Federalist Paupers

My Man Harry

Bill Whittle, of whom I had no knowledge prior to watching this video, takes the truth stick and beats Jon Stewart mercilessly for calling Harry Truman a war criminal. The video’s sorta long, but it’s a worthwhile remedy for the thoughtless revisionism exemplified by Stewart’s comment.

It was once the case in America that our liberals – Roosevelt, Truman, LBJ – clenched their jaws and struck at our enemies harder than our conservatives. That modern liberals find it so easy to attack these old-time liberals for their defense of American lives and ideals (Truman dropping the bomb, Roosevelt summarily executing German saboteurs, Johnson sending Americans to defend our South Vietnamese allies) shows how few on the left still believe in the fighting faith of American liberalism. It’s a shame, and a tremendous loss for freedom worldwide.

Posted by Apollo in The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 9:37 pm and is filed under The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

10 Responses to “My Man Harry”

Jamie says:

That. Was. Awesome.

One of my biggest pet peeves is WW2 revisionism, and especially Hiroshima/Nagasaki revisionism. Its so easy to pass judgment on those men from our comfortable and easy lives. A man like Stewart, who believes courage is making funny faces to belittle people more important than himself, doesn’t know the first thing about hard decisions.

May 4th, 2009 at 10:21 am

biggles says:

That bit about “we should have dropped an A bomb off shore to demonstrate the power of the new weapon to the Japanese.

Hmmmm – we dropped one on a Japanese city and still the Japanese refused to surrender – until we dropped the second one.
Stewart is a loathsome, no nothing, smart alec – which means he can probably get elected as a senator in Minnesota…..

May 4th, 2009 at 10:35 am

Geoff says:

There is a serious debate to be had over the bombings, but it has to include the understanding that Truman and others were facing a difficult decision with uncertain information. Even if one comes to the conclusion that dropping the bomb was the wrong decision, that doesn’t in itself condemn Truman.

May 4th, 2009 at 12:28 pm

Jamie says:

Its funny how said debate becomes more “serious” the further we are removed from the actual events.

20/20 hindsight and all that.

May 4th, 2009 at 1:03 pm

Geoff says:

There’s a lot to be said for hindsight and emotional distance; it makes it easier to get beyond the “everything America did in WWII was right”/”Truman was a monster” nonsense.

May 4th, 2009 at 1:11 pm

Jamie says:

It also makes it harder, nay impossible, to truly understand the thinking that went into those decisions. How do you way the killing of 100,000 Japanese vs the potential deaths of 1,000,000? These are the real decision Truman had to struggle with. And as the video Apollo linked points out – the preponderance of the evidence suggests the Japanese would have fought to the last man.

May 4th, 2009 at 1:26 pm

Geoff says:

It also makes it harder, nay impossible, to truly understand the thinking that went into those decisions.

If that’s really the case, then the world’s history departments had better pack up and go home.

For the most part, I agree with you, actually. A lot of the arguments that anti-Truman people make (it was only to impress the Russians, it was only because the Japanese weren’t European) are hard to swallow.

Even the more feasible arguments (that some form of peace short of unconditional surrender might have been reached without nuking or invasion, or that the second bomb was ultimately unnecessary) are based on an understanding of events in Japan that the Americans would not have had access to.

I don’t think there’s very much interesting to say about it, though, if all that we’re interested in is condemning or vindicating people for modern political purposes.

May 4th, 2009 at 2:15 pm

Independent George says:

Following the Nagasaki bombing, there was an attempted, and narrowly averted, military coup when word filtered out that surrender was forthcoming. Even after a second city was vaporized, it still took no small measure of luck and circumstance for the war to end.

May 4th, 2009 at 3:41 pm

Apollo says:

I yield to few in my respect for the Japanese, but a) you just can’t look at the totality of their actions from 1933-45 without concluding, “They had it coming;” and b) they were a foe of uncommon devotion to their cause, and no common level of pummeling would cause them to quit.

Of course, what people often forget in their hindsighted analyses is to look at the whole picture, not just the part of the picture that amuses them. The jaw-dropping level of defeat we inflicted on the Japanese played no small role in how pliant they were during the MacArthur occupation, and thus in creating the free, prosperous, and delightful modern Japan we all know and love. It think it’s very difficult to argue that Japan would be better off today had we let them surrender conditionally, or had they not been so awestruck by our might. Only the atom bomb could have yielded the result we got.

May 4th, 2009 at 4:55 pm

Tom says:

That video was much better than I had expected, though some of it’s reasoning was a bit off.

Whittle, like many supporters, acts as if the invasion was imminent: that the choice was either to try the bombs, or 1,000,000 Americans would die — to say nothing of the Japanese — immediately. Much could have happened between August and November ‘45 that might have made the Japanese surrender; specifically, dropping the fourth bomb or making additional ones.

That said, I side strongly with the apologists because 1) given the tenacity of the Japanese up to that point, one has to give Truman the benefit of the doubt and 2) Americans were dying in combat operations at the time dropping one bomb offshore might not lead to an invasion of the home islands — though it also might, in itself a reasonable justification — it would almost certainly lead to more American’s deaths elsewhere.

May 4th, 2009 at 8:20 pm

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