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Obama To Become First US President To Visit Hiroshima Since 1945 Nuclear Attack (independent.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: The White House announced U.S. President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima, becoming the first sitting American President to do so since the city was destroyed in 1945 by a U.S. nuclear bomb. President Obama and Japan Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will visit the city on May 27th "to highlight his continued commitment to pursuing the peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a statement. Obama said he hoped to visit both Hiroshima and Nagasaki when he first visited Japan in November 2009. "The memories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are etched in the minds of the world, and I would be honored to have the opportunity to visit those cities at some point during my presidency," President Obama said at the time. At least 140,000 people died from the nuclear attack on Hiroshima on August 9, 1945. Three days later, the U.S. dropped a second atomic weapon on Nagasaki. Japan surrendered to Allied forces within a week after that second attack.
Cue the millennials' halfwitted observation that the bombs were "unjust" and my grandparents should've gone into another brutal, horrifying ground war in Japan.
My grandfather had a stroke and spent the last eight years of his life screaming, "I'LL KILL THAT FUCKING HITLER, GOD DAMN HITLER!" He had never swore before the stroke. That ground war was burned into his mind, and was a burden he had to carry the rest of his life.
Why would history judge his presidency to be horrible?
Why wouldn't it? The primary arguments for Obama are checking off the appropriate ethnicity boxes, kludging pre-existing medical conditions, and being the lesser of two evils in two presidential races.
The arguments against include pathological and often criminal behavior in his administration on par with the worst in US history, remarkably bad legislative and regulatory efforts, terrible economic policy, terrible foreign policy, and a larger than normal number of unanimous Supreme Court defeats for blatantly unconstitutional practices.
Obviously President Obama did a terrible job because he couldn't clean up the mess left behind by Dubya and the big dick Cheney.
The ability to blame OTHER people for their mistakes and incompetence is one of the trademarks of today's so-called Republican Party. NOT to be confused with Abe Lincoln's party that accepted "government of the people, by the people, for the people" as a good thing. Later on the GOP shifted to "government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%", but at least Teddy and Ike expressed some reservations.
Now we have Trump, who may bring us "government of the Donald, by the Donald, for the Donald".
Not trolling. Just stating what is "intuitively obvious to the most casual observer" of American political history.
By the way, as regards the original article, I have concluded that we were not really experimenting when we dropped the bombs. From our test we knew it was a bad thing. Mostly we wanted to send a very clear message to everyone, but especially to the Soviet Union.
My belief is that if we had really wanted to end the war ASAP, then we would have dropped the first one on Mount Fuji, and the second one would have been the first and probably only city. No one in Hiroshima could figure out what had happened. There was only one physicist close enough to the city to see it, know what it was, and survive. If we had hit Fuji first, then ALL the physicists in Tokyo would have known EXACTLY what it was, and the second bomb would have made it absolutely clear that it wasn't a one-off.
Second disclaimer: I live in Japan now. While I think my views are consistent, they have evolved somewhat over the years since I walked through the Enola Gay during its brief exhibition in the Smithsonian.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It constantly amazes me that the japenese don't appear to harbor extreme hatred to all americans. I know I would if they had nuked my country for whatever reason.
First, the nukes were such a small percentage of casualties. Civilians don't really distinguish between being nuked, firebombed or starved to death.
Secondly, you don't understand the perspective of the Japanese people at the time. After the war they quickly came to understand the truth about the magnitude of the lies their militarist government had told them, manipulated them into war. The Japanese public had a incredible turn of opinion against their former leaders. Many genuinely grew to like General MacArthur during the occupation. Having spent so much time in Asia earlier in his career he was one of the few generals who understood their culture and perspective on the world and was well equipped to co-opt that perspective.
Little things he did had a vast impact. When he first landed in Japan and went into Tokyo for the first time he allowed Japanese troops to line the streets on his route and provide security. He had minimal US security on that drive. The public noted that, was surprised at such "civilized" behavior by the American military. It didn't make sense, it didn't match what they had been told. Plus as people came home and told their stories of interactions with Americans even on the battlefield, the anger at the former government grew. In one documentary I recall a Japanese Army Nurse describing how Japanese soldiers on Okinawa gave them hand grenades to commit suicide with. Hers was a dud and failed to detonate when she tried to use it at a later date. She was wounded by mortars and when an American solder approached her, drew his knife, she expected to be raped and tortured and killed as all the American barbarian soldiers would do such things. She was absolutely shocked when he used the knife to cut open her pants near her wound and began to sanitize and bandage her wound before he moved on to another injured person. As she watched the Americans she began to realize she had been lied to, that they weren't barbarians. She had literally been told that some American soldiers were cannibals. Seeing victorious Americans act in humane and civilized ways was a complete shock to many Japanese given what they had been told for so many years. This had a huge impact on the post-war occupation. Probably the wisest, although most likely a quite unjust thing, that MacArthur did was to allow the emperor to live and continue on in a ceremonial role.