On who we call the good guys
People seem to enjoy invoking WWII in debates about Russia and what the the United States should do in Ukraine. This call to pathos urges us to “be the good guys” “again” and fight for “freedom.”
Okay, so let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about standing up to bad guys and chains of command and new world orders that are pretty fucking old. If you want to make it about WWII, let’s make it about WWII.
In American high schools we are told that the reason we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to prevent a costly, deadly invasion of Japan. The idea that you need to kill 100,000 people to prevent killing more people strikes me as uniquely depraved, yet this is the political consciousness taught in American public schools.
As with most history taught American high schools, this is a lie. Japan was in the process of initiating surrender before we dropped the bombs—and American leaders knew it. Allied intelligence broke Japanese codes to learn Japan was negotiating surrender through Moscow, but American leaders didn’t like this. (Quite odd, you know, given that they were very concerned with preventing civilian deaths, and surrender achieves this without killing people.) The United States wanted to be the big dog who ended the war—not Moscow. The waning months of WWII were a fight over who would become the next global power broker.
There are two men to highlight at this juncture. The first is James F. Byrnes, a progressive Democrat from South Carolina and Truman’s chief advisor on diplomacy and the atomic bomb.
“I admit I am a New Dealer, and if the New Deal takes money from the few who have controlled the country and gives it back to the average man, I am going to Washington to help the President work for the people of South Carolina and the country.”
If you think being a New Deal Guy speaks to Byrnes’s moral compass as a progressive politician, think again. “Progressive” politicians can do funny things like opposing the Ku Klux Klan but also uh, um, Brown v. Board of Education (like Byrnes did). They will champion the New Deal while fighting minimum wage laws that hurt their state's “competitive advantage” of low factory wages (Byrnes again).
I’m not sure what to make of moral compasses that say separate-but-equal and think the poverty of factory workers is a “competitive advantage.” But I digress.
Byrnes was a complex, secretive, even devious politician. In his diary, Truman refers to him at this time as “conniving. There is unmistakable evidence that Byrnes tried to rewrite the historical record, in part by destroying documents, in part by literally rewriting the private diaries of his assistant, Warren Brown—and passing them off to official government archivists as authentic.
In any case, Forrestal's diaries show Byrnes “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” It was also Byrnes who proposed that the bomb be targeted on a factory surrounded as closely as possible by workers' housing to achieve maximum psychological effect. (source)
The second man to know is Leo Szilard, a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor who developed the idea of nuclear chain reactions in 1933. He was also, more importantly, a pacifist and a contrarian.
James Byrnes claimed he was worried that if Russia entered the Japanese war, it would gain control of Manchuria and northern China in addition to Eastern Europe. But Leo Szilard—a Jewish man with a sense for thinly veiled jingoism—saw through to the unconscious core of it all: James Byrnes wanted to murder people to impress Russia.
On May 28, 1945, ten weeks before Hiroshima was nuked, Leo Szilard met with Byrnes. Here is what Szilard recorded from that meeting:
Mr. Byrnes did not argue that it was necessary to use the bomb against the cities of Japan in order to win the war. He was concerned about Russia's postwar behavior. Russian troops had moved into Hungary and Romania; Byrnes thought it would be very difficult to persuade Russia to withdraw, and that Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might. I shared Byrnes's concern, but I was completely flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable. (source)
Szilard presented Byrnes a memo with his arguments, but Byrnes refused to share it with President Truman. Undeterred, Leo drafted a petition with signatures of scientists from the Manhattan Project. The director of the Manhattan Project, General Groves, insisted this petition make its way up the chain of command through official channels only (which was very out of character, given that Groves was an egotistical man known for his wanton disregard of organizational channels). Szilard’s petition argued that
Szilard’s original proposition pleaded for the use of the bomb to be avoided at all costs. His petition ended up being far more moderate, arguing that atomic attacks on Japan “could not be justified, at least not until the terms which will be imposed after the war on Japan were made public in detail and Japan were given an opportunity to surrender.”
In the end, the United Sates vaporized 120,000 people in 90 seconds for a geopolitical dick-measuring contest. This is a very conservative estimate due to the fact that in many cases, entire families were killed—leaving no one to report the deaths. People died by the blunt force and excruciating heat of nuclear fission. The Radiation Effects Research Foundation estimates that in the weeks that followed the bombings, another 100,000 people died of radiation sickness, which obliterated their bone marrow and intestinal tracts.
What and whose history, exactly, are we serving when we invoke this story in talk of war? It is audacious. We ignore who paid the price of history that we never even learn, and use distorted memory in service of the war economy. If you cannot be bothered to learn history, spare me talk of “humanitarian” war and “nonviolent” sanctions that are just violent, regular war rebranded.
With all disrespect to my public education, I’ll take my cues from people like Leo Szilard—the ones who fight for different visions of the future, even when they know they’re bound to lose.