Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, Universityof Wisconsin - Green Bay
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I get hits for some of the strangest reasons. One reader hit a page discussing cartoonist Scott Adams being conned by creationism, and wrote:
On this webpage
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/pSEUDOSC/ScottAdams.HTM
I read the following lines:
Adams fundamental fallacy is what I call the Myth of Moral Symmetry. Its the idea that if two parties do something roughly analogous, theyre morally on the same plane. Criminals have guns, but so do cops, so theyre really no different from each other. Someone kills an innocent person in cold blood, and we execute him, so we're on the same level as the murderer. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor but we bombed Hiroshima, so theres no difference. Communism was bad, but we supported nasty right-wing dictators, so there was really no difference between us and them.
Are you totally OUT OF YOUR MIND????
The Japanese bombed A LEGITIMATE MILITARY TARGET and you yankee murderous barbarians NUKED TWO CITIES FULL OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN...and you DARE TO CLAIM 'moral high ground'?????
The USSR aligned states fought hard against colonialism, racism and the imperialism of the CIA and the u.s. multinationals AND YOU DARE 'accuse' them of being WORSE than the DOZENS OF MURDEROUS TYRANTS you supported (and still support) in the last decades?
Francisco Franco, Salazar, Marcos,. Zia ul Haq, Suharto, Somoza, Batista, Pinochet, Videla, the Palhavi Shah, Mubarak, Saddam Hussein, the fascist Greek Colonels...
...you are a shame, you are a criminal and and apologete of criminals, you are the proof that the u.s. is a totally corrupt culture which needed to be BLOWN AWAY off the face of the earth...
...I hope the next September the Eleventh COMES FAST and THIS TIME HAS TO BE NUCLEAR!!!!!!!!!!
Well, there's nothing I like quite so much as nuanced, tightly reasoned argument. I responded:
Its not so much Pearl Harbor as Nanking, Manila, etc. Read Richard B. Franks "No Bomb: No End" in What If? 2 In the unlikely event youre at all interested in facts.
Tally up the toll of Franco et al., even including both sides in the Spanish Civil War, and the suppression of the Communist coup in Indonesia in the late 60s. Then tally up Stalins Gulag (interesting read, The Gulag Archipelago, which of course you havent), Maos Cultural Revolution, Pol Pots Cambodia, North Koreas famines, Lenins starvation of the kulaks, etc. How do they compare?
For that matter, Id really like to see a comparison of the Shah's victims versus the Islamic Republic. Or Batista versus Castro.
I seem to recall something about us toppling Saddam Hussein. It was in all the papers.
You, not I, are the apologist for criminals.
I am sorry you did not agree with my page. You are cordially invited to view the many fine sites that reinforce your preconceptions.
This reader illustrates a widespread sentiment, a bit more stridently than many, that U.S. support for right-wing ugliness in the Cold War was as bad as anything the Communists did. So I did look up the facts. My principal source of data is a series of pages by Matthew White in Historical Atlas of the Twentieth Century (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/20centry.htm). White makes use of many sources and seems to have no particular axe to grind. Plus he has a marvelous, common sense FAQ page about what numbers do and do not mean.
Lets first off tackle the Hiroshima/pearl Harbor thing. No, taken out of context, the two events are not equivalent. Taken in context that Japan had conquered much of China and all of southeast Asia and showed no indications that its expansionism was ending, it's another matter. With the Rape of Nanking and Manila and the Bataan Death March, and every indication that Japanese occupation meant more of the same, it's another matter.
Richard B. Frank, in "No Bomb: No End," in What If? 2 (Putnam, 2001) analyzes the situation pretty thoroughly. He begins by noting that decision making power in World War II Japan rested solely on a junta of eight men who had to act unanimously. He notes:
To this day, no pre-Hiroshima document has been produced from Japan demonstrating that any one of these eight men ever contemplated a termination of the war on any terms that could, or should, have been acceptable to the United States and her Allies.
Even after Nagasaki and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (a meticulously planned multi-pronged attack, far from a land grab at the expense of a defeated foe), the junta had members that insisted on war crimes trials being held only in Japanese venues, and no occupation. Even after the Emperor announced surrender, a cabal of hard-liners plotted a coup. Would Japan have disbanded the Kempeitei, a military police force that made the Gestapo and NKVD look like Boy Scouts? Unlikely.
U.S. plans called for occupying southern Kyushu in November, 1945 (Operation Olympic), and landing near Tokyo in March, 1946 (Operation Coronet). The Japanese, who could plan military operations with the best of them, looked at their maps and anticipated every single move the U.S. would make in an invasion. Not only did they extensively fortify all the landing sites, but they inaugurated a plan, Ketsu Go, to turn the civilian populace into a suicide army. But it wouldn't have come to that. By summer, 1945, the Navy was becoming convinced it could not support an invasion of Kyushu, let alone sustain an invasion of Tokyo with a supply line stretching across the Pacific. Douglas MacArthur, who never saw a plan to gain glory he didn't like (technically with other people doing the actual dying), was still gung ho, but the Navy had all the ships. Also, casualty estimates were sobering. An indication of how seriously the estimates were taken was that the War Department ordered half a million Purple Hearts, a supply that lasted through Korea and Vietnam. Then ULTRA signal intelligence revealed that Olympic would have been walking into an ambush. Something Frank doesn't delve into is that it takes time to prepare for an invasion and there just wasn't enough time between before November, 1945 to assemble the men and materiel needed. It took about two years to get all the ducks in a row for D-Day.
One revisionist theory is that Japan surrendered mostly for fear of a Soviet invasion. The Soviets were all set to attack Hokkaido, the northernmost island, in the summer of 1945. But Hokkaido is peripheral. It wasn't even part of ancient Japan. And there's no indication the Soviets would have had any friendlier a reception than the U.S. would have, or the Japanese had any less confidence that Ketsu Go would succeed against Russians any less than against Americans.
That left blockade. Japan's transportation relied on coastal shipping and rail. Coastal shipping was pretty much obliterated by the summer of 1945, and Japan's rail net could be fragmented by hitting a handful of key locations. The result would have been mass starvation in Japan, which suffered severely in 1945-1946 even with intact food production, rail transport, and a benign occupation. Certainly all the civilian internees and prisoners of war in Japan would have starved. As someone once observed: "Sometimes a horrible end is preferable to horrors without end."
So, taken out of context, the 2000 dead at Pearl Harbor don't equal the 300,000 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Taken in context as stopping a homicidal war machine responsible for the deaths of millions, and prepared to sacrifice its own populace, it's another issue entirely. And suppose we had accepted an armistice that left Japan's junta in power. How long before we might have to fight World War 2.1?
The list of right wing tyrants my reader sent includes (Figures based on White):
This is far from a complete list and doesn't include things like landlords hiring private death squads to keep tenants in line. We should also mention the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique which killed an estimated 1.5 million as South African supported movements battled leftist governments.
I was in Greece in 1971 and Chile in 1975 and I didn't see any evidence of political repression or torture in either place. That of course, is a stupid comment, but it's on a par with Jane Fonda visiting POW's in North Vietnam and saying she never saw any evidence of abuse. The difference is that Fonda means it seriously and people take her seriously.
More seriously, while Allende's Marxist regime was in power in Chile (elected by only 36 per cent of the vote, a statistic rarely cited) I was in graduate school working with numerous people who traveled to Chile regularly for field work. Virtually all of these people were politically liberal and sympathetic to Allende. During my own work in Canada, I got far more detailed news about Chile from the CBC than most Americans. By 1973, it was obvious to all of us that Chile was collapsing and the only question was how violent the collapse would be. Supporters of Allende asserted that finally the poor in Chile could afford meat. the problem was that after all the meat on the shelves had been sold at artificially low prices, nobody produced any more. What convinced me was the nationalization of the trucking industry, mostly owned by small independents. You could just see the Marxists frantically flinging aside seat cushions looking for loose change and wondering where all the wealth had gone, because according to Marx, once you controlled the means of production, everyone would have plenty. If they were going after truckers, they had bled everything else white. It was obvious to all of us that it was going to end very badly. One of my acquaintances left Chile less than 24 hours before the coup. He arrived in the U.S. and read about it in the papers. I heard him later venting his frustration at trying to explain what had really been going on in Chile. "Fine," he said, "don't believe me. I was only there."
In World War II, the Western Allies made common cause with Stalin after Germany attacked the Soviet Union. Stalin was, by any measure, a more malevolent dictator, and responsible for more deaths, than Hitler. Hitler reminds me of a petulant child smashing things in rage; Stalin reminds me of a cat tormenting a crippled mouse. Yet it's hard to think of a scenario where the West would have done otherwise. Why? Well, the Holocaust is a major part of it. It's hard to imagine even defending a strategy that would have allowed the Holocaust to continue. Stalin imprisoned anyone who even remotely smacked of opposition, but they were mostly individual adults. The Holocaust swept up entire families down to infants. The Gulag killed a lot of people, but many survived. The Holocaust was specifically designed to kill. After the Jews, then who? The Slavs? Arabs? Blacks? Asians?
Moreover, Hitler in control of Western Europe now was a far more imminent threat than what Stalin might do in the future. Or as White puts it, Stalin had maxed out whereas Hitler was just getting started.
The consensus estimates of the death toll from World War II converge at about 50 million. If we'd simply let Germany and Japan have their way, would as many people have died?
What's loopier and more offensive than a Holocaust denier? How about a World War II denier? No, we don't have anybody - yet - claiming that World War II never happened. It will take a few centuries before World War II fades enough for academia to produce people like the contemporary historians who claim Marco Polo never visited China or Christ is an amalgamation of mythic figures. But we do have people arguing that Hitler was just a cuddly little lamb and he was goaded into war by Churchill and Roosevelt. On the one hand are leftish anti-war thinkers who have problems with the notion that any war can be good, and therefore World War II must have been immoral, somehow or other. Because otherwise they might have to re-evaluate their assumptions, and thinking make head hurt. And on the right we have people like Pat Buchanan, a name you can trust, who is unhappy that Stalin got to conquer Eastern Europe, and therefore there must have some other way to do things.
Suppose you are in a bank and a gang of gunmen show up. What do you do? Most people in law enforcement would say don't resist, and go along with their demands. And most likely nobody will get hurt. Now, suppose from their weapons and style, you realize this is the same gang that has hit several other banks, and each time they herded all the witnesses into a back room and shot everyone. Now what do you do? Resist or at least try to run. And clearly resisting is the morally superior choice. It may get you killed but it may also save others. Other people may get killed as well, but that risk has to be weighed against the far higher probability that a much larger number will die if the gang gets its way. And if you do get killed, you're no more dead than you would be anyway.
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Created 26 August 2009; Last Update 24 May, 2020
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