All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Josiah Lippincott.
He wrote this really interesting thing for the American Conservative Magazine called Wholesale Slaughter of Japanese Civilians in World War II was Evil.
Welcome to the show.
I'm doing well.
Thank you for having me on, Scott.
Really happy to have you here.
And so I like this.
There's a couple of things about you really advanced the story of my understanding quite a bit here, telling me what you read in a very important book I never heard of that I learned a lot from in here.
But also, it's interesting that this article came out not right around the time that we write our Hiroshima articles in the beginning of August every year, but at the end of August, beginning of September here, because this is actually rejoinder to a hawkish piece that was written in, I forgot what, oh, the Federalist there, making the typical what's now I think considered the typical conservative case for why, of course, the red, white and blue had to do what it did that day and on the 6th and the 9th when they knew Hiroshima and Nagasaki back in 1945.
And so I guess maybe if you want, we start with that, the Federalist, who wrote it.
And can you, I guess, rehash his case and or the general case to whatever degree they coincide here?
Sounds like his tape was the pretty conventional one, right?
Yeah.
So the author of that piece is a guy named Josh Lawson.
He's actually a graduate student or was a graduate student at the same program that I am attending currently.
So we just missed each other.
And I think he's an editor there at the Federalist, and he makes the case that I've seen made elsewhere to the effect that what we had to drop the bomb, right?
We were confronted with Japan, they're evil.
If we don't nuke them, then the civilian casualties of a siege or from an invasion of the island would be just orders of magnitude greater than anything we'd experienced prior to in the war.
And so confronted with that choice, the argument that Lawson puts forward, much like many other conservative commentators, is that we just had to drop the bombs.
We had to engage in strategic bombing in order to bring the war to an end shorter.
And so that meant targeting civilians.
But it's justified because we're saving more lives in the aggregate.
Yeah.
And then so now I think by the time I was just getting into high school, President H.W. Bush said that, hey, look, we had to save a million lives.
And so we saved a million lives by, you know, he didn't say exactly the change, a couple hundred thousand of these two cities.
But that was what it was that the loss that they were trying to prevent there.
Although I don't think that's really the history of the numbers that the military estimated at the time.
Right.
Well, I mean, of course, you can talk about things that didn't happen and say, well, this would have been an abject disaster if we hadn't done X.
And I think that's part of.
And this book that I reference in my piece is by this guy named Paul Ham.
It's called Hiroshima Nagasaki.
I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in the atomic bombings.
And I had begun to question the narrative around strategic bombing on military grounds about a year before I actually ended up being stationed there in overseas in Japan.
I was on Okinawa.
I served as a Marine.
And so reading that book, just seeing the facts, it really changed my perspective on what had happened.
And I realized, OK, this narrative that we would have had to invade the islands, that doesn't make sense.
Why would we have wanted to fight the Japanese to the death on their home turf?
Was there another way?
Well, it turns out that there was.
Right.
You had the possibility of negotiating a surrender there.
By 1944, the Japanese had basically been defeated militarily.
It was over.
I mean, by Leyte Gulf in October of 1944, all of their capital ships were either damaged, destroyed, sunk, completely outnumbered, out of position.
They had lost territory.
They had lost their navy.
They had really no air force to speak of.
And so at that point, the Japanese government knew that they were defeated.
What they were not willing to accept was total submission to the United States.
And that was what was being demanded, unconditional surrender.
And you can see this in the notes, which Paul Ham helpfully put in the book.
He just lays out, the Japanese high command did not want to see the emperor removed from his throne.
That was the issue upon which the continuation of the war hinged.
If he was not willing to step down, there were those within the Japanese government, especially the war minister, Kurochika Anami, who was willing to continue the war indefinitely.
They were willing to commit national suicide, gyokusai, or shattered jewel.
And it turns out they wanted to negotiate.
They wanted to negotiate a surrender or some sort of peace treaty, and the United States government was unwilling to do so.
And I think that, for me, was what really put it over the edge, because then that argument falls apart.
You don't have to invade and sacrifice millions of lives.
In fact, it then becomes, and then you start asking, why did we attack Okinawa?
Why did we invade Iwo Jima?
An amphibious landing means charging straight into enemy gunfire.
That's one of the first things they teach you at the basic school.
It's, don't charge at the enemy's strong point.
Go around if you can.
Attain your objectives at minimal cost by attacking the enemy where he's weak.
Attacking a fortified island is not attacking the enemy's weak point.
It's attacking his strong point.
And so the idea that has gotten into people's minds that, oh no, we would have had to attack the Japanese mainland and fight to the death of the Japanese is crazed, because it ignores that there are options here, and we should have pursued those options.
And I think that's what really changed my mind about the bombing more than anything else, was recognizing, oh, actually knowing some facts about what happened.
Yeah, well, and yeah, especially as you recount the chronology there about when their navy had absolutely had it and all the time there was despair.
And just like with almost everything, it's a giant pregnant presumption at the beginning and all the rest of the discussion takes place after that.
So the question of unconditional surrender is never debated.
Everybody knows that these guys and their Nazi allies were so evil that we demanded absolute surrender because we had the right to because of how bad they are.
And that's just how it is.
And they maybe explain that to you one time, maybe not even that.
Just everybody knows that, of course, that was the right thing to do.
And that part is never debated.
You're talking about and people would say, I think, oh, this is Monday morning quarterback stuff.
If only they had known what you know now and this kind of thing.
But at the time they thought, you know, how can we ever approach, you know, how could how could we ever accept anything less than total surrender and how could we ever approach their islands without taking these other islands and all of that?
So what do you say to that?
I mean, I think you've hit it on the head there, which is to say you have to reject the false binary.
It is not unconditional surrender or fight to the death.
That's an infantile way of looking at history.
And I know a lot of really smart people.
I know good people with good character.
I've met Josh Lawson, the guy I was responding to.
This is not an evil person.
At one point I made the same arguments.
My problem is.
We have got to get outside of these sort of imposed, you know, you're either on the side of the devils or the angels, and it makes it hard to think.
And we have got to think about what we're doing, especially about military matters.
I say this as someone who served in the military, who cares about this country.
I want to win wars.
I do not want to waste the lives of the young men who go out and fight them.
And I don't want to kill civilians either.
I'm not a barbarian.
And so I get it.
Sometimes in war people there are there's collateral damage.
People die.
It's not good.
But the problem is we've gotten in this mode where suddenly anything goes.
And by the way, that was not the way it was in the West prior to World War One.
People did not have this idea in their minds that you it was OK to just obliterate civilians intentionally in order to attain your objectives.
There were limits on what war was supposed to be like.
And a lot of that has been forgotten.
The old international law basically shredded up despite the fact that it represents civilization.
I like civilization and I like winning wars.
And it turns out doing the right thing morally corresponds to the good.
I'll make one point here.
The bombing campaigns took up enormous resources to conduct strategic bombing.
You had to take these islands like Okinawa and Iwo Jima so they could base out fighters so they could provide landing strips for bombers once they were damaged and returning.
And if you begin asking the question, what can Japan actually do militarily?
It turns out not very much.
They had basically been defeated.
So why are you pouring resources and lives and money into annihilating cities and in creating the conditions for that to be possible?
So I'm sorry.
I forget if it's in your article or it's one of the things that you linked to there.
We tell the story about how they decided that they were even.
Oh, I know.
It was from the debate in the comment section about how they even and may have been one of your links there.
How they decided to even go to Iwo Jima was basically two against one among, you know, the Navy and the Army Air Force and the that's the Army Air Force and the Marine Corps.
And they had like these three men had a discussion in a room and said, OK, fine.
And that was essentially the way just I got to catch 22 or something.
This is how they decided to go to Iwo Jima was a decision that very well could have been the other way that we could have just gone around them.
What are they going to do?
They don't have a single.
All we got to do is leave one battleship offshore, maybe not even that a skiff.
And what are they going to do?
Swim.
They can't do anything.
They're stranded there.
And so we can just move on right past them at that point.
Unless, as you say, oh, we need those airstrips for our long range bombers that we've already committed to seeing through the use of.
Yeah.
And you know what?
I am totally willing to be wrong.
If someone wants to come out and make the argument, we had to do what we did in terms of taking Okinawa or Iwo Jima, then people need to make that argument.
And that's that's what I'm getting at here.
Reject a false binary.
We have to think about what was done.
We have to think we have to make the argument right now.
It's just assumed we just have these narratives, right?
You see the photo of the Marines playing the flag on Mount Suribachi.
And that's what you that's what the Battle of Iwo Jima becomes.
So the logistics, the decision to go to battle, the individuals involved, it all falls away.
And what you're left with is a photograph or a slogan or a term.
And by the way, this is a huge problem within the military now is that we continue to live off of the fumes of what was accomplished 75 years ago.
Yeah.
And so we continue to have bases overseas.
We continue to pour millions of dollars.
I don't think most Americans are tracking that there are 22,000 American personnel on Okinawa.
There are a ton of people.
And then you have to ask, why are we still there?
What are we trying to do?
Where does this strategy come from?
And it turns out a lot of it is the momentum from World War Two with us today.
And there's just no discussion about, hey, maybe our fundamental premises aren't right here.
And we need to have that conversation.
Yeah.
Boy, ask the people of Okinawa, they'll tell you.
Yeah, I mean, it's again, it's it's it's controversial there.
You know, they get money from the American government.
OK, that's good for some people, but they give up sovereignty, too, which isn't so great.
Or maybe that's still not required.
Well, it's not really up to them.
Right.
And Okinawa is sort of separate from the rest of Japan and are kind of the, you know, Japan's Puerto Rico or whatever they they got to put up with what's decided for them.
Yes.
And the politics there are very complicated.
There's been talk of moving the base from Okinawa to Guam.
But then I think what really needs to happen and what I'm working on now is to say, what do we need to do to contain, you know, the argument that was made now is what we have to contain China.
We have to do X, X, Y and Z to make sure that we can continue trade in the Far East.
And then you have to ask, well.
You know, how is what we're doing now relevant to that end, how relevant are the weapon systems we're using, how relevant are the arguments?
You know, I saw people making arguments that the way we were going to defend from, you know, invasion is we're gonna have these islands and defend them.
And it looks a lot like what the Japanese did in World War Two, but in reverse.
And it's like that's not going to work.
Well, I'm sure you saw the thing in the big Reuters piece about how you know what?
You're right.
Our entire Navy is obsolete and we can't use it because if we get within range of them, then they're in range of us or strike that, reverse it.
And then all of our ships are at the bottom of the Pacific.
And so but you know what we're going to do?
We're going to use our B-1 bombers.
So they're already fessing up that their entire Navy in the Pacific is obsolete for anything other than what, keeping Filipino pirates at bay or something.
I think part of it, I mean, yeah, that gets I think that gets to the core of part of what's happening here, which is to say you can see, right, strategic bombing the B-1 that's going to save us.
And then you have to.
That's the whole reason we have a separate air force from the army is that you have these bombers which are designed to hit targets deep within enemy territory.
This isn't close air support.
This is, you know, you're going hundreds of miles deep to attack, you know, these nodes, these these centers so that you can disrupt them and and halt manufacturing and, you know, wreck their supply line.
Well, it turns out that that mode of that that mode of fighting an air war, that kind of strategic bombing, I have come to question all of that.
And part of it is, of course, because of World War Two, it didn't work.
Bombing all these cities in Japan, we bombed five dozen cities, over 60 cities burned to a crisp by American bombers.
And after the bomb fell on Hiroshima on August 8th, on August 7th, they have the discussion, should we surrender?
No.
On August 8th, they are still insisting that the emperor is still insisting, I'm going to stay on my throne.
You know, two days after Hiroshima has been obliterated in a single shot.
You know what?
It changes their mind.
It's the Soviet Union invades Manchuria.
They take over Manchuria.
And when that happens, the Japanese understand we cannot negotiate our way out of this.
And so then they send then then they're willing to consider surrendering.
And they know that Stalin is willing to send his infantry and lose them.
And they would rather be occupied by the Americans than the Soviets was the choice they were making at that point.
Right.
Yeah.
And I think, again, one thing you do not see, at least I have not seen.
And again, totally willing for someone to point this out to me and have this conversation.
But I have not seen anyone who's really explicitly connected the invasion of Manchuria by the Soviet Union.
And by the way, that included Korea to the Korean War, which happens just several years later.
And that was a bloody war.
I think it's something like 30,000 dead Americans in Korea fighting the forces of communism.
Then you have to ask, how did the communists get into Manchuria and North Korea?
It's because we let them invade.
If we had negotiated with the Japanese sooner, then the Japanese would have owned Manchuria.
We might have been able to work something out with them.
So this is where the narratives get really strange.
So we are on the side of the angels in terms of fighting the evil Japanese.
We're fighting with the Soviet Union, with the communist powers.
And then we end up with a Cold War where we're fighting them again.
So then you have to ask, whose bright idea was this?
And was this the best option?
And by the way, you can stretch this back even further, back to early 1900s.
The Russians had owned parts of China and they invaded all of Manchuria by 1900.
China was being divided up by these European powers.
The Japanese were trying to occupy territory as well.
And yet the narrative that gets presented is, it's bad for the Japanese to have an empire in China, but is it not bad for the Russians to do that?
And by the way, what about the United States?
We had troops inside of China in 1940 and 1941.
If I'm tracking that the 4th Marine Regiment was stationed in Shanghai and got moved in November of 1941 to the Philippines, we had troops in China.
But so again, America also backed Japan's puppets in South Korea in that war.
The people had fought as the quizlings of the Japanese empire.
Against those who had fought for independence, who were led by the communists in the north.
I mean, again, you can just see how this is complicated.
We have to think about these things and we need to think about them more seriously than we have.
And that's really the point of me writing this piece was to say, not just to say the bombings were immoral, which I think they were, but to say they also were driven by bad policy.
And we we have to think about that clearly.
And if we can't do that, then.
Yeah, look, we don't have to go over this, but it's got to be mentioned that American entry into the Pacific War is not altogether on the up and up anyway.
If you're familiar with Robert Stinnett's great work in Day of Deceit and the rest of that.
So this whole conversation presumes that we've got to get one or another kind of surrender here for the sake of argument.
But that's already assuming a lot to start.
And, you know, this is something I'm interested in.
I haven't read Stinnett's book, but I'd like to because, you know, you begin once you start asking one question, then you start asking others.
And that's that's what that's liberal education.
That's thinking right is to say, I have this view.
I want to see if it's true.
So Pearl Harbor, why is the fleet at Pearl Harbor?
Turns out a lot of those ships have been based out of Coronado in the continental United States, but have been moved in the summer of 1940 to threaten Japan because of their actions in China and then in Indochina, which we know is Vietnam.
So if you ask why was Pearl Harbor attacked in the summer of 1941, in June, the United States embargoes Japanese, we get embargoing oil and rubber and I believe scrap metal to Japan based off of they had an air base they were trying to get in Indochina and they had conducted negotiations with the Vichy French regime and were attempting to base out of Indochina.
So because of that, the United States cuts off the Japanese supply, then you're putting them under pressure.
The regime to decide, you know, can they maintain their position in China, which they see is necessary for their national survival, or do they have to seize more territory to get the resources they think they need?
And how do you like that for chapter one of the Vietnam War?
I like it.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead.
Yeah, no, I mean, I think all of this goes back to the United States does all these things to restrict the Japanese, to contain them.
And then we end up fighting in the same places to contain communism.
Yeah.
And by the way, when we embargo the Japanese in the summer of 1941, what are they then not able to do?
Fight the Soviet Union on their eastern, on their eastern front.
Right.
And so a lot of this, you look at it and you think, I mean, I'm not a fan of Nazi Germany or, you know, imperialism and the Japanese may have done these nasty things.
I am definitely not a fan of the Soviet Union.
And so if you're going to say, you know, the Soviet Union was just great at that time.
I mean, talk about a murderous regime.
And we knew how bad they were.
That was known.
And the thing is, too, is you could say, look, we needed to get, you know, Japan had no right to Manchuria or any of China.
We needed them out of there.
But we might have negotiated with them that, look, do your best to leave the right and not Mao and the communists in the best position.
But the way that they withdrew, they left all their equipment and everything behind for the Maoists to get and help turn the tide in favor of that side of the civil war that followed.
And then Mao, of course, internationally, not so much, but domestically was the greatest monster in all the world history there in terms of his regime's forced famines and all the rest of that.
Although, by the way, you know, of course, containing communism in Indochina meant that America was the one that kicked over the royalty, well, the sock puppet royalty in Cambodia and spread communism and the nightmare of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge to Cambodia.
It wasn't the Chinese and the Vietnamese who did that.
It was the Vietnamese who tried to stop them.
And then Carter and Reagan ended up taking the Khmer Rouge's side against the Vietnamese.
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Hey, guys, Scott Horton here from Mike Swanson's great book, The War State.
It's about the rise of the military industrial complex and the power elite after World War Two, during the administrations of Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and Jack Kennedy.
It's a very enlightening take on this definitive era on America's road to world empire.
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Anyway, but I want to go back to this great thing that you wrote in your piece, this really important note.
It's sort of just a factoid, but no, I think it's actually extremely relevant, right?
When you say it was only after the Soviet invasion that Hirohito agreed to a full cabinet meeting specifically to discuss surrender to the U.S., that meeting began three hours later at 10 a.m., an hour before the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.
So not just, you know, this horrific war crime.
And as you say about Hiroshima, not decisive, but here completely superfluous.
And yet at the same time, you know, murdering approximately 100000 people in a moment.
And annihilating the largest Christian community inside Japan at the time.
And I think this shows you how things are really done.
Nagasaki, Truman did not know about the bombing of Nagasaki.
He was not told.
He did not sign off on it.
I want to make that clear.
The people making that decision were inside the military bureaucracy, inside the Pacific, right?
So, in fact, Leslie Groves, the guy who's in charge, did not know when the bomber took off that they were going to hit Nagasaki.
They made that decision in the air because of weather over Kokura, which they were actually planning on bombing.
In other words, they had devolved the orders so low down the chain of command.
This is just another bomb at that point.
We're going to keep dropping them.
The managerial elite or the ones who get to make the decision as to what actually gets hit.
You can see the deep state, the quote unquote administrative functionaries, which extend hither and yon.
They're the ones who are driving policy and making these decisions without the consent of the people, without reference to politics.
That's not good.
And you can see how bad this, what a nasty effect this has on the American regime.
And that runs throughout the Cold War.
The other ugly irony here that you write about, about the timing of all of this, is the Burns note, who's, this is the very hawkish new secretary of state under Truman.
He writes the Burns note on, that's issued on the 11th, that says what?
Yeah.
So, I mean, what Burns is, what Burns ends up putting in that note is he says, for the first time that the emperor can be allowed to stay on his throne.
Two days after Nagasaki.
Right.
Two days.
Excuse me.
Yes, that's right.
So it's only after the bombings that we finally clarify the position of the emperor.
And to me, this is that, that, that blows my mind.
How you can't get that the Japanese view the emperor as the embodiment of the regime, regardless of what regime he's actually supporting.
And was that the date of the actual, you know, notification?
I know they signed the document later, but that was the day that they notified the Americans that they were surrendering, was the 11th?
Yes, they accepted.
I think it took them a little bit.
They had to have a debate.
There was some question over the English translation of the orders.
But I think it's August 15th is the day that they surrender.
We celebrate, or they agreed to the armistice and the emperor comes out and tells the troops to stop fighting.
And then September 2nd, we signed the actual, you know, that's the USS Missouri signing in terms of the surrender.
I think, you know, the common narrative is just that, yeah, MacArthur decided to let them keep the emperor anyway.
But what I'm getting at is that they were told you can keep your emperor before they really even notified, even, you know, on the wire, like, hey, we are surrendering.
Give us a day to get our act together.
So, you know, so the note itself says it's it says something to the effect of the emperor subject to this, to the supreme commander of the Allied forces.
You know, the phrasing is such that.
It allows the emperor, it implies that the emperor will remain pursuant to the command of the supreme allied general or the ruler of Japan post-war.
So there is this sense, you know, MacArthur was the one who let him stay.
And by the way, that may have been MacArthur's prerogative to decide whether or not Hirohito.
I guess my point really was that that makes it sound like it wasn't decided in my mind, I guess, as I was learning this as a youth and whatever, just as a youth.
That's funny.
The way I had learned this was just, you know, it wouldn't have been decided till after he showed up and was on his own throne and then issued this order, something like that.
But the point I'm making is they really were notified after the second nuking, OK, OK, you can keep your emperor.
And then for all practical purposes, the surrender came after that, not just after the Russians, but also after the Burns.
No, is that correct or not?
That's correct.
Right.
That's OK.
So that's what I really learned here that I did not know before.
Yeah, they were willing to keep fighting if even after the bombings.
And again, they did not have photo even after the Russians crossed the line.
Potentially.
Right.
And so it was those two events when they realized they could no longer negotiate.
You know, they're sending their there is a willingness there that it wasn't there before where it's like we have got to figure out how to surrender and keep the emperor.
And so when they get the Burns note on August 11th, they're saying, OK.
And that shows that Truman and Burns are desperate.
Right.
Here come the Russians.
We better go ahead and give them a concession so that they'll surrender to us instead right now.
Right.
I mean, again, talk about a disaster.
And the whole history here, I think, is worth getting into.
I've done some of the work here, but like.
On one hand, publicly, they're asking the Soviet Union to help them in the war effort, and on the other hand, they very much do not want them to help because already they're seeing the outlines of the Cold War.
But again, the very unclear in the minds of the people who are making policy what they're actually trying to do.
And so that bleeds over into having, you know, where you're saying unconditional surrender.
We can do anything to you after you surrender.
Unconditional.
We are going to govern you.
We're going to institute your form of government.
And then in the Burns note, they finally give them this.
They give them something like you can the emperor.
It sounds to them the emperor will be allowed to stay or very likely to be allowed to stay.
And so that's what then that gives the impetus to the emperor to say, OK, I'm ready to I'm ready to let the war come to an end.
And like you say, hey, if then why not last November, boys?
Yeah, I mean, there's a great I was reading this book by Edward Luttwak.
It's called The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire.
Great book.
I recommend it to anyone who's interested in foreign policy.
And what he points out is when Attila the Hun was conquering this step, when he would invade a country, he would immediately make a peace deal to his enemies, to the people he's conquering.
And what this did was it creates a peace faction within his opponents, which is like, look, if you want this to stop, you can end it right now.
And it's usually pretty mild in terms of what at least Attila the Hun was making to his opponents.
So in this way, Attila the Hun, the barbarian, is more humane and better at international politics than these modern 20th century supposed foreign policy experts who are fighting this massive global war.
Attila the Hun.
I mean, that to me was striking.
Yeah.
And you know what?
It's been a theme on the show all day long is that part of it is because of the economics of democratic politics here, where no, everybody is such a weak coward that they're afraid of being called a weak coward.
And so they all act completely crazy.
You know, I think, you know, part of it, I think part of this, too, is you have very small cliques of people who end up taking power and then they end up driving policy.
I mean, look at something like the atomic weapons program.
Vice President Truman did not know it existed.
You had 20,000 people working on a super weapon.
Congress didn't know.
The American people didn't know.
No one ever voted on this.
Like it wasn't.
And that, I think, is what's so striking, is that you'll have these small groups of people making these policies that dramatically affect our lives.
And they often do things which, in hindsight, are questionable and worth probing deeper.
And there's many such cases, you know, the history of the CIA, very relevant here.
The history of lead up to the war in the Pacific, also very relevant.
And this is stuff I'm continuing to work on and I'm very interested in.
And I think it opens, I think it can open people's eyes to thinking more clearly about foreign policy and about our own regime.
Yeah, that's the goal here, at least for me.
Yeah, for sure.
And it's a really great piece, a great contribution to that.
And Anything Speaking Reason on this issue under the name The American Conservative Magazine is, you know, doubly important in value.
I mean, who knows about what liberals think nowadays?
But mostly, if you're going to get a sort of emotional, super patriotic, how dare you question this decision type of a reaction from somebody that typically tends to be like a talk radio listener and a Republican voter type.
And I've seen this in my own life and I've heard many stories by other people having the same exact experience that it could be so productive to actually pick a little bit of a fight like that and then explain that, hey, I bet you didn't know that all these generals and all these admirals who were in charge at the time all opposed it.
And where, you know, from Eisenhower to Curtis LeMay, for God's sake, and everybody in between, Nimitz and all the rest, MacArthur, even MacArthur, he wanted to drop, I don't know, dozens of extra radioactive cobalt laced nukes on the border between Korea and China because he was the biggest barbarian in the history of East Asia.
And yet when it came to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he was like, why would we do that?
We'd already won the war.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, and I'll say this in defense of I think a lot of people who were like me grew up a Republican, you're conservative.
The reason we ended up defending the bombings is because it's seen if I don't do this, then it means I don't that I don't believe in my country, that I have somehow betrayed our fundamental principles or betrayed something that I love.
And I would say that's not true.
The American people have always had were very reticent to go to war without really good cause.
And they I think Americans, the Americans didn't make these decisions.
We don't have blood guilt from the atomic bombings.
I disavow.
I'm not going to apologize for them.
I don't think the president should apologize.
You know, it is.
It's almost like because it's all black and white pictures of Truman that that just sort of makes it so historical.
It's beyond question.
But if you frame it like this, where Harry Truman was nothing but Bill Clinton, if Bill Clinton dropped an atom bomb on someone, you wouldn't say, hey, that's my country that did that.
You better shut up, dude.
You would say that's Bill Clinton.
Of course, he's the worst person in the world.
And that's just one more proof.
Yeah, I think, you know, I think the way you can is to make it clear to people that America can win wars.
We can defend our rights.
It does not require us spending, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars necessarily.
I think we can think about this.
America is, we are blessed in so many ways.
We have lots of natural resources.
We have oceans separating us from potential enemies.
We have the ability, the technology to establish from border controls to keep ourselves safe, if we so choose, without needing to necessarily be involved everywhere.
And I think that's, that to me was what really changed my mind on some of these things was the beginning was to ask, OK, what are we really attempting to do here overseas?
What are we, what were we attempting to do historically?
And then how do we go from here and how do we make policy?
I think the reason to do some of these historical writing and read and to try and think about these things is so that we can make better policy for my kids and for their children.
I want America to be safe, but I also want America to to not sacrifice the, you know, the virtue, you know, the best of our young men for for what, you know, bad policy made by people who made obvious errors.
And we should at least acknowledge them as such and say, look, that was wrong.
Don't do that again.
And well, and of course, look, I mean, the point here, too, is that if you're questioning the decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and World War II in the Pacific and all of these things, then anything's fair game after that.
And that is what is really dangerous is because this is like, you know, I've always said, sorry to quote myself, that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are dead.
That was too long ago.
That really it's FDR and Truman are the founding fathers of the United States, of our modern American empire.
And you're sitting here saying that, you know, they lied and tried to deny they chopped down the cherry tree and challenge the very kind of basis of our civic religion at this point.
That, yeah, FDR made the bomb and Truman used it and it was great.
And that's how you know it was great because they were the ones who did it and etc.like that.
So if you could question that glorious decision that saved a million lives, then that means what does that mean for Korea and Vietnam and Iraq and their legitimacy today?
No, I think the most important thing Americans can take away is to say walk away being able to ask questions about policies made in their name that they have to then pay for.
I'm a big fan of the American people.
I like them.
I am an American citizen.
I want, like I said before, I want my country to be safe.
And I want it to.
But then I have to ask, what is the value of the things we're doing and where do we get these ideas from?
And I think when you look at someone like FDR, I think you really begin to see this is a, I think you put this very well, that's a that's a re-founding of the American regime.
What he wants to do with American power is different than what someone like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln thought we should use our powers for or use our resources.
I mean, George Washington, we want to be, you know, friendly to all, right?
And then, you know, if we have to fight wars, then we need to win them.
And then we need to go back to having peace and we need to secure our rights.
And I'm all about that.
But we and I again, I think there just needs to be more of a discussion on this topic as we go forward.
And I, you know, that's that's the goal.
That's the hope.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, this is a great contribution to it.
I really appreciate your time on the show to talk about it, too.
Yeah.
Hey, Scott, so much.
I'm very grateful.
Thank you for having me on.
All right, you guys.
That is Josiah Lippincott.
And he wrote this great thing at the American Conservative magazine called Wholesale Slaughter of Japanese Civilians in World War Two was evil.
The Scott Horton Show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APS Radio dot com, antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org and Libertarian Institute dot org.
