A Resounding "YES!" to War Crimes
Today is Tuesday, 4 August 2009.
A July poll by Quinnipiac University released today found that 61% of Americans surveyed believed that the USA/USE Government “did the right thing” in conducting atomic war on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of more than 500,000 Japanese, mostly civilians, was called “wrong” by 22%; 16% were undecided. The margin of error was 3%.
I’m hardly surprised. Many, if not most, Americans have fallen for the falsehood that the American government had estimated that 1,000,000 American servicemen would die if Japan were to have been invaded. In fact, this number was concocted in 1947 by McGeorge Bundy, who was co-writing the memoirs of the wartime Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. The latter couldn’t recall the estimated number, and the government refused him access to the actual estimate.
My personal evaluation is that Bundy fabricated the number for two reasons: to rationalize the mass killings of civilians, a war crime, and to sensationalize, in order to sell more books. As national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Bundy would later be a prime architect of the escalation of the Vietnam/Indochina War, in which more than 6,000,000 would be slaughtered.
Bundy later came to “regret” his actions, though not enough to deliver himself to prison.
A July poll by Quinnipiac University released today found that 61% of Americans surveyed believed that the USA/USE Government “did the right thing” in conducting atomic war on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of more than 500,000 Japanese, mostly civilians, was called “wrong” by 22%; 16% were undecided. The margin of error was 3%.
I’m hardly surprised. Many, if not most, Americans have fallen for the falsehood that the American government had estimated that 1,000,000 American servicemen would die if Japan were to have been invaded. In fact, this number was concocted in 1947 by McGeorge Bundy, who was co-writing the memoirs of the wartime Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. The latter couldn’t recall the estimated number, and the government refused him access to the actual estimate.
My personal evaluation is that Bundy fabricated the number for two reasons: to rationalize the mass killings of civilians, a war crime, and to sensationalize, in order to sell more books. As national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Bundy would later be a prime architect of the escalation of the Vietnam/Indochina War, in which more than 6,000,000 would be slaughtered.
Bundy later came to “regret” his actions, though not enough to deliver himself to prison.
posted by HH at 2:31 PM
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