Is Barack Obama going to apologise for Hiroshima?

Toby,

Be sure of this, the minute the west accepts the direction of the fool prez, America will no longer be the *only one* to use nuclear weapons.

Why does a state of being defendless appeal to some?

This may very well amount to ‘apologising’ for my existence, as my late father was due to go out to the Pacific to partake of the no doubt bloodbath/invasion of mainland Japan when the bombs were dropped. Nice one, Mr President – thanks very much.

As HotAir’s MadisonConservative puts it, this would be seen as the “cherry on a weakness sundae”.

Well, the toughness sundae, comprehensively rejected at the ballot box in the last election, managed to get nearly five thousand Americans killed, tens of thousands maimed physically and mentally, virtually bankrupted the American economy, and made America’s rivals, from Iran to Russia, China to the Afpak Taleban, more powerful than they could have hoped for.

If America has any sense, it will be eating a whole load of those cherries, even if one of them involves apologising for incinerating and poisoning hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians with the most devastating weapon known to man.

Beaton – as an alternative viewpoint, a couple of nukes in the right place at the right time did seem to work against the Japanese Empire. Now there’s a thought…..

Will Japan apologize for the incarceration of thousands of UK and Australian civilians living and working in places they overran, including children and babies? Will Japan apologize for the brutal treatment, including summary execution, meted out to military POWs and civilian prisoners alike? Will Japan apologize for the forced marches that left many civilians dead? Don’t hold your breath.

One has to wonder how Nagasaki and Hiroshima are meaningful to Obama personally. If he vists those sites, or even gives a whisper of apology, he will incur the wrath of untold numbers worldwide.

Will Japan apologize for the incarceration of thousands of UK and Australian civilians living and working in places they overran, including children and babies? Will Japan apologize for the brutal treatment, including summary execution, meted out to military POWs and civilian prisoners alike? Will Japan apologize for the forced marches that left many civilians dead? Don’t hold your breath.

One has to wonder how Nagasaki and Hiroshima are meaningful to Obama personally. If he vists those sites, or even gives a whisper of apology, he will incur the wrath of untold numbers worldwide.

If he does, then it will yet another example of how he is a paleocon at heart. In the tradition of Republican calls for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War. Of refusal to enter the Second World War until actually attacked by either side. Of Eisenhower’s ending of the Korean War, his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and his denunciation of the military-industrial complex. Of Nixon’s pursuit of détente with China.

Of the ending of the Vietnam War by him and Ford, an old America First Committee stalwart. Of the only conservative thing that Reagan ever did, to begin nuclear arms reduction in Europe. Of Republican opposition to Clinton’s global trigger-happiness. And of the only conservative thing that George W Bush ever did, to remove American troops from Saudi Arabia after 9/11, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil.

That tradition now subsists in Barack Obama and his Administration. Which is more than welcome. But whatever happened to the Republican Party?

Some clue to that one could very recently be seen elsewhere. As soon as Obama promised out loud what everyone had really always assumed anyway, that there would be no federal funding for abortion or he would not sign the final Bill (frankly an inconceivable eventuality), then it became clear that, since making most or all of healthcare federally funded was the whole point, abortion might remain legal but would become practically impossible to procure. Those who say that Obama is some sort of sleeper agent may very well be onto something. But not at all in the way that they mean. And in any case, he is wide awake now. Never forget that he is an adult convert to Christianity.

Social democratic means to conservative, Christian ends. Old Labour, if you will, in British, Irish, Australian or New Zealand terms. The founding position of the Canadian New Democratic Party. Or the position of the conservative Democrats now back in their historic position as the de facto third and determinative party in a de facto hung Congress, these days as something very like a Continental Christian Democratic party. Complete with the close ties to the Catholic Church, scourge alike of abortion and of nuclear weapons and needless wars.

Does Obama bow only to non-white royaly?

Japanese are honorary whites. In return for full diplomatic relations, apartheid South Africa classified immigrants from Japan, South Korea and Taiwan as white. They were termed “honorary whites”.

Stuff that bull. Honorary whites. I like people to be the race that they are.
Being white is not some kind of perfect state. It is just another race.

Quite so, 1bonnie. But then, that is no doubt only one among many reasons why you were never running apartheid South Africa.

DL the puke mopper doesn’t understand anything. Go write your own blog, Tooter.

If Obama apologizes for nuking Japan out of WWII, his Secret Service detachment will quit, if they haven’t already by then.

As Damian wrote a few days ago:

“Paleocons have historically been noisier in their anti-socialist rhetoric than any American political tradition (and that’s saying something). But, given a choice between big business driving an internationonalist foreign policy and an isolationist Christian America in which secularism can be curbed only by federal legislation, I increasingly get the sense that they’d plump for the latter.”

And as I commented:

“How is anyone who wouldn’t in any sense a conservative? Conservative of what? Call it Socialism or anything else you like, so long as the “curbing” gets done.

As a practical example of how government intervention in the economy achieves conservative ends over and against the ravages of the Whiggish “free” market, see the sheer reach of the Stupak Amendment – http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/11/10/stupak-reac/ – combined with the incandescence of those who think that Obama owes even though they never wanted him as the nominee in the first place, and even though they went around threatening to vote for McCain, at this levelling of the playing field so that abortion is no longer much less expensive than carrying a pregnancy to full term – http://www.catholicsforhealthcarereform.org/ad

Other examples might include import controls, immigration controls, Buy American requirements, insistence on English, the definition of marriage as only ever the union of one man and one woman, the hard work necessary to ensure a non-interventionsit foreign policy, and the subsidies needed by nuclear power so that it can help to safeguard national sovereignty, the economic basis of paternal authority, non-entanglement in the Middle East (and elsewhere), and a relationship with Russia based on the Biblical-Classical heritage rather than on the price of gas. Money well spent all round.

And quite likely to be spent. Now that conservative Democrats are back in their time-honoured role as the de facto third party in a de facto hung Congress. Universal public healthcare. But only if there is no coverage for illegal immigrants, nor any federal funding of abortion, the two guarantees that every future aspirant Democratic Presidential nomineee can now be expected to have to give. Happy days are here again.”

Cherokee Kid, look me up on the Durham University directory (I have relented for other reasons, but don’t expect a swift reply from my University email address), and you will see me listed, entirely accurately, as “Academic/Management staff”.

To be honest, I think that you are the one who knows nothing at all about America, and so imagined that the Dubya aberration was somehow normal, leaving you utterly bewildered now that normal service has been resumed. Read over my first two paragraphs at 11:12 pm and then tell me which of them you already knew.

Water under the bridge.

I really like Japan, I really like the Japanese. In some alternative universe/pipe dream I imagine having a flat in Germany and a flat in Japan and would divide my time between Europe and Asia. In March I will go to Japan and spend some time with my best mate, born and raised in Hiroshima to parents who were born and raised in Hiroshima and for as long as anyone remembers in his family they are all from Hiroshima. Point made, time to move on…

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both horrible and their effects still resonate in both cities. WWII was horrendous, especially in the Pacific region. The vast majority of the people who died in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had nothing to do with the war or Japanese atrocities. If that were the issue alone then a US president would be obligated to at least acknowledge the issue. There is more to it, however. The Japanese military, while weakened, was still a formidable fighting force and as amassing in Kyushu — the southernmost of the Japanese home islands and also the island where Nagasaki is located.
The civilians in both cities, should there have been an allied landing, would have fought to the death — every man, woman, child young or old, healthy or infirm. The chances are that millions would have died in the carnage that would have ensued. There was also the risk that the Soviets would have taken over part of Japan like they took over part of Korea and Germany. We all know about East Germany and North Korea. Having a North Japan and South Japan would have been no better. Yes, that the bombing happened is horrible but the alternative would have been worse.

Dr Stephen Morris on Nov 16th, 2009 at 10:50 pm

My late father also was slated to take part in the invasion of Japan, so I agree wholeheartedly.

Further, having met a number of ex-servicemen who had the misfortune to have been captured by the Japanese, I have no sympathy whatsoever for them, their treatment of prisoners of war was utterly unforgiveable.

Further still, it appears to escape a number of apologists that the Japanese were not only the first and only nation to be on the wrong end of nuclear weapons, they were the first and only nation to utilise biological weapons on a large scale, killing considerably more victims with botulism, anthrax and plague than the Americans with the A-bomb. Google “Unit 731″ for more information about this atrocity, and various other horrors such as vivisection.

But hey, it wasn’t white Western nations doing it was it, beaton, so it doesn’t count, right?

Does anyone expect Japan to apologise for for killing over half a million people with these particularly unpleasant agents?

Interesting point, there were other plans afoot to shorten the war with Japan should the A-bomb test have failed, one of which involved loading a number of B-29 Superfortresses with Barnes Wallis’ “Tallboy” and/or “Grand Slam” earthquake bombs and dropping them simultaneously along a fault line, with the intention of dumping Yokohama into the ocean. It is possible that RAF 617 “Dam Busters” squadron was to have been involved in the operation, perhaps for training American crews in the accurate bombing techniques necessary for the effective deployment of those weapons.

Heaven knows what the death toll would have been if that had been successful.

“Does anyone expect Japan to apologise for for killing over half a million people with these particularly unpleasant agents?”

It’s an outside bet, but if anything could make them, though no doubt far from immediately, then it might be this. We are not in the position that they are (an uncle by marriage of mine, now in his late eighties, still won’t have any Japanese appliance in his house), but on Hiroshima and Nagasaki we are on shaky legal and frankly non-existent moral ground: using WMD, necessarily and inescapably indiscrimate as they are, is at least probably illegal, and is certainly immoral.

If Obama neutralises this one, then he takes away the key Japanese argument. “What about your atom bombs?” becomes “Well, what about them?” This is far from academic. China, with a very non-belligerent five thousand year tradition vastly predating either Communism or her new-found capitalism, nevertheless maintains her sheer scale of military spending in no small measure because she fears that Japan, being unrepentant about the last time, may very well have a next time. The issue is also very live in, if anything even more Confucian, South Korea. And, of course, in North Korea. Why else has North Korea the Bomb? It is not to attack Europe or America. It is to warn off Japan. Why? Because Japan has never admitted what she did to Korea in the Thirties and Forties.

So do a mainstream Christian-conservative thing and apologise for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were entirely outside the just war tradition as all WMD use is, and then say to the Japanaese, “Over to you”. Can Obama pull it off? I certainly hope so. And, not least because he himself can play the Hawaiian and Indonesian cards, I cannot see why not.

Anecdotal from a South African man I’d known for some 10 years: He moved to South Africa with a Japanese wife (well we all make mistakes), and was inducted into the military. However, he went the “refused to obey an order” route on the grounds that he wasn’t prepared to serve in the army of a country that treated his wife as a second-class citizen. When human rights organizations started to take up his case, the military quickly “resigned” him. Which was a lose-lose outcome as he was an unarmed combat trainer. However, his stand may have been partly instrumental in SA making Japanese honourary whites.

Apologies seem to be flavour of the month. You can cite Japanese wartime atrocities setting them off against the firebombing of Japanese cities and the nuclear bombing: But bottom line is that when the head-bangers get in the driving seat, really, really bad things happen.
Those that still harbour negative feelings towards the Japanese people really do owe themselves a visit to Japan in the interest of balance.

Mr president
u should really be apologised to them on be half of The Americans

DL the Tooter, at best you come across as multiple personalities, a couple of which are literate and the rest intoxicated, but all of which are ignorant of America.

OTH, you may just be a random text generator app.

I hope you are the former, because at least you may have some value as an organ donor.

DL proctors exams and empties dustbins at Durham (Academic/Management). I pity the students who have to listen to his noxious, ignorant blather. I fractured my gut laughing at DL and Damian trying to make Left out of Right in US politics. Convoluted horsepukey!

Firebombing Jap and German cities killed ten times more than the two Atom bombs. So what. They started it, we finished it. Militant Islam is next.

Apologists need to go to France. Obama signes his political death warrant if he apologises to Japan. He wouldn’t even be dog catcher in Chicago.

I guess Brown will be apologising every day for the rest of his life: selling the gold, referendum, pensions, taxes, more taxes, lies, dead soldiers, airmen, destroyed military capability, devastated economy, mass immigration, rapacious lawyers, deported British subjects.

DD, DL, cyndi and beaton could also be compelled to atone.

In fact, every one who voted for Labour, and everyone who stood under the Labour ticket, will be apologising. Then there’s Murdoch, The Sun, The Guardian, The BBC, Indie, Observer, The FT and a fair share of the DT staff.

It’s easy! The “apology” gets loads of free publicity and sympathy, for zero cost. It implicitly blames “the other guys”, and since the apologisers are socialists, they are just sticking it to the people, as usual.

So come on, pinkoes! Get apologising NOW!

Why not ever since he became the USA’s first LYING Mohammedan BOGUS POTUS the Obamantion has been touring the world licking Mohammedan and Dictators ars*s insulting allies and apologising for well just EVERYTHING about America. So why should the fact that the Atomic bombs saved HUNDREDS AND HUNDREDS of thousands maybe millions of Allied and Japanese deaths in an invasion stop him from apologising even more. After all he already BOWED low to the Japanese Emperor thus confirming his and by extension Americas subservience to japan just as he already did to the Sordid King of Saudi. The man is an ignoramus and a balloon and a very dangerous balloon as he is full of toxic gas.

Of course we should apologize… the Japanese never did anything that would be considered a war crime or anything… it’s not like the Imperial Japanese Army ever murdered captured Chinese soldiers and civilians and then brutally raped 20,000-80,000 Chinese women — see Rape of Nanking.

The Japanese are absolutely on the moral high-ground.

Note: The Japanese Imperial Army, in addition to raping 20-80 thousand Chinese women, murdered hundreds of thousands (Chinese estimates are 300,000) soldiers/civilians — far more than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

Also note that thanks to Japanese biological warfare that China suffered numerous outbreaks of plague decades after the war ended no telling how many thousands died.

Obviously Obama does not read history.

if some of the bleeding hearts had been sent to help our POWs in north malaya just after the war finished and seen how they were treated by the japs, they would not be so quick to cry for the japs, i saw sights of our men i never again want to see , the sheer cruelty was unbelieve able, i bless harry truman every day of my life, he gave me 64 years of life by his action. and
also million of our men british and american,i feel it was right and two bombs were not enough in my opinion.

P.S. NEVER APOLOGISE FOR SOMETHING YOU DID NOT DO YOURSELF,THE DEMOCRACYS OF THE WORLD ARE SO WEAK AND SERVILE TO CORRUPT RELIGIONS AND POLITICAL REGIMES.

This lust for redundant apologies is sickening. It rarely reflects anything other than unashamed ignorance of the facts and those who value them should be regarded with pity, at best.

Apoligies next to Germany for bringing down Hitler and to Russia for destroying Mr Obama’s favourite – Socialism.

If you have any doubt about how fanatical or hard the Japanese would have fought during an invasion of the Japanese mainland, all you have remember is that it took TWO atomic bombs to get them to surrender.

God bless Harry Truman. The last decent Democrat.

We can count the Okinawa campaign as a test case for a hypothetical invasion of mainland Japan – and if anyone is in doubt as to what the atom bombs avoided they should study it in detail and then consider if they really think Japan would have been better off the other way around. There’s no question that the US picked the right option from its point of view … and that, after all, is the job of the US president in any era: to look after the interests of his own nation first.
Of course, Barry Hussain probably _will_ apologise, because he and his supporters can only see the world and its history through a screen of their own ignorance and bigotry – that doesn’t mean he’s right to do it but, hey, we already know him for what he is.

Oh my God, my heart was in my mouth when I heard Obama take that question -Would he discuss the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in front of a microphone?

They had him nailed: he is exactly the kind of tool to just go ahead and apologize on behalf of a former President on an issue he is clueless about.

And is there any hope those same Japanese reporters will be asking their own Emperor to apologize on behalf of his own father, for the wanton destruction of life throughout Asia perpetrated by the Japanese Imperial Army?

Will the Japanese schools ever mention the mass civilian executions, or slave labor, the inhumane treatment of prisoners, the thefts of national sovereignty, of resources? …nope.

In fact, the whole ‘Rape of Nanking’ thing is still to this day called a myth by those remaining alive who carried it out. And, yes, the Japs also tried developing atomic weapons for use in that very same war.

In which case – I can’t think of any people more in need of being obliterated, city by city until they surrendered, than the Japanese in the 1940’s.

LeMay was right. MacArthur was right. Truman was right. Those atomic warheads detonated just in time, and in just the right spots to make our threat of ‘annihilation from the air’ understood. We have no need to apologize for sharing the Love.

BREAKING NEWS!!
The British government has issued a formal apology for Britain’s conduct during the Second World War.
Speaking from the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary Milliband described Britain’s conduct in the 1939-1945 period as “shameful”:
“We recognise that British military aggression between the years of 1939 and 1945 led directly or indirectly to the deaths of many, many people in Europe, Asia, Africa and elsewhere. It is time to acknowledge this fact and to apologise for it.
The opposition Conservatives roundly condemned the Foreign Secretary’s remarks as not going far enough and being “too little, too late”. They urged the Government to issue a further apology for all the environmental damage inflicted on the world by British forces during the war and since.
In Germany, a spokesman for an association of SS veterans described the apology as “a good start”

…………I’m just off to watch Simon Schama’s ’slightly camp’ History of Britain!! Oh the truth shall set you free!!!!!!!!! WE were the true Nazis!!!

I’ve just been laughing at some of Jo Brand’s jokes…….

actually no one is going to believe that are they, it’s too far fetched. I admit it, it’s a lie.

Dev Sherman:
It’s now a war crime (for British soldiers) to threaten someone. I guess every soldier should preface threats with “were it not assizes day I’d (insert threat)”.

By the time the USA had its nuclear bombs ready to drop on Japan the Japonese were utterly defeated and negotiating to surrender.
The destruction of Hiroshoma and Nagasaki was intended as a threat to the USSR and one of the chief worries was that the Japonese might surrender before the bombs were ready

Will Japan apologize for the incarceration of thousands of UK and Australian civilians living and working in places they overran, including children and babies? Will Japan apologize for the brutal treatment, including summary execution, meted out to military POWs and civilian prisoners alike? Will Japan apologize for the forced marches that left many civilians dead? Don’t hold your breath.

The then Prime Minister of Japan apologised on January 16 1998. The statement is online here. No other country, save perhaps Germany, has apologised so profusely for its wartime conduct.

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t just war crimes, they were flagrantly contrary to traditional notions of the Just War, and were recognised as such by impeccably conservative philosophers. And not just once: it is telling that in this book, it is the conservatives who most fervently opposed the deployment of nuclear weapons.

Toby took it that the mere thought of apologising for Hiroshima was some new form of liberal unctuousness. Instead, the flagrant immorality of dropping the bomb is an uncontroversial consequence not only of the traditional Christian understanding of the just war, but of basic traditionalist ethics too. The case for an apology is simply unanswerable. When liberals are doing a better job of upholding traditional Christian morality, it’s time to find another example.

David Lindsay is without a doubt one of the biggest idiots writing about the United States or its traditions. He is totally oblivious to our history or traditions. To suggest that an apology will be conservative, is so utterly ridiculous as to be beyond the laughable. It is clear that Obama has studied the historical myth perpetrated by those at Columbia University or by the likes of Chomsky. This is what he is acting upon. To say this is “conservative” as the pillock Lindsay says is simply laughable. But then his verbal diarrhea is totally laughable.

Sorry, that should have been When liberals and Japanese are doing a better job of upholding traditional Christian morality, it’s time to find another example.

“When liberals and Japanese are doing a better job of upholding traditional Christian morality it’s time to find another example.” – emmanuelgoldstein

I cannot imagine what you think ‘traditional Christian morality’ actually means. Is it something like being more obsequiousness than the next fellow?

“The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t just war crimes …by impeccably conservative philosophers.” – emmanuelgoldstein

Oops. Japanese soldiers used the impeccable ones for bayonet practice.

But why don’t you tell us all about this strange and unfamiliar concept of war crimes and “immorality” in your own words. I mean, what you and the Japanese know that we don’t.

And find “another example” of exactly what? -War criminals who apologize profusely? They’re self-serving and commonly found.

But we’re talking about a leader who isn’t the President of a nation of war criminals, and who may NOT apologize as if he were. savvy?

We may think he is pandering an apology with his bow to the Emperor, but in actuality he is rendering the secret signal for a presidential surrender of his nation.

A nation which is being crippled by its massive spiraling out-of-control debt and endless trade deficits, that is becoming further complicated by an internal Jihad (Radical Islamic Holy War)!

This same nations’ infrastructure, health care system, employment labor force, and its very own independent manufacturing markets are all falling apart like a 5000 year old mummy in a violent car crash!

Obama take a ‘bow’. >>>>>>>>>>>

http://www.volconvo.com/forums/blog.php?b=179

http://thefifthknight.blog.friendster.com/2009/11/obama-messianic-syndrome-oms-public-mental-health-alert-warning/

Fernandez: Stalin was also planning on getting his hands on part of Japan like he did Germany and Korea. The USA, all things considered, took the least bad option.

When I read the pathetic outpourings of people like ‘emmanuelgoldstein’ on here then I know just were the criminal appeasers came from. They did not go away when they were PROVED pathetically and criminally wrong they just melted in to the background and under their rocks to crawl out again now to lead the West to destruction. The destruction they failed with in the 1930’s thanks to great men like Winston Churchill who knew them for what they are