Hiroshima:
Hamlet bombs out
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
This article was released on Aug. 7, 1995. It appeared in the Aug. 18 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Respecting the next several decades, and beyond, the vital strategic interests of the United States depend upon establishing secure forms of cooperation with Russia and the key nations of East Asia, most notably China and Japan. The stability of those nations, and our relations with them are crucial; otherwise, the world as a whole becomes a most perilous place for us all.
Whatever criticisms some might direct against it, the Clinton administration has been working toward such stability, often despite attempted sabotage, especially from London, but also from well-known hindquarters. The dominant factions centered in London are doing the utmost to wreck U.S. strategic interests: attempting to destabilize countries in South and Central America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, Russia, the Balkans, and East Asia, among other locales. So far, the United States under Clinton has kept its head above water, and has had a few significant, if inconclusive successes.
Now, comes another London-directed game. This time, a pack of credulous Americans--notably including veterans of the World War II Pacific Theater--have fallen into the trap. This threatens the fragile stability of U.S. relations with East Asia, and also Russia, threatening incalculable consequences for all of the nations of this planet.
These days, many Americans seem to find it difficult to resist a queen. Each report of dirty deeds which merry old London is doing to the United States, or Africa, or the Middle East, or the Balkans, brings a George-Bush-like, "I'm-sick-and-tired-of" whine, protesting: "Conspiracy theories!" One hears Bush-league fairy tales on the subject of a poor little island fallen upon hard times, or of a withered old Snow White's Disneyland monarchy in tatters. The common premise of such heart-rending fantasies, is the popular delusion that the United Kingdom is a nation, rather than a merely make-believe nation, the financial-oligarchical plantation which it is in fact.
The subjects of the U.K. have really very little to say about British policy; policy is made by a Venice-style oligarchy of several thousand persons, of whom the currently dominant faction is typified by the "Doge" of Edinburgh's World Wide Fund for Nature, or the wild right-wing doctrines of Lord William Rees-Mogg, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne, and such Bush-linked Dwayne Andreas cronies as former Soviet Ambassador Bob Strauss and the Hollinger Corporation press empire. It is that dominant faction of that few thousand oil- and olig-archs, typified by the interests of Royal Dutch Shell, which makes current British policy against the United States.
The following report has a double significance. It outlines what might be called the "Hiroshima Gambit," a sophisticated sort of ongoing chaos operation, which the London oligarchy is conducting against the flanks of the United States' vital strategic interests. That operation is important in itself; but, it also illustrates the way in which the same roster of British con-men, time and time again, succeeds in swindling the United States into buying the proverbial used car without engine or wheels. Sad to say, the United States is taken in, again and again, not because those British oligarchs are so smart, but because so many influential Americans insist, so stubbornly, on being so terribly dumb!
Right now, Americans who insist that dropping the uranium bomb on Hiroshima "saved one million American lives," are being very stubbornly, terribly dumb.
The Hiroshima flap
Within approximately a week following author Gar Alperovitz's review in the London Sunday Times of July 20, 1995, anyone who wished to know should have known. Alperovitz is working against his native United States, in the British interest. After two centuries of many like Jeremy Bentham's Aaron Burr, that, by itself, should not surprise us. What is pathetic, is the number of presently senior U.S. figures, who have decided to play the fool in this British game.On the surface, the issue is the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. nuclear bombing of the city of Hiroshima in Japan. Alperovitz writes, that there was no military necessity for the nuclear bombing of Japan cities; that far, he is right. The trouble is, too many veterans of the World War II Pacific Theater insist on retelling the lie which President Truman's crowd told them back then, that "one million American lives" had been saved by the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. That foolishness, by those veterans, could spell disaster for the United States whose honor they pretend, mistakenly, to be defending. They are falling into London's Alperovitz trap.
I was in service in northern Burma at the time. I heard the Truman administration's lie, just as the rest of my fellow-veterans from the Pacific Theater did. At that moment, I believed the lie, too. Later, I corrected my error; I checked the facts, and found that I had been misled.
Also, after the war, I reread Shakespeare's Hamlet. Hamlet was a swashbuckling, macho fool, ready to thrust his sword at the man behind the curtain before he knew who was there. Hamlet was a born soldier, afraid of nothing but ghosts and ideas which conflicted with his well-established prejudices; it was those fears that killed him, and those stubborn prejudices which led him, and his kingdom to their doom. Like Hamlet, some surviving veterans of the Pacific Theater choose to blindly defend the lying myth of "The One Million American Lives Saved." Like Hamlet, those old swashbucklers, too, are afraid of ghosts, and of ideas which might be contrary to a popularized mythology.
Consider the essential points. First, the facts about the U.S.A.-Japan military situation, 1945. After that, the significance of the way in which London is playing the issue of the Hiroshima bombing today: why that, which those thick-headed veterans are doing, is so dangerous to the United States today.
Spring/Summer 1945
By April 12, 1945, the day of President Franklin Roosevelt's untimely death, he, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and Adm. Chester Nimitz had led the United States and Australia to assured victory in the Pacific Theater. Already, Japan's Emperor Hirohito was negotiating surrender with President Roosevelt, and other U.S.A. allies, working through Pope Pius XII's acting secretary for diplomatic affairs, Giovanni Montini (later Pope Paul VI). At the time Roosevelt died, the islands of Japan were already effectively blockaded; Japan's military situation was hopeless. Surrender on the Emperor's proposed terms was virtually assured within a few more months, as the logistical noose tightened sufficiently to end all Japan military leaders' resistance to the Emperor's will. At the time, the best U.S. guess was Autumn 1945, by no later than November.
There was no need for a military invasion of the islands of Japan. There was no military reason for dropping those nuclear weapons on two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of a Japan which had been utterly defeated; there was only a British geopolitical motive, which had almost nothing to do with Japan as such.
As Niccoló Machiavelli's commentaries on the ten books of Livy emphasized to many generations of professional military officers, there is no military justification for a deadly assault on an adversary who is already hopelessly defeated, and cornered; to invade Japan head-on, in such circumstances, would have been a folly fit for the court-martialling of any commander incompetent enough to order it.
There was one crucial motive for that bombing: Winston Churchill and Company wished those bombs used. Once Churchill's political adversary, President Franklin Roosevelt, was dead and buried, Churchill and his U.S. accomplices had their way with Harry S Truman.
Among London's first steps toward setting up dupe Truman to drop the bomb, was sending British asset Allen Dulles and his wretched James Jesus Angleton into Italy, to wreck the channel of peace negotiations being run through OSS Italy, and to discredit with lies the Vatican's mediation between Tokyo and Washington. Inside Washington, D.C., itself, the key London asset was the group of so-called "brain trusters" gathered around Churchill's crony, Averell Harriman, especially Secretary of War Henry Stimson. London's other key asset, Truman's Secretary of State James Byrnes, was a special figure in the configuration; but, the key was Gen. Douglas MacArthur's deadly, Anglophile enemies inside Washington, the crowd of the so-called "best and brightest" of the Liberal Establishment, around the patron of President George Bush's father, and, later of George Bush himself, Averell Harriman.
To understand the U.S. side of Hiroshima nuclear politics, keep your eye on the Harriman-versus-MacArthur controversy of 1945-51, and keep your eye on the significance of post-MacArthur U.N.O. policy in the Korean War: the model for dragging the United States as a nation down into the quicksands of the 1964-75 Indo-China war, and into London's 1992-95 Serbian Balkan War, conducted under U.N.O. management, later on.
First, look at Gar Alperovitz's role in this affair.
The Enola Gay and Gar Alperovitz
The recent public stir over the Hiroshima issue began during 1994. The opening gun was an attack upon the Smithsonian Institution's plans to feature a partial reconstruction of the "Enola Gay," the B-29 bomber that dumped the uranium bomb on Hiroshima. The exhibit was intended as a memorial for the 1995 fiftieth anniversary of the bombing. In response to questions which the exhibitors raised about the need for the bombing, there was a flurry of letters and other documentation in the press, asserting that the bomb "saved 'One Million American Lives' "; there were a few token pieces expressing an opposing view. It was in that 1994 time-frame, that I wrote and published my 71-page report, addressing this subject: "How Bertrand Russell Became An Evil Man," in the Fall 1994 edition of Fidelio quarterly. For a time, the Hiroshima issue grew relatively quiet; once the somewhat modified Smithsonian exhibit opened, and August 1995 approached, the controversy flared again.
A veteran of the 1960s New Left, Gar Alperovitz, has contributed an increasingly prominent part in this 1994-95 process, even prior to his surfacing as an asset of British interests, with his London Sunday Times piece.
Alperovitz has a staked-out interest in the issue: his current, 847-page, $32.50 book: The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb: And the Architecture of an American Myth. This book has been used to establish Alperovitz as a putative authority on the subject of the Hiroshima-bombing policy. He has been wielding that literary authority with significant success over the recent months: in such locations as the Washington Post, the New York Times, the London Sunday Times, the London Independent daily, and the BBC.
On the least complicated aspect of the Hiroshima issue, whether or not there was a military need to bomb Japan, Alperovitz is usually right, and has the facts to prove it.
However, as it is said, Satan sometimes tells a half-truth, for the Devil's own reason; so it goes with Alperovitz. If the need to defeat Japan supplies no proper military premise for the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, what then was the real motive of Stimson and those behind him? To that question, Alperovitz replies with a threadbare, decades-old relic from early during the Cold War era: to threaten Russia. That is the kind of half-truth of which big lies are made. That is the bait for the British strategic trap into which the Hamlets among our Pacific Theater veterans have fallen.
The key to the bombing of Hiroshima is Bertrand Russell's "The Atomic Bomb and the Prevention of War," published, a year after the bombing of Hiroshima, in the September 1946 edition of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Another key to the bombing of Hiroshima, is the speech delivered by Russell's crony, Dr. Leo Szilard, at the Second Pugwash Conference, held in Quebec, in 1958; this was the address which fully earned Szilard the fictionalized role of "Dr. Strangelove," in the Stanley Kubrick film of the same name. Another key to the 1945 bombing, is a May 10, 1982 public confession by a veteran "Pugwashee" and former U.S. Secretary of State, Henry A. Kissinger. On that occasion, Kissinger bragged of having been a British agent during "my White House incarnation" (of 1969-77), and explained that he was politically on the side of wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill, against the American patriotic, anti-colonialist tradition of President Franklin Roosevelt.
As Russell and his crony, former British foreign-intelligence chief H.G. Wells, had insisted repeatedly before the war, their objective was to make war so horrifying, that nations would surrender their sovereignty to the arbitration of a world government, such as the United Nations Organization (U.N.O.)'s "Blue Helmets," instead. Russell's goal was never to eliminate war, but to eliminate the existence of the nation-state, especially the United States which Russell, like his grandfather, Lord John, envied and hated so bitterly all his adult life.
What the British oligarchy is doing, by bull-baiting duped old veterans with Alperovitz's sly half-truths, is to poison the foreign-policy atmosphere of the 1996 U.S. election campaign with the rewarmed lie of the "One Million American Lives Saved." To those credulous Americans, provocateur Alperovitz offers, "If not Japan, then Russia." The effect of such a ruckus among already half-crazed American populists, is to tend to render the foreign policy of a President politically unmanageable during the reelection-campaign period. At the same time, that London-managed chatter in the U.S.A. and British mass media, enrages already infuriated Moscow, Tokyo, and Beijing to the relatively maximum degree.
One key fact, which should suffice to upset London asset Alperovitz's version of Hiroshima, is that it was not the United States alone which dropped the bomb on Hiroshima: It was Churchill delivering orders to dupe Truman through Secretaries Byrnes and Stimson. It was the same policy used for the Churchill war-crime known as the militarily useless British fire-bombing of Dresden. The targetting of a militarily irrelevant civilian center, Hiroshima, for the dropping of the first bomb, was a direct continuation of the Churchill-Lindemann imitation of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels' policy of Schrecklichkeit: blind terrorism against civilian populations (as in Oklahoma recently) as a strategic weapon.
There is a second fact, a much deeper reason for both the Hiroshima bombing and the London propaganda stunt on whose behalf Alperovitz is currently deployed. Whoever does not know and understand this fact, is not qualified even to speak the phrase "foreign policy." The name of this fact is "British balance-of-power doctrine," the only doctrine which Henry A. Kissinger ever really learned during his 1950s and 1960s apprenticeship in the British foreign-intelligence service.
'Britain has no permanent allies'
Britain's Lord Palmerston explained the monarchy's "Balance of Power" politics to the British Parliament this way: Her Majesty's government has no permanent allies, only permanent interests. This standing British "balance of power" doctrine, was established by the present monarchy's mother, the financier oligarchy of Venice, by approximately A.D. 1510.
That latter watershed is the triumph of Venice's diplomacy, in the time of the notorious Gasparo Contarini, in pitting Venice's enemies, the League of Cambrai, at one another's throats, in a moment when the League was about to rid Europe once and for all of the usurious evil which Venice represented. Later, during the last quarter of that Sixteenth Century, Venice adopted the policy of developing the Netherlands and London as the capital of a new, worldwide financial and maritime power, to be a clone of Venice. Venice took control of the English monarchy by 1603, established its British monarchy in 1714, and launched the British Empire, under the direction of the William Fitzmaurice Petty known as "Shelburne," beginning 1763.
The history of Europe since A.D. 1510 poses the crucial question: How did tiny, physically weak states such as Venice and, later, Venice's clone, Britain, contrive to exert imperial diplomatic hegemony over many nations more numerously populated and more powerful than itself? The answer, is "balance of power" politics: to play powerful potential competitors against one another, and to orchestrate the balance of power between them to one's advantage.
When Britain sensed its power threatened by economic cooperation among 1890s France, Germany, and Russia, London organized the Entente Cordiale, with the Anglophile French faction of Palmerston's former puppet, Napoleon III, and, with aid of Britain's Serbian puppets, created the Balkan Wars and the Triple Entente, putting France, Germany, and Russia at one another's throats in World War I.
When Britain feared, in 1932-33, that the Great Depression was impelling Germany toward economic cooperation with the Soviet Union, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne's stepfather, Montagu Norman, worked with the New York Morgans and Harrimans to bring Nazi Adolf Hitler to power in Germany, to ensure a future, mutually devastating war between Germany and Russia, in which Britain hoped the two nations would bleed each other to death. The British monarchy backed Hitler's consolidation of power in Germany, during 1933-38, and then abandoned its Hitler protégé, in preparation for the pre-arranged general war in Europe.
During World War II, Britain's great fears were, that the U.S.A. would force Britain to accept bringing Germany to defeat "prematurely"--before a sufficient number of Germans and Russians had been killed to satisfy Winston Churchill's appetite. The other great fear among Churchill's circles then, was that an anti-colonialist Roosevelt would organize relations with a realistic Stalin and a unified China, to the purpose of defeating London's design for the postwar world. London's answer to this latter threat, was to organize a balance of nuclear terror between Washington and Moscow, which London would manage, through the aid of its agents within both capitals, ensuring decaying London's continued intellectual and financial hegemony over a "balance of power" world-order.
Today, the International Monetary Fund-centered, worldwide monetary and financial system is heading toward an unavoidable, early collapse. Either powerful nation-states put the old financial order into government-controlled bankruptcy-reorganization, or the world as a whole descends into chaos. The majority within the British oligarchy, those allied with voices such as Prince Philip, Lord William Rees-Mogg, and the Hollinger Corporation press, prefer chaos. A stable new monetary and financial order, arising out of the bankruptcy of the old, would represent a world in which London's former financial position was ended, and the power of the London-centered oligarchy--Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, and so on--reduced to also-rans or worse.
In this circumstance, that faction, currently in the saddle in London, is engaged worldwide in a wrecking-campaign, pure and simple. London uses its right-wing Israeli and Hamas assets, in the attempt to destroy the efforts of Rabin and Peres, together with Yasser Arafat, to build peaceful cooperation in the Middle East. London acts, around the planet, with the intent to ruin U.S.A. Clinton administration policy in the Balkans, and toward Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, Delhi, and western Europe as a whole. London uses willing assets such as former President George Bush's Halcyon mob, London's assets inside the Criminal Division of the Justice Department and FBI, and outright London assets such as the American Spectator and Speaker Newt Gingrich, to cause as much chaos inside the U.S.A. as possible.
The Kitson-style gang-and-countergang operation which London has orchestrated between Gar Alperovitz and the Hamlets of the Pacific Theater veterans circles, is an important, and potentially dangerous, added element in London's global chaos game. One hopes those Pacific Theater veterans will come back to their senses before their Hamlet-like, swashbuckling fear of ghosts and serious thinking, causes some very unpatriotic damage to the future of the United States.
