Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
August 6, 2023
Hello All – Sunday, August 6th, is the anniversary of the use of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, another bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. Why did the USA use an atomic bomb against Japan? Was it really "necessary"? Did it end World War 2? These questions are still with us today.
After the bombing, President Truman said the Bomb was the only alternative to an invasion of Japan. He said that a million US soldiers would have been killed if an invasion was necessary. But was there an alternative? We now understand that there was, and that the President lied about many things. Historians now know that the US knew that Japan was seeking to end the war, several months before August 6th. Japan had lost the war. All leading US military people, including General Eisenhower, opposed using the Bomb. They said it was cruel and unnecessary. But Japan was willing to surrender only if the Emperor/system was allowed to continue, and the US and its allies were insisting on "unconditional surrender." Many top US leaders urged that this policy be changed. But President Truman refused.
The evidence is strong that Truman wanted to use the Bomb before the war ended. Using the Bomb was intended to scare the Russians, not just in the Pacific war, but in the postwar settlements in Europe and elsewhere. Also, he wanted to end the war before Russians troops joined the war, which was scheduled for mid-August. The demand for "unconditional surrender" prolonged the war until the Bomb was ready, but the Soviets declared war and invaded Manchuria before Japan surrendered. Historians now understand that Japan decided to surrender not only because the Bomb, but because of the Russian invasion, two days after Hiroshima. In the end, ironically, the Peace Treaty allowed the Japanese to keep their Emperor, suggesting that the demand for an "unconditional surrender" had only been a ploy by Truman to keep the war going until the Bomb was ready and could be used. And so began "the Atomic Age."
Some reading on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
U.S. leaders knew we didn't have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war. We did it anyway
By Gar Alperovitz and Martin J. Sherwin, Los Angeles Times [August 5, 2020]
---- The accepted wisdom in the United States for the last 75 years has been that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and on Nagasaki three days later was the only way to end the World War II without an invasion that would have cost hundreds of thousands of American and perhaps millions of Japanese lives. Not only did the bombs end the war, the logic goes, they did so in the most humane way possible. However, the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it. [Read More]
Counting the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
---- How many people died as a result of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? There is one thing that everyone who has tackled this question has agreed upon: The answer is probably fundamentally unknowable. The indiscriminate damage inflicted upon the cities, coupled with the existing disruptions of the wartime Japanese home front, means that any precise reckoning is never going to be achieved.But beginning in 1945, people have tried to estimate the number of the dead and injured. … The estimated casualties also play a nuanced role in the various narratives and arguments about the end of World War II. [Read More]
News Notes
Friday, August 4th, was the anniversary of the 1964 "Tonkin Gulf Incident," which President Johnson turned into the "Tonkin Gulf Resolution," a congressional blank check to wage war against North Vietnam and the Vietnamese revolution. What actually happened that day in August is illuminated in this short clip featuring Daniel Ellsberg, an excerpt from the PBS film "The Most Dangerous Man in America. The only Senators to vote against this Resolution were Oregon's Wayne Morse and Alaska's Ernest Gruening, and each year we remember them and honor them. Wayne Morse was outspoken in his opposition to the war and the presidential proclamation of the war, as shown in this clip from the film, "War Made Easy."
We recall that July was the hottest month in human history. In September, UN is hosting a Climate Ambition Summit to compel world leaders to stop the fossil fuel expansion driving the climate emergency. On Sunday, September 17th, ahead of the Summit, a zillion people will march to demand that President Biden take bold action to End Fossil Fuels. The march will be from 1 to 4 pm; the march route is TBD. To learn more and keep up, go to https://www.endfossilfuels.us/.
At the conclusion of Secretary of State Blinken's recent visit to Australia, the Australian Foreign Secretary spoke at a press conference and called on the USA to release Julian Assange, who is an Australian citizen. Blinken rejected this request, saying that Assange had done many mean things to the USA. To learn more, go here.
Gymnast Simone Biles is back, and back in form, winning the U.S. Classic meet with a combo of amazing vaults, including an Yurchenko double pike. (Don't try this at home.)
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held in Yonkers on Monday from 5:30 to 6:00 pm at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
I started college in 1960, just 15 years after Hiroshima. Like most youngsters, I had "ducked and covered" at school, but knew little about the A-Bomb except that it ended World War II, and Uncle Charlie came home from the Pacific. In one of my early college classes, I heard a political and ethical defense of using the atomic weapon, and became puzzled and curious and – finally – outraged as I investigated further. It was a slippery slope, with no exit; a journey I shared with many, as more info about the Bomb became available. Not surprisingly, Bob Dylan's early music spoke to many of us. His "Hard Rain" and "Masters of War" denounced not just war, but our rulers and their world. Sixty years later, they still do. Enjoy!
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
Putin's Forever War
---- I spent a month in Russia, a country almost as large as the United States and Canada combined, searching for clues that might explain its nationalist lurch into an unprovoked war and its mood more than 17 months into a conflict conceived as a lightning strike, only to become a lingering nightmare. The war, which has transformed the world as radically as 9/11 did, has now taken 200,000 lives since Feb. 24, 2022, roughly split between the two sides, American diplomats in Moscow estimate. As I traveled from Siberia to Belgorod on Russia's western border with Ukraine, across the vertigo-inducing vastness that informs Russian assertiveness, I found a country uncertain of its direction or meaning, torn between the glorious myths that Mr. Putin has cultivated and everyday struggle. Along the way, I encountered fear and fervid bellicosity, as well as stubborn patience to see out a long war. [Read More]
Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Dark Times
By Maria Popova, The Marginalian [March 16, 2016]
---- The stories we tell ourselves about our public past shape how we interpret and respond to and show up for the present. The stories we tell ourselves about our private pasts shape how we come to see our personhood and who we ultimately become. The thin line between agency and victimhood is drawn in how we tell those stories. The language in which we tell ourselves these stories matters tremendously, too, and no writer has weighed the complexities of sustaining hope in our times of readily available despair more thoughtfully and beautifully, nor with greater nuance, than Rebecca Solnit does in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. [Read More]
What Happened To Democracy in Turkey?
---- The failure of the Turkish model cannot be explained solely in terms of unrealistic expectations. The rapid deterioration of Turkey into full-blown authoritarianism is also a manifestation of a broader, global trend of what political scientists call "democratic backsliding." As documented by Freedom House, 2021 marked the 15th consecutive year of decline in global freedom. With a global freedom score of 32 out of 100, Turkey is categorized as "not free." … But how did Turkey get here? What accounts for the meteoric fall from grace of what was once considered a success story? To what extent is the deterioration of democracy in Turkey related to the global rise of authoritarianism? And how do domestic factors, notably nationalism and religion, factor in? [Read More] Also of interest is (Video) "Turkey: Rise of Erdogan's Empire," from the BBC [July 18, 2023] [Link].
War & Peace
Niger is Fourth Country in Sahel to Experience Anti-Western Coup
By Vijay Prashad adn Kambale Musavuli, Globetrotter [August 2, 2023]
---- The coup in Niger follows similar coups in Mali (August 2020 and May 2021) and Burkina Faso (January 2022 and September 2022), and Guinea (September 2021).At 3 a.m. on July 26, 2023, the presidential guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum in Niamey, the capital of Niger. Troops, led by Brigadier General Abdourahmane Tchiani closed the country's borders and declared a curfew. … This region of Africa—the Sahel—has faced a cascade of crises: the desiccation of the land due to the climate catastrophe, the rise of Islamic militancy due to the 2011 NATO war in Libya, the increase in smuggling networks to traffic weapons, humans, and drugs across the desert, the appropriation of natural resources—including uranium and gold—by Western companies that have simply not paid adequately for these riches, and the entrenchment of Western military forces through the construction of bases and the operation of these armies with impunity. [Read More]
US Leaders Split on China Policy
---- On the one hand, U.S. policy aims to constrain China's economic, political, and military development because it has now become the United States' chief economic competitor and thus enemy. On the other hand, U.S. policy seeks to secure the many benefits to the United States of its companies' trade with and investments in China. U.S. debates over "decoupling" the two countries' economies versus the milder version of the same thing—"de-risking"—exemplify, on both sides, U.S. policy's split approach to China. The difficult reality for the United States is economic dependence on the world's number two economy that deepens with China's relentless march toward becoming the world's number one. [Read More]
The Iraq War – 20 Years Later
Manufacturing Consensus: An interview with Noam Chomsky
With Bhaskar Sunkara, Jacobin Magazine [July 28, 2023]
---- The Iraq War has been easily absorbed into the powerful doctrinal system, illustrating George Orwell's observation eighty years ago that, in free societies, inconvenient facts can be suppressed without the use of force. After twenty years, one would be hard put to find a single sentence anywhere near the mainstream affirming the obvious: the US-UK invasion of Iraq was the worst crime of this century, the kind of crime for which Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg — or even a sentence affirming that it was a crime. It has been refashioned as a benign effort to rescue the Iraqi people from a terrible dictator and to bring them the gift of democracy, an effort that unfortunately failed. Omitted are a few of those easily suppressed inconvenient facts…. [Read More]
The War in Ukraine
(Video) John Mearsheimer: Ukraine war is a long-term danger
[FB – Mearsheimer is a "realist" scholar who has been skeptical of the US/Ukraine project since 2014. He laid out his views in a short article last June. In this one-hour video, "Ukraine War is a Long-Term Danger," he is interviewed by Aaron Maté, who recently published "US admits to pushing Ukraine into a fight it can't win" [Link].]
When facts cut through the fog of war
By Katrina vanden Heuvel and James Carden, Responsible Statecraft [July 28, 2023]
---- The fog of war over much of the last 18 months has skewed press coverage and our understanding of what is happening in Ukraine. Yet media opacity can no longer mask the facts on the ground. In only the past week, reports have emerged in the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Financial Times and the New York Times indicating, among other things, that Ukraine's much awaited spring offensive has ground to a virtual stalemate and munitions from its NATO-allied partners are drying up. [Read More]
The Climate Crisis
"Is It Going to Get Us?" Climate Dystopia, Borders, and the Future
By Todd Miller, The Border Chronicle [August 3, 2023]
---- On the evening of July 23, my phone buzzed with an emergency alert. I was on the island of Corfu, Greece. There was a fire. Sure enough, I looked up and saw a plume of smoke coming over a ridge. It didn't look far. Was it just a cloud? No— as night fell, my frivolous hope was debunked when the ridgeline began to glow like an ember. Then we could see the licking flames. "Is it going to get us?" asked my seven-year-old William. For all of our two-week stay in Greece, there had been a heat wave, which would turn out to be the longest in Greek history (and one of the worst ever for Europe, and the world, for that matter). … Still, I do not want to diminish the real fear that I saw in my child's eyes. And the pain in my heart to know that this is the world we are leaving to new generations. [Read More]
The Far Right Has a 'Battle Plan' to Undo Climate Progress Should Trump Win in 2024
B Kristoffer Tigue, Inside Climate News [August 1, 2023]
---- Far-right conservative groups are promoting a sprawling "battle plan" to obstruct and undo the federal government's efforts to tackle the climate crisis, with hopes of quickly enacting a series of sweeping changes if Donald Trump, or any other Republican, gets elected as president next year. The 920-page proposal, if implemented, would not only undo any progress the Biden administration has made to reduce emissions and fund clean energy development and other climate-related efforts, but it would make it far more difficult for a future administration to pursue any policy that seeks to address global warming at all. [Read More]
Civil Liberties
Ten Years After The US Military Verdict Against Chelsea Manning
By Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter [July 31, 2023]
---- It was ten years ago that a United States military judge found Pfc. Chelsea Manning guilty of violating the Espionage Act, along with several other related offenses. She was fortunately acquitted of the most alarming charge levied against her: "aiding the enemy."Manning provided over 700,000 documents to WikiLeaks, many of which contained evidence of torture, war crimes, human rights abuses, and corruption within the State Department. … I noted in my coverage of the verdict that Manning was convicted on National Whistleblower Appreciation Day, and that her conviction crystallized a sharp contradiction. While U.S. officials professed their support for whistleblowers, U.S. military prosecutors simultaneously secured a guilty verdict in one of the most harsh and vindictive cases ever brought against a U.S. soldier. [Read More]
Israel/Palestine
Israel didn't Place Palestinians in "Refugee," but in Internment Camps
By Thomas Suarez, Middle East Monitor [August 3, 2023]
---- During much of 1948, Palestinians driven from their homes by the violence of that terrible year took safety in what could reasonably be called refugee camps; camps for people who have fled ongoing violence or natural disaster and are unable or fearful to return. They ceased to be refugee camps by January, 1949. … Like so much of the mainstream language used to explain what is happening with Israel and the Palestinians, the framing of these places as "refugee camps" distorts reality for Israel's benefit, and yet this is so ubiquitous that we repeat it without a thought. The narrative needs to change. The term tells a public already conditioned to see Israel-Palestine as a "conflict" with "two sides", that the camps are the result of complicated historical circumstances, a tragedy without a specific perpetrator. This obscures the simple reality that Israel has for seventy-five years blocked the people in the camps from going home simply because they are not Jewish. That, for the Zionists, has always been the Palestinians' "crime". [Read More]
Jewish supremacy won't end from within. BDS is still the only hope.
By
---- Israelis will never dismantle a system of domination that works for them. That's why the end of Jewish supremacy in Palestine will only come from external pressure — and BDS represents that hope. … The point is to make Jewish supremacy costly. If you really really hope for an end to Israeli apartheid, you have to advocate for pressure on Israeli society from the outside — that means BDS. Israel's internal fissures, as symbolized by the protest movement, are an isolated intra-Jewish fight that excludes Palestinians because they are not part of the "Jewish and democratic" vision. None of that offers hope to me. My hope, quite simply, is in the liberation of Palestinians. [Read More]
Also of interest – "Judea vs Fantasy Israel: the Collapse of Israeli Pillars, and the Opportunities for Palestine," b[Link]; (Video) "Weaponising Water in Palestine," from Aljazeera [July 27, 2023] [Link]; and "Abolishing Israel's Reasonableness Standard: An Explainer," by Elisheva Goldberg, Jewish Currents [August 1, 2023] [Link].
Our History
The test ban treaty at 60: How citizen action made the world safer
By Robert Alvarez and Joseph Mangano, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [August 4, 2023]
---- Sixty years ago, almost to the day, in a Cold War world haunted by the specter of nuclear war, negotiators brought large-scale atmospheric nuclear weapons tests to an end. The United States, Soviet Union, and United Kingdom—which had conducted over 500 above-ground tests, with the combined power of 30,000 Hiroshima bombs—agreed to end testing in the atmosphere, under water, and in outer space. France and China, which had detonated a much smaller number of tests, did not sign, but ended all atmospheric tests in 1980. The Limited Test Ban Treaty became the first international environmental treaty curtailing the poisoning of Earth. [Read More]
