Great prize! Great cause!
Ron Paul’s isolationist views didn’t come out of a vacuum. He’s just espousing a foreign policy view echoed by radical Libertarians. Justin Raimondo is an radical Libertarian Isolationist. He is against any military action overseas, even if they’re in our clear interest. His website Anti-War.com has vile writers and revisionist articles.
The most vile article ever written by Justin Raimondo was written on August 8th 2001. It was 56th anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. It was one month before 9/11, which he has blamed on the Mossad and the CIA. Justin Raimondo claims that the US was the villain in the Pacific theater during WWII. He envisions that a Japanese victory would have been a great thing.
The idea that America is, in any sense, a civilized country is easily dispelled by the orgy of self-congratulation and rationalization that accompanies the dual anniversaries of Harry Truman’s decision to atom bomb the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Want your gorge to rise? Check out the New York Post editorial “The Bomb That Saved Millions,” (August 6) which justifies the bombings as a “military necessity.” The editorial opines that “few at the time questioned President Harry S. Truman’s wisdom in using the devastating new weapon, but revisionist historians and political activists maintain now – more than a half-century later – that the atomic bombing of Japan was militarily unnecessary and morally unacceptable.” The Post is New York City’s most popular newspaper – a place where the official standard of morality is closer to the Code of Lek than the Ten Commandants. So why are we not surprised that the Post finds all this appalling?
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One of the job qualifications for being a New York Post editorial writer is a complete ignorance of history, as well as an amorality that might be called Murdochian, as this little screed makes all too clear. For the myth of “military necessity” as a justification for the incineration of two cities has been convincingly debunked by the so-called revisionists, who have shown that the decision to drop the bomb was opposed by an impressive list of Truman’s top commanders, General Douglas MacArthur among them. In The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, historian Gar Alperovitz reveals that Truman’s chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, chief of Naval Operations Admiral Ernest J. King, Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, Rear Admiral Lewis L. Strauss, commanding general of the U.S. Army Air Forces Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, General Claire Chennault of the Flying Tigers, Army Strategic Air Forces Commander Carl Spatz, and Army Air Force General Curtis “Bombs Away” Lemay, all challenged the military necessity argument. Among Truman’s top advisors, Secretary of State Stimson, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, former Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew, Navy Under Secretary Ralph Bard, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all took issue with the decision in one way or another. In 1963, Dwight Eisenhower told Newsweek that “it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
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The great horror is that this heinous deed was committed against Japan, a civilization as far removed from our own as the streets of New York are from the African savannas. It’s at times like these that I tend to believe the wrong side won the war in the Pacific. Just think: if we all woke up one day living in some alternate history, as in Phillip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, our cultural malaise would disappear overnight. Instead of listening to the latest loutish lyrics of Eminem, American teenagers would be contemplating the subtle beauty of the Japanese tea ceremony. If contemporary Japan is any clue, the crime rate would be cut by 95 percent, and the literacy rate would skyrocket. Certainly everyone’s manners would improve. All in all, life would be far more civilized, imbued with a gentility that would make the New York Post an impossibility
Read the rest: HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR Why Americans are barbarians
It’s been 10 years since Justin Raimondo wrote this lunacy. His views haven’t changed. Just this week over at Anti-War.com, there’s an article claiming the US dropping the bombs on Japan, was kicking a them when they were down.
As I recall, the three main speakers on the earlier panel were historians, and each offered a different reason why the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
Gar Alperovitz argued that the U.S. wanted to assert its military superiority in the upcoming Cold War, that is, to intimidate the Soviet Union.
Barton Bernstein posited that the U.S. dropped the bombs for domestic reasons. President Harry Truman feared that the American taxpayers would revolt if, with the war ended, they discovered he had not used the products of the horribly expensive government R&D venture, the Manhattan Project. It had cost $2 billion, today’s $20 billion.
Ronald Takaki said the U.S. motive was largely racist.
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Most likely, before the U.S. planned the invasion of Japan on Nov. 1, the USSBS concluded, “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.” Many U.S. military commanders had expected the same.
Yet Gen. Henry Arnold assembled the largest air armada ever of 1,014 aircraft to bomb Tokyo after Japan accepted the surrender terms. The motive was purely “vindictive” and “gratuitous,” Dower notes.
Justin Raimondo is not an isolationist, he’s anti-American. He claims to be a Tea Party supporter, but in the Paulian context. Mr. Raimondo has written at vile websites like VDARE and the nasty Greek businessman Taki’s, American Conservative.
Justin Raimondo is a nasty person who deserves no credibility and is to be rightfully vilified.
Here is Justin Raimondo posing as some cool hip tough guy.
Just Raimondo poses some scary Mob figure.
Justin Raimondo is a deranged self delusional man.
Great prize! Great cause!
