Op-Ed: U.S. Leaders Knew We Didn’t Have to Drop Atomic Bombs on Japan to Win the War. We Did It Anyway,” Gar Alperovitz and Martin J. Sherwin, LA Times, August 5, 2020.
“The Greatest US War Crime Against Japan,” Ralph Raico, November 26, 2010.
On August 9, 1945, [Truman] stated, “The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians.”[3]
This, however, is absurd. Pearl Harbor was a military base. Hiroshima was a city, inhabited by some three hundred thousand people, which contained military elements. In any case, since the harbor was mined and the US Navy and Air Force were in control of the waters around Japan, whatever troops were stationed in Hiroshima had been effectively neutralized
“Harry S. Truman: Advancing the Revolution,” Ralph Raico, June 28, 2004.
1937, Nanking Massacre. An excellent movie on this event is Flowers of War, starring Christian Bale.
1937, Panay Incident.
1940s, U.S. Census helped the Army round up Japanese Americans. Awful. This reminds me of what the Nazis did with new prisoners to concentration camps in Germany and Poland. Camp commanders told new prisoners that the prison was a labor camp and that they would work there until the war was over. Lied to them about typhus as a rationale for shaving heads and going to the “showers,” a.k.a., gas chambers. But the commanders instructed the new arrivals to write back home telling their families where they were and that they were alright. Many did. And the Nazis used the information to gather up more Jews. I remember one of my earliest purchases on Amazon how I was concerned about giving my personal information online specifically for this reason–that it could be used for something else, something more sinister. So far, so good. Only marketers with their viruses and spam can get a hold of me . . . for now.
1942, Joseph Schumpeter in 1942 wrote these words in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. They are more relevant today than they were then, for the Left has controlled academia for two additional generations.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the picture is the extent to which the bourgeoisie, besides educating its own enemies, allows itself in turn to be educated by them. It absorbs the slogans of current radicalism and seems quite willing to undergo a process of conversion to a creed hostile to its very existence. Haltingly and grudgingly it concedes in part the implications of that creed. This would be most astonishing and indeed very hard to explain were it not for the fact that the typical bourgeois is rapidly losing faith in his own creed.This is verified by the very characteristic manner in which particular capitalist interests and bourgeoisie as a whole behave when facing direct attack. They talk and plead–or hire people to do it for them; they snatch at every chance of compromise; they are ever ready to give in; they never put up a fight under the flag of their own ideals and interests–in this country there was no real resistance anywhere against the imposition of crushing financial burdens during the last decade or against labor legislation incompatible with the effective management of industry.
1942, Lights of the Old Right.
1942, Battle of Midway, June 4 to June 7.
Rethinking the Good War (i.e., WWII) by Laurence Vance.
1942, Internment of US citizens of Japanese ancestry throughout the United States.
The caption to this picture reads “A crowd of Japanese Americans stand behind a barbed-wire fence waving to departing friends on a train leaving Santa Anita, California.” This is Santa Anita Race Track, folks. Gary North states that John J. McCloy was the brains behind the Japanese internment camps.
Here is a cartoon illustration of Hitler’s economic policies. And this commentary by Lew Rockwell on Hitler’s economic policies is where I lifted it.
1942, On Japanese internment camps throughout the U.S. under FDR, Gary North explains the non-air brushed horrors:
On April 1, 1942, California announced the order for the arrest and deportation of Japanese citizens in California. They were sent into internment camps — read: concentration camps in Idaho. Here are photos and an accompanying account. Here are other photos.
We all know this story. President Roosevelt signed an executive order on February 19, 1942, authorizing the program. Congress never voted on this. The program was implemented by Secretary of War Henry Stimpson. The only major figure in Washington to oppose this was J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the FBI.
The prisoners were released in early 1945. They were given $10 and a train ticket back home. But they had no homes to go to. Most of their homes had been sold, along with their possessions and businesses, at bargain basement auctions in 1942.
This executive order stayed on the books until February 19, 1976, when Gerald Ford rescinded it. In 1982, the American government issued a formal apology. It made token reparations to survivors of $20,000 each.
This is the airbrushed version. This part of the story could not be hidden from the public. It got into American history textbooks.
More on American Concentration Camps.
1942-1943, Aug. 7 (’42) to Feb. 9 (’43). Guadalcanal Campaign on the Solomon Islands.
1942-1946, Manhattan Project gave birth to more than just the Atomic Bomb…
Michael is exactly correct in his presentation of facts concerning the US Government under Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As a history teacher, I have discovered that one of the most enduring myths of younger Americans not versed in the history of their country preceding their birth is that the United States entered the Second World War in order to save the Jews of Europe. In fact, the very opposite was the case. The government deliberately chose not to save the Jews until it was much too late. After FDR’s callous immigration authorities illegally obstructed and surreptitiously slammed the door to freedom for vast numbers of potential refugees, his administration continued its policy of deliberate betrayal of the millions of European Jews in Hitler’s death camps until the “Final Solution” was almost finalized. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr. even had his staff prepare “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of This Government in the Murder of the Jews,” concerning heinous activities of the State Department in this regard, which was presented to Roosevelt. David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, is a masterpiece in meticulous scholarship. This brilliant book formed the basis for the powerful PBS documentary, America and the Holocaust: Deceit and Indifference. After the war the government under FDR’s successor, Harry S Truman, was complicit in both Operation Keelhaul (which concerned the forced repatriation of Soviet POWs to the USSR – and to certain death or the GULAG) and Operation Paperclip (the program which brought thousands of former war criminals and perpetrators to the United States under the guise of the Cold War.
Michael Rozeff uses house-to-house invasions to illustrate comparisons between American fascism and German fascism.
1
1943, Current Tax Payment Act
1943, The Origin of Tax Withholding
So where did the withholding tax come from? It was not part of the original income tax that resulted from the sixteenth amendment in 1913. Very few people paid any taxes back then anyway. The income tax did not directly affect the average American until World War II.
On the eve of the war, few Americans paid income taxes. Those that owed taxes paid them in one lump sum on March 15 (later changed to April 15). To pay for the war, the Revenue Act of 1942 lowered exemptions and raised income tax rates. But it also did something even more insidious—it instituted a 5 percent “Victory Tax” on all wages above an exemption of $624. The tax was to be collected by the employer and deducted from the employee’s paycheck—just like the Social Security tax that began in 1935.
The Current Tax Payment Act of 1943 then revolutionized the income tax by making withholding taxes universal. The withholding tax was part of the new tax plan offered by Beardsley Ruml (1894–1960), the chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank and treasurer of R.H. Macy and Co. By 1945, about three-fourths of Americans were paying federal income taxes. And although the withholding tax was sold as a wartime emergency, like most expansions of government instituted during wartime, it has been a way of life for most Americans ever since.
Curse of the Withholding Tax
The income tax allows the government to confiscate the wealth of its citizens. The curse of the withholding tax is that it allows the government to commit this crime systematically, effortlessly, painlessly, and benevolently.
Surprisingly, it was a free-market economist who helped the federal government implement the withholding tax in the first place. As was pointed out by the Austrian economist, Murray Rothbard (1926–1995), in his 1971 article “Milton Friedman Unraveled“:
One of Friedman’s most disastrous deeds was the important role he proudly played, during World War II in the Treasury Department, in foisting upon the suffering American public the system of the withholding tax. Before World War II, when income tax rates were far lower than now, there was no withholding system; everyone paid his annual bill in one lump sum, on March 15. It is obvious that under this system, the Internal Revenue Service could never hope to extract the entire annual sum, at current confiscatory rates, from the mass of the working population. The whole ghastly system would have happily broken down long before this. Only the Friedmanite withholding tax has permitted the government to use every employer as an unpaid tax collector, extracting the tax quietly and silently from each paycheck. In many ways, we have Milton Friedman to thank for the present monster Leviathan State in America.
Here it is in Friedman’s own words.
Dr. Gary North on WITHHOLDING TAXES
The withholding tax program makes it easier for governments to collect taxes. The system was invented by Rockefeller agent Beardsley Ruml. When, in 1942, he came up with a plan to sell Congress on the idea of income tax withholding, he understood exactly what this would do for revenues actually collected: multiply them.
Here was the government’s problem in 1942: only about five million out of the 34 million Americans subject to the income tax were saving to pay it on March 15, 1943. This presented a big problem for tax collectors, now that wartime taxes had been hiked dramatically. Ruml, formerly the director of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation, in 1942 was chairman of the New York Federal Reserve Bank. He was also the treasurer of R. H. Macy & Co., the department store. As Macy’s treasurer, he well understood that most people resist saving for known expenditures. He asked: Why not get employers to deduct their employees’ income tax liabilities? He recommended this to Congress in 1942, and Congress in 1943 passed a tax collection bill that included Ruml’s withholding provision: the Current Tax Payment Act.
The Treasury Department went to work defending this program. It used staff economist Milton Friedman to do much of the research.
Did the scheme work? Beyond the politicians’ wildest expectations. In 1942, the U.S. government collected $3.2 billion from income taxes. It 1943, before the law was fully operational, it collected $6.5 billion from income taxes. In 1944, it collected $20 billion. (“Historical Statistics of the United States,” Pt. 2 [1975], p. 1105.)
The withholding tax was passed as a wartime measure. Naturally, it was not repealed in 1945.
The withholding tax system is popular with the Federal government for four reasons. First, the government deliberately over-withholds. This forces taxpayers to file their forms to get their refunds. They must identify where they live. Second, it creates a “free money from the government” emotional response when the refund check arrives. Third, the government gets to use this money, interest-free, during the taxable year. Fourth, it makes income taxes and Social Security taxes less painful and therefore more acceptable.
If withholding were abolished, the decline in revenues would be both immediate, permanent, and spectacular. Then, on the second Monday of November, there would be desperation across the land. Hardly anyone would have saved all of the money owed during the year. Where would they get the money to pay? They wouldn’t. So, many would not file. There would be no way that the Internal Revenue Service could follow up on all the non-filing residents.
As soon as the taxpayers realized that there are too many people to convict, they would understand the enormous power they possess. Congress could do nothing. It would have to cut taxes to such a degree that people will set aside money to pay. It would have to issue high-interest tax prepayment bonds.
The government would have to default on its other debts.
I mention this just as a reminder: the entire system of Federal power rests on three laws, two of which are essentially technical, namely, the date for tax filing and tax withholding. These two technical laws are the foundation of the modern welfare-warfare-nanny state. Remove these two pillars, and the whole Federal system will come down.
1944, Bureaucracy, Ludwig von Mises.
Mises’s 1944 book applies his insight concerning economic calculation to delineate the difference between bureaucratic management and profit-and-loss management in the free market. The implications of his argument are far-reaching, for it shows that all types of public administration lack the ability to conduct their affairs in an economically rational manner.
1944, D-Day, June 6, 1944.
from Eric Margolis:
At the 1945 Yalta Conference, Stalin boasted to Winston Churchill that Commissar Lazar Kaganovitch, who had supervised the murder of at least seven million Ukrainians and sent 2 million to concentration camps, “is my Adolf Eichmann,” referring to the Nazi official responsible for killing millions of Jews. [Did you hear that? Mass murder, Stalin, bragging to another world leader that he, too, has someone in charge of murdering millions. These thugs brag about their own violent accomplishments. Publicly, they will hide it or lie about or at best hold some kind of insincere memorial and bloviating mea culpa that can only make one sick.]
In 1945, the Soviet Union — the close wartime ally of Britain, Canada, and the United States — had 5.5 million prisoners in its prison system, the gulag, of whom 25% died annually from cold, hunger, exhaustion and disease.
Though Stalin’s worst crimes were committed before World War II, the full horror of his system of industrialized murder and slave labor were barely known outside Russia until the 1980’s. To this day, the world is constantly reminded of Germany’s crimes during the National Socialist era. But Stalin’s victims, who surpassed those of Hitler by a factor of three times, are almost forgotten. Why?
History is the propaganda of the victors. Few photographs of the gulag have survived, evidence was destroyed, and witnesses have died. Churchill and Roosevelt could not admit they were allied to the greatest mass killer since Genghis Khan, and complicit in his crimes. Or reveal that Communist agents of influence had shaped White House policy. The feeble-minded Roosevelt even hailed Stalin as “Uncle Joe.”
Algiers Hiss is the man standing at the far right in the picture below. Read this on the communist subversion of the Roosevelt government.
Gar Alperovitz explains that “at Yalta [the February 1945 summit between Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill] we desperately begged the Russians to come in.” Why?
1945, Feb. 16-March 26. Iwo Jima.
1945, April 12. FDR dies two months after the Yalta Conference.
1945, April 30th, Hitler dies. Did Hitler Escape to South America?
1945, May 8. Germany surrenders in Berlin.
1945-1959, Project Paperclip.
1945, July 17 to August 2, Potsdam Conference, held in Potsdam, Germany.
1945, July 26: Potsdam Declaration which attempted to lay out the terms of surrender in Japan. With FDR dead, Truman attended this conference. The Declaration laid out the terms of Japan’s surrender with a direct and open threat of annihilation if Japan refused to surrender.
The Potsdam Declaration or the Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender was a statement that called for the surrender of all Japanese armed forces during World War II. On July 26, 1945, United States President Harry S. Truman, United Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chairman of the Nationalist Government of China Chiang Kai-shek issued the document, which outlined the terms of surrender for the Empire of Japan as agreed upon at the Potsdam Conference. This ultimatum stated that, if Japan did not surrender, it would face “prompt and utter destruction”.[1][2]
And this
The allied leaders meeting at Potsdam in late July issued the Potsdam Declaration laying the surrender terms for the Japanese. In your book, you discuss an attempt to include the necessary assurances about preserving the emperor in the declaration. What happened?
As originally written, paragraph twelve of the Potsdam Declaration essentially assured the Japanese that the emperor would not be taken off of his throne, and [would] be kept on in some titular role like the king or queen of England but with no power. It was a recommendation of everyone in the top government, with the exception of Jimmy Byrnes. Byrnes was the chief advisor to the president on this matter, and he was secretary of state. There’s no doubt that he controlled the basic decision-making on it. He was also the president’s personal representative on the interim committee, which considered how, not whether, to use the bomb. He was the man who was directly, in this case, in charge. They all thought the war would end once that was stated, and they knew the war would continue if you took out paragraph twelve, and Jimmy Byrnes took it out, with the president’s approval.
1945, August 9, Nagasaki. On Nagasaki, Rockwell makes an interesting point, “The war criminal Truman was a bitter anti-Catholic. It’s why he decided to atom-bomb Nagasaki as well, the Catholic capital of Japan.” Catholic capital in Japan, Nagasaki, is fleshed out in a little more detail here. As evidence of Truman’s anti-catholic views, he boycotted the DNC that nominated Kennedy in 1960. “The Kennedy bandwagon could not be stopped despite the pressure of the combined Congressional leadership, including Speaker Sam Rayburn of Texas, and of former President Harry S. Truman. Mr. Truman had boycotted this meeting on a charge that the convention had been rigged for Senator Kennedy’s nomination.”
1945, August 6, Hiroshima
To Live, 1994
Sunshine with Ralph Fiennes is not available at Netflix but is available at YouTube for $2.99. This movie is far better than any trailer can hint at. The performances are exquisite. Some features will offend and appall. It is not suited for under-aged students; home-viewing, well, you’re on your own. It is 3 hours long. But I feel worth the time. Here is Wikipedia’s summary.
Another movie to consider is Burnt By the Sun, 1994
1945, August 14, eight days after the bombings on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the United States launched a 1000-plane air raid against Japan.
Arnold wanted as big a finale as possible, hoping that USASTAF could hit the Tokyo area in a 1,000-plane mission: the Twentieth Air Force had put up 853 B-29’s and 79 fighters on 1 August, and Arnold thought the number could be rounded out by calling on Doolittle’s Eighth Air Force. Spaatz still wanted to drop the third atom bomb on Tokyo but thought that battered city a poor target for conventional bombing; instead, he proposed to divide his forces between seven targets. Arnold was apologetic about the unfortunate mixup on the 11th and, accepting Spaatz’s amendment assured him that his orders had been “coordinated with my superiors all the way to the top.” The teleconference ended with a fervid “Thank God” from Spaatz. Kennedy had the Okinawa strips tied up with other operations so that Doolittle was unable to send out his VHB’s. From the Marianas, 449 B-29s went out for a daylight strike on the 14th, and that night, with top officers standing by at Washington and Guam for a last-minute cancellation, 372 more were airborne. Seven planes dispatched on special bombing missions by the 509th Group brought the number of B-20’s to 828, and with 186 fighter escorts dispatched, USASTAF passed Arnold’s goal with a total of 1,014 aircraft. There were no losses, and before the last B-29 returned President Truman announced the unconditional surrender of Japan.
This was the largest bombing raid in history. Yet, many timelines of World War II do not even list this event as having occurred.
1945, September, 2: Japan surrenders.
1945, October 24: United Nations is created.
Map of the Pacific Naval Battles during WWII.
1945-1949, Nuremberg Trials
Here is some revealing details about who was involved in the Jewish Holocaust. Every high school in the nation will point to the Nazis as being the sole perpetrators of Jewish extermination. According to Hannah Arendt, a German Jew, that just isn’t true. That, in fact, many Jewish leaders were involved in the extermination of Jews as well. Horrifying fact. Yet rarely told. Arendt told it and got flak for it. By flak I mean hate mail. Books that Hannah Arendt has written related to this subject are:
The Origins of Totalitarianism
1945, Kobe Bombings, five months prior to the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Great movie, Grave of the Fireflies, 1988 animated film. It is set during the American fire-bombing of Kobe.
San Gabriel Tutor 