Justice Radhabinod Pal and Hiroshima

cs:

yes, there is no alternative

thanks CS!

a minor, factual point. Contrary to what I write above, one of the key revisionist hitorians, Gar Alperovitz does NOT teach at UC Berkeley. He got his MA from UC Berkeley.

Instead, he is the Lionel Bauman Distinguished Professor of Political Economy at the University of Maryland, College Park and the founder member of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University.

oops, i meant, thanks, Temporal!

I need some sleep....

Thank you for posting this. When I was in Tokyo, people used to ask me about Pal, and I had no clue who he was. That is when I heard about his long dissenting opinion.

Very good commonsense. You are making a lot of sense may or may not be common but sense for sure.

Somik and Morris,

Thanks!

During my first visit to Japan, I was also asked about "Pal". I had not a clue who he was!

Conventional history overwhelmingly points towards Japan's top military/imperial brass' complicity in refusing to surrender. I tend to lean in that direction.

All Japan had to do was to utter the words "We Surrender!". Where is the proof that they did that? Apparantly they did not. If they had announced publicly "We Surrender", rest assured, a war weary and a jingoistic press would have gobbled it at a moments notice.

Personally, I have always wondered if the Allies had dropped the bomb close to those cities where they could have demonstrated to the Japanese the effects of a nuclear holocaust.

Might have prodded the Japanese to surrender. But we are talking about a martial culture that back in the day generally refused to accept defeat(at least the warlike elites behaved like so).

IMO, the most disturbing act post-war by the Allies was the case of General (Dr) Shiro Ishii's immunity. Here is where Desicritics' Golden Boy and the west's military industrial complex(much feared by Ike) converge, albeit for different reasons.

good points you make rani laxmibai. as is evident from the general tenor of my piece, i make no claims about presenting the unvarnished truth, so to speak.

at the same time, if you take a look at Gar Alperovit's book, _The Decision To Use the Atomic Bomb, (New York: Vintage Books, 1996)._British edition (Harper Collins), you will find that he has used a number of declassified documents that were simply not available to other historians just after the war (2o year rule, until documents are de-classified). In rough summary, the points he makes, based on these documents:

1. The Japanese had decided to surrender, but the whole issue of not to be seen as bowing down to the US, since they were locked in war with them, meant they approached the Swiss govt/embassy, neutral in the war. In those days, it was not as simple to broadcast "I surrender" over Youtube. Apparently the American were upset about why the Swiss needed to be involved. And there were many negotiations with the Americans over the modality and the role of the emperor after the war. This discussion and negotiation went on for quite a while. I suggest, once again, Alperovitz's book as well as the many scholars who have criticized him for overstating his case.

2. Dr. Ishii was immune, because the Allies really wanted to get their hands on all the data Ishii had obtained as a result of his horrendous biological experiments on the Chinese POW's. The same with most of the Nazi/German doctors who got similar data from their experiments on the Jewish concentration camp prisoners. They were flown, to the US and their data helped, so to speak the American military, and later the space program too...as they had put the Jewish prisoners thru a number of stress tests, so to speak: their condition after impact, after being boiled in oil, in a vacuum etc. etc. All this is not just well documented, but is the subject of many documentaries too, since it did not happen too long ago. Once again, an issue of double-speak, double-standards, and an holier than-thou attitude of the victors.

3. Which is not to say the Allies (the power structures) were unalloyed devils and the Japanese (govt/army) were innocent victims. There was plenty of blame to go around, and that was Justice Pal's point.

4. As to why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen: well, the initial target was Kyoto, and a famous professor of japanese studies at Harvard, talked the American president/generals out of it. Most big cities had been hit hard by the war, the fire-bombing etc. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were relatively unscathed. Alpervitz' point is that perhaps, and there's no way to PROVE it, is that if one wants to test a unique bomb, here was a choice target, so to speak. Immediately after the war, dozens of investigators/doctors spend months in Hiroshima/Nagasaki, documenting, analysing the effects. All the data was never released to anyone.

5. The lesson of all this is NOT that the Allies were devils and the Japanese were/are angels. It is: nuclear weapons are a dead end for everyone.

6. Even if the weapons are not used, the billions spent on them, feed the military-industrial complex and all those who benefit from it. The billions spent on this crap is simply immoral. Think of how many pints of beer these hundreds of billions of dollars could buy. Enough for all of us to get the most massive hangover ever.

Laxmibai:

"Personally, I have always wondered if the Allies had dropped the bomb close to those cities where they could have demonstrated to the Japanese the effects of a nuclear holocaust."

many people have wondered this too. or why not drop them in the sea to demonstrate their effect. but then again, others who claim that this was partly for testing their effects on a large city, would argue that a real live test in a real city, against a demonized enemy was too "good" an opportunity to pass by. Who knows what the "truth" is, but certainly, we must consider all possibilities.

If you have seen the documentary _The Fog of War_ where Robert McNamara, the guy in charge of the war in Japan, and late the Defense Secretary of the US, has this to say: (PARAPHRASE)..."If we had lost the war, sure we would have been tried as war criminals...the fire bombing of Tokyo civilians which killed more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be enough. But the point is that we won". I think, McNamara's point is similar to the point that Justice Pal made. A point that is lost on jingoistic Indians who have delusions of superpower status, regardless of the costs. It's not a question of being anti-American, anti-Japanese, anti-Indian or pro all of them...it's a matter of where are we headed as humans.

Disclaimer: I am not at all claiming that I have a monopoly on truth! But I would strongly recommend a read of Alperovitz's book, the only text that has actually made use of recently declassfied materials available in archives only relatively recently.

Rani Laxmibai,

A piece by Richard Drayton, a history professor at Cambridge University on Dr. Ishii and other war criminals...and possible reasons why the were granted immunity even though they were the real war criminals and against humanity in general"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2005/may/10/foreignpolicy.usa

Richard Drayton, ""An ethical blank chequeBritish and US mythology about the second world war ignores our own crimes and legitimises Anglo-American warmaking""

The Guardian, May 10, 2005.

a key excerpt from Drayton's piece. Nobody has ever contested the factual accuracy of what he has to say - ah, except for Dr. Ishii's daughter, who of course, denied it! I guess it addresses your question as to why Dr. Ishii was granted immunity:

""After 1945, we borrowed many fascist methods. Nuremberg only punished a handful of the guilty; most walked free with our help. In 1946, Project Paperclip secretly brought more than 1,000 Nazi scientists to the US. Among their ranks were Kurt Blome, who had tested nerve gas at Auschwitz, and Konrad Schaeffer, who forced salt into victims at Dachau. Other experiments at mind control via drugs and surgery were folded into the CIA's Project Bluebird. Japan's Dr Shiro Ishii, who had experimented with prisoners in Manchuria, came to Maryland to advise on bio-weapons. Within a decade of British troops liberating Belsen, they were running their own concentration camps in Kenya to crush the Mau Mau. The Gestapo's torture techniques were borrowed by the French in Algeria, and then disseminated by the Americans to Latin American dictatorships in the 60s and 70s. We see their extension today in the American camps in Cuba and Diego Garcia.

War has a brutalising momentum. This is the moral of Taken By Force, which shows how American soldiers became increasingly indiscriminate in their sexual violence and military authorities increasingly lax in its prosecution. Even as we remember the evils of nazism, and the courage of those who defeated it, we should begin to remember the second world war with less self- satisfaction. We might, in particular, learn to distrust those who use it to justify contemporary warmongering.

· Richard Drayton is senior lecturer in history at Cambridge University.""

Justice Pal was very aware of these double standards. In fact the "judge" form Netherlands raised similar objections. But then, Justice Pal was "just an Indian" and the Dutch were not really involved in the war, so presumably they were simply "idealists", not "realists"

Richard Drayton making the point in a page, that Justice Pal made in 1500 pages:

""We least like to remember that our side also committed war crimes in the 1940s. The destruction of Dresden, a city filled with women, children, the elderly and the wounded, and with no military significance, is only the best known of the atrocities committed by our bombers against civilian populations. We know about the notorious Japanese abuse of prisoners of war, but do not remember the torture and murder of captured Japanese. Edgar Jones, an "embedded" Pacific war correspondent, wrote in 1946: "'We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments""

The point being: there were no angels in the war. the spin on it was the spin of the victors. not surprising, but yet, important to keep in mind.