Introducing Anthony Gregory, he's a research editor at the Independent Institute, that's independent.org.
His personal website is anthonygregory.com and of course you can also find him at the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org, lourockwell.com, and everywhere that libertarians are published, you can find Anthony Gregory.
Welcome back to the show, Anthony, how are you doing?
Good, Scott, it's good to be with you.
I'm very happy to have you here and I really like this article.
We do this every year around this time.
This one is called Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the U.S. Terror State.
And earlier today on the LRN show, I was trying to think of which are the biggest and yet most easily debunked lies in America's civic religion or political indoctrination in this country.
And it seems to me like the sad but necessary nukings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the biggest and probably pretty close to most easily debunked lie of them all.
What do you think of that?
Well, I think that's definitely up there and it is important and like you, I think about this every year because it seems that every August, out comes the people to apologize for this, to say that it was justified, necessary, and all of this.
And it sickens me every year that it comes out.
I thought I'd write about it a little early this year to preempt them.
But yeah, the necessity argument is a lie and of course it's morally bankrupt anyway because what is the necessity argument?
If the U.S. had a nuke Japan and killed all those civilians, then American soldiers would have had to die in large numbers.
So even if the premise were true, it's a terroristic premise.
It says that we should kill innocent children and civilians to save our troops, as though that's morally defensible.
But yeah, it's a lie.
They always exaggerate it.
It seems every year the number of Americans they say have saved increases.
So it's horrible.
There was no necessity and it's totally morally indefensible what happened.
And it's sad that we even have to say this.
Well now, I want to get to that one point there that you make about the number of American soldiers who would have died in this thing getting bigger and bigger every year.
Back when it happened, they said, what, that a couple of ten thousand soldiers would have died invading Japan?
Well, I think, you know, Ralph Rako has written about this in particular, the number going up every year.
He says that before, when they were actually contemplating the worst-case scenario for a full-scale invasion of the Japanese homeland was 46,000 American deaths, which is a terribly large number, although it's about, you know, one-tenth the number of Americans that died in the entire war.
But that number went up and up until after the war, they started talking about half a million.
These days, as Rako points out, George H.W. Bush once said millions, I think he said millions of Americans, even civilians.
People will say that it somehow saved Americans in the homeland.
But there's also, of course, the issue of was it necessary to invade the homeland anyway?
I don't think so.
I think Japan was defeated.
Sixty-seven of their cities had been destroyed already.
They were blockaded, they were starving.
Right, their navy, their air force were already done, right?
Yeah, and they still had some imperial holdings and their government was brutal, but did they pose any threat to America at that time?
No, of course not.
Right, and I mean, the whole thing was premised on the idea of the unconditional surrender, and they only had, if I remember the way I read Rako on this correctly, by the time of the nukings in August of 1945, they were down to just one condition, and that was that they got to keep their emperor.
That's right, and that was the main sticking point, and then they kept the emperor anyway because the Americans eventually gave in.
The idea that these nukings finally changed the course of the war is a fantasy.
In fact, the strategic bounding survey conducted by the U.S. government found that the nukings were not decisive at all, given that all these cities were already destroyed.
The war was over, and it's just, it's really sad.
People don't want to confront, in America anyway, that their government could have done something like this unless it was absolutely necessary, and people like to believe that it's almost like people find some sort of relief in the idea that sometimes you have to just mass murder tens, hundreds of thousands of innocent people, and this is just, it's unrealistic to think the world could work differently.
And Americans, as I point out in the article, are among, I think, the most blind to the atrocities of their own government in the past.
I mean, certainly people all over the world know that their governments have been crooked and murderous, and especially in the past, in these massive wars, they commit atrocities.
But the U.S. government, no, it's pure as the driven snow.
Right, which, you know, it's funny, it's too easy of a comparison to just go to sports.
You know, you listen to sports radio, you hear people are absolutely as concerned with the trials and tribulations of these teams as, you know, their own families, certainly politics, anything in their own lives, and yet, you know, come on, if the Dallas Cowboys just, you know, burn 50,000 people to death, it would be okay for us to not like the Cowboys anymore, right?
At some point, our Dallas Cowboys nationalism has a limit, doesn't it?
And especially if Tom Landry and everybody else was telling him, don't do it, and they did it anyway.
Well, sure, and you know, you see this, it's nationalism and American exceptionalism in the case of the U.S., and we see this with, how's terrorism defined?
Well, even with the Fort Hood attack, not the one that was foiled, but from two years ago, the one that worked, that was called terrorism, even though it was an attack principally on a military base.
But then, when the government targets civilians, that's not terrorism.
So if the U.S. is targeting innocent children, that's not terrorism.
If a foreign power or someone within the U.S. who has an ideological outlook that conflicts with that of the U.S. government religion, if he targets not civilians but soldiers, that's terrorism.
So everything is just defined in such a way that the U.S. government is good and everything it does is good or at least is well-intentioned, and then everything opposed to the U.S. is evil.
It's the most, I'd say childish, but I don't think children are capable of the degree of contortion you have to go through ethically and logically to come up with such a worldview.
I think this comes from years of being taught in the school system and the media and paying attention to the two-party system, which is just...
Everything is, as I say in the article, Orwell's War is Peace doesn't cut it.
Not in this case.
This is beyond that kind of paradox.
This is exterminating civilians by the hundreds of thousands or millions as the U.S. did in this war in Vietnam and Korea.
These aren't just peace, or these aren't just necessary for peace.
These are virtues in themselves almost.
Well, and it's almost as though, you know, what we love about America that makes us so nationalistic and patriotic and whatever is that in America we all have rights, but then sometime, apparently half the time anyway or more, we kind of let the rest of that sentence, which is, you know, incomplete, kind of stand anyway, which is that other people don't have rights.
So, in fact, we're so good because we do have rights, it's perfectly okay for us to blow up all those other people who don't have them.
And, of course, that includes anyone outside of the U.S.
Sure, and this goes back to the Romans and the British Empire, this attitude that we are enlightened, we understand liberty and freedom, our government is almost the source of our rights.
And we see this with the immigration debate, we see it with the foreign policy debate.
Americans are human.
Maybe a few other countries are almost human.
Their people, Britain, Israel.
But most people, anyone that the U.S. is at war with, they're not human beings.
You can just drop bombs on them, you can poison their water supply, you can destroy through chemical warfare their plants and their agriculture in the name of stamping out a drug problem that's domestic in origin, for anyone who understands economics.
You can just do whatever you want to foreigners, because they're not really human beings, they don't have rights.
If they had rights, why weren't they born American, right?
Well, you know, Tom Woods pointed out at that Nullify Now conference where we all gave speeches in L.A. a couple of months back, he said, you know, if there was a terrible earthquake in Iran, which, let's think back a few years ago, right, remember the terrible earthquake at Qom, and everybody said, you know, hey, we've got to help the people of Iran, they're the victims of Mother Nature came, and a lot of Americans, we know what that's like to have to go through an earthquake, we've got to help those people.
And we'll turn right around and support nuking them all to death in a preemptive strike.
You know, the very same people that we truly are, it's not just crocodile tears, people truly are concerned and want to donate and want to really help the people of Iran when they're the victim of something like an earthquake, or, you know, any of the neighboring countries there, or I guess Iran, too, with the tsunami back in 2005.
But then when it comes to war, we'll just turn right on a dime.
As long as it's the U.S. government doing the killing, then they're not people anymore.
The very same ones.
Well, it is the case that certainly that Americans and most people in the world do recognize the humanity of other people.
I don't think even when it's a natural disaster, although I totally agree with Tom, I think even if it's a natural disaster, Americans don't care quite as much as if it's Americans suffering.
And, you know, that's somewhat understandable as those that are closer to you.
It's easier to relate to them and to care for them.
But certainly people do recognize that foreigners are humans, but this can be turned off by the government.
The government, in fact, it's in the name of saving foreigners that the government sometimes says that the U.S. has to murder them or murder another country's foreigners.
In fact, so they do appeal to our humanitarian inclination to want to see people saved.
But, yeah, that's absolutely true.
I don't think the American people, by and large, don't think that other people in the world are people.
And we do see internally that this is a country where, despite all our problems, we have fewer religious conflicts and even less racial conflict than you see throughout much of the world.
I think the American people are quite humanitarian in some important ways, and yet at the same time, when it comes to foreign policy, when it comes to an issue of political nationalism, they can turn that off.
And so all these children in Japan who were destroyed by Harry Truman, they're not real people.
They must not be, because how else can you explain it?
Or what they'll say is, well, what did the other side do?
Well, look at what the Japanese did in the rape of Nanking, or look at what the Nazis did.
As though the other side doing things that we all acknowledge were acts of pure evil somehow justify the U.S. acts that are evil.
So there is something special about war and nationalism that make people forfeit their moral compasses and turn off their brains, where they just think, you know, you're right, of course, if as many look at the way Americans cared about what happened with Japan's nuclear fallout when it wasn't caused by the U.S. government.
But if we were at war again, it would be different.
I mean, certainly Americans aren't, I don't think Americans lose much sleep over what the U.S. has done to Iraq and Pakistan and Afghanistan.
You know, the idea that these, I think, the horrors of war are so easy to forget.
You know, it was you, I point this out in my article, and it was you that alerted it to me on Facebook.
I'd known about the tens of thousands of Americans, or not tens, the tens of thousands of Vietnamese farmers and peasants and normal people who've been killed by U.S. ordnance left there since the war in Vietnam.
And just the other day, three farmers got killed.
So Lyndon Johnson, maybe it was Nixon who left those bombs, but Johnson still gets some blame.
Whoever it was, the U.S. war machine, Johnson, Nixon, these guys are still killing people.
In fact, I think I remember reading a couple years ago about someone dying from ordnance from World War I.
Right, in Germany, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, these monsters.
Oh, those in Cambodia, too, they die all the time there.
Oh, sure.
Yeah, because of the terror bombing, the unspeakable terror bombing conducted by Nixon and Johnson.
You know, these people probably killed something like 1,000 times as many civilians as Osama bin Laden did, you know.
And, you know, if you say that, people think, well, what are you trying to get at?
Well, I'm just pointing it out.
Let's, for the sake of argument, let's say that when bin Laden murders an American citizen, let's say that's ten times as bad as when the U.S. slaughters an innocent civilian in a foreign country, just for the sake of argument.
Well, Johnson and Nixon are still 100 times worse than bin Laden.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, all bin Laden says in his declarations of war in 1996 and 98, his interviews with CNN and ABC News back then, in a nutshell, is I am now adopting the morality of the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States, and I'm now saying it's okay to kill civilians.
You know, everybody flipped out when Timothy McVeigh used the phrase collateral damage, as though he didn't learn that from his commanding officer in the U.S. Army.
Oh, sure, yeah, in the Gulf War, right?
Right, and that's all, even if we limit what really happened at Oklahoma City to his role in it, that was his justification, right?
This was not a matter of civilians versus civilians.
He was a military man on a mission, and the building was a target, and hey, if it's full of people, those are just the breaks, right?
That is Republican and Democratic American Pentagon morality in a nutshell right there, perfect, you know, summed up.
Well, I was asked, I think thoughtfully and reasonably by someone on Facebook, would Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been more justifiable if the U.S. warned the Japanese that it was coming?
And, I mean, I think it's no, it wouldn't have been more justified.
I mean, maybe on some level it's even more barbaric to do something like that by surprise, but on the other hand, I point out, you know, Osama bin Laden warned America.
That doesn't mean it's justified to kill a bunch of innocent people in the World Trade Center.
Right, or even at all, even to the slightest degree.
Right, no, of course it doesn't justify it.
Here's the thing too, Anthony, is, you know, you talk about all this violence in the name of we're going to liberate people and all that, and of course that's part of this World War II legacy.
The sales pitch for the Iraq War to a great degree was they are going to welcome us like the French did when we liberated them from German rule by throwing flowers at our soldiers' feet, and thank goodness the Yanks came to set us free.
That was the image that they sold us.
This most horrible thing that ever happened, World War II, is the basis.
America is the hero coming out of that thing and hasn't taken off the Superman costume since, you know, no matter how backwards we have it, no matter how many innocent people die in our attempts to improve their lives.
Yeah, and you know, one thing I get to in this article is even liberals who are somewhat more critical than conservatives are of modern war, and maybe even of Hiroshima and so forth, even people who are skeptical of war, they somehow look at these leaders from World War II, the American leadership, as holy.
It's like they're complaining that Obama is not like FDR.
They're complaining under Bush, you know, people said, why can't Bush be like the bold leadership we used to have?
And I point out the controversial point that, remember, when Trent Watt was criticized for what he said about Strom Thurmond being a better presidential candidate than Truman, I hate these people a lot.
And Strom Thurmond, I think government segregation was a disgusting, evil, tyrannical practice, and I have no sympathy at all for these folks and their politics.
And yet it was assumed to be just completely beyond question that Thurmond was worse than Truman.
But what Truman did, Truman slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
He helped Stalin round up a million or two million refugees to enslave and slaughter.
And then he started the Cold War and the Korean War, in which a million or two million civilians were targeted then.
I mean, why is war different from being, you know, it's terrible what happened, the stuff that Strom Thurmond supported in America, but is that worse than just outright exterminating millions of people?
I mean, why doesn't that register, even with people who don't like war?
When they don't like war, they don't like the civil liberties violations, which they should take very seriously.
They don't like that it hurts American diplomacy at our station in the current world.
They hate the cost, the financial cost.
They hate that Americans are being injured and killed.
All these things are important.
In fact, all these things are more important than people seem to acknowledge.
And yet, even those things I think aren't, they don't really get to the heart of the matter, which is that war is a mass murder of innocent people.
All these children who are slaughtered in these wars, even these newer civilized wars.
Iraq, of course, was a less evil bombing campaign than these earlier campaigns.
And yet, you know, still, the many people that were just outright blown to bits in shock and awe, and the hundreds of thousands who died because of the invasion and occupation, it would seem to me that that would be the number one concern of every American, is that our government murdered a million people in the last decade.
Why isn't that a bigger deal?
Because they were Iraqis.
And, you know, that's the thing.
Underlying this whole entire terror war is the worst kind of white supremacist bigotry.
And everybody, you know, it's just not cool and polite society for people to be racist against, for example, blacks in America anymore.
But to be racist against Arabs and Muslims in general, to be racist against the southern hemisphere of this planet, and to think it's okay for them to all be killed, as long as they can't fight back, Americans, for the most part, seem to be perfectly happy with it.
I mean, that's the thing.
Even though Americans all have friends with brown skin, pretty much everybody does these days, still, the fact that the Afghans are brown people, the Pakistanis, the Iraqis, the fact that they speak a language we can't understand, the fact that there's salt water between here and there, I guess, means, let God sort them out.
It's the religion, too.
There's a religious bigotry, of course, with Muslims today.
Well, and as George Carlin would say, the hats, too.
The hats are different.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it is true, during World War II, of course, dozens of, I think, over 100 German cities were destroyed as well.
And Americans in that war, and even more, much more in World War I, were capable of hatred of Germans, where, you know, German language was purged, people who spoke it were lynched.
Americans have a rich legacy of being hateful and bigoted toward almost any group you can think of.
Even the Germans and, at other times, the British, who made up the major cultural stock of this country in the beginning.
So, in a certain sense, we're not quite equal opportunity in this nationalism and bigotry, but it's a little bit of a rainbow coalition of warmongering hate, if you add up all the four.
I mean, we even had a civil war, right?
The U.S. lost more Americans killing other Americans that looked just the same as it did in any other, than all the other wars combined.
So, I think Americans are capable of hating white people, too.
But you are right that there's an outright racism, one that seems to be, the government brings this out in war, of course, the prison system, too, but war is even worse, the immigration stuff.
In the U.S., it's not PC to be insensitive about race, but treating the other like the cockroach is still allowed.
It's quite a paradox, you know?
You're not supposed to use the wrong word to describe people.
There was a journalist over ten years ago who used the innocent word niggerdly and lost his job for it, even though, of course, it doesn't have anything to do with racism, that word.
In fact, people are so PC, I'm afraid even to tell the story and use the word.
But at the same time, we've got this completely unbelievable number of black Americans in prison, being beaten by the police.
That's ignored, as is all of the outright slaughter of foreigners and other countries who look different.
That's okay.
That's different from the kind of racism that our parents and grandparents marched to oppose decades ago, I guess.
Right.
Well, you know, most of those words are actually, their purpose is to help to demonize and deny the humanity of people.
But you're right that we get our cart and horse all screwed up now, where it's perfectly fine to mass murder and oppress people and lock them up and whatever.
Just don't call them names while you do it.
That's all.
Sure.
And, you know, I'm not a fan of these slur words, but I'm not talking about people saying, you know, it's good to be polite.
It's good that people aren't using these really hateful words that have always been hateful.
So I must say purging even the worst words from like Huckleberry Finn while we have a world empire that extinguishes life in other countries like they're an insect, that confuses me.
I think that, yeah, the cart and the horse, that's just the way to put it.
We can pretend that we're so enlightened now because we don't want to read what Mark Twain actually wrote.
But I guess we haven't learned the actual lesson.
One of the best, on one of the first major U.S. foreign wars against, you know, people who really look different, of course, I just thought about how Mark Twain was good on that too.
Yeah, well, actually we just talked with David Beto about the anti-imperialist league and the role that Mark Twain played in that.
Where he actually, I guess, first was for it, right?
And thought, yeah, we'll whoop on Spain and they deserve it and whatever.
And then he saw real quick that we were becoming Spain and turned right around.
Well, I think that, you know, eventually we'll let Cuba have Guantanamo Bay back.
We had to go in there and liberate Cuba.
Well, I think they should have consumer reports or somebody go in there and judge an independent third party and see who's got the fair judicial system on which side of the wall there.
Jack Nicholson's famous wall that he's standing on over there in Guantanamo.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, look, I guess we better leave it here, Anthony.
I want to recommend to the audience again, they look up this great article, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the U.S. terror state, as always.
Anthony Gregory putting the toughest questions to your logic and your principle.
And see if you come out right on the other side.
Thanks again very much, Anthony.
Thanks, Scott.
It's been great.
All right, y'all, that is Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute, lourockwell.com, the Future Freedom Foundation, and anthonygregory.com.
And now I'm actually going to play this clip from the fog of war that Anthony has embedded in his article, Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
And the U.S. terrorist state, Robert McNamara, who at the time was the lick spittle of General Curtis LeMay.
The choice of incendiary bombs, where did that come from?
I think the issue is not so much incendiary bombs.
I think the issue is, in order to win a war, should you kill 100,000 people in one night by firebombing or any other way?
LeMay's answer would be clearly yes.
McNamara, do you mean to say that instead of burning to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in that one night, we should have burned to death a lesser number or none, and then had our soldiers cross the beaches in Tokyo and been slaughtered in the tens of thousands?
Is that what you're proposing?
Is that moral?
Is that wise?
Why was it necessary to drop the nuclear bomb if LeMay was burning up Japan?
And he went on from Tokyo to firebomb other cities.
58% of Yokohama.
Yokohama is roughly the size of Cleveland.
58% of Cleveland destroyed.
Tokyo is roughly the size of New York.
51% of New York destroyed.
99% are the equivalent of Chattanooga, which was Toyama.
40% are the equivalent of Los Angeles, which was Nagoya.
This was all done before the dropping of the nuclear bomb, which, by the way, was dropped by LeMay's command.
Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
Killing 50 to 90% of the people of 67 Japanese cities and then bombing them with two nuclear bombs is not proportional, in the minds of some people, to the objectives we were trying to achieve.
I don't fault Truman for dropping the nuclear bomb.
The U.S.
-Japanese war was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history.
Kamikaze pilots suicided.
Unbelievable.
One of the most brutal wars in all of human history.
The U.S.
-Japanese war was one of the most brutal wars in all of human history.
Kamikaze pilots suicided.
Unbelievable.
What one can criticize is that the human race prior to that time, and today, has not really grappled with what are, I'll call it the rules of war.
Was there a rule then that said you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death 100,000 civilians in a night?
LeMay said if we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals.
And I think he's right.
He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals.
LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost.
But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
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