Two of warfare’s great crimes were inflicted when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing hundreds of thousands of civilians and in the bitterest of ironies wiping out Nagasaki’s Christian community which had survived long-term Japanese persecution, writes Gary G. Kohls.
By Gary G. Kohls
Seventy years ago, an all-Christian bomber crew dropped a plutonium bomb over Nagasaki City, Japan, instantly vaporizing, incinerating or otherwise annihilating tens of thousands of innocent civilians, including a disproportionately large number of Japanese Christians. The explosion mortally wounded uncountable thousands of other victims who succumbed to the blast, the intense heat and/or the radiation.
At the time of the Nagasaki bombing following the first use of a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima just three days earlier the United States was regarded as the most Christian nation in the world. But it was a form of Christianity in which most churches were proponents of eye-for-an-eye retaliation, supported America’s military and economic exploitation of other nations, or otherwise failed to sincerely teach or adhere to the ethics of Jesus as taught in the Sermon on the Mount.
The U.S. explosion of a nuclear bomb over Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945.
In a cruel irony, prior to the bomb exploding nearly directly over the Urakami Cathedral at 11:02 a.m., Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan. The massive cathedral was the largest Christian church in the Orient.
The Christian U.S. airmen, following their wartime orders to the letter, did their job efficiently. They accomplished the mission with military pride, albeit with an astonishing number of near-fatal glitches along the way.
Probably most Americans would have done what the crew did if we had been in the shoes of the Bock’s Car crew and if we had never seen, heard or smelled the suffering humanity that the bomb caused on the ground. After being treated as heroes in the aftermath, most of us like the crew would have experienced little or no remorse, though the action was retrospectively, almost universally regarded as a war crime.
Of course, the crew members knew few details about the top-secret bomb that they dropped. Some of the crew did admit that they had some doubts about what they had participated in after the bomb actually detonated. But none of them actually witnessed the horrific suffering of the victims up close and personal. “Orders are orders” and disobedience in wartime is severely punishable, even by summary execution, so the crew obeyed the orders.
Hard for Japan to Surrender
It had been only three days since Aug. 6, 1945, when another U.S. bomber crew had dropped another atomic bomb incinerating Hiroshima and leaving Japanese leaders uncertain precisely what had happened. When the Nagasaki bomb was dropped on Aug. 9, there was massive chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military command was just beginning a meeting with the Emperor to discuss how to surrender with honor. The military and civilian leadership of both nations had known for months that Japan had lost the war.
The only obstacle to ending the war had been the Allied Powers insistence on unconditional surrender, which meant that the Emperor Hirohito would have been removed from his figurehead position in Japan and perhaps even subjected to war crime trials. That demand was intolerable for the Japanese, who regarded the Emperor as a deity.
The Soviet Union had declared war against Japan the day before (on Aug. 8), hoping to regain territories lost to Japan in the humiliating (for Russia) Russo-Japanese War 40 years earlier, and Stalin’s army was advancing across Manchuria. Russia’s entry into the war had been encouraged by President Harry Truman before he knew of the success of the atom bomb test in New Mexico on July 16.
But afterwards, Truman and his strategists knew that the Bomb could elicit Japan’s surrender without Stalin’s help. So, not wanting to divide any of the spoils of war with the Soviet Union and because the U.S. wanted to send an early Cold War message to Moscow that the U.S. was the new planetary superpower, Truman ordered the bomber command to proceed with using the atomic bombs as weather permitted and as they became available (although no more fissionable material was actually available to make a fourth bomb).
Aug. 1 was the earliest deployment date for the Japanese bombing missions, and the Target Committee in Washington, D.C., had already developed a list of relatively undamaged Japanese cities that were to be excluded from the conventional US Army Air Force fire-bombing campaigns (that, during the first half of 1945, had used napalm to burn to the ground over 60 essentially defenseless Japanese cities).
The list of protected cities included Hiroshima, Niigata, Kokura, Kyoto and Nagasaki. Those five cities were to be off-limits to the terror bombings that the other cities were being subjected to. They were to be preserved as potential targets for the new “gimmick” weapon that had been researched and developed in labs and manufacturing plants all across America over the several years since the Manhattan Project had begun.
Ironically, prior to Aug. 6 and 9, the residents of those five cities considered themselves lucky for not having been bombed as had the other large cities. Little did the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki know that they were only being temporarily spared from an even worse carnage in an experiment with a new weapon that could cause the mass destruction of entire cities that were populated with hundreds of thousands of live human guinea pigs.
The Trinity Test
The first and only field test of an atomic bomb had been blasphemously code-named “Trinity” (a distinctly Christian term). That experiment had occurred in secrecy three weeks earlier at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945. The results were impressively destructive, but the blast had just killed a few hapless coyotes, rabbits, snakes and some other desert varmints. That plutonium bomb at Alamogordo had been identical to the Nagasaki bomb.
Trinity also produced huge amounts of an entirely new type of rock that was later called “Trinitite,” a radioactive molten lava rock that had been created from an intense heat that was twice the temperature of the sun.
On Aug. 6, a uranium bomb, nicknamed “Little Boy” (although first called “Thin Man” after President Franklin Roosevelt) was dropped on Hiroshima. Three days later, a B-29 Superfortress bomber (that had been “christened” Bock’s Car) was loaded with a plutonium bomb code-named “Fat Man,” partly because of its shape and partly to honor the rotund British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
At 3 a.m. on Aug. 9, Bock’s Car took off from Tinian Island in the South Pacific, with the prayers and blessings of the crew’s Lutheran and Catholic chaplains. Barely making it off the runway before the heavily loaded plane went out over the ocean (the bomb weighed 10,000 pounds), Bock’s Car headed north for Kokura, the primary target.
Japan’s Supreme War Council in Tokyo still had no comprehension of what had happened at Hiroshima, so the members were not inclined to heighten their sense of urgency concerning the issue of surrendering. As they scheduled a meeting at 11 a.m. on Aug. 9, the council members were mostly concerned about Russia’s declaration of war.
But it was already too late, because by the time the War Council members were arising and heading to the meeting with the Emperor, there was no chance to alter the course of history. Bock’s Car flying under radio silence was already approaching the southern islands of Japan, heading for Kokura. The crew was hoping to beat an anticipated typhoon and the clouds that would have caused the mission to be delayed.
The Bock’s Car crew had instructions to drop the bomb only on visual sighting. But Kokura was clouded over. So after making three failed bomb runs over the clouded-over city and experiencing engine trouble on one of the four engines – using up valuable fuel all the while – the plane headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.
The History of Nagasaki Christianity
Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. The city had the largest concentration of Christians in all of Japan. St. Mary’s Cathedral was the mega-church of its time, with 12,000 baptized members.
Nagasaki was the community where the legendary Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier planted a mission church in 1549. The Catholic community at Nagasaki grew and eventually prospered over the next several generations. However it eventually became clear to the Japanese that the Catholic Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests were exploiting Japan. It only took a couple of generations before all Europeans and their foreign religion – were expelled from the country.
From 1600 until 1850, being a Christian in Japan was a capital crime. In the early 1600s, Japanese Christians who refused to recant their faith were subject to unspeakable tortures – including crucifixion. But after a mass crucifixion occurred, the reign of terror expired, and it appeared to all observers that Japanese Christianity was extinct.
However, 250 years later, after the gunboat diplomacy of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were thousands of baptized Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in secret in a catacomb-like existence, completely unknown to the government.
With this revelation, the Japanese government started another purge; but because of international pressure, the persecutions were stopped and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground. By 1917, with no financial help from the government, the revitalized Christian community had built the massive St. Mary’s Cathedral in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki.
So it was the height of irony that the massive Cathedral – one of only two Nagasaki landmarks that could be positively identified from 31,000 feet up (the other one was the Mitsubishi armaments factory complex, which had run out of raw materials because of the Allied naval blockade) became Ground Zero for Fat Man.
The ruins of the Urakami Christian church in Nagasaki, Japan, as shown in a photograph dated Jan. 7, 1946.
At 11:02 am, during Thursday morning mass, hundreds of Nagasaki Christians were boiled, evaporated, carbonized or otherwise disappeared in a scorching, radioactive fireball that exploded 500 meters above the cathedral. The black rain that soon came down from the mushroom cloud contained the mingled cellular remains of many Nagasaki Shintoists, Buddhists and Christians. The theological implications of Nagasaki’s Black Rain surely should boggle the minds of theologians of all denominations.
Most Nagasaki Christians did not survive the blast. 6,000 of them died instantly, including all who were at confession that morning. Of the 12,000 church members, 8,500 of them eventually died as a result of the bomb. Many of the others were seriously sickened with a highly lethal entirely new disease: radiation sickness.
Three orders of nuns and a Christian girl’s school nearby disappeared into black smoke or became chunks of charcoal. Tens of thousands of other innocent, non-Christian non-combatants also died instantly, and many more were mortally or incurably wounded. Some of the victim’s progeny are still suffering from the trans-generational malignancies and immune deficiencies caused by the deadly plutonium and other radioactive isotopes produced by the bomb.
And here is one of the most cruelly ironic points: What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in 250 years of persecution (i.e., to destroy Japanese Christianity) American Christians did in mere seconds.
Even after a slow revival of Christianity since World War II, membership in Japanese churches still represents a small fraction of 1 percent of the general population, and the average attendance at Christian worship services across the nation is reported to be only 30 per Sunday. Surely the decimation of Nagasaki at the end of the war crippled what at one time was a vibrant church.
The Catholic Chaplain
Father George Zabelka was the Catholic chaplain for the 509th Composite Group (the 1,500-man United States Army Air Force group whose only mission was to successfully deliver atomic bombs to their Japanese targets). Zabelka was one of the few Christian leaders who eventually came to recognize the serious contradictions between what his modern church had taught him and what the early pacifist church believed concerning homicidal violence.
Several decades after Zabelka was discharged from the military chaplaincy, he finally concluded that both he and his church had made serious ethical and theological errors in religiously legitimating the organized mass slaughter that is modern war. He eventually came to understand that (as he articulated it) “the enemy of me and the enemy of my nation is not an enemy of God. Rather my enemy and my nation’s enemy is a child of God who is loved by God and who therefore is to be loved (and not to be killed) by me as a follower of a loving God.”
Father Zabelka’s sudden conversion away from the standardized violence-tolerant Christianity changed his Detroit, Michigan ministry around 180 degrees. His absolute commitment to the truth of gospel nonviolence just like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. inspired him to devote the remaining decades of his life to speaking out against violence in all its forms, including the violence of militarism, racism and economic exploitation.
Zabelka travelled to Nagasaki on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing, tearfully repenting and asking for forgiveness for the part he had played in the crime.
Likewise, the Lutheran chaplain for the 509th, Pastor William Downey (formerly of Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota), in his counseling of soldiers who had become troubled by their participation in making murder for the state, later denounced all killing, whether by a single bullet or by weapons of mass destruction.
In Daniel Hallock’s important book, Hell, Healing and Resistance, the author described a 1997 Buddhist retreat that was led by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The retreat involved a number of combat-traumatized Vietnam War veterans who had left the Christianity of their birth. The veterans had responded positively to Nhat Hanh’s ministrations.
Hallock wrote, “Clearly, Buddhism offers something that cannot be found in institutional Christianity. But then why should veterans embrace a religion that has blessed the wars that ruined their souls? It is no wonder that they turn to a gentle Buddhist monk to hear what are, in large part, the truths of Christ.”
Hallock’s comment should be a sobering wake-up call to Christian leaders who seem to regard as important both the recruitment of new members and the retention of old ones. The fact that the U.S. is a highly militarized nation makes the truths of gospel nonviolence difficult to teach and preach, especially to military veterans (particularly the homeless ones) who may have lost their faith because of spiritually-traumatic horrors experienced on the battlefield.
Prevention, the Only Cure
I am a retired physician who has dealt with hundreds of psychologically traumatized patients (including combat-traumatized war veterans), and I know that violence, in all its forms, can irretrievably damage the mind, body, brain and spirit. But the fact that the combat-traumatized type is totally preventable and oftentimes virtually impossible to fully cure – makes prevention really important.
The old saying that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is especially true when it comes to combat-induced PTSD. And where Christian churches should and could be instrumental in the prevention of homicidal violence (and the soul-destroying combat PTSD) is by counseling their members to not participate in it, as the ethics of the nonviolent Jesus surely guided the pacifist church in the first three centuries of its existence.
Experiencing violence can be deadly and sometimes it is even contagious. I have seen violence, neglect, abuse and the resultant traumatic illnesses spread through both military and non-military families – even involving the third and fourth generations after the initial victimizations.
That has been the experience of the hibakusha (the long-suffering atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and their progeny and it has been the experience of the warrior-perpetrators (and their victims) who experienced the acts of killing in any war, not just WWII.
Years ago I saw an unpublished Veteran’s Administration study that showed that, whereas most Vietnam War-era soldiers were active members of Christian churches before they went off to war, if they came home with PTSD, the percentage returning to their faith community approached zero. Daniel Hallock’s sobering message above helps explain why that is so.
Therefore the church – at least by its silence on the issue of war – seems to be promoting homicidal violence, contrary to the ethical teachings of Jesus, by failing to teach what the primitive church understood was one of the core teachings of Jesus, who said, in effect, that “violence is forbidden for those who wish to follow me.”
Therefore, by refraining from warning their adolescent members about the faith- and soul-destroying realities of war, the church is directly undermining the “retention” strategies in which all churches engage. The hidden history of Nagasaki has valuable lessons for American Christianity.
The Bock’s Car bomber crew, like conscripted or enlisted men in any war, was at the bottom of a long, complex and very anonymous chain of command whose superiors demanded unconditional obedience from those below them in the chain. The Bock’s Car crew had been ordered to “pull the trigger” of the lethal weapon that had been conceptualized, designed, funded, manufactured and armed by other entities, none of whom would feel morally responsible for doing the dirty deed.
As is true in all wars, the soldier trigger-pullers are usually the ones blamed for the killing and therefore they often feel the post-war guilt that is a large part of combat-induced PTSD. However, their religious chaplains, who are responsible for the morals of their soldiers, may share their guilt feelings. Both groups are down at the bottom of the chain of command, but neither group knows exactly who they are trying to kill or why.
The early church leaders, who knew the teachings and actions of Jesus best, rejected nationalist, racist and militarist agendas that are now the foundation of the modern national security agencies, the military-industrial complex and the war-profiteering corporations. As Christianity adapted to the needs of powerful leaders and empires, the teachings of Jesus were deformed into eye-for-an-eye retaliatory doctrines that have, over the past 1,700 years, enabled baptized Christians to willingly kill both Christians and non-Christians in the name of Christ.
Gary G. Kohls is a retired physician who practiced holistic mental health care for the last decade of his career. In his practice he often dealt with the horrific psychological consequences of veterans (and civilians) who had suffered psychological, neurological and/or spiritual trauma during incidents of violence (including basic training and combat).
@Zano You are right on the money
https://richmondunlimited.wordpress.com/2012/03/20/ww-2-the-only-two-christian-cities-in-japan-bombed-with-atomic-bombs/
….Who, in Washington, was capable of such a barbarous act? More than one no doubt. But one man stands out above the rest. He was Henry Morgenthau Jr. He was responsible for the diabolical Morgenthau Plan For Peace in post-war Germany. He was close to Roosevelt throughout Roosevelt’s presidency. That was when the plan to drop the bomb was hatched; And the two Christian cities were to be the targets.
Morgenthau was a prominent Zionist; He was chairman of the American Financial and Development Corporation for Israel; financial advisor to Israel; And chairman of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem……
CIA O
masonic zionists did it
While mentioning the Christian air crew dropping the bomb, the writer might have mentioned the Jewish scientist who helped make it.
Bret Stephens. The neoconservative true believer has been campaigning against the Iran Deal, and never lacking for certitudes, went to Hiroshima last week for the Wall Street Journal to discover that Japan is thriving today because it went through the necessary horror of being nuked. Who knew!
“The bomb turned the empire of the sun into a nation of peace activists…
“Modern Japan is a testament to the benefits of total defeat, to stripping a culture prone to violence of its martial pretenses… It is a testament, too, to an America that understood moral certainty and even a thirst for revenge were not obstacles to magnanimity. In some ways they are the precondition for it…
“There are lessons in this city’s history that could serve us today, when the U.S. military forbids the word victory, the U.S. president doesn’t believe in the exercise of American power, and the U.S. public is consumed with guilt for sins they did not commit.
“Watch the lights come on at night in Hiroshima. Note the gentleness of its culture. And thank God for the atom bomb.”
[…]
Stephens told a Christian audience two weeks ago that rather than the Iran Deal he would prefer an option in which the Congress rejects the deal and Iran goes on to pursue a nuclear bomb. “It gives the next president more options than [Obama has now].â€
Stephens was on a panel at Yeshiva University when Sheldon Adelson said that President Obama should nuke Iran, in the desert, to get them to give up their nuclear program. Stephens had no objection to the comment at the time. Later he defended Adelson against the charge that he was supporting genocide, and Stephens went on to say “I’m opposed to dropping nuclear weapons in deserts or anywhere else.†He has now thought better of that position.
Celebrating Hiroshima, WSJ columnist insinuates US should nuke Iran
By Philip Weiss
http://mondoweiss.net/2015/08/celebrating-columnist-insinuates
The “traditionalist” polemic that nuclear weapons “save lives” has fueled Israel’s pursuit of nuclear arms and its current nuclear threats against Iran.
[The Prime Minister of Japan, ShinzÅ] Abe has been evasive in explaining under what circumstances Japan’s Self-Defense Forces might be dispatched overseas. Many Japanese are fearful that Japan will be dragged into war at Washington’s behest, taking to the streets to voice their opposition and staging mass anti-Abe rallies. Moreover, there is a consensus among constitutional scholars that the laws are unconstitutional. The public worries that Abe is seeking to bypass Article 9 of the constitution that imposes constraints on Japan’s military, a key proviso that is embraced as a touchstone of national identity and symbol of pacifism. The release of the report on August 6 is curious since it coincided with ceremonies commemorating the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a day that reminds Japanese about the folly of war and the disastrous consequences of reckless leaders operating without constraints.
History Haunts Japan’s Prime Minister Abe
By Jeff Kingston
http://japanfocus.org/events/view/257
Please note the following errors in your comment:
Operation Downfall was the codename for the planned American invasion of home islands of Japan.
MacArthur estimates
A study done by General Douglas MacArthur’s staff in June 1945 estimated 23,000 US casualties in the first 30 days and 125,000 after 120 days. When these figures were questioned by General Marshall, MacArthur submitted a revised estimate of 105,000, in part by deducting wounded men able to return to duty.
Cadillac Beach
There was no Operation Cadillac Beach set for September, 1946
The first phase of the planned invasion was Operation Olympic, an assault on the southernmost main Japanese island of Kyūshū.
Scheduled for November 1, 1945, thousands of soldiers and Marines would pour ashore on beaches all along the eastern, southeastern, southern and western coasts of the heavily fortified and defended island.
All of the Operation Olympic landing beaches were named after automobile manufacturers. I Corps, the Eastern Assault Force, would land near Miyaski. One of the I Corps landing beaches was named code-named Cadillac.
Later, in spring 1946, Operation Coronet was the planned invasion of the KantŠPlain, near Tokyo, on the Japanese island of Honshū. Airbases on Kyūshū captured in Operation Olympic would allow land-based air support for Operation Coronet.
Churchill speech
In his “Sinews of Peace” address of 5 March 1946, at Westminster College, known as the “iron curtain speech”, Winston Churchill made no mention of the US atomic attacks on Japan having saved a million Allied lives.
http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/16/1946-03-05.pdf
Churchill used the term “iron curtain” in the context of Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe.
I think it is important to remember that despite their novelty, the destruction caused by the atomic bombs dropped on Japan was no greater than that wrought by the massive air raids the USAF launched against Tokyo, Nagoya, and other cities in World War II. It is all but forgotten that most devastating conventional air raid in all of history, the 1,000-plane bombing mission against Tokyo led by the egomanaical General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, took place on Auigust 14, after the two atomic bombings.
What is different is that all this destructive power was concentrated in a single weapon, which ultimately brought down the huge costs of building and arming entire air fleets in order to obliterate enemy population centers. This is the unspeakable evil of atomic weapons and their far deadlier nuclear successors: they were developed primarily to
reduce the cost of mass murder. And here some of us are, all these years later, congratulating ourselves still on our Yankee ingenuity and courage at wisely saving a
buck during our most enthusiastic overseas killing spree, a grotesque race war against a
foe uniformly depicted in the American news media of the day as animalistic and subhuman.
If it is true that these bombings were ordered to give notice to erstwhile ally Stalin that the U.S. possessed an invincible new weapon, the Soviet Union reacted sensibly by occupying eastern Europe for the next half century, to safeguard Russia from this very
real threat of yet more western aggression.
General MacArthur had estimated 23,000 U.S. causalities in Operation Cadillac Beach, the invasion of the Japanese homeland, set for September, 1946. U.S. President Truman, announcing the atomic attack the next day, inflated this number to 100,000, and
Churchill, in his “Iron Curtain†speech of 1946, said the attacks saved a million Allied lives, and this has become the “official†number. A patriot might reflect whether General
Washington would have ordered the massacres of Tory civilians in order to spare the Continental Army the hazards of an engagement with the Redcoat host.
That defenseless populations are legitimate military targets to this day, is the horrific but
always unspoken legacy of “the good war.â€
“all but forgotten”
The single deadliest air raid of World War II was the Operation Meetinghouse firebombing of Tokyo on the night of March 9-10, 1945. Approximately 15.8 square miles of the city was destroyed. Historian Richard Rhodes put deaths at over 100,000, injuries at a million and homeless residents at a million. This death toll was greater than Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki as single events. Emperor Hirohito’s tour of the destroyed areas of Tokyo in March 1945 was the beginning of his personal involvement in the peace process, culminating in Japan’s surrender six months later.
The US Third Fleet performed the final raid on Tokyo on August 13, 1945, but it was not the “most devastating conventional air raid in all of history”.
Other historical errors in your comment are detailed below.
In years past I was a naive sort of person. Example: when the door-to-door missionaries showed up, I’d invite them into the living room for a conversation. It took a while to figure out that all the ‘give-and-take’ was strictly ‘take’ from their viewpoint. It had to be, for they were and are cult members who had absolutely no room for flexibility. When push came to shove, THEY were always in the right and I was always in the wrong. No exceptions!
This thread is the first time I’ve ever realized the same is true with the discussion of Hiroshima. At least with some people. They have bought into the missionary work of Mr. Gary G. Kohls and are – like him – people who now Know The Truth. No amount of “logic” or “reason” or “facts” will sway them from that view.
As it happens, I’m a slow learner about that when compared with more perceptive types. Back in 1995 Robert P. Newman wrote a book titled Truman and the Hiroshima Cult.
Here is some of the product description:
Yet, Newman goes further in his discussion, seeking the reasons why so much hostility has been generated by what happened in the skies over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August, 1945. The source of discontent, he concludes, is a “cult” that has grown up in the United States since the 1960s. It was weaned on the disillusionment spawned by concerns about a military industrial complex, American duplicity and failure in the Vietnam War, and a mistrust of government following Watergate. The cult has a shrine, a holy day, a distinctive rhetoric of victimization, various items of scripture, and, in Japan, support from a powerful Marxist constituency. “As with other cults, it is ahistorical,” Newman declares. “Its devotees elevate fugitive and unrepresentative events to cosmic status.
So my conclusion is only 20 years late. And I’ll admit it might have been even later had I not had the Saint Holdridge hint. What’ll we see in coming years – miracles? Visions? Prophesy? No doubt these and more will eventually appear.
In the future I’ll no longer be surprised when I run into brick walls of denial. By their very nature cults are irrational, and this one is no exception. Not bashing the old noggin into those brick walls is something I need to keep in mind.
As for Gary C. Kohls, his ministry will obviously continue in this area. One place where I seriously hope the man falls flat on his face is his dedicated preaching against vaccinations. As for his “Chem-Trail” fixation, I just don’t know what to make of that one.
Regardless of anyone’s opinion of what constitutes a cult, or how eloquently it’s stated that there was no WWII option other than to drop A-bombs on Japan as proclaimed by it’s own cult followers, one of the greatest man-made threats to all life on earth is the warrior culture armed with the false notion that atomic age weapons can be justified.
Robert P. Newman is a principal author of “orthodox” polemic about Truman’s decision.
The “orthodox” cult has been enthused by the publication of Hell to Pay: Operation DOWNFALL and the Invasion of Japan, 1945-1947, by D. M. Giangreco.
Published by the US Naval Institute Press in 2009, Giangreco’s study of American and Japanese operational and planning documents shows that the American invasion of the home islands would have been fiercely resisted with great military and civilian loss of life.
However, this information does not eliminate questions about the morality of Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The Japanese Army and navy were each supporting independent programs to build an atomic bomb. They were delayed because they lacked suficient supplies of uranium 235. They had the knowhow and the facilities to purify uranium and the ability to construct a bomb. It would be brought to the mainland of the US by submarine .
Like their suicide plane attack there would be no consideration of civilian casualties. This was a war of survival, not a war of political or religious empire building that we have experienced in the post war republican mythology.
Brainwashed, Morton?
The Japanese program to develop nuclear weapons was conducted during World War II. Like the German nuclear weapons program, it suffered from an array of problems, and was ultimately unable to progress beyond the laboratory stage before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Japanese surrender in August 1945.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_nuclear_weapon_program
In 1934, Tohoku University professor Hikosaka Tadayoshi’s “atomic physics theory” was released. Hikosaka pointed out the huge energy contained by nuclei and the possibility that both nuclear power generation and weapons could be created. In December 1938, the German chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann sent a manuscript to Naturwissenschaften reporting that they had detected the element barium after bombarding uranium with neutrons; simultaneously, they communicated these results to Lise Meitner. Meitner, and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch, correctly interpreted these results as being nuclear fission and Frisch confirmed this experimentally on 13 January 1939. Physicists around the world immediately realized that chain reactions could be produced and notified their governments of the possibility of developing nuclear weapons.
World War II.
The leading figure in the Japanese atomic program was Dr. Yoshio Nishina, a close associate of Niels Bohr and a contemporary of Albert Einstein. Nishina had co-authored the Klein–Nishina formula. Nishina had established his own Nuclear Research Laboratory to study high-energy physics in 1931 at Riken Institute (the Institute for Physical and Chemical Research), which had been established in 1917 in Tokyo to promote basic research. Nishina had built his first 26-inch (660 mm) cyclotron in 1936, and another 60-inch (1,500 mm), 220-ton cyclotron in 1937. In 1938 Japan also purchased a cyclotron from the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1939 Nishina recognized the military potential of nuclear fission, and was worried that the Americans were working on a nuclear weapon which might be used against Japan. Indeed, in 1939, President Franklin D. Roosevelt started the first investigations into fission weapons in the United States, which eventually evolved into the massive Manhattan Project, and the laboratory from which Japan purchased its own cyclotron would become one of the major sites for weapons research.
In the early summer of 1940 Nishina met Lieutenant-General Takeo Yasuda on a train. Yasuda was at the time director of the Army Aeronautical Department’s Technical Research Institute. Nishina told Yasuda about the possibility of building nuclear weapons. However, the Japanese fission project did not formally begin until April 1941 when Yasuda acted on Army Minister Hideki TÅjÅ’s order to investigate the possibilities of nuclear weapons. Yasuda passed the order down the chain of command to Okochi Masatoshi, director of the Riken Institute, who in turn passed it to Nishina, whose Nuclear Research Laboratory by 1941 had over 100 researchers.
Meanwhile, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Technology Research Institute had been pursuing its own separate investigations, and had engaged professors from the Imperial University, Tokyo, for advice on nuclear weapons. This resulted in the formation of the Committee on Research in the Application of Nuclear Physics, chaired by Nishina, that met ten times between July 1942 and March 1943. It concluded in a report that while an atomic bomb was, in principle, feasible, “it would probably be difficult even for the United States to realize the application of atomic power during the war”. This caused the Navy to lose interest and to concentrate instead on research into radar.
The Army was not discouraged, and soon after the Committee issued its report it set up an experimental project at Riken, the Ni-Go Project. Its aim was to separate uranium-235 by thermal diffusion, ignoring alternative methods such as electromagnetic separation, gaseous diffusion, and centrifugal separation. By February 1945, a small group of scientists had succeeded in producing a small amount of material in a rudimentary separator in the Riken complex—material which Riken’s cyclotron indicated was not uranium-235. The separator project came to an end two months later when the building housing it was destroyed in a fire caused by the USAAF’s Operation Meetinghouse raid on Tokyo. No attempt was made to build a uranium pile; heavy water was unavailable, but Takeuchi Masa, who was in charge of Nishina’s separator, calculated that light water would suffice if the uranium could be enriched to 5–10% uranium-235.
While these experiments were in progress, the Army and Navy carried out searches for uranium ore, in locations ranging from Fukushima Prefecture to Korea, China, and Burma.] The Japanese also requested materials from their German allies and 560 kg (1,230 lb) of unprocessed uranium oxide was dispatched to Japan in April 1945 aboard the submarine U-234, which however surrendered to US forces in the Atlantic following Germany’s surrender.
In 1943 a different Japanese Naval command began a nuclear research program, the F-Go Project, under Bunsaku Arakatsu at the Imperial University, Kyoto. Arakatsu had spent some years studying abroad including at the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge under Ernest Rutherford and at Berlin University under Albert Einstein. Next to Nishina, Arakatsu was the most notable nuclear physicist in Japan. His team included Hideki Yukawa, who would become in 1949 the first Japanese physicist to receive a Nobel Prize.
Early on in the war Commander Kitagawa, head of the Navy Research Institute’s Chemical Section, had requested Arakatsu to carry out work on the separation of Uranium-235. The work went slowly, but shortly before the end of the war he had designed an ultracentrifuge (to spin at 60,000 rpm) which he was hopeful would achieve the required results. Only the design of the machinery was completed before the Japanese surrender.
Shortly after the surrender of Japan, the Manhattan Project’s Atomic Bomb Mission, which had deployed to Japan in September, reported that the F-Go Project had obtained 20 grams a month of heavy water from electrolytic ammonia plants in Korea and Kyushu. In fact, the industrialist Jun Noguchi had launched a heavy water production program some years previously.
Historian Rainer Karlsch has alleged that shortly before the end of the war US intelligence acquired information to the effect that Japanese scientists had planned to conduct a test of a nuclear weapon near Hungnam on 12 August 1945. However, this could not be verified as the Red Army occupied Konan a few days later, before US occupation authorities could investigate fully.
On 16 October 1945 Nishina sought permission from the American occupation forces to use the two cyclotrons at the Riken Institute for biological and medical research, which was soon granted; however, on 10 November instructions were received from the US Secretary of War in Washington to destroy the cyclotrons at the Riken, Kyoto University, and Osaka University. This was done on 24 November; the Riken’s cyclotrons were taken apart and thrown into Tokyo Bay.
In a letter of protest against this destruction Nishina wrote that the cyclotrons at the Riken had had nothing to do with the production of nuclear weapons, however the large cyclotron had officially been a part of the Ni-Go Project. Nishina had placed it within the Project by suggesting that the cyclotron could serve basic research for the use of nuclear power, simply so that he could continue working on the device; the military nature of the Project gave him access to funding and kept his researchers from being drafted into the armed forces. He felt no qualms about this because he saw no possibility of producing nuclear weapons in Japan before the end of the war.
In 1946 the Atlanta Constitution published a story by reporter David Snell, who had been an investigator with the 24th Criminal Investigation Detachment in Korea after the war, which alleged that the Japanese had successfully tested a nuclear weapon near Konan before being captured by the Soviets. He said that he had received his information at Seoul in September 1945 from a Japanese officer who had been in charge of counter-intelligence at Konan. SCAP officials, who were responsible for strict censorship of all information about Japan’s wartime interest in nuclear physics,[20] were dismissive of Snell’s report.
Under the 1947-48 investigation, comments were sought from Japanese scientists who would or should have known about such a project. Further doubt is cast on Snell’s story by the lack of evidence of large numbers of Japanese scientists leaving Japan for Korea and never returning. Snell’s statements were repeated by Robert K. Wilcox in his 1985 book Japan’s Secret War: Japan’s Race Against Time to Build Its Own Atomic Bomb. The book also included what Wilcox stated was new evidence from intelligence material which indicated the Japanese might have had an atomic program at Konan. These specific reports were dismissed in reviews of the book.
Yahweh=Allah=Jehovah=Satan
Several things make nuclear WMD’s really offensive:
One bomb could kill 5 million people or more.
Ten bombs could kill 90% of life on earth, possibly more over time.
Newborns arrive with birth defects after parental exposure to radiation.
There is always — 24/7 — the implied threat of an accident or computer/human malfunction or judgement error.
Anytime there’s a conflict between two nuclear powers the nuclear threat increases.
Some people die slow torturous deaths years or decades after detonation and exposure.
Huge risks exist just in manufacturing the materials to make these weapons.
Nuclear waste is hazardous for a millennium and we’ve been unable to safely contain it so far.
Having these weapons increases the chance humans will innihillate all life as we know it.
The world is not safe with the neocon war crime record and them having potentially more nuclear warheads at their disposal than anyone else.
The world could potentially recover from excessive capitalism or communism but any nuclear exchange is a fools mission.
The world is not safe with nuclear power and having WMD’s on hand is reckless behavior.
There may be something inaccurate in what’s stated above, but if so, it is far less potentially dangerous to anyone than the nuclear weapons presently existing on this planet.
There are more than 7 billion reasons not to have nukes on this planet waiting for an accident or the deranged individual who would luanch a nuclear strike for any reason whatsoever.
Agree. Big time!
^The above is also true for nuclear power plants^
Humans have created 300,000 tons of nuclear waste with no clue as to how to keep it out of the environment, and must be cooled 24/7. What could go wrong?
But, hey, it’s your children’s problem, right?
â—„ 2 Peter 3:10 â–º
But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.
Operation Downfall was the codename for the Allied plan for the invasion of Japan near the end of World War II.
The Japanese planned an all-out defense of KyÅ«shÅ«. Casualty predictions varied widely, but were extremely high. Depending on the degree to which Japanese civilians would have resisted the invasion, estimates ran up into the millions for Allied casualties. US military planners anticipated a”fanatically hostile population”.
The Japanese were resistant to surrender due to the Japanese military indoctrinating its personnel to fight to the death, Allied combat personnel often being unwilling to take prisoners, and many Japanese soldiers believing that those who surrendered would be killed by their captors.
Western Allied governments and senior military commanders directed that Japanese POWs be treated in accordance with relevant international conventions. In practice though, many Allied soldiers were unwilling to accept the surrender of Japanese troops due to a combination of racist attitudes and reports of atrocities conducted against Allied troops. A campaign launched in 1944 to encourage prisoner-taking was partially successful, and the number of prisoners taken increased significantly in the last year of the war.
Japanese soldiers’ reluctance to surrender was also influenced by a perception that Allied forces would kill them if they did surrender, and historian Niall Ferguson has argued that this had a more important influence in discouraging surrenders than the fear of disciplinary action or dishonor. In addition, the Japanese public was aware that US troops sometimes mutilated Japanese casualties and sent trophies made out of body-parts home from media reports of two high-profile incidents in 1944 in which a letter-opener carved from a bone of a Japanese soldier was presented to President Roosevelt and a photo of the skull of a Japanese soldier which had been sent home by a US soldier was published in the magazine Life. In these reports Americans were portrayed as “deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman”. Hoyt in “Japan’s war: the great Pacific conflict” argues that the Allied practice of taking bones from Japanese corpses home as souvenirs was exploited by Japanese propaganda very effectively, and “contributed to a preference to death over surrender and occupation, shown, for example, in the mass civilian suicides on Saipan and Okinawa after the Allied landings”.
The causes of the phenomenon that Japanese often continued to fight even in hopeless situations has been traced to a combination of Shinto, Messhi hoko (self-sacrifice for the sake of group), and Bushido. However, a factor equally strong or even stronger to those, was the fear of torture after capture. This fear grew out of years of battle experiences in China, where the Chinese guerrillas were considered expert torturers, and this fear was projected onto the American soldiers who also were expected to torture and kill surrendered Japanese. During the Pacific War the majority of Japanese military personnel did not believe that the Allies treated prisoners correctly, and even a majority of those who surrendered expected to be killed.
The planned operation was abandoned when Japan surrendered following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet declaration of war.
Abe, I appreciate a majority of your posts, but here I must disagree based chiefly on the writing of Howard Zinn. Pages 413-415 of A Peoples History of the United States.
On page 414& 415 of my First Edition copy: On July 13, 1945, foreign Minister Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: “Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace…”
—- If only the Americans had not insisted on unconditional surrender – that is, if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place, the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.
—– British scientist P.M.S. Blackett suggested in his book, Fear,War and the Bomb, that the US was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war.
— (skipping ahead) Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was ” the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.”
—(skipping ahead) The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated on Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment?
““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““`
Wow! What a question that is! Would it be out of range for military supremacists to seek such an answer? I doubt it… .
August 6: “The Jewish Bombâ€
Posted: August 5, 2011
Smoke clouds from Hiroshima bomb August 6 1945The first nuclear attack in history took place on this date in 1945 when the city of Hiroshima was largely destroyed by a single bomb dropped by an American B-29. Three days later, the city of Nagasaki was similarly destroyed, and Japan surrendered six days after that, ending World War II. The nuclear bomb was the product of an intensive development campaign in which Jews were prominently involved: Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, three Jewish refugees from Nazism, had co-signed an August 2, 1939 letter to President Roosevelt warning of the consequences if Germany developed an atomic bomb; J. Robert Oppenheimer, David Bohm, Rudolf Peierls, Otto Frisch Felix Bloch, Niels Bohr, Otto Hahn, and Edward Teller (as well as Wigner and Szilard) — many of whom were refugees from Nazism — were key leaders among the 6,000 scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the American bomb. After the war, a number of these scientists became leading advocates of disarmament and/or international control of nuclear weapons.
“When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.†–Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power
http://www.jewishcurrents.org/august-6-the-jewish-bomb-6434
Remarks about Truman and the bomb in Howard Zinn’s troubled A People’s History were mostly sourced from Gar Alperovitz’ troubled Atomic Diplomacy.
The Japanese resistance to surrender was fortified by Allied anti-Japanese sentiment, racist propaganda and conduct of the war in the Pacific.
U. S. historian James J. Weingartner noted the widespread American “conviction that the Japanese were ‘animals’ or ‘subhuman’ and unworthy of the normal treatment accorded to POWs.”
Niall Ferguson said that “Allied troops often saw the Japanese in the same way that Germans regarded Russians [sic] — as Untermenschen.”
Ulrich Straus, a U.S. Japanologist, believes that front line troops intensely hated Japanese military personnel and were “not easily persuaded” to take or protect prisoners, as they believed that Allied personnel who surrendered, got “no mercy” from the Japanese.
Weingartner argues that there is a common cause between the mutilation of Japanese war dead and the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki. According to Weingartner both were partially the result of a dehumanization of the enemy, saying, “[T]he widespread image of the Japanese as sub-human constituted an emotional context which provided another justification for decisions which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands.”
On the second day after the Nagasaki bomb, Truman stated: “The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true”.
Historical analysis of the atomic bombing of Japan need not subscribe to the polemics of either the “orthodox” or “revisionist” camps.
War is hell, war is a racket and of course, war is always an amoral and unchristian choice. What legal arguments or distinctions can be drawn from deciding to drop a barrage of incendiary bomb-lets, or fuel air bombs against non-combatant city dwellers as opposed to using an A-bomb? During WW I I, Dresden was literally burned to the ground with hundreds of thousands of civilians either slowly cremated or suffocated from lack of air in basements or bunkers. Since Nagasaki, nuclear weapons have undergone many refinements, smaller sized, lower residual ground-shine (radiation), modified for additional explosive power, or EMP effects, or light energy and so on…my point is, the ever increasing horror of weaponry, in general demands a coordinated global response. When ex-Soviet Biowarfare expert Sergei Popov showed the world a whole new and synthetic strain of bacteria (s), that can at first appear as pneumonia but then evolve into multiple sclerosis; not a single head in the mainstream media turned to take a long look. This obliviousness occurred more recently with a news blackout about an Israeli neutron bomb detonated in Yemen (confirmed by the IAEA?). The world community at large has permitted science to run a muck and with the aid of implacable ignorance coupled with endless forms of distraction (s) we now find ourselves in an impossible predicament!
The effect of the WWII is an eye-opener for most of us. What the US did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki is unforgivable. But we still pray for them. What you said about “enemies of mine and the enemies of my nation are children of God” is true. We should all pray for others, even our enemies.
All of these faith based religions are a virus of the human mind. Holding everyone captive in the grip of the biggest BS story ever told. I am sickened by all the lives that have been wasted waiting for a god to rescue them. I am holding on to hope that humans will give up the fairy tail….If and when that happens …. planet earth will survive ….
Christianity has been co-opted by the far right-wing Zionist Christian theology in the United States.
This tutorial by Dr. Rev. Stephen Sizer explains the history of Christian “Zionism”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps-v2NkoNVg
Millions of Presbyterian Christians have denounced the war crimes of the State of Israel by endorsing the BDS movement in support of the Palestinians.
In the United States there is now a theological war between true Christians, who support the Biblical passages of Hebrews 8:13 which generally states that all that is written in the Old Testament will become OBSOLETE once Christ is born.
Jesus’ message was one of PEACE and FORGIVENESS, not of war and hatred and killing.
I was raised as an Evangelical Christian from 1950. All I ever learned was the teachings of Jesus Christ from the New Testament. Little was taught to us from the Old Testament (which is the primary book of the Jews).
I grew up learning kindness, love, faith, forgiveness, loving your neighbor as yourself.
I go to sleep at night remembering Jesus’ last teaching at The Last Supper to, “Love one another as I have loved you.” And I strive to do this every day.
This, to me, means loving ALL my brothers and sisters on Earth, not slaughtering them for domination, resources or for abject power.
There are two kinds of Christianity in the world now. Christian ZIONISM and Christianity.
It is Christian ZIONISM that is destroying the love we must have for one another.
A beautiful post, thank you, I enjoyed reading it and feeling what you feel.
Two of warfare’s great crimes were inflicted when the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki…
It’s the “uniqueness” of the evil at Hiroshima and Nagasaki which agitates the new cult. That “an all-Christian” army of English soldiers slaughtered half a million people in Ireland using old fashioned bullets and bayonets doesn’t make the grade. “An all-Christian” German army surrounded Leningrad and caused the starvation of a million Russians – that somehow doesn’t count either. “An all-Christian” counteroffensive against the Spanish Republicans killed half a million people – not “great enough”.
No, it had to be something “high-tech”, and defined as pure evil in defiance of all historical reality.
An analogy to the US Civil War comes to mind. Ulysses S. (or Unconditional Surrender) Grant was at the time positively vilified for his determined pursuit of the traitor Robert E. Lee. Lee had been very fortunate to encounter second and third string Union commanders who would fight a big battle, then go off and lick their wounds. It was a long and strung-out slaughter, and quite pointless because the war ground on. McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, and Meade had been doing this for years. The new commander of the Army of the Potomac took the war to Lee in an entirely new fashion – call it ‘bulldog’. The death totals earned Grant the nickname of “butcher”.
But his total casualties were lower than the others, and these deaths were not in vain, for he put an end to the endless dying.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the slaughter in the Pacific Theater. The civilians there died horrible deaths, but the two events convinced the Japanese command that the war must end. Had the same people died of firebombings or high explosive from bombs, or artillery and bullets during the approaching invasion, their deaths would have gone unremarked, and the megadeaths would have continued.
The new cult has had to create new “facts” about WW2, and from all accounts the converts of their missionary work are continuing to grow in number. In the days of the internet reinventing reality isn’t all that difficult.
What do you think would have happened if the bombs were not used?
Have you ever considered that any use or even testing of these weapons is criminal on some level?
What do you think would have happened if the bombs were not used?
I think the invasion would have begun, and turned into a catastrophe almost beyond understanding.
http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?AD=ADA528442
That’s a brief article by an author who knows a LOT about the planned invasion.
Have you ever considered that any use or even testing of these weapons is criminal on some level?
As much as any weapon is “criminal on some level”.
Dead is dead, even if you’re skewered by stone-tipped arrows or spears. Mass murder by primitive arms is just as possible as it is by A-bombs. Just a little more work.
The Mongol hordes wiped entire cities off the face of the earth. At the start of the Albigensian Crusade the Papal army slaughtered every inhabitant of Beziers with their iron weapons. The citizens there were just as dead as the Japanese men, women, and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some people survived the Bomb, but very few escaped the gangs of armed goons who hunted them down.
So how can atomic bombs be seen as uniquely evil?
Comparing stone tipped arrows and spears or even bullets and artillery to atom bombs is not a valid comparison. While all the the spears and arrows along with all the bullets and artillery that have ever existed could not end life on the planet, atom bombs have the capability to end all life as we know it. The one is unquestionably more evil if defined by destructive capability and potential.
As for justifying the use of atom bombs to lessen the total number of humans killed — as in WWII — with this logic we could justify global nuclear war so humans will never be able to kill again and will die no more.
The dangers of producing and storing these weapons cannot be justified. With humans being what they are, it’s only a matter of time before accident or intentional use and possible escalation, take the lives of how many people if not all?
And just like we don’t know how many would have died had the bombs not been used on Japan, we don’t know if that initial use will now make it easier for someone else, or us, to “justify” using them again — to kill how many and to what end?
“The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.” Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
To you, Sovereign Grand Instructors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the Brethren of the 32nd, 31st and 30th degrees: ‘the Masonic Religion should be, by all of us initiates of the high degrees, maintained in the purity of the LUCIFERIAN Doctrine. If Lucifer were not god, would Adonay (Jesus)… calumniate (spread false and harmful statements about) him?…Yes Lucifer is God…”
Albert Pike 33rd Degree Mason Sovereign Grand Commander
The third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the ‘agentur’ of the ‘Illuminati’ between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam and political Zionism mutually destroy each other. Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on the issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economic exhaustion…Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity…will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in public view.[39]
“The injury we do and the one we suffer are not weighed in the same scales”: Aesop, Fables
“He does not believe who does not live according to his belief”: Thomas Fuller
“In the last analysis we must be judged by what we do and not by what we believe. We are as we behave”- Geoffrey L. Rudd, British Nutritionist, September/October 1962
“Live truth instead of professing it”: Elbert Hubbard
You believe that there is one God; you do well: the demons also believe, and tremble. JAMES 9:12 KJV Bible
“To say one believes in God and steal from your neighbor or cheat your customer annuls your testimony.â€
Patrick Rivera
Of course Satan uses avarice and greed as weapons of deceit, however it goes far beyond that. It goes to the heart of Luciferianism whose deeply entrenched in governments establishing a chain of command to destroy personal culpability and means of shifting blame for conscience already weak.
Hence, the third World War is already on the horizon. I would suppose that’s another reason the Scriptures say, ‘hell is never full’.
One point: I can assure you that the Vatican and most prelates, priests and laymen – particularly those who were not “Americanists” (a heresy denounced by Pope Leo XIII) were appalled and sickened by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and a thousand other war crimes.
True, there were those priests then (and still today) who, ignoring the doctrine of Just War, defended and continue to defend this atrocity but they are getting fewer and fewer as time goes by and as realization begins to set in.
Not being Catholic, I’ve never been very impressed by the likes of nutcases like Pius IX. Or the fact that the WW2 pope used total lip glue about the Holocaust. A person has to assume the silence meant he approved of the activities of the German Dictator he’d help to install. Or that he was a bedwetting coward.
Ok, maybe both.
You need to read a few books on Pope Pius XII that give the truth about the saintly Pope. One is “The Myth of Hitler’s Pope” by Rabbi David G. Dalin and the other is “Pius XII and the Second World War” by Pierre Blet, S.J.
No other world leader, secular or religious, did more to save Jewish lives than did Pius XII. HIs detractors today are working for the Prince of Lies.
From Amazon:
Product Details
Hardcover: 209 pages
Publisher: Regnery History (July 25, 2005)
From Google:
Our list of authors reads like a “who’s who†of conservative thought and action, including Ann Coulter, David Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Dinesh D’Souza, Newt Gingrich, Mark Steyn, Mark Levin, Ed Klein, David Horowitz, Laura Ingraham, Donald Trump, and many more.
The author obviously couldn’t find a real publishing house if he used one as crappy as this.
My conclusion: the unusually high number of 1 Star Amazon Reviews is fully justified.
Second book:
Paulist Press – The Paulist Press is a major component of the work of the Paulist Fathers, a society of missionary priests founded for and by Americans in 1858.
A person need go no further.
If you have any information about the WW2 pope saying ANYTHING about the Holocaust, I’d welcome it. BS from hacks doesn’t ‘hack’ it.
When you come up with a comment by FDR, Truman, or Winston Churchill about the Holocaust-who were in a lot better position to know about and do something about it–let us all know-dumbass.
August 9, 2014
An annual event.
You seem to be absolutely certain that you are right in your thinking about the matter of the atomic bombings, and that anybody who holds a different view is completely wrong. And you also seem to take the matter very personally.
Did you in any way participate in World War II? (I would have a very hard time believing that you are that old.)
I have to wonder why you are so personally affronted and offended, as you seem to be, by any view other than that the atomic bombings were absolutely necessary to end the war.
You seem to be absolutely certain….
How very odd that you make that claim of me, despite Mr. Kohls showing not the slightest bit of doubt in all the repetitive essays he has posted here and on other sites. Here is a sampling of recent Consortium News pieces.
August 9, 2014 The Very Un-Christian Nagasaki Bomb
August 9, 2013 Would Jesus Drop the Nagasaki Bomb?
August 8, 2012 The Darkness of August 9
August 9, 2011 Nuking Japan’s Christian Center
August 8, 2010 Reflections on the Ninth of August
Based on the numerous books and articles I have read on the issue, it’s my belief Mr. Kohls uses “faith-based” history. Pick and choose from all the “stuff” available with no concern as to whether it’s real or not.
I don’t appreciate that sort of ‘scholarship’.
Finally, do you have some personal insights on the issue, and in particular, ones based on historical reality and not merely devout religious belief?
OK, I understand your not liking Mr. Kohls’ “faith-based” history and scholarship.
Let me say that I can much better understand why somebody would feel very strongly that our use of the atomic bomb was wrong and unjustified, than I can understand why somebody would feel that our use of the atomic bomb was necessary and justified (and that anybody who thinks differently is wrong).
No, I don’t really have any personal insights on the issue (other than the very obvious fact that the bombs were very horrible and had very horrible effects). It is a matter about which I have no more than the common and general knowledge. And I don’t really have the inclination to thoroughly study the matter. And it is not a matter about which I normally post. It is something about which I can learn from other people more knowledgeable about the subject than I am.
In 1944, while working in Wash. D.C. in various Planning and Training positions, Brigadier General Herbert C. Holdrige had several communiques stating that the Japanese wanted to surrender as they new defeat was imminent, and each time the general brought it up to his superiors, he was told that the war needed to go on for one more year, because people were working, the “Depression” was over, and companies were making money.
Making references to the unnecessary loss of life and limbs suffered by all groups involved in the war, and why we should accept the surrender, Holdrige was literally told to shut up. Frustrated, he resigned his commission, supposedly the only general officer (which includes Navy admirals as well) in the U,S. armed forces to resign during WW2.
The new cult seems to have advanced to the stage where it needs Saints and Martyrs. An obscure Army General named Herbert C. Holdridge might well have the qualities needed for both positions. From his wiki:
Hey. I came upon your site today on the mark of the bomb dropping on Nagasaki’s 70th yr anniversary. While I agree that it was a huge tragedy for Japan and it’s civilians, you have to remember that Japan was ruthless, and I mean AWFUL in the Second Sino-Japanese War. The Japan military killed somewhere around 300,000 innocent Chinese civilians in that war – many of which were soldiers RAPING and killing women and children. What is worse, an Atom bomb or that? I don’t know. I’m a Christian, ABChinese American and feel… your article is pretty slanted in looking at what the history of WW2, the role of US and Japan was really about. Japan got into this war and perturbed America to join, first by the submarines that were off the coast of San Diego, then the bombing of pearl harbor. They, like Germany, felt they were the Imperialists of the world and were ready to kill millions of people in doing so. Remember, the U.S. at first –didn’t– want to get involved, in fact, were more passive/reluctant than anything until the mounted pressure from Churchill, the allies in Europe and it wasn’t till FDR HAD to when Pearl Harbor happened. It has been largely known UK has had a somewhat bitter taste w/ the US for getting involved so “late” because the Holocaust was already happening throughout Europe.
To say it was not Christian of America to bomb Japan is so erroneous in it’s broad sweep, that I don’t even know where to begin with that. As you probably are well aware, Buddhism, Shintoism and Taoism are the core religions and beliefs of millions in Japan. NOWHERE in those practices do they support war, killing innocent people or even killing animals. Yet, we had imperialists that were governing Japan during WW2 (more like Atheists if you asked me, anyone who wants to be an imperialist or a deity/supreme being does NOT believe in a higher God whatsoever) who collaborated with possibly the most evil man in human history named Adolf Hitler to take on the whole world for supremacy. And it was bad, evil Christians that stopped them from doing so. Give me a break.
Unfortunately, it was the innocent civilians on both sides of the war who paid for the consequences.
I understand that the Japanese soldiers were brutal, but how on Earth can you say it was Christian to drop an atomic bomb on a Cathedral, and burn and boil alive women and children who are saying their prayers?
It absolutely wasn’t Christian. Christianity does not preach that we should massacre children. Christianity does not care for earthly kingdoms; USA, Russia, Japan, none of this matters. These are just geo-political divisions.
War is horrible, but we didn’t need to drop atomic bombs on civilians. There were other options; ultimately, as a nation, we went for the ‘quick’ and ‘expedient’ solution of murdering non-combatant civilians through an incredibly painful and aberrant method, that had never before been used. There was nothing Christian about it; it was absolutely anti-Christian.
“To say it was not Christian of America to bomb Japan is so erroneous in it’s broad sweep” — emphasis on broad sweep. Samantha seems to be concerned the author is saying that Christianity is *uniquely* non-violent. I don’t think the author means to exclude other religions, but only to emphasize his view that there’s a disconnect between what Christianity says and what Christians rationalize.
Dear Samantha, I wonder if you consider it a “christian” position to affirm in our constitution that Blacks are “three-firths human” and that Native Americans were inhuman/not human at all..? Have those people NOT been continually treated as noxious irritants in “christian” america..? —— You must, therefore recognize how easy a choice it was for the former Klansman Truman to execute those “Japs”. Just as easy as Johnson/Nixon killed at least Three Million Southeast Asians. Only God knows how many Philippinos were sacrificed in that Spanish American so-called war. Nor do we know how many Natives of America we massacred during the Indian Wars of EXTERMINATION that lasted at least 50 or 60 years.
Slave holders used the “christian bible” to justify Forced Free Labor wealth accumulation and visited maliciously harsh cruelty upon their three-fifths human “property.”
I suggest, Samantha, if you somehow, in any way, consider yourself a “christian”,you must be in the misinformed branch of “believers”. That deceived assembly who agree with, for example, GW Bush, who responded to the question, “who is your favorite philosopher”? “Jesus”, said Bush, “Jesus is my favorite philosopher.”
–#%&$!Only a faker could refer to Jesus Christ as a “philosopher.”
Only a deceived Fool would have the mentality to perceive it CHRIST-like to demonically/diabolically drop horrific bombs on innocent civilians. Moreover, only a non-christian simpleton would wrap themselves in the notion of “christian of america” as if America has some Exceptional claim to faith in Christ.
Your quote — To say it was not Christian of America to bomb Japan is so erroneous —
Truth is, dear one, it was absolutely SINFUL of Truman and his generals to do what they did. It was absolutely AGAINST Everything Christ lived and Died for!!!
You? You need to humbly read the Gospel of John from chapter 1 to 21 and ask God to change your mistaken mind.
No offence intended, but you’re seriously full of disinformation and error if you’re a believer in the concept “American can do no wrong. “America” has done Much wrong and continues to do so.
I’m done.
Peace.
Attn: Samantha : (Is your last name Power?)
A Plea To Pope Francis: Name United States Foreign Policy Genocide
By Brian Terrell
10 August, 2015
http://www.countercurrents.org/terrell/100815.htm
Mortimer,
I wouldn’t have suspected Truman was a Klansman being the unimposimg and benign looking man he was (thanks for that info).
In the end he was a politician more concerned about popularity and votes than moral or ethical principles.
One pf the worst Presidential decisions ever calculated was meant to please Jewish lobbyists and voters by legitimizing Zionist terrorism through the recognition of Israel’s self-declaraed statehood on ethnically cleansed Palestinian land — a decision when all added up has cost the US Trillion$ of dollars to date.
Israel’s 2003 Iraq war — which the US was pushed into by our Zionist infiltrated government and Zionist controlled media, will cost more than 6 Trillion$ alone when everything is said and done…
In my opinion, with these decisions to bomb Japan and “legitimize” Zionist terrorism, Truman has proven himself as one of the most spineless Presidents ever to disgrace the office…
“more like Atheists if you asked me, anyone who wants to be an imperialist or a deity/supreme being does NOT believe in a higher God whatsoever)”
This sentence is the work of a child. More like athiests if you ask me? Do you even know any athiests? Name a country or a people who were actually athiests and who perpetrated holocausts. Hitlers helpers were christian catholics and lutherans. Russians were/are orthodox christians. The horror perpetrated by christians against each other is legend not to mention. Moses believed in Jehovah and he certainly perpetrated holocausts against other tribes and his own tribe!
The Bomb Sends a Message to the World – Untold History
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=macaR0ZsxO0
Discussion with Peter Kuznick, professor of history and the director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, and the co-writer with Oliver Stone of The Untold History of the United States.
Kuznick is author of Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists As Political Activists in 1930s America (University of Chicago Press); co-author with Akira Kimura of Rethinking the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Japanese and American Perspectives (Horitsu Bunkasha, 2010); co-author with Yuki Tanaka of Genpatsu to Hiroshima – genshiryoku heiwa riyo no shinso (Nuclear Power and Hiroshima: The Truth Behind the Peaceful Use of Nuclear Power) (Iwanami, 2011); and co-editor with James Gilbert of Rethinking Cold War Culture (Smithsonian Institution Press).
The REAL Reason America Used Nuclear Weapons Against Japan (It Was Not To End the War Or Save Lives)
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/10/the-real-reason-america-used-nuclear-weapons-against-japan-to-contain-russian-ambitions.html
excellent link…excellent quotes
Unfortunately, that’s not the case.
There has been a long-running cottage industry of rewriting history. One of the biggies:
Godfather of Hiroshima Revisionism
Eisenhower is one of my pet peeves. Ignorant, ambitious, and dishonest. Judging from the accounts of others present when he supposedly made his objections, the man was simply lying. In the unlikely event he actually was telling the truth, there remained his ignorance of affairs in the Pacific.
The others were generally also out of the decision loop, or had an ax to grind.
The Washington’s Blog post is a representative summary of so-called “revisionist” polemic — more accurately described as counter-polemic to “orthodox” claims that President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb was a morally virtuous act.
Seventy years later, debates about Truman’s decision largely remain exercises in moral mythology rather than historical analyses of military and political facts.
While Kuznick and Pilger were writing about Hiroshima in the mid-2000s, the George W. Bush Administration was re-defining US nuclear doctrine for the 21st century by declaring tactical nuclear weapons “safe for civilians”.
Kuznick’s later collaboration with Oliver Stone for the 2012 documentary series, The Untold History of the United States, merely propagates the “revisionist” polemic on Truman, rather than addressing the realities of US nuclear policy.