PART III. THE LEGACY OF THE HIROSHIMA MYTH

By Ronald T. Fox

THE LEGACY OF THE HIROSHIMA MYTH

Parts I and II examined distortions of truth surrounding the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These distortions formed a mythology about the bombings that has become deeply embedded in the collective American conscience. Part III offers my thoughts on the legacy of the Hiroshima Myth.

Enduring American allegiance to the Hiroshima Myth—or, conversely, our collective failure to confront its truth—has had a profound impact on the United States, both at home and abroad. Perceiving the atomic bomb as the decisive weapon necessary to end World War II helped create a conviction that nuclear weapons could serve a useful military purpose. Americans came to embrace them as essential protectors of our nation. To be safe, we needed to stockpile nuclear weapons and be prepared to use them, a belief that would spark a massive nuclear arms race in the ensuing decades. Accepting the Hiroshima Myth meant accepting nuclear weapons as a fact of national and international life.

The United States has refused to renounce the first use of nuclear weapons, even if their use risks the end of human civilization. Ask yourselves: would this refusal be the U.S. stance if Americans did not so forcefully believe that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the winning weapons that forced Japan to surrender?

The belief that the bomb killed thousands to save millions imparted a moral righteousness to the bomb that today translates into a collective American numbness to matters of mass destruction, even genocide. Almost anything is permissible if used to “save American lives.” This numbness, along with our belief in American exceptionalism and the decisiveness of military power, helps explain why the US is prone to deploying extensive force and using increasingly destructive weapons against perceived international enemies, however non-threatening they may appear to the reasoned mind.

JULY 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

The recent spike in Covid delta variant cases, and associated deaths, and continued refusal of many Republican faithful to get vaccinated, dominated the July news cycle. At the risk of kicking a dead horse in the mouth, I will confine the July nominations to GOP absurdities on the subject.

NOTE: Also, as you will notice the presence of some frequent IGGY candidates, perhaps it is time, as one Phronesis reader suggested, to retire some of these repeating absurdists to the Ignominious Absurdity Hall-of-Shame, thus joining original inductee Donald Trump. Expect a new induction ceremony in the near future. If you have any IGGY HOS recommendations, please let me know.

1. Tennessee Republican Lawmakers. Ever wondered how far the GQP will push the limits of anti-science?  Look no further than the state of Tennessee.  Straight from the files of “you can’t make this up,” some Republican lawmakers were so aghast at commercials encouraging children to get Covid vaccines (which is a great idea, by the way, of addressing the low vaccine rates we are still struggling with), that they are saying we should just cancel the Health Department.

Some Tennessee Republican lawmakers accused the Tennessee Department of Health of "guilt-tripping" kids to take the Covid-19 vaccine. Rep. Scott Cepicky, (R) Culleoka, motioned to "dissolve" the department altogether over the accusations.

Cepicky said the department's vaccine campaigns featuring children "peer pressure" them into taking the vaccine.

"When you have advertisements like this with a young girl with a patch on her arm all smiling, we know how impressionable our young people are and wanting to fit in in life," Cepicky said.

How terrible!  It’s bad enough teens have to fend off aggressive advertising from tobacco, alcohol, vapes, and big pharma, now we are taunting them with lifesaving, pandemic-busting vaccines!

At the source of this conflict (allegedly) is the state’s “Mature Minor Doctrine” allowing health care providers to treat children age 14+ without parental consent.  These advertisements may brainwash teens into getting health care against the wishes of their science-denying parents!  The horror!

The worst part?  This wasn’t just some off-the-cuff comment that will be ignored and forgotten.  The issue is scheduled to be brought back up in July.  Republicans have a strangle-hold on the state, and so far, only democrats and health officials have spoken up in opposition to the plan.

It may be time for us to move.

PART II. WHY DID THE JAPANESE SURRENDER?

By Ronald T. Fox

WHY DID THE JAPANESE SURRENDER?

It is conventional wisdom that the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, along with Truman’s threat to launch a “reign of ruin” on Japan the likes of which the world had never seen, forced the Japanese Supreme Council (consisting of the six top members of the government—The Big Six) to accept the Potsdam Declaration demanding its “unconditional surrender.” Assessing the validity of this claim requires looking at the war situation from Japan’s perspective. Were the atomic bombings, and the threat of more to come, the main reason Japan’s Supreme Council decided to surrender? To answer this question, it is necessary to examine the timing of the surrender decision as well as how the top Japanese political and military leaders saw their strategic options in August of 1945.

JUNE 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Pardoned Dirtbag Michael Flynn. Over the weekend, the now-pardoned traitor Michael Flynn appeared at a QAnon-themed event in Dallas, Texas, where he once again seemed to support the notion of a violent pro-Trump rebellion to topple the government. This was met with approval by the Trump-supporting crowd. The movement of oft-delusional conspiracy theory promoters is well represented among the seditionists who staged the Jan. 6 insurrection.  Those still demanding that individual state electoral totals be nullified because of unspecified frauds, believe that the entire election was a scam or undercover front and actually Trump is still the legitimate president. They point to an August date when Trump will drive his gilded golf cart back onto the White House grounds, arrest Joe Biden, and begins mass executions of all those who doubted him. Or something to that effect.

Yes, Michael Flynn may have been caught dead to rights in acting as influence-peddler for foreign government while moonlighting as Trump adviser—which, among Trump's many advisers, now seems to have been the most common single occupation—but now that Trump's freed him from his criminal past he appears to believe it is time for a good, old-fashioned coup. That's what he told the Q crowd, anyway.

A self-identified "Marine" in the audience posed the question, "I want to know why what happened in Minamar[sic] can't happen here?", a reference to the recent military coup in Myanmar that has been promoted in Trump-supporting circles as a playbook for reinstalling Trump as president in this country.

"No reason. I mean, it should happen here. No Reason. That's right," Flynn replied.

After video of these remarks exploded through the internet, the ex-national security adviser once again bizarrely attempted to claim that he specifically did not say the specific thing he was filmed saying. "There is NO reason whatsoever for any coup in America, and I do not and have not called for any action of that sort," he bellowed.

As the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake points out, this has become a routine for Flynn. He says something clearly supportive of martial law, an overthrow of government, or the QAnon movement itself, it gains national attention, and he or an ally responds by claiming he never meant the thing and you're all fake news for thinking he did. Flynn, however, is a liar through-and-through. He was ostensibly fired from his White House position in the first place for lying to federal investigators and to American Jesus Mike Pence. He's not good at it.  Like Trump, he simply gaslights his audiences with toddleresque claims that whatever you saw happening didn't. If you're a believer you'll go along with it, and if you're not then he doesn't care.

Flynn appears to be fully off the rails. It's not clear that he himself knows what he believes and what he doesn't, but he seems utterly unconcerned with the violence that he and his allies have already unleashed. Instead, those in Trump's orbit seem intent on pushing for more. You probably won't see Michael Flynn on the front lines of whatever new violence comes after the Jan. 6 insurrection, but at the conferences and meet-ups that validate those violent views, he continues to poke and prod for it.

MAY 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Arizona House Rep. Joseph Chaplik. From the Church of the Perpetual Face Palm (aka the modern-day Republican Party) comes another wee dollop of “what the fuck?” So how do you even begin to respond to this?

The Republican-controlled Arizona House voted along party lines last week to allow state businesses to ignore any and all city, town, or county measures requiring their customers to wear masks. In other words, the state that flipped blue last year for the first time since 1996 has decided to flip the fuck out. Why? Well, as the sponsor of this anti-mask bill, Rep. Joseph Chaplik, would have you believe, it’s because we didn’t all die of AIDS back in the ‘80s.

In the House debate, Rep. Randall Friese, a Tucson Democrat who is a physician, said masks are part of the “very basic, important tools,” along with hand-washing and social distancing, to curb the spread.

Chaplik, however, argued that the mandates are an overreaction and that society has managed to survive other viral outbreaks without masks.

For example, he cited HIV “that was going to wipe our global destruction of human bodies with AIDS.”

“We heard about that in the ’80s,” Chaplik said. “Yet no masks were required.”

Uh … who wants to tell him?

People are fond of saying Republicans these days are virulently anti-science. But that suggests they actually know what science is. This feels more like a bunch of little kids who’ve never tried a vegetable saying they hate broccoli. I don’t know that they’re anti-science so much as they’re anti-scientist—because scientists keep telling them they can’t just eat Pixie Stix all day and expect to stay healthy.

They’ll do what they want, dammit, because FREEDOM!

Another GOP representative, Bret Roberts, questioned the overall effectiveness of masks, asking, “If they work, how are people still catching COVID?”

Uh, okay, now who wants to tell him?

Thank God we now have a president who takes COVID seriously. Unfortunately, we can’t just throw fools like this in the gulag because, you know, freedom.

But that doesn’t mean we have to keep reelecting them.

APRIL 2021 IGNOMINIOUS ABSURDITY OF THE MONTH: THE IGGY

1. Trump Attorney Sidney Powell. It’s been amply established that Sidney Powell bears a large measure of moral responsibility—at the very least—for creating the poisonous environment that led to the Jan. 6 insurrection. Powell was one of the main legal lowlives behind Trump’s misbegotten legal effort to steal another term.

Powell’s claims to fame were a series of lawsuits that alleged Dominion Voting Systems was in cahoots with Venezuela to steal victory from Trump—the infamous “Kraken” lawsuits. All four of them crashed and burned—but not before her claims led to Dominion and its employees facing vicious harassment and trolling. At least one Dominion employee, Eric Coomer, was driven into hiding.

Partly due to this, Dominion filed a whopping $1.3 billion defamation suit against Powell, her law firm, and her nonprofit organization, Defend the Republic. Well, early in the month, Powell sought to throw out the suit. Her reasoning? Wait for it—she now says “no reasonable person” would believe her claims.

No, this isn’t really snark. She actually said this in an actual legal filing.

In her motion to dismiss, Powell does not argue that the statements were true. She claims they are not actionable because they are protected statements of political opinion.

“Reasonable people understand that the ‘language of the political arena, like the language used in labor disputes … is often vituperative, abusive and inexact,'” her motion to dismiss argues. “It is likewise a ‘well recognized principle that political statements are inherently prone to exaggeration and hyperbole.'”

Powell goes on to say that Dominion called her theories “wild” and “outlandish,” and in so doing support the notion that “no reasonable person” would take them seriously. Rather, she would have us believe her statements were merely “claims that await testing by the courts.”

So, in other words, Powell is tacitly admitting that when she made her much ballyhooed vow to “release the Kraken,” she knew it was based on hokum. And she also knew that when she was filing these statements that they were baloney.

I’m not a lawyer, but even I know that when you make court filings, you’re asserting that your arguments are based on fact. Not, though, if you’re a Trumper.

LEGISLATING FROM THE BENCH: THE REAL G.O.P. AGENDA

By Ronald T. Fox

If you’re like me and inclined toward progressive politics, you likely continue to be amazed as to why so many Americans continue to vote for Republicans when many of their political beliefs and actions, especially on economic and financial issues, are so broadly unpopular. Solid majorities of Americans support gun control, regulating big banks, reducing greenhouse gasses, a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy, laws to protect public health and safety, a wider access to healthcare, raising the minimum wage, protecting voting rights, and a progressive tax system that makes corporations and wealthy individuals pay more. These are all issues where republican lawmakers have defied the majority will of the American people.

How do they continue to get away with it? I’ve written in the past on Phronesis about how our political system is structured to thwart majority rule, citing the disproportionate influence moneyed interests, which are easily expressed through a constitutional system that in the electoral college, the small state-dominated Senate, and state and local governments stifles majority sentiment. I’ve written about the impact of gerrymandering and the failure of out communication outlets to educate the public on the realities of power and influence in our governance. I’ve addressed the failure of the Democratic Party to address working class concerns. I've posted about white resentment of identity politics. I’ve even pointed to the stupidity of voters (though such condescending academic preaching admittedly contributes to alienating ordinary Americans).

These factors help explain how Republicans, and their wealthy backers, have been able to thwart popular progressive legislation and retain their solid, if primarily white, electoral base. Still it is astonishing how a political party that has no clear legislative agenda other than obstruction, campaigns without a platform, goes at length to tell us what they’re against rather than for, has been so successful in achieving a policy agenda skewed toward rewarding the few Americans with wealth and power.

Ian Nillhiser’s opinion piece in the April 2, New York Times offers a clue: the Republican Party relies on the judiciary. The Supreme Court’s conservative majority has for decades pushed an agenda that benefits corporations and the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. Court decisions have advanced the Republican vision in which government is prevented from regulating business, protecting civil and voting rights, and providing a basic social safety net.  Why should Republicans operate openly in the messy political arena when they can quietly achieve goals through the courts? How many Americans are aware of, and can comprehend, complicated court decisions, or non-decisions when they refuse to hear a case? You get the point: legislating from the bench enables them to dodge accountability for unpopular policies.

The conclusion for progressives and liberal to draw from the current reality of judicial legislating is depressing, to say the least. With conservatives controlling the Supreme Court and much of our nation’s networks of federal, as well as state and local, courts, and with most justices relatively young, we face years of rulings destined to benefit wealthy private interests and the broader agenda of conservatives. This endangers President Biden’s agenda, but, more ominously, our cherished Democracy.

I’m including Nillhiser’s op-ed below as a guest commentary. For a fuller exploration of his thesis, read his book: The Agenda: How a Republican Supreme Court is Reshaping America.