Not The Last Samurai

The issue of Hiroshima/Nagasaki comes up whenever the left or the Islamofascists get around to listing the "crimes of the US." In the past I've tended to agree with the critics, because by and large I was as uninformed as they about what was actually going on within the Japanese High Command in those last days. Well, we now know that using nuclear weapons was probably the only way to get Japan to surrender, and even that almost didn't work. From John Hawkins' interview of Victor Davis Hanson:

John Hawkins: A couple of historical questions; One thing I seem to hear a little more these days is people questioning whether the U. S. was right to drop two atomic bombs on Japan and whether they would have surrendered without it. What’s your view on that issue?

Victor Davis Hanson: Well, they wouldn’t have surrendered after the first one; we know that. They almost had a coup after the second one; there was a plot to kidnap the emperor during the peace signing ceremony. [Note: There was a History Channel episode on this plot, and had not an enterprising Japanese officer hidden a copy of the Emperor's surrender speech so that it could be played at the proper time, the plot might well have succeeded.]

I think the answer to that question is for a person to go back very carefully and look at the campaign in Okinawa which was started on April 1st and actually the United States military didn’t declare the island secure until July 2nd which was just about 70 days before the surrender. If they would go back and look at that they would see that was the costliest campaign for the U. S. Marines.

It was also the costliest campaign for the Japanese, 100,000 Japanese killed, 100,000 Okinawans killed, 50,000 American casualties and wounded, missing and killed --- and that was just a foretaste of what was going to come with an invasion. If some people say, “Well, maybe we didn’t have to invade,” then they should look at what Curtis Lemay had as an alternate solution; bringing B-17’s and 24’s, Lancasters and B-29’s and putting them on Okinawa to continue the incendiary raids of Japan. That would have been a bloodbath. So any calculus you have for achieving a non-conditional surrender would have cost more lives.

If you take the third alternative and say, “Well, we didn’t have to have an unconditional surrender,” then critics should look and see what the Japanese army was doing in places like the Philippines, Korea and China up until the last days of the war. They were continuing a pattern of systematic butchery and execution. That’s really not been commented on, but they were just as bad in some ways as the Nazis and the Soviets were. So they were just a barbaric military and the only thing that put them out of business was the U. S.

I recently saw The Last Samurai and felt it one of a long line of fundamentally anti-American films eminating from the left coast, essentially siding with a totalitarian movement and ideology against the US. I don't know if the movie is historically accurate or not, but sincerely doubt it. In the early 20th Century there was an effort to reform the Japanese culture by turning the lowest class of nobility, the Samurai, into businessmen. It was partly successful, but the culture was still vulnerable to fascism and the Samurai/Warrior cult later had a resurgence leading to Japan's involvement in WWII as allies of the Nazis. The Last Samurai is an utterly foolish movie, with almost no redeeming social value. It could easily have been produced by the Japanese Fascists in the High Command as a propaganda film during WWII, except that censorship would have prevented it from being shown here.

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Demosophia and The Jawa Report)