles. There was, therefore, no immediate
need to use the bomb to save libes. Hanson Baldwin [in \Great
Mistakes of the War/] summarized the situation as follows:
The atomic bomb was dropped in August. Long before that month
started our forces were securely based in Okinawa, the
Marianas and Iwo Jima; Germany had been defeated; our fleet ad
been cruising off the Japanese coast with impunity bombarding
Japan; even inter-island ferries had been attacked and sunk.
Bombing, which started slowly in June, 1944, from China bases
and from the Marianas in November, 1944, had been increased
materially in 1945, and by Auguat, 1945, more than 16,000 tons
of bombs had ravaged Japanese cities. Food was short; mines
and submarines and surface vessels and planes clamped an iron
blockade around the main islands; raw materials were scarce.
Blockade, bombing, and unsuccessful attempts at dispersion had
reduced Japanese production capacity from 20 to 60 percent.
The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic
position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconcitional
surrender was made on July 26.
Such, then was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but
the answer is almost certainly negative.
Confirmation of the argument against the Truman-Byrnes "only
reasonable conclusion thesis was supplied by an official government
committee, the United States Stratgic Bombing Survey...
[Of course, hindsight is wonderful, however:]
[p 17:]
The motivation behind dropping the bomb on Hiroshima, despite the
death and suffering of the Japanese, and despite the consequences for
the world of that atomic terror forecast by the Szilard petition,
[Predicting these consequences was why the subject was originally
brought up on this list, remember? The petition was withheld from
Truman by Brig. Gen. Leslie Groves, the engineer in charge of the
Manhattan project (he also built the Pentagon)]
was political; the "humanitarian" aspect of the decision to dropt the
bomb is dubious. That political motive was to keep the Russians out
of the Pacific war so tat the United States would play the primary
role in the peace settlement in Asia. The circumstantial evidence for
this conclusion...is that the strictly military need to end the war
did not require such instant use of the bomb. Admiral William Leahy,
Truman's chief of staff; General Henry Arnold, commanding general of
the air force; General Carl Spaatz, commander of the Strategic Air
FOrce; as well as General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Pacific
theater; and General Eisenhower, did not think use of the bomb was
necessary.
[Zinn goes on to describe the analysis by PMS Blackett in his book
\Fear, War, and the Bomb/, which basically goes like this: The
Russians promised at Yalta and Potsdam to attack Japan three
months after victory in Europe, which was May 8 --the bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima on Aug. 7, remember. He then goes on to
say:]
[p 18:]
Blackett's conclusion is supported by Gar Alperovitz's meticulous
research of the Stimson papers and related documents. Alperovitz
points out that at Potsdam Winston Churchill told his secretary of
stat for foreign affairs, Anthony Eden, that "it is quite clear that
the United States do not at the present time desire Russian
participation in the war." Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, in
his diary entry for July 28, 1945, said the Secretary of State Byrnes
"was most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the
Russians got in." byrne's own memoir, \Speaking Frankly/, is full of
frankness: "As for myself, I must frankly admit that in view of what
we knew of Soviet actions in eastern Germany and the violations of the
Yalta agreement in Poland, Rumania, and Bulgaria, I would have been
satisfied had te Russians determined not to enter the war." He then
adds a much franker statement: that at the January, 1945, Yalta
Conference the United States agreed on Russian entrance into the war
because then "the military situation had been entirely different"; now
with Japan near defeat and with the United States in possession of a
brand-new deadly weapon, there was no reason to give Russia the added
psychological and physical power in Asia that a major share in
defeating Japan would afford.
[If you don't like the facts, go out and find some of your
own.
Dave Mankins
------------------------------
Date: 29 May 1982 00:02-EDT
From: James A. Cox <APPLE at MIT-MC>
Subject: Nuclear bombing of Japan
From: Bill Hofmann
A point of interest: the Russians agreed to stay out of the
Pacific theater until August of 1945. If the Russians HAD entered
the Pacific War in an offensive capability to a large degree,
there would have had to have been the same sort of power-sharing
that there was in Europe. Some analysts have suggested that that
was why the US felt it necessary to end the Pacific war
dramatically and with finality BEFORE August.
There is some confused information in this paragraph. The Russians
did not agree to stay out of the Pacific theater until August, 1945.
The rather agreed to \attack/ by that time. The U.S. had negotiated
hard in order to convince them to attack. This was because Operation
Olympic, the proposed invasion of Japan, was expected to mean more
than a million American casualties. Russian involvement would have
made the job easier. Indeed, the Russians \did/ get involved; they
invaded Japanese-occupied Manchuria two days before the dropping of
the second atomic bomb. Naturally, after the U.S. found that the bomb
worked, we viewed Russian involvement in a much different light, given
our experiences in central and eastern Europe (note: it wasn't that we
objected to the simple sharing of power, but that the Russians tended
to abuse any power they were allowed.) It is quite clear that a chief
motivation for dropping the bomb was fear of a larger Soviet
involvement. That does not make the dropping of the bomb immoral.
Indeed, preserving the Japanese, and attempting to preserve many other
East Asians from Soviet domination (to whatever degree) was a very
moral act.
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Date: Sun May 30 16:26:12 1982
From: decvax!watmath!bstempleton at Berkeley
Subject: Nukes on Japan
Sure it was horrible, guys, but come on - they would have dropped them
somewhere.
The whole point of Hiroshima today (the second bomb was not necessary for this)
is that it sits as a horrible example of what the bomb does on a city target.
I really think that generals, without direct exposure to what the bomb does,
would have been itching for a long time to blow one up. It is only because
of the example that is so strong in everybody's minds that there has been great
public pressure not to use the bomb again. Chances are that without use in
Japan the bomb would have remained a highly classified secret, and some general
would have used it at a later time, knowing only what it does to already
burnt out desert. What if the bomb had been used for the first time against
the Russians when they had the power to send more bombs back?
I think we all owe our lives to the dropping of the bomb on Japan.
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Date: 28 May 1982 18:59:53 EDT (Friday)
From: David Mankins <dm at BBN-RSM>
Subject: provocation
[From \The Rising Sun Newsletter/:]
What's in a Billion?
A billion dollars is a very elusive concept. Look at it this way.
Suppose that every day, seven days a week, you got a thousand
dollars. In a year, hou'd have roughly a third of a million and in
roughly three years, a million. Since a billion is a thousand million,
it would take you three thousand years to earn a billion dollars at a
rate of a thousand a day. (We're assuming no interest and no taxes.)
Now, if at the time of Christ someone started laying aside a thousand
dollars a day to your account, now, thow thousand years later, you'd
still be shy almost one third of the amount. Reflect a moment on this,
and then realize that the Rockefeller family is worth between two and
twelve billion dollars, and that there are perhaps up to a dozen more
families in or near the billion dollar mark. Then ask yourself how could
they possibly have \earned/ that money in any realistic sense of \earn/.
And if they didn't earn it, who did, and how did they come to get hold
of it?
--found unsigned on a bulletin board by
a friend of Bud Kenworthy
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Date: 29 May 1982 14:40:45-PDT
From: decvax!minow at Berkeley
Subject: Progressive literature
In sf-lovers recently, James Cox (APPLE @ MIT-MC) stated "politics generally
makes bad literature. Nobody ever reads fiction writers 'with a cause.'"
Permit me to suggest a list of progressive writers, roughly ordered
cronologically (with apologies for misspellings):
Aristophenes, Macchievelli, Voltaire, Swift, Balzac, Thomas Paine,
Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe (and the other abolitionists),
Mark Twain, Victor Hugo, Strindberg, Ibsen, Dosteyevski, Gorky,
Shaw, Driesler, Jose Marti, Lorca, Jallosa Vargas.
Zola, Camus.
In our era, we have:
Brecht, Gunter Grass, Orwell, Satre, de Bouvoir, Vilhelm Moberg,
Ivar Lo Johansson, Maj Sjovall and Per Wahloo, Theodorakis,
Vaino Linna.
These writers all exhibit several characteristics:
1. They are all part of the Western cultural tradition.
2. They were in opposition to the traditional society.
3. They were popular during their own time.
Regards
Martin Minow (with some help from a friend)
decvax!minow
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Date: 31 May 1982 14:21 PDT
From: Sybalsky at PARC-MAXC
Subject: Pseudo-pacifism & Gun Control
I happened recently upon a most interesting book, "Restricting
Handguns, The Liberal Skeptics Speak Out" Don B. Kates (ed.), North
River Press, 1979. It is a collection of articles (with references to
real, factual work!) which pretty well refute most of the claims
advanced in favor of gun control. All of the authors have impeccable
credentials as liberals--they are feminists, civil rights workers, and
generally protectors of the down-trodden. What makes them unusual is
their belief that eliminating guns won't work. What makes them more
unusual is that they've done the research to prove it: They have the
facts.
One passage (by Kates, a freedom rider in the 60s) caught my
eye. It sums up pretty well my opinion of emotional gun haters:
"As a civil rights worker, I saw how posession of a firearm
could shrink the threat of ultimate violence.... I also learned what
value to place on the pseudo-pacifism (I have too much respect for
genuine pacifists to call this real) of those who see no difference
between aggression and self-defense. Driving South, I had been
accompanied by another new civil rights worker bound for another
state. Proclaiming himself an ethical pacifist, he was appalled that
I carried guns for self-defense. When we met a few months later, I
still believed in self-defense. He now believed in terrorism and
assassination. The philosophy of self defense prepares one to
evaluate realistically a potentially violent world and respond with a
minimum degree of violence necessary to cope with it. His philosophy
having not so prepared him, he had perforce to abandon it. People who
are unable to discriminate between defensive violence and aggression
are unlikely, if they come to believe violence necessary, to be very
discriminating about its use. A little-remembered fact is that all
the white members of the Symbionese Liberation Army started out not as
'macho gun nuts,' but as pacifists of the flower-child type. The
failure of their rosy dreams that all obstacles can be surmounted, all
prejudices and differences of viewpoint reconciled, through 'good vibes'
and effusions of love, led them to equally unrealistic dreams of
salvation through blood and death."
Hmmm.
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Date: 29 May 1982 1921-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject: Structurally wrong
So even if our system of government is better than everyone elses, it can
still be structurally wrong. I would like to hear more about that.
Especially what you think is structurally RIGHT (obviously nothing
existing now, since we have a better system in place - oh, but that
means your system would have no track record to see how it would
actually work in practice (as opposed to theory) - too bad).
Jim
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Date: 29 May 1982 1926-PDT
From: Jim McGrath <CSD.MCGRATH at SU-SCORE>
Subject: Left/Right
Come on now folks!! "We all know that the KKK is a bunch of evil doers,
while leftists are just poor people with a pure heart." If THAT is the
level this conversation is going to degenerate into, then nothing should
be said anymore - obviously people have their own fantasies that they
will NOT ignore.
Jim
PS I have witnessed several instances of disruption and criminal acts
by leftist groups, often with the people involved getting a mere
slap on the wrist. I refer you specifically to almost any random
month at Stanford between 1968 and 1972. There were excesses on
both sides (as a primary student advocate here I can fully
appreciate the sometimes harsh actions of both parties), but that
is the point - BOTH sides. The left (from student demostrations
to organizing unions) has been known to take the law into its
own hands as often as the KKK.
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Date: 29 May 1982 1703-EDT
From: Bill Sholar <SHOLAR at CMU-20C>
Reading about surveillance of leftists and rightists is interesting;
my one bit of personal experience with documented surveillance might
be of interest to the list:
While running a center that provided counseling to people seeking
discharges from the military as conscientious objectors, I happened to
send a letter to the army asking, using the Freedom of Information
Act, if we had been the target of any surveillance. They said no. I
also sent a letter to the FBI. The FBI said all they had was a copy
of the army surveillance reports(!), and included Xeroxes of them.
Essentially, the reports indicated that we had been the target of
fairly substantial surveillance. At one meeting of the board of the
organization -- mainly Quakers from nearby cities -- there were,
according to the declassified report, approximately 21 attendees, of
which 6 were army intelligence agents. The agents reported, in
incredible detail, the events of the meeting. The events amounted to
listening to "an unidentified caucasian male who arrived in an
automobile registered to (name deleted by the FBI), a dentist at
nearby Fort Bragg". This speaker asked the group to endorse a
petition GI's were circulating asking that the haircut policy at Fort
Bragg be liberalized. The intelligence report concluded by stating
that the agents were unable to determine how the petition was to be
delivered to the commanding general.
The army seemed to have given up on part of this surveillance, at
least on infiltrating the group, possibly because their agents were so
easy to spot -- they were the only ones who suggested violent actions
in the pacifist Quaker organization. The later army reports merely
reported names, when they could figure them out, license numbers of
arriving cars, and so forth.
Sharing this story with a person from a national organization resulted
in the reply that, during the 60's, the War Resister's League survived
financially because of the FBI. Although they were the ones who
seemed to suggest violent behavior, they were also the only ones who
paid dues.
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End of POLI-SCI Digest
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