From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!poli-sci Newsgroups: fa.poli-sci Title: Poli-Sci Digest V2 #138 Article-I.D.: ucbvax.7496 Posted: Tue Jun 1 17:19:41 1982 Received: Wed Jun 2 03:17:15 1982 >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) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 29 May 1982 1918-PDT From: Jim McGrathSubject: A bombing Japan Please folks, lets keep this discussion on Arms-D OR Poli-Sci, NOT both. Jim ------------------------------ Date: 28 May 1982 17:19:21 EDT (Friday) From: David Mankins 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 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. ------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------ Date: 28 May 1982 18:59:53 EDT (Friday) From: David Mankins 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 ------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------ Date: 29 May 1982 1921-PDT From: Jim McGrath 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 ------------------------------ Date: 29 May 1982 1926-PDT From: Jim McGrath 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. ------------------------------ Date: 29 May 1982 1703-EDT From: Bill Sholar 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. ------------------------------ End of POLI-SCI Digest - 30 - -------