08/06/14 – Greg Mitchell – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Website is ScottHorton.org.
You can find all my interview archives.
There are more than 3,000 of them now going back to 2003.
Our first guest on the show today is our friend Greg Mitchell.
First of all, you should look him up at Amazon.com.
Ah, better yet at ScottHorton.org slash Amazon.
And then check out Atomic Cover-Up, So Wrong for So Long, Hiroshima in America.
A lot more, but I'm trying to flip through all the nuclear ones first.
Hollywood bomb, of course, and then the Age of WikiLeaks and a lot of other ones.
Welcome back to the show.
Greg, how are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
I'm doing quite well.
Thank you.
All right, good deal.
Very happy to have you on here.
Oh, yeah, Truth and Consequences, the U.S. vs.
Private Man.
That's a great one there.
Appreciate that work with Kevin Gostela.
All right.
So, yeah, I have you here because it's Hiroshima Day and hard to believe it's already that time again to talk about the nuclear explosions over Japan with you, Greg.
I believe it was Zora Neale Hurston who called Harry Truman the butcher of Asia.
And in fact, there's an article today in the San Jose Mercury News by Barton J. Bernstein, who is a conservative from Stanford University called American Conservatives Are the Forgotten Critics of the Atomic Bombing of Japan.
It's kind of maybe a fun little place to start this interview with kind of the roles reversed from what we would typically think of as the Dove Hawk position here in the U.S. today.
Yeah, Bart Bernstein.
I've met him many years ago, and he's been quoted in some of my books.
And can you talk about, at the time, some of the some of the conservative critics of the war even within the military, right?
It was not... the way I learned about it in fifth grade was, hey, it had to be done.
What are you going to do?
If it didn't have to be done, it wouldn't have been done, right?
But apparently that was not the consensus at the time.
Well, it was divided.
You know, General Eisenhower famously opposed it, told Truman, Secretary of War, in advance of using the bomb, that, you know, we shouldn't hit them with that awful thing, as he put it.
Admiral Leahy, who was Truman's top military chief of staff, was against the use of the bomb.
General MacArthur later said that we didn't have to use it, although some people think he did.
He was upset because he wanted to get in on the kill, put in an invasion himself.
But there were other conservatives.
You know, David Lawrence, who was the founder of U.S. News & World Report, a very well-known conservative writer and editor at the time, was the way, you know, said that, you know, we basically exterminated people, hundreds, a hundred thousand people from the air.
John Foster Dulles, who was then one of the directors of the United Council of Churches, came out against it, very, you know, in the days after the bombing.
Really?
So, yeah.
I didn't know that about Dulles.
Yeah, and it was based on...
And then the United Council of Churches itself came out against it.
It was basically with this, I might say, fleeting recognition that we had deliberately targeted hundreds of thousands for death, the vast majority women and children, in Hiroshima, and almost all civilians in Nagasaki.
And so there was a moral outrage.
It wasn't, yes, you have all these arguments about it was a terrible war, and it might help end the war, and there was so much carnage elsewhere.
This was just another one.
You know, that was all understood at the time.
But there also was, for a while, a certain moral outrage over the U.S., that the U.S., who were supposedly above this, you know, deliberately did this.
It wasn't, oh, gee, we thought we were hitting a military base, and we killed, you know, 130,000 people.
We knew very well what was going to happen.
But, you know, as I've written so many articles and books for 30 years, the official narrative took hold quickly that this was absolutely necessary, there were no alternatives.
And, you know, it's gotten shaky over time, but it's still pretty much held with the U.S. media, with many historians, certainly with U.S. presidents.
No U.S. president except for Eisenhower has ever really spoken out about it.
So it's, you know, it's an enduring narrative, but I'd argue it's a very dangerous one.
Well, now, you know, yeah, it's one that, well, like I was saying, I learned about it in fifth grade, and I think I was probably lucky that I had a social studies teacher who made it ambiguous at all, that there was really an argument at all about whether it was worth it to do such a horrible thing.
But at the end of the discussion, basically, the lesson was, it was our side that did it.
And Harry Truman, why, he was a great American president, and so what more do you need to know, really, other than, you know, again, he wouldn't have done it if he didn't have to do it, kind of an argument.
And yet, it's funny, just what, it's almost like all of history is just the lie they told on the news that day, written down permanently, just like the kind of nonsense we hear on TV every day right now.
If you look at this argument for a minute, it breaks down on even just the unconditional surrender terms.
Well, they could have made it conditional, and they would have had their peace already.
Well, they did make it conditional after we used the bomb.
You know, we let them keep the emperor.
That was the main condition.
No, I think, listen, you know, well-meaning people can have a full debate on this.
It's not black and white.
You know, it's not an easy historical question, unless you want to take the strictly moral, never kill civilians view.
But the point is, and what I've been struggling with for 30 years, is that the official narrative is so overwhelmingly in the other direction.
Now, you know, polls are more split.
Let's say maybe it's 55-45, people support the use of the bomb.
But in the media, that's certainly not true.
And in official circles, and in the U.S. Congress, I'm actually impressed by those numbers.
Could you say that again, 55-35?
No, 55-40, maybe 55-40-45.
It's gotten a little more, you know, over the years, there's been a few more people against it.
But that's, I mean, that's separate from this overwhelming narrative that it was necessary.
And that's what I keep, you know, I even, I posted something today that just a couple years ago, John Stewart had the temerity to make an offhand comment on his, on The Daily Show, that maybe Truman, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe shouldn't have used the bomb.
Maybe, maybe shouldn't have used it.
And he got so much criticism, he came on the next day and apologized for that, which feels kind of sickening.
And, you know, the...
Well, and in fact, I think, Greg, what had happened was someone in an interview had challenged him, well, you know, on the basis of, I forget whether they were arguing about Iraq or something else, and they said, well, so then is Harry Truman also, was that a war crime when he nuked Hiroshima?
And Stewart agreed that, yes, that was a war crime.
And then the next day when he apologized, he didn't have any explanation for why it wasn't a war crime.
He just said, no, of course, that's ridiculous.
But without any explanation as to what was ridiculous about it, deliberately blowing up 100,000 civilians in an instant.
Well, you know, again, people can, if anyone, you know, has the, you know, has the guts to really challenge the narrative, they get incredible pushback.
In 1995, which was 50, at the 50th anniversary, which was really, you might say, the U.S. attempted to come to terms with this.
There was massive coverage.
Of course, I had a book myself with Robert J. Lifton, cover stories on Time and Newsweek, all kinds of TV specials and so forth.
So there was massive coverage at the 50th anniversary.
And almost all of it, although they paid tribute to those who were killed and the survivors and so forth, ultimately almost everything came, everyone came down at the end to, well, it was necessary.
The one TV person who had ended by concluding differently was Peter Jennings, who did a special on ABC that I think might be one of the most important and so he looked at the historical record, looked at it carefully, talked to experts, and in the end he said, maybe this wasn't such a great idea.
He was vilified.
People called for his firing.
All kinds of nasty things were said about him.
And he was the one guy.
So you just don't dare speak out too loudly against that narrative.
Don't look through Heller's lens for just a minute.
All right, hang on everybody.
We'll be right back with the great Greg Mitchell in just a sec.
Let TheBumperSticker.com help you get the word out.
That's TheBumperSticker.com at TheBumperSticker.com All right you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
It's Hiroshima Day, so we're talking with Greg Mitchell who has spent a great many years specializing on the subject of Truman's nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And he says, Harry Truman is a monster.
Was a monster.
And he just says it so matter-of-factly.
He's so much better spoken than I am, Lou Rockwell.
He just makes it sound that of course, just really does the trick.
He can convince anyone with a simple statement that there's really just no denying it.
In fact, if you go to his blog, one of the most important points in there is he says, listen, despite all the talk about however many, and the argument about however many American lives would probably have been lost in the invasion, imagine if the Americans had done an invasion just of Hiroshima and rounded up all the men, women, and children, like you said Greg, and took their town and machine gunned them all to death.
Which is something out of what the Gestapo was doing in Eastern Europe in the war with the Russians, that kind of thing.
Then there's no question that that would have been the most horrible thing ever, ever.
And yet somehow we're supposed to rationalize the atomic bomb.
But when you put it that way, then you realize the main argument for using the bomb is it prevented this U.S. invasion which would have killed tens of thousands of Americans and many more Japanese.
And of course, there was an invasion planned for later that year, November I think would be the first leg, and then the more major wasn't even until I think the following March.
So the argument is that without the bomb we would have had this invasion.
The invasion would have cost all these lives, and ergo we had to do it.
But of course that leaves out the argument that maybe something could have happened back in August that would have ended the war without the invasion, which was quite a ways off.
And that's where the argument has to be, although most Americans are aware of that.
You still, at this late date, you still get the overwhelming response that it saved lives because we were going to lose all these.
And often it's put in personal terms.
My father, my grandfather was steaming the Pacific and would have died in this invasion.
But the point is always would there have ever been an invasion without the use of the bomb since Japan was making a half-hearted or full-hearted attempt to surrender.
And the Soviets, as we had demanded and they had agreed, were about to enter the war on August 8th.
And the Japanese were more terrified of the Soviets than they were of the Americans.
And so even Truman had written in his diary a few days earlier saying that when the Soviets declared war, they need Japs when that occurs.
That's without the use of the bomb.
So, you know, again, you don't know exactly how this would have played out.
The Japanese may have not surrendered despite having their military was devastated and now the Soviets were attacking.
So you don't know.
You don't know if they would have accepted our conditional surrender terms if we'd put them forth on August 6th.
But there certainly is a good chance of it.
And I've just always argued that, you know, when you kill, you know, 120,000 or more in Hiroshima and, you know, 90,000 or more in Nagasaki and the vast majority are, you know, women and children, you know, the weight of evidence has to be on your side.
And, you know, some of us don't think the weight of evidence is on the side that was really necessary.
And now, yeah, there's a couple more things there, too, which is that the reason that they targeted, or isn't it the case, Greg, that the reason they targeted Hiroshima and Nagasaki is because they really weren't military towns or just barely and that was why they hadn't already been burnt to the ground.
So they made great target practice.
Right.
They wanted a clean, if you want to use that word, look at what the results would be.
And, you know, Nagasaki didn't even have a major base and Hiroshima had one.
So, in any case, the bombs were not dropped over the military bases.
If you wanted to argue that this was a purely military strike, you'd say, well, we aimed it at this military base on the edge of Hiroshima and, gee, we didn't know the 100,000 civilians were going to die.
But they, that wasn't even what they tried to do.
So you can't even make that argument.
And yet, as I, you know, I wrote a piece today that in the carefully crafted speech that Truman gave hours after the attack, he said, you know, today we have struck Hiroshima, a military base, no mention of it being a city or anything.
So, you know, it shows the sensitivity they had for publicity but not for, you know, stopping them from doing the attack.
Yeah.
Well, and then Truman also when asked, how come you didn't drop a third one since it still took him a couple of more days to surrender, he said, oh, you know, I was gonna but I just thought all those women and children.
Right.
He said, I didn't want to burn up anymore.
He's conceding that, yeah, well, the first two, too, Harry, you know?
Well, that, you know, and then the tragedy of Nagasaki among other things is that it was sort of on the assembly line.
You know, no one has been able to find a bomb on Nagasaki.
It was just, you know, Truman gave the okay around August 1st that, you know, drop bombs when ready and so the Hiroshima bomb was ready, the weather was okay for August 6th and then no one stopped, you know, Truman, but there's no record of someone even having a major meeting with Truman and saying, you know, Harry, you know, should we hold off on the second one for a few days?
It was just strictly assembly line, you know, devastation, so.
That's just incredible.
He did not even retain the specific authority per nuke.
He just said, go ahead and go, guys.
Yeah, well, he retained it, but he didn't actually, yeah, he didn't exercise it.
I mean, if we had a third, if we had, and I think we did have a third one that was ready, but I think the order was probably, you know, went in after the second, but yeah, I guess if we, you know, we could have easily, if Nagasaki run had gone off a day earlier, maybe we would have used the third before it stopped.
Wow.
All right, y'all, Greg Mitchell's new book, and it's an e-book, too, available there at Amazon with the rest of them, is Atomic Cover-Up.
Two U.S. soldiers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the greatest movie never made, and he's got, go to Amazon.com and just search for Greg Mitchell there at Amazon, and you'll find his whole book at Amazon, and you'll find his whole collection of, well, all kinds of different books, too, but a whole collection of books about Hiroshima and how the American population and media and government have handled the issue over all these years and all this great stuff.
It's just great stuff.
Thank you so much for your time, Greg.
Appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
Thank you.
And you can find his great blog at Pressing Issues.
Pressing Issues.
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