If it weren't for one New Yorker journalist, would we know what happened at Hiroshima? Credit: Getty
There are two possible responses to the rise of conspiracy theories: either the media needs to re-educate the public, or the media needs to regain the public’s trust. Among respectable commentators, the first option is more popular. Barack Obama recently suggested that “we’re going to have to work with the media and with the tech companies to find ways to inform the public better about the issues, and to bolster the standards that ensure we can separate truth from fiction.”
But of course, the media, the tech companies and the rest of the political elite which Obama describes as “we” are not trusted in the first place. And looking at their recent record — Russiagate, the Cambridge Analytica non-story, the suppression of inconvenient reports about the Biden campaign — you can see why. So perhaps it’s better to start with the other question: how can the mainstream media regain the public’s trust?
The simple answer to that is that it needs more people like John Hersey, and more institutions like the New Yorker of 1946.
Hersey, a journalist and novelist who died in 1993, is the hero of Lesley Blume’s absorbing new book Fallout. As Blume shows, the US government did a remarkably efficient job of covering up the effects of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Reporters were first banned, then allowed in on condition that they toed the line. At one point, the Pentagon invited reporters from outlets including the Associated Press, United Press, the New York Times, NBC, CBS and ABC to join a supervised trip to the two cities. The results were exemplified by a piece in the New York Times assuring readers that, “horrible as the bomb undoubtedly is, the Japanese are exaggerating its effects … in an effort to win sympathy for themselves in an attempt to make the American people forget the long record of cold-blooded Japanese bestiality.”
There were a couple of more truthful journalists; one found that his report was lost in the post, while the other had his camera stolen and was kicked out of the country. Both spoke contemptuously of the “housetrained reporters” who were, in effect, relaying government propaganda. It’s the kind of thing which encourages conspiracy theories: a major atrocity, a huge historical event, concealed from the public — and not despite the media but with its help.
What eventually rescued the credibility of the press was Hersey’s New Yorker report from Hiroshima, which described, in 30,000 vivid and precise words, what had happened on the day the bomb fell. The horrifying facts Hersey had uncovered, and the novelistic skill with which he presented them, caused a sensation. The article reached hundreds of thousands of readers — among them Albert Einstein, who ordered a thousand copies for him to distribute to leading scientists, and President Truman, who publicly pretended he “never read” the New Yorker while launching a damage-limitation PR campaign.
Hersey himself was named as one of Celebrity Bulletin’s top 10 celebrities of 1946 alongside Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman. After his article, celebrations of scientific progress, or of World War II as a great moral crusade, would never ring quite as true again. And it’s partly thanks to Hersey that the atom bomb has not been used since.
What was Hersey’s, and the New Yorker’s, secret? Partly it was luck: he arrived several months after the first wave of journalists, by which point the authorities had relaxed their grip. But partly it was Hersey’s — and his editors’ — very particular virtues. At the time, anti-Japanese feeling was running high in the US: polls found that almost one in four Americans wished there could have been “many more” atom bombs dropped. Hersey remembered an atmosphere of “rage and hysteria”, and having read about Japanese wartime atrocities, he had at first shared those emotions. But over the course of the war, his own attitude changed. If “civilization was to mean anything,” Hersey decided, “we had to acknowledge the humanity of even our misled and murderous enemies.”
The deputy editor of the New Yorker, William Shawn, was an ideal colleague in this respect. As the writer Lillian Ross recalled, Shawn believed “every human being [was] as valuable as every other human being … every life was sacred.” Ross once pushed Shawn on this: “Even Hitler?” “Even Hitler,” Shawn replied.
The New Yorker sent Hersey to Japan not to judge, but to listen. First he found a Hiroshima priest who could introduce him to locals and act as a translator. Then he simply sat down with the survivors and humbly, attentively, heard them out. One Japanese interviewee said it was like talking to an old friend.
That respect for survivors’ stories made Hersey’s report extraordinarily vivid. Instead of writing in a tone of outrage or forced empathy, he focused on the human side — the banal, even comic, details of the day the bomb fell. A doctor, rushing to help survivors, discovers that his own glasses have been lost in the explosion, and snatches a pair off the face of a wounded nurse. (He ends up wearing them for a month.) Two survivors find a dead carp in a pond and discuss whether it is safe to eat. (Probably not, they conclude.) A priest, falling asleep in a temporary camp, is sadistically woken by his housekeeper who feels like a chat. It was against this backdrop that Hersey set his tale of death, destruction and disease — and those who read it understood: These people are like me.
All of which suggests a moral. If the mainstream media is distrusted, it’s partly because it seems to ignore or look down on large parts of society. Journalists like Jon Ronson, who sympathetically interviews social outcasts, or Chris Arnade, who listens to the stories of poor Americans, have to put up with a lot of mockery and criticism. But they are doing what Hersey did: going to the people on the margins, and hearing what they have to say.
The other thing about Hersey was his love of truth. He had left a previous job at Time because the editors were taking the controversial bits out of his articles. (Echoes of Suzanne Moore and The Guardian.) The New Yorker was a better fit: the editor Harold Ross, and Shawn, his deputy, had what Blume’s book calls “a near mania for accuracy” — not just about facts but about linguistic precision. In an early draft, Hersey described a bicycle as being left “lopsided” by the blast. Ross was kept awake at night worrying about this single adjective. Could a bicycle, in a sense a two-dimensional object, be lopsided? So he put Hersey and Shawn to work, and they settled on the right word: crumpled. That kind of care over language is closely related to truthfulness: it’s no accident that where you find lazy, jargon-filled, clichéd prose, you will also find distortions of reality.
If the mainstream media ever regains the public’s trust, it will be because of journalists like Hersey who genuinely seek the truth wherever it is to be found, and institutions run by editors who, like Harold Ross, aim to “present the truth and the whole truth without fear.” Everyone, of course, claims to be doing that. But as the poet George Crabbe put it 200 years ago:
Truth! for whose beauty all their love profess;
And yet how many think it ugliness!
Dan Hitchens writes the newsletter ‘The Pineapple’ and is former editor of the Catholic Herald
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SubscribeInteresting piece. Ironically, the New Yorker is now just a propaganda rag. There was a time when I loved it and bought it, and until a couple of years ago I would still read it given the opportunity. Today, I don’t even look at it.
Ironically, over the last couple of days I have been thinking that although the internet promised, and has to some extent delivered, access to more information, this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in lies and censorship by the MSM and the politicians, often working hand in glove. So much so that one now automatically disbelieves simply everything they write, say or broadcast. This is precisely the opposite of what the internet was supposed to deliver.
I stopped reading the Daily E….. and the Daily M… some time ago. The lies and distortion was giving me palpitations.
Why would you even start reading those particular newspapers? Actually, the DM does have some good columnists such as Peter Hitchens and Dan Hodges.
To get the palpitations
And weep a little.
Free online.
How on earth would you know Peter Hitchens and Dan Hodges are good columnists if you don’t read the Mail?
You haven’t read either of these papers though, have you.
Your transparency is painful to observe.
And do you still read the Guardian?
And the Indy?
I gave up on The Independent, if that is what you are referring to, in 2002/3. It had been ‘my’ newspaper since its launch in 1986, but by the early noughties it had become more left-wing than The Guardian.
I blame the Leftist zealot ideologues who believe the end justifies the means. I think it is not the Internet, which is just a highway for information. The main culprits are those with the largest audience. Google is the most powerful and most devious because they manipulate the search results. At first we have no idea that something as benign as a definition is being manipulated and is reduced to Leftist propaganda. The person who runs Google and many employees are despicable Leftist zealot ideologues. Truth to them is nothing, nothing more than propaganda to promote their Leftist agenda. The other social media, so called platforms, are mainly just censoring. I say just censoring as if that is not as bad as what Google is doing. It is infuriating and short of a Stalinist style purge I don’t know what to do to fix it.
A Stalin-style purge would certainly get rid of a lot of leftists, as it did for Uncle Joe himself — he didn’t like ’em either.
But I think your focus is a bit narrow. Back in the 1950s, I read a book on how to read the news whose title I now forget — maybe ‘How To Read The News?’ Anyway, the author explained that the press — in those days the press was most of the media — wrote what their owners, who were typically well-off, well-connected people, wanted to see. Of course, they also were fairly careful not to offend their advertisers or customers either. I started to read the news with a critical eye, and sometimes I personally investigated events and situations covered by the papers, and I found, to put it very mildly, that there was a lot going on besides earnest truth-telling. It was no surprise to find later that even such august authorities as the New York Times were lying, obfuscating, reframing, filtering, and so forth — whatever the ‘narrative’ required. And so the lying about WMD in Iraq or Biden in Ukraine is nothing new. I do think social media, however, garbagey, have started to undercut the official gatekeepers, anyway, which is one reason the official gatekeepers are so upset about them and are trying to institute censorship. Knowledge is power; so the powerful will not care to let it spread around. In any case, are Matt and Glenn and Edward and Julian and so on always going to tell us the truth? Are they always going to be able to?
That sounds like Noam Chomsky. The film of his book ‘Manufacturing Consent’ is on YouTube. It is worth watching. Not easy seeing what the US has been involved in but that makes it more important to watch. Ironically Chomsky’s social platforms are silent on the lockdowns and the ongoing censorship and instead rail against religion. And in fact an interview in spring had his support for the lockdowns. If he would say, karma is finally catching up with Americans, his silence would make more sense and I could respect it. Instead I, and friends who had been his admirers, are left with cognitive dissonance.
+9! It’s insane that some people still haven’t evolved beyond search engines that trade on Wall Street. People are such astoundingly useful tools!
As for social media, it’s AMAZING to see these “undercover at facebook” exposes making waves (Zach McElroy, Ryan Hartwig, Project Veritas).
So is the Atlantic. This is an article form Scientific America giving a sort of mea culpa for not supporting dissenting scientists. At least they did it. https://www.scientificameri…
I cannot help but notice that many a “serious” journalist would clearly like the kudos of being a latter day John Hershey. You see it in the mournful, conscience-pricking dispatches from world’s trouble spots (Sky News is particularly fond of those) and “special reports” on poverty and deprivation accross the globe.
Somehow the buck always manages to stop with the developed nations of the West ““ no matter who is perpetrating the atrocities or which backward and corrupt regime is thriving at the expense of its people.
Yes, it’s always our fault. I threw out the TV and just started to ignore it all over 20 years ago.
Yes it’s all fault (sic) we live in civilised societies created by our values. The uncivilised monsters exploiting their own people are the problem. Not us, Japan waged a vicious war and deserved what they got. Read the history, the only reason Tokyo was not nuked was that there would be no one to negotiate surrender. Without surrender, a ground war in Japan would have killed many more of ours and theirs.
Thank God for the USA, we we all be speaking German Japanese if not for their generosity of spirit.
yes
Atrocity? You hear the same about Dresden in some quarters, but maybe the best protection against having your cities disintegrated is to not send 60 divisions into Poland or attack Pearl Harbour. Consequences.
In other news, Media follows political agendas and public opinion shocker!
The argument that an attack on a military base (Pearl Harbor) is a justification of indiscriminate bombing of civilians (Firebombing of Tokyo- an even more destructive event than the atomic bomb over Hiroshima) is on a rather shaky ground. It makes one wonder what certain organisations in the Middle East might think on the topic of responding to the ‘crusaders’ invading their homeland ‘in search of WMD’.
America was not at war with Japan when the latter attacked it, having already engaged in a war of aggression, involving mass murder of civilians, in China. As a result the US and other countries were forced into a war in Asia which ultimately caused the bombing of Japan and the use of the atom bomb to end it. The alternative was an invasion of Japan which would have caused far more Japaneses civilian casualties not to mention that of vast numbers of allied forces. I don’t know what certain organisations you’re talking about; perhaps you could be more specific.
There were more attacks than just Pearl Harbor…but that fact doe not fit your narrow point, does it?
I note that you mention ‘more attacks’ but neglect to specify those, which makes me think that you would struggle to name one Japanese attack on civilian population in the US, even marginally comparable to the bombing of Japanese cities by the USAF.
On the topic of ‘narrow point’ – if fact mine is the broader point about the moral justification of targeting civilians in conflicts, something which nowadays is supposed to be a big no. However according to your logic the ‘broad point’ would be to make decisions on that based on whom we define as the ‘evil guy who had it comming to him’. broad point indeed.
Your historical account of the motivation for attacks on Japanese cities is lacking context. It wasn’t just Pearl Harbor, but the knowledge of Japanese action in Chinese cities before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even American civilians were aware of Japan’s actions in Nanking thanks to a pictorial report in Life magazine, among others.
Lacking a proper context, your reasoning is readily dismissed.
The US had been gradually ‘winding up ‘ the idiotic Japanese since the mid 1930’s with trade embargoes.
These culminated in 1940-41 with a total ban on the export oil and petroleum products together with scrap metal, the closing of the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping and the freezing of all Japanese assets in the US. In mid 1940, the US Pacific Fleet obligingly moved from San Diego, California to Pearl Harbour. (ie: 2455 miles closer to Japan).
Despite this obvious provocation, the attack on Pearl Harbour (anniversary in four days) came as a complete surprise. Whow!
.
As far as I know the only people who’ve ever targeted civilians are terrorists. It is permissible under the laws of war to kill civilians as long as that’s not the end in itself.
You can, for example, bomb an anti-aircraft gun the PLO has placed in a school, because the war crime there is to use civilians to protect the gun.
It’s entirely in order to bomb cities to reduce their war fighting potential. Attacks on civilians started in WW1 with German submarine attacks on passenger lines that often contained not only civilians but neutrals; entirely in accord with the Clausewitz view that you don’t fight with one hand tied behind your back. Attacking cities rather than ships full of civilians is the same thing on a grander scale, and if you are stupid enough to attack someone capable of doing this to you on a greater scale than you can, more fool you.
I see your point & I disagree not on a moral point but one of military effectiveness.
Indiscriminately targeting civilians doesn’t end the war quicker. It normally just stiffens enemy resolve, wastes precious military resources & risks the lives of aircrew.
The key is to target En centres of gravity such as petroleum refineries, rare material processing, power generation or build more efficient combat equipment (ground attack aircraft, armour, arty)
Who indiscriminately targets civilians?
Yours is probably the strangest logic I have ever seen. Only terrorists attack civilians, but bombing from the air of cities full of civilians is not attacking civilians?
Just so that we are clear- if some member of isis, who believes he is engaged in a war with foreign invaders of his country, gets his hands on a plane and a nuclear bomb, and manages to drop it on London, would that be attacking civilians or bombing of cities to reduce their war fighting potential?
Er… Bomber Harris, Dresden?
I suggest you re-read what I wrote until you understand it a little better.
The aim of bombing cities is to destroy the war fighting capacity of the city. Nagasaki was a naval base and construction yard, Hisoshima was an army communications centre, and those were what was attacked. Japan did not get to hide military installations among civilians and thereby shelter them from attack, like Hamas or the PLO do. The targets were military and the civilians were unavoidably included in the damage.
The rape and murder of Singapore hospital nurses was not an unavoidable accident that’s somehow inevitable when you’re raping enemy soldiers and you accidentally rape a few nurses at the same time. It’s a deliberate choice to be evil, with no possible justification, and with the civilians intended to be the sole target, like the ISIS nuke scenario you posit.
Deliberately misunderstanding this so you can signal your virtue is abject moral incompetence, and a big part of why terrorists think they can win. There’s always a quisling faction that’s anxious to represent air strikes on military targets as somehow morally equivalent to murdering civilians on buses, which terrorists take as evidence of inviting feebleness and lack of resolve.
Re-read it and still your statement lacks logic, despite your protestations to the contrary. If Hiroshima was an army communication centre, London would be the captial of an agressor nation in the eyes of the islamic terrorists. Crippling it would be a major blow to the military machine of the enemy. Terrorists may lack the means to do massive damage to their enemies’ cities and are reduced to small scale attacks, but their actions are exactly in the same spirit as the bombing of cities during WW2, which you advocate. It has previously been said that the terrorist has a bomb but not a bomber plane, so how does a terrorist who puts a bomb on a bus differ morally from an USAF or RAF pilot dropping the same bomb from a plane?
It’s very simple unless you’re determined to tie yourself in knots not getting it.
A criminal runs into a bank, sticks it up, shoots the cashier and runs out with a hostage. The police arrive and fire two shots killing both the robber and the hostage.
In your worldview, clearly the police are exactly equivalent to the robber. They both shot a civilian, they both used firearms, they both want more money. Complete moral equivalence.
If you actually believe that, there is no hope for you. If you don’t, use it to work out what is wrong with your thinking. As a clue, think about motive, desired outcome and intent in each case. Good luck.
I see that you continue to sidestep my questions and retreat in ever more so outlandish scenarios. So I will ask you agin- how does a terrorist, who puts a bomb on a bus in revenge over British invasion of Iraq differ morally from an USAF or RAF pilot dropping the same bomb from a plane over Tokyo in revenge for Japanse atrocities?
I have debunked your stupid questions and you have your fingers in your ears.
I refer you to my previous post once more, and I laugh at the label “outlandish” from someone who can’t see the moral difference between a bank robber and a police officer.
If I remember right the British night bombing of German cities was understood to be, due to the difficulties of achieving nighttime accuracy, indiscriminate. But in any case the strategic objective came to be the spreading of terror and despondency by killing civilians and making the cities uninhabitable. Indiscriminate but concentrated bombing of city centres was seen as the means to this end. As written, it looks like an atrocity. But the context is all: winning side (Goering’s point at Nuremberg); ends justify means (defeat of Nazism); they started it (my Dad’s response to my complaints about Dresden).
The rationale was indeed that, as you couldn’t hit anything smaller than a city with 1942 technology, you bombed cities. But the aim wasn’t to kill civilians as an end in itself. It was to wreck homes and infrastructure, so that industry couldn’t function. If killing German civilians was a goal, the ground troops would have done it in occupied areas.
An attack on a city is an attack on the economy. It reduces the enemy’s ability to wage on us the war that they started.
Japanese soldiers raped and bayoneted nurses in Singapore’s principal hospital, then raped them again while they were dying. They tortured and murdered already-injured soldiers on and off the battlefield. Those are callous and murderous attacks on civilians and the helpless, with no possible economic or military justification whatsoever.
If you don’t want your cities eviscerated from the air, don’t do this. It’s not hard, and Germany and Japan seemed to have learned their lesson, because they haven’t assaulted any other country since.
Returning to my original post- I wonder how that would sound in the mouth of the caliph of isis when applied to civilians in the UK and USA? Probably will elicit a lot of responses along the line of ‘but that is different’.
There is indeed a very, very big difference between attacking China, Malaya, and the Philippines, or planting bombs on Tube trains, and fire-bombing Tokyo in 1944.
You can end the bombing of Tokyo by not attacking or by surrendering. You then are either not bombed in the first place, or it stops.
You can’t stop Islamofascist terror attacks by not attacking or by surrendering, because they are at war with what we are, not what we are doing. We’re not Muslims, and some of us are even Jews, so we all deserve to die. If we surrender it makes it easier to kill even more. ISIS didn’t stop killing people once they’d taken their territory, they killed more.
The likes of ISIS don’t rely on any moral justification for attacking civilians nor can I ever recall hearing one invoked. It’s just “infidel”, or “Jew”, or “Koran”, and that’s all they need.
This is exactly the sort of sophistry to which I referred in my post about things ‘being different’. None of the examples you have provided give justification for the USAF bombing Tokyo. The USA did not become engaged in the war against Japan until after
Pearl Harbor and to claim that the bombing of Tokyo is a retaliation for Japanese actions in China is nonsensical. War is war, but war is not an excuse for everything and even in war some level of restraint can be exercised. Just because our opponents are committing atrocities does not mean that we need to employ the same, and worse, methods against them and preted those are justified.
Regarding the islamic terrorists- very likely there are many among them that are motivated in their actions by ‘who we are, rather than what we do’. However, our actions in many countries have been such that quite a few the terrorists will be motivated by exactly what we have done. Yet you are completely refusing to accept that is the same sort of logic that justifies firebombing of children in Tokyo for what the Japanese army has done in China, and planting bombs on busses in London because of what the British Army has done in Iraq. Refusing to recognise this will lead to a forever perpetuation of the violence against innocents we have seen before and are seeing now.
The Japs had it coming. If dropping the Bomb saved a single.allied life, that justifies it. Simples!
“forever perpetuation of the violence” – Not quite. Since the development of nuclear weapons, no large wars that result in millions dead have happened. Perhaps some degree of sanity restrains those intent on world dominance. The notion of avoiding civilian casualties is relatively new. Long ago armies fought armies with no intent of civilian casualties. That changed ~ 1860’s with the US Civil War fought as total war where destruction was on a much larger scale and civilian deaths became acceptable as a part of war. That continued in later wars until the aftermath of WW2. Nominally some justification for civilian casualties existed even in WW2 where some military purpose was defined in justification, except Dresden.
“ An attack on a city is an attack on the economy. It reduces the enemy’s ability to wage on us the war that they started. “
Not quite. The point is to destroy economic centres of gravity to undermine the enemy’s ability to wage war e.g. petroleum refinement, power generation, comms structures.
Bombing women & children just tends to piss off whoever is still fighting & extends the war.
Miro – the operative word is ‘consequences’. Anyone with the shakiest understanding of history can understand the massive casualties faced by the allied forces if they attempted a land invasion of a fanatical Japan. In this context getting the Japanese to surrender and avoiding hundreds of thousands of allied casualties, by wiping out first one city, then as surrender was not offered, a second city was justified.
Anyone can understand the disappointment the West would have suffered had the Soviet Union got to Japan before them.
And how would they have done that exactly? In 1945 the Red Army and the Soviet forces in general were not remotely prepared, trained or equipped to conduct opposed amphibious landings thousands of miles from their own shores. They didn’t possess a single aircraft carrier for example, the US had in the region of a hundred with as many as needed to follow from shipyards in the US. You can’t do amphibious warfare on the scale required against Japan without carriers, and that’s just for starters, landing craft anyone?
Which part of Japan is thousands of miles from Russian/Soviet shores?
Yopu’re right on that, but I think Ned’s point still holds that Russia had zero experience with amphibious invasion and the Japanese massive experience in defence against invasion!
He likely meant thousands of miles from where their troops were stationed at the time – Eastern Europe.
That is not correct. By the time of Japanese surrender the USSR had close to a million troops in Manchuria, engaged against the Japanese Kwantung Army.
Or simply looked it up on Google, where the first result does indeed say it’s 3,633 kilometers from Japan to Russia (distancefromto dot net, “Distance from Japan to Russia”).
And there were hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in Manchuria at the time, successfully defeating the Japanese.
The Russians did join the war with Japan on 8th August 1945 after moving 1.5 million experienced troops and 5500 tanks across their huge landmass. By all accounts they cut through them with ease.
There was also the invasions of South Sakhalin, the Kuril Islands and other seaborne landings by the Soviets.
The Soviets both could and did operate successfully without aircraft carriers, they were at the end of WW2 a brutally efficent military force. Their methods were still probably less caring of their service mens lives that the allies.
Now obviously if the US (largely) hadn’t already destroyed the Japanese navy and it’s airforce then the Soviets would have been suicidal operating a fleet without air cover.
“Thousands of miles from their own shores”? The distance between Japan and Russia is actually the smallest distance between Japan and any foreign nation; Cape Crillon, Sakhalin is only 27 miles from Cape Soya, Hokkaido (by contrast, it’s 130 miles from Fukuoka in southwestern Japan to Pusan at the southern tip of South Korea). However, during World War II the distance was even smaller as Japan and the USSR actually had a land border, halfway down the long island of Sakhalin (at the 50th parallel). Southern Sakhalin, in accordance with the Treaty of Portsmouth, was under Japanese control from 1905 to 1945 as Karafuto Prefecture. The Soviets did in fact invade and annex Southern Sakhalin in 1945; it remains part of the Russian Federation to this day.
‘Dissapointment’ is a strange term for it. Denying the Soviets (a horrible regime) further territory made absolute sense. The Japanese were a lot luckier to be invaded by the Western Allies than the Soviets.
If the US hadn’t already destroyed the Japanese navy and airforce the Russians couldn’t have operated at sea in that area without massive losses.
That may indeed have been a calculation the Americans made.
Much of the push at D-Day was about getting as far across Europe as they could before the Russians got there.
I have always suspected that the second bomb drop on Japan was a signal to the Russians that “we’ve got more where that came from”
Both Curtis LeMay, (bombs away LeMay!) and Douglas MacArthur we’re both for dropping as many nukes as possible, particularly on the Chinese. In their view Western ‘Face’ had to be restored. That ‘Face’ had existed from 1840, when we gave the Qing a ‘dammed good thrashing’. The US and other Europeans quickly piled in, and soon the entire Far East, with the exception of Japan and arguably Siam was under Western control.
1941 changed all that, with fall of Singapore and later the Philippines.
Had that ‘Face’ been restored post 1945, ‘we’ would not be in the pickle we now find ourselves.
I have often wondered what would have happened if the Japanese had surrendered 1 day prior to the bombing of Hiroshima. Just think about it: the shiny new bomb is already on the plane, everything is ready, everyone is itching to teach the Japs a lesson they will never forget, and those bastards decide to surrender! What?! You mean we cannot demonstrate to the world the power and prowess of the US military machine just because the Japs want to wriggle out of the war they started? No way, Hirohito! You are getting the bomb whether you like it or not! We will just pretend we did not get the message of surrender until after.
If the Japanese had accepted surrender early, thousands of troops would sigh relief and the bomb would have returned to the US.
They should have dropped ‘it’ on Moscow instead. Japan was already finished, but the USSR was quite obviously going to be, and proved to be, a total menace.
Why stop there? Why not simply make a list of the world’s cities, cross off those – if any – that can be definitely proven not to be a menace, and obliterate the rest?
“Moderation in all things” as the Ancients said.
Well if you wondered about it, I guess that’s the same as if it actually happened. I wonder if you’re a child molester.
Excellent argument! Please continue responding to me.
You’re just being silly, mon ami. Of course the US would not have dropped the second bomb if Japan had surrendered after the first one. Japan (and the world) would have got the message. And, by the way, if we value our freedom, we STILL need a prosperous, powerful and democratic USA (despite all it’s many faults). “Talk softly and carry a big stick” and, in my opinion, the USA is still the best in this role. I certainly wouldn’t like the EU, Russia, China or anyone else (ourselves included) to fulfil it. Despite it’s many faults, the world prospers under US leadership ( they’re not perfect, of course, but few can claim perfection)
The question was about the surrender happening before the first bomb, not the second. It is a hypothetical one, but an interesting one nonetheless.
“The argument that an attack on a military base (Pearl Harbor) is a justification of indiscriminate bombing of civilians.”
But that wasn’t the justification.
An interesting little fact that I once came across, to give you some perspective: The axis powers killed far more civilians than soldiers; The allies killed far more soldiers than civilians.
But war is not really fair, ever. Today we might consider civilian casualties and even approach laws of war to try to avoid such death. At the time the goal was to demoralize the enemy in an attempt to stop the carnage. The firebombing of Tokyo was much more devastating than the damage by the Atomic Bomb, but that didn’t impress the Japanese. The few atomic bombs with the potential (to the Japanese) of many more made the Japanese respond.
Their failure to abide by the Geneva Convention (even nominally) did not encourage empathy. As is always the case in war the innocent suffer along with the guilty (often more so). War is simply horrific & best avoided.
Your argument would make some sense if the former attack (Pearl Harbour) had been immediately followed by the latter (firebombing Tokyo). But there was four years of struggle in between in which there seemed no prospect of defeating Japan without such measures. The duty of the US government was first and foremost to defend and protect its own people.
Immediately after Pearl Harbour the USAF did not have the means to reach the Japanese main islands on alarge scale. In fact the first raid was the Doolittle raid against Tokyo in April 1942, which was a small scale attack with a limited number of bombers taking off from carriers. Once the US took the Marianas, where the heavy bombers could be based, the massive bombing raids began in earnest.
Arguably any military action that could have been pedicted to have large civilian casualties is an atrocity.
I don’t find the atomic weapons any worse than indiscriminate area bombing. Dead is still dead, instant death is probably preferable to a fire storm etc.
The counter factuals are depending on you views either 100,000s more dead allied soldiers or Soviet involvement on the Japanese mainland.
Based on the Okinawa the US predicted 500,000 casualties to invade the mainland. Japanese civilian losses were upto 100,000 for Okinawa and maybe more for military, at just a couple % of the mainland size and pop. If we presume the ‘atrocity’ of using atomic weapons ended the war (which isn’t unreasonable) then the number of lives saved would be a minimum of 10 fold. One big atrocity saved millions of little ones.
Plus from a military viewpoint how many of your service men are you willing to kill and maim in order to save enemy civilians?
I can’t disagree with your point. However, I think the war is usually not between the civilians of one nation and the civilians of another nation. The war is between a few zealots, one or two self serving zealots who use their civilians as consumables. The civilians of the world just want to live their lives and let us live our lives. The civilians have no desire to invade and conquer, or force their ideology on others.
As a civilian who has no desire to live under the jackboot of Nazis, Communists or anyone else, does that make me a zealot?
The world would be a better place is everyone left everyone else alone to get on with their lives. Sadly it never works like that, I think mainly because those of us who have no wish to boss others around don’t want power. It takes a truly great leader to have power and seek to genuinely give it to the people.
Not at all sure I agree. In, eg, WW2 was it OK to shoot a soldier who had been forced to fight but not bomb a civilian who was enthusiastically making the soldier’s guns and bullets. The soldiers could not fight without the civilians or vice versa,
It may be sad but they are all part of the enemy (as a group even if not individually) and so will have to face the same threats and outcome.
“You hear the same about Dresden in some quarters, but maybe the best protection against having your cities disintegrated is to not send 60 divisions into Poland or attack Pearl Harbour.” Well, but maybe children aren’t responsible for decisions made by their parents and grandparents? Of course the Axis powers were surpassingly wicked, but the Second World War still marked a step back in barbarism for the whole of the human race.
So the allies should have fought with one hand tied behind their backs to avoid all risks to German and Japanese children, thereby endangering and orphaning more children on the allied side?
If it’s kill German children or risk Germans killing mine, I don’t even need a nanosecond to decide what to do.
Yes, well everybody prefers their own children to someone else’s, and civilisation is unworkable if that natural preference is taken too far; that’s the lesson that 2000 years of Christian civilisation strove to teach us.
However, the Second World War was probably a case where the moral and practical options coincided: several years of strategic bombing of civilian population had a minimal effect on the outcome; the Allied oil campaign, specifically targeting facilities supplying Nazi Germany with oil, was instrumental in bring the war to end within a year (as several senior German military figures acknowledged).
Needless to say, the Germans and Japanese needed to be defeated, and terrible, impossible decisions were made by Allied leaders who were, on the whole, men of good will. So I don’t find it easy to condemn them for acting as they did in their time. Yet with the benefit of hindsight, we should never forget that we resorted to atrocious means to win the war. Apart from anything else, acknowledging that might help us refrain from waging wars whenever that is possible.
Wanton destruction without a defined military objective is wasteful. The strategic bombing campaign used resources that would have been better spent elsewhere and caused unnecessary damage to a German population we would clearly need on side later. Nukes aside, no nation has ever been ‘bombed into submission’.
War is not about punishment, it is about winning.
“no nation has ever been bombed into submission”. Perhaps not bombed, but certainly shelled.
The British Empire versus the Sultanate of Zanzibar in 1896 is a good example.
The Sultan offered insolence, and the Royal Navy responded by bombarding the Sultan’s Palace for between 35-48 minutes, before the Sultan surrendered unconditionally, thus ending the shortest war in history.
Part of the Peace Treaty required the Sultan to pay for the shells expended in this epic encounter, so this may also be the cheapest war in history.
Yes, I found that particular piece of moral grand-standing rather irritating; especially since it is used as an axiom to justify condemning his fellow journalists. Is this what is required for the editor of the Catholic Herald to keep his job these days, I wonder.
Cambodia was carpet bombed by the USA, with which it was not at war, killing up to half a million, mostly unarmed civilians. Has the MSM been covering up the 60 divisions Norodom Sihanouk sent into Poland and the Cambodian navy’s attack on Pearl Harbour?
Precisely.
Journalist used to be a profession. Journalist knew they served a customer, the reader, but they did so under a certain work ethics. They had a divine mission to be objective, chech their sources and always letting accused defend themselves.
The commoners understood the rules. They could buy a newspaper according to their convictions and the journalists writing for the paper would report somewhat biased but within the framework of the work ethics.
Then came a disaster called internet. The business model of newspapers did not work anymore. Journalist employment became unsure. Unemployment hung like the Sword of Damocles over journalists.
Even worse: Anyone could write and be published. A flod of writings emerged on internet. The writers were commoners. Some were good which made The glamour of journalism vanish.
Deprived of their privileges, their social position, their pride and their future, journalists closed their ranks. They started to see themselves not as agents of the readers but as member of a class. They gained class awerness.
Today journalists consider themselves, together with producers of culture and other beneficiaries of tax money, of a ruling elite. Their job is no longer to serve the commoners. It is to subdue the commoners so they will continue to pay so that the elites can continue to be the elite.
Yes, that is all true. If you can find it online, Matt Taibi delivers an excellent and chronological spoken account of the collapse in journalistic standards.
Taibbi is one of the few journalists I trust and read at this point. https://taibbi.substack.com/
There was a journalist on this site who said that, under serious time pressure, day in day out, the easiest way to write was to grab a news article off the internet, and then spout off bile for the required word count.
This modus operandi changes the journalist, over time. It’s an easy trap to fall into.
One of the reasons news has become lower quality is that it is now cheaper, and bile is cheaper than deep consideration.
This is a major problem in Sweden. Journalists reads an American newspaper and create an article from what they have red. Thus Swedish news mimics an American reality where, for example race is a problem, and not religion. To keep the narrative going all Muslims are racified to black and all problems with Islam are explained by racism against the black minority (which is not black and are themselves the worst racist against true black peoples)
The time pressure is pivotal I suspect. The above article stresses how great care over language – individual words – is important if you are seeking to communicate a truth. One editor agonised overnight about a description of a bicycle. But with the internet there is no overnight and little time for nuance. Twitter disasters are created by instant publication. Online journalism falls into the same trap: you can see it in the typos – there seems to be a complete absence of editing.
My first job (in the late 70s) was as editorial assistant on an academic journal. I was taught not only to correct for style, but also for accuracy and comprehension. The draft article went back and forth until we thought we’d got it right. The published article was often as much a product of the editors as the author.
Even now I tend to edit my disqus posts more than the average commenter!
Unfortunately the media (on both sides of the Atlantic) just push a narrative. It reached a peak in 2016 over the EU referendum and Trump and has not fallen back. You can see that in reporting of Covid 19 and how they have only selected one point of view to report
Stop running op-eds about how basic freedoms are just white privilege would be a good place to start.
The treatment of stories is certainly a problem – anyone fancy a ‘mostly peaceful’ protest? But news selection is worse, whereby the ‘unhelpful’ stuff is just not mentioned. The organised suppression of the NY Post’s Biden story being an egregious example. The only bright spot is that more people now recognise they’re being played.
What was the average Japanese citizen’s view of the Japanese war efforts up to the atomic bombings? I’ve read over the years they were willing to fight street to street to the end…or was that just the military? Comparing interviews of bombing survivors to interviews of modern “marginals” seems like not the same thing. Did Hershey ever consider interviewing the family members of those killed by the Japanese in China before WWII or those imprisoned or killed during the War? Seems that might have added some balance to his outpouring of sympathy for atomic bomb survivors and those who didn’t survive.
Related: have historians been able to document what US Military planners considerations were in targeting Nagasaki and Hiroshima? I vaguely recall that there were legitimate military targets in both cities, but were there more strategic targets farther from civilian populations? Were the targets chosen selected in part because of relatively low anti-aircraft protection–last thing you’d want is your a-bomb getting dumped in the ocean without going off. OTOH, if US Military thinking was “we need to destroy a city to strike terror into the populace and leadership”, that would be good to know in such discussions.
Don’t forget either that had we been required to invade the islands of Japan to win the war, likely another million people would have died. Including my father. Or so I’ve read.
Nagasaki was a major warship building port for the Japanese navy:
https://commons.wikimedia.o…
There was a report called “The Atomic Plague” in the Express in September 1945. The reporter was the Australian traitor Wellfed Bullshit.
Hiroshima was a military communications centre with 20,000 troops in it, and Nagasaki was a naval base and shipbuilding port.
It would help if the BBC led by example. Once upon a time there was a clear distinction between news reporting and current affairs. News bulletins delivered the facts, current affairs programmes the subjective analysis.
Today they have conflated the two making News at Ten unwatchable: vox-pop interviews drenched in emotional bias now a substitute for impartial news reporting. That should be saved for Newsnight.
The BBC will never lead by example in this regard. And the rot there is now so deep that they wouldn’t know how to even if they wanted to, all the journalists with any talent or integrity having retired or left.
The BBC is no better than SKY News, it should be forced to provide its own funding or shut up shop. In order to do my bit, I returned my tv licence in June and perused them until I finally received a refund. My stress levels have improved because I no longer watch or listen to their biased utterances, in fact it’s quite liberating after 60 years of having a TV in the corner in order to find something to point the furniture at😊
Journalists can’t just print the truth they need the backing of their editors and publications and the trust that they will still have a job after. In 1945 the US had a real and present threat in the soviet Union, an external threat that had internal supporters across the west and I am willing to bet somewhere Hersey was backed by soviet money and hence he knew he could probably tell the truth.
In 2020 there is no real external threat to the globalists there is no one who will risk the truth as they will not be backed. This is the harsh reality and I see no reason why it will change. The only hope internally for truth is minor websites such as Spiked or Unherd and clearly the wider their audience is the more they will be leaned on.
“somewhere Hersey was backed by soviet money”
Conspiracy theories like this are what constitutes and advances Fake News.
You’re right– Russiagate comes to mind. I would say that close-minded emotion-driven and zealous ideological perspectives are even more significant causes, e.g. the BBC, the NYT, universities that subvert and ignore truth.
Dear DAY
Dr Mike Yeadon: ‘Stong evidence’ of Covid herd immunity in the UK
you tube watch?v=aRLnM8DsLLM
Dr Mike Yeadon, a former chief scientific adviser with Pfizer, has claimed there is “strong evidence” that the UK has developed some herd immunity against coronavirus.
Speaking with talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer, the lockdown sceptic said it was shown by the “lack” of Covid deaths happening in London.
“It was about 200-250 a day seven months ago. I checked three days ago, it was nine – so about 90-95% lower”.
Dr Yeadon also voiced concerns over the mass roll out of the newly approved Pfizer and BioNTech jab, because it was “too early” to know its the long term safety or effectiveness.
However, he did say that he was “pro-vaccine” and “not an anti-vaxxer”.
We got Dr Mike Yeadon’s podcast, which was taken down from Facebook, and which explained his views and the evidence for his holding them. If the government had listened to him and others who hold similar views, we would probably be in a much better situation now.
Atrocity? The author no doubt also thinks ISIS was benign and the mullahs don’t really want nukes. Japan refused to surrender. The alternative was invasion of Japan. How many hundreds of thousands of US grunts would have been killed? The author thinks that would have been preferable. Of course he does. He’s in his armchair.
That is not what the article is about at all. There is nothing that even implies it was wrong to drop those 2 bombs on those cities. What it says is thanks to the cover up of their devastating effects being exposed and countered by proper journalism we have, so far, had no further nuclear bombs dropped. It is also worth remembering that those 2 bombs were like fire crackers compared to the thermonuclear devices we have today.
Disagree. The author is intent upon creating a “cover up” where there wasn’t. Most of us here know what “atrocity” means. The author used it to describe the events that put an end to a World War that cost the lives of 75 million people. As someone else below has said, the real atrocities were the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the rolling of panzer divisions across Germany’s borders, and the genocides of enemies and minorities at the hands of the Germans and Japanese. At that time, neither of my parents (one of whom fought his way across the Pacific) was under any illusions regarding the destruction of those weapons. The actual suppression of information was done by Imperial Japan, otherwise only one use might have been necessary. Your point about “firecrackers” is simply wrong. Unfortunately, nuclear weapons of all sizes exist today including very low yield battlefield tactical munitions. We may yet get to see them used since Biden wants to start sending money to Hamas and the mullahs again.
It is quite clear that the early reports were manipulated by government with the full complicity of the media to misrepresent the true horror of what relatively small nuclear bombs do. If that is not a cover up then please suggest an alternative.
War is a series of atrocities perpetrated deliberately by both sides. The blitz was an atrocity committed on us by the Germans and in return we gave them Dresden.
Some times war is necessary and Si vis pacem para bellum is a long standing truism. By trying to deny the true horror of war, especially now it can be conducted much more remotely so you no longer see the whites of your enemies eyes, we are much more likely to have more wars and more terrible wars. That is the point you seem to be missing.
Nobody is arguing that the dropping of those bombs did not achieve a net overall saving of lives compared to continuing a conventional war in the Pacific. It is entirely possible, given Japanese psyche in that era, that there was also a net saving of Japanese life. What the article is saying is that by exposing and countering the “cover up” even more lives have probably been saved because, as yet, nobody has dropped another one and it remains in all our interests to ensure that nobody ever does. If we are allowed to forget the atrocities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki then it is more likely somebody some day will drop a much bigger one and then there will be retaliation in kind.
Re: “major atrocity”-I am certain that had the Japanese and/or Germans won, any reporting would have been fair and unrestricted. Interesting choice of “atrocities”…but somehow typical…
UNFORTUNATELY THE AMERICAN NAZIS WON THE WAR NOW WORLD HAYWIRE EVERYTHING IS DOWN TO THE WIRE THEN YOU LOSE
WE NEED TO SAY NO TO WMD MACHINES
WE NEED TO UNDO CAPSLOCK…don’t we?
Whenever I see all caps, I skip it.
Linda, dear – take a laxative. And disengage caps lock!
A laxative – or a sedative? I guess it depends on whether you’re more concerned about the composition of her posts, or their vehement style.
Is there a hybrid that addresses both?!
Nothing ever changes. The designation “muckraker” was not, originally, a term of abuse. Back in the days when “progressives” were actually doing some good (early 20th century or thereabouts) it was recognized that there were stones that had to be turned over in order to allow society to deal with what was underneath, and somebody had to do it; the muckrakers, people like Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell and Upton Sinclair. It was true then and it’s equally true now – the further up the totem a “journalist” is, the more “respected”, the more “influential”, then the nearer the likelihood of him being a liar approaches to 100%.
See: Duranty, Walter and New York Times whitewashing of the Stalin years. The media’s standing is self-inflicted. Too many journos have chosen to instead be activists, which is not in the job description.
Conceding that global war in itself may be described as ‘atrocious’, does selecting this single event make it any more atrocious than all the other atrocities that occurred? I’m not sure my Father, who survived imprisonment at the hands of the Japanese, and who never fully recovered from the experience, would agree somehow.
As is now well known more people died in the fire-bombing of Tokyo with conventional weapons than were killed in Hiroshima or Nagasaki with nuclear bombs.
That being said, with the invention and deployment of the nuclear bomb a line was crossed. An entire city could be wiped out in seconds with a totally new weapon, using technology devised by the West’s finest scientific minds.
That technology soon found its way into the hands of the two greatest mass-murders in history: Stalin and later Mao. Imagine, if you will, a world where the USSR or Mao’s China had been the originators of the atomic bomb.
There are some crucial misdirections in this piece, the product of this author’s failure – like too many (rather glibly self-righteous) modern youngsters – to connect causes and effects.
[1] Without the use of the atomic bombs in Japan in 1945, the war would have gone on and on till utter destruction prevailed in that country.
Just as the Germans had intoxicated themselves with the notion ‘Better a terrible end than an endless terror’, and some commanders were still sending troops into pointless battle in late April that year, so – far more so in the Oriental case – there was a key component of Japanese culture which considered an honourable death the finest thing in life.
Millions really were willing to go on fighting till the last drop of blood.
In practice this would mean not only their blood but the blood of so many of their captives who died at a steady rate day by day in horrendous prison-camps; and the blood of millions of Allied troops having to fight their Japanese foe.
The way in which the atomic bomb simply obliterated a whole city in one go and vapourized half its inhabitants took from Honourable Death all its Japanese-festooned dignity.
Even so, after the bombs were dropped the Japanese cabinet was divided 50/50 on whether or not to surrender; and it took the Emperor’s casting vote to bring hostilies to a conclusion.
It follows that to consider the atomic bombing of Japan ‘a major atrocity’ is not even a half-truth. Atomic bombing is infinitely horrific; but if nothing else will put a stop to lots of major atrocities, then it is not in itself IN THAT CONTEXT a major atrocity.
Unrestrained, the Japanese went characteristically berserk and raped all the women in Nanking; they committed horrors all over East Asia.
Really to win a war you need to change your opponent’s way of thinking.
The atomic bomb, like the flattening of German cities, at last caused both those nations to give up the idea of extending their territory and power by military means.
[2] It was wrong of the journalists to forgo their sacred duty and toe the line of U.S. government propaganda. Indeed. To that extent Hersey was in the right and his fellow journalists in the wrong.
The complaint of all reasonable people about the media nowadays is exactly that most broadcasters, newspapers and journals are busily committing the same sin; this time, not on behalf of this or that government, but on behalf of a ruling oligarchic establishment throughout the western world, of which establishment the newspaper- and network-owners, editors and journos are themselves beneficiaries and a part.
What’s all this about?
The New Yorker ran Hersey’s stories in August 1946.
William Burchett’s story “The Atomic Plague” ran on the front page of the Daily Express on 5 September 1945, almost a year earlier. It’s widely available online.
You are absolutely right about the importance of linguistic precision. I, for example, get very annoyed when journalists write that “Mr X admitted that his …” as if what he said was a certain truth rather than what it was: his opinion. Newspapers should say “said’, “opined’ or similar which is much less biased.
We are told that 74,000,000 citizens voted for President Trump. If they are telling us that number then it is likely more. This shows there is a sizable audience for truth that does not subscribe to the lies, deceit, and censorship of main stream media and big tech. The point being there is a market for a Conservative news and information source in print and online. Step up Conservative multi-billionaires to this opportunity. It could be also done at the citizen grass roots level as a stock offering but someone will have to set up and manage the financing effort. Of course those fund raising efforts are always prone to malfeasance. Easier, quicker, and safer for a deep pockets patriot entrepreneur to take on the project.
I’ve no doubt at least 74 billion voted for Trump, and not a corpse among them. You know what a liar he is. If he says 74 million we can be sure it’s at least a thousand times that number.
As for conservative news, how about Fox, Brietbart, Ben Shapiro and News Target? The latter three are very much alive – I get regular email newsletters from them. Perhaps you mean something more like the Daily Stormer, booted into obscurity for its thoroughly reasonable calls for genocide and race war?
Thus far, no one has suggested even a single corpse among the 74 million so what’s your point? Some people have noticed that this the first time in our history that an incumbent received more votes the second time and still lost. Biden barely attracted flies to his events, but he somehow dwarfed Obama’s vote totals? Perhaps it’s true, but it’s not necessarily believable.
Since you’re concerned about the likes of the Stormer, perhaps you can explain the numerous pundits on the left calling for what amounts to purges and enemies lists of anyone who worked for Trump, supported him, or for that matter, supported any Repub. The Stormer was booted out by people on the right. The left, meanwhile, not only has pundits saying these stupid things, but also multiple members of Congress and a former Labor Secretary.
I mentioned The Daily Stormer wondering if that’s what you meant by a conservative news outlet. In addition to the others I mentioned, there are the likes of the Telegraph and Express in the UK. My point being, there seem to be plenty of conservative news outlets already. If Fox, Breitbart, the Telegraph and Express aren’t your idea of conservative, or aren’t conservative enough for you, and The Stormer isn’t your idea of news, what is it you feel is missing? Something in between?
William Tecumseh Sherman seemed to have it figured out – 80 years before Hiroshima
War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it.
The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.
My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride,
to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us.
Fear is the beginning of wisdom
War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.
If I had my choice I would kill every reporter in the world, but I am sure we would
be getting reports from Hell before breakfast.
Mr. Hitchens makes some decent points but in my view suffers, as so many do that opine about the past, from lack of context.
“OMG! – That was awful!” is easy, anyone can do that and get nothing but nods of approval but placing your mind in that place at that time can be extremely difficult.
We don’t always know ALL of the facts and we aren’t mind-readers so filling in the blanks is no guarantee of accuracy either.
I’ll agree with what others have already said; that the days of media outlets controlling the message to suit their own editorial biases are over.
The internet has blown the lid off Pandora’s box and now literally anyone that get an internet connection is a reporter, censor, judge and jury.
Or as General George S. Patton said:
The purpose of war is not to die for your country. It’s to make sure the other b*****d dies for his!
UnHerd: censorship is the enabler of deception and therein is the corruption of truth.
I don’t think they ever started so how can they stop!
My entire life I have never given credence to the conspiracy theories that came to my notice because there were usually more logical explanations or they didn’t pose much threat.
I think differently over Coronavirus because I cannot come up with a sensible logical explanation. The data just doesn’t justify the response and the cure is most definitely going to be much worse than the disease and I fear the majority will not question and probe until too late. Why is no challenge coming from mainstream broadcasters, why is there no airing of alternate approaches, why is the opposition supporting the government when those most damaged will be their supposed core voters.
What the f@%k is the World Economic Forum doing. If you read some of their glossy narrative they clearly think they should decide what is best for us whether we want it of not. We know how this ends because Nazi Germany wasn’t that long ago. These people will enslave us without hesitation because they actually believe they are saving us. We may all end up on the Universal Salary living in flats in packed cities but I’ll bet you the “party” members will be enjoying large estates in the country.
The first bomb dropped on Japan might get away with not being a war crime but the second bomb could not. The war crimes committed by the Allies were many, including the fire-bombing of Dresden.
One historical account says Churchill ordered bombing of German civilians because he knew it would trigger the Germans to bomb British civilians and his hope was it would bring the Americans into the war.
The Americans incinerated the Japanese not to end the war because it was over, but to test their Atomic Bomb and to send the Russians a message. For all the finger-pointing at the Nazis, when push came to shove, there was too much in common. Little wonder then that the US ferreted out German Nazi scientists and took them home.
The first casualty of War is truth and with that goes ethics, whatever the claims.
This article from Dan Hitchens proves for once and ever that the theory of the multiverse is true. Dan lives in his own universe separated from mine.
Well then I must be in Dan’s!
Today, suppression of objective truth is an increasing problem, also as others have commented the lack of boundaries between reporting and opinion.
“These people are like me” – that was the realization that the Nat government tried so hard to keep from the voting public in Apartheid S.A.
Walter Duranty.
To call the atomic bombing of Japan an atrocity is to put it on a par with terrorism.
The facts are that it shortened the war by many months and saved countless lives on both sides. The threat of its use alone would have been insufficient to bring about a Japanese surrender, but it has subsequently proven to be the most effective deterrent
the world has ever known !
We subscribed to the New York Times when Trump was elected, as we felt we should invest in quality journalism that was defending access to truth. We cancelled a few months back as the NYT is now clearly using its platform to push a certain agenda (in this case COVID-related hysteria) rather than provide the facts and context that would allow readers to make rational judgments.
Let’s hope that a Hersey-like article can eventually hit the mainstream media that puts the current crisis in context, including the harm from the virus, and the harm locally and internationally that is being wrought in health, human rights and through mass poverty from the response, and the evidence-base or lack there-of on which this is based. Without this divergence back to honesty, it is hard to see how society can go anywhere but backwards. But it would take a courageous journalist and a courageous editor.
‘We subscribed to the New York Times when Trump was elected, as we felt we should invest in quality journalism that was defending access to truth.’
I’m sorry, but that is one of the saddest and most absurd sentences I have read in years. The NYT has had no connection to the truth for at least 10 years and possibly longer. It was a cheer leader for the invasion of Iraq and various other such criminal activities, and it is home to the likes of the eternally wrong-about-everything Paul Krugman. Trump pushed them over an edge from which they can never recover. Just watch them praise Biden as he starts to drop bombs on various Middle Eastern countries.
Since newspapers became big blogs, did away with sub-editors, and got smashed by the news cycle, they began to put any old rubbish to print. Typos, personal bias both intentional and accidental, cliches, mangled syntax – is it any wonder readership is contracting around interest groups who will excuse mistakes as long as the mistakes come from the right POV. Back in the 1940s the NYT editors had time to agonise over le mot juste; in the 2020s they are forced to rush articles to print so that they can boast they got in first.
It started going wrong when they stopped calling people *reporters*, now the world is full of journalists who are either political activists pretending to be journalists so people will get tricked into reading their turgid polemics, and they’ll get on the poundland TV circuit of political shows, newspaper reviews and such like…or *journalists* who split into two, those sitting at home thinking big thoughts and the rest who are crazily cutting and pasting press releases, and DMing anyone on twitter with a video that’s already trending.
The chap described in the article was a brilliant example from the sounds of it, of the bog standard reporter that every local, regional, and regional offfice of a national had by the score in the 70s and 80s, but who were already disappearing as the media hollowed out into what it is today.
And what it is today is trapped in a hyper-speed, always evolving news agenda, often *refreshing* 3 or 4 times a day, and never mind the quality see the clicks, all of which engenders the bash it out and move on quickly approach.
But it’s a problem..Google and Facebook/Instagram stole the Ads money and the internet in general stole the cover price. There are clearly some winners, but they’re going to thin out rapidly as the internet seems to prefer monopolies; and anyway the whole deal is *video* or at least 99% of the money is,though buying a paper to newswash a corporate image seems to be the next thing, so if the other tech titans follow Bezos maybe two or three will get to linger on….
Being slightly OTT there…in the spirit of our age…but not massively so….
Most journalism is so poorly written without the slightest regard for proper structure or language a good place to start would be the skills of fact finding, analysis and recording in a clear structured manner. Maybe aim for mid school standards as a start.
As awful as the bombings were, the war would not have ended any other better way. It is said they saved a million lives. I think they saved many millions.