Thursday, June 11, 2009
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Monday, June 1, 2009
Book Portfolio: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
In, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, the author, Dee Brown, shows how the Native Americans were mistreated by the Europeans and later by the Americans during the civil war era.
The way that the Native Americans varied. It all started way back when Columbus discovered the Indies in 1492. At first, like how most things start, things between the Native Americans and the European explorers were okay and the natives welcomed the Europeans with opened arms and would trade with them and they would even help them.
The theme in history would have to be how the Native Americans were mistreated severely by the European settlers and later by the Americans. This is shown by the author when the author states events throughout American history where the Native Americans were mistreated. For example, when the Europeans were first settling in America, they would, at first, treat the natives with respect and would trade with them and do all sorts of things with them as if they were life long pals and then later they would betray them and steal their stuff and kill them for the newly found land.
This perspective to the theme is important because it reveals what really went on between the Native Americans and the Americans during the Colonial era through the mid to late 1800's.
All in all, I would definitely have to say that the author, Dee Brown, shows how the Native Americans were mistreated by the Europeans and later by the Americans during the civil war era.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Daniel S. American Imperialism
American Empire
Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in the year 1897: "In strict confidence . . . I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."....
There was heated argument in the United States about whether or not to take the Philippines. As one story has it, President McKinley told a group of ministers visiting the White House how he came to his decision:
Before you go I would like to say just a word about the Philippine business. . . . The truth is I didn't want the Philippines, and when they came to us as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them. . . . I sought counsel from all sides -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- but got little help. I thought first we would only take Manila; then Luzon, then other islands, perhaps, also. I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way -- I don't know how it was, but it came: 1) That we could not give them back to Spain -- that would be cowardly and dishonorable. 2) That we could not turn them over to France or Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient -- that would be bad business and discreditable. 3) That we could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and 4) That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly.
What is disturbing about this is that people back then thought of the Philippines as a business deal and not a place where actual people live.
The Filipinos did not get the same message from God. In February 1899, they rose in revolt against American rule, as they had rebelled several times against the Spanish. Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino leader, who had earlier been brought back from China by U.S. warships to lead soldiers against Spain, now became leader of the insurrectos fighting the United States. He proposed Filipino independence within a U.S. protectorate, but this was rejected. It took the United States three years to crush the rebellion, using seventy thousand troops -- four times as many as were landed in Cuba -- and thousands of battle casualties, many times more than in Cuba. It was a harsh war. For the Filipinos the death rate was enormous from battle casualties and from disease. The taste of empire was on the lips of politicians and business interests throughout the country now. Racism, paternalism, and talk of money mingled with talk of destiny and civilization. In the Senate, Albert Beveridge spoke, January 9, 1900, for the dominant economic and political interests of the country:
Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever. . . . And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. . . . We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . . The Pacific is our ocean. . . . Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. . . . The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East. . . . No land in America surpasses in fertility the plains and valleys of Luzon. Rice and coffee, sugar and cocoanuts, hemp and tobacco. . . . The wood of the Philippines can supply the furniture of the world for a century to come. At Cebu the best informed man on the island told me that 40 miles of Cebu's mountain chain are practically mountains of coal. . . . I have a nugget of pure gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. . . . My own belief is that there are not 100 men among them who comprehend what Anglo-Saxon self-government even means, and there are over 5,000,000 people to be governed. It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse. . . . Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals.
Again with the business deals and The Philippines being "ours forever". Along with the fact that it was used for trading products with China, making it extremely valuable to America at the time.
The fighting with the rebels began, McKinley said, when the insurgents attacked American forces. But later, American soldiers testified that the United States had fired the first shot. After the war, an army officer speaking in Boston's Faneuil Hall said his colonel had given him orders to provoke a conflict with the insurgents. In February 1899, a banquet took place in Boston to celebrate the Senate's ratification of the peace treaty with Spain. President McKinley himself had been invited by the wealthy textile manufacturer W. B. Plunkett to speak. It was the biggest banquet in the nation's history: two thousand diners, four hundred waiters. McKinley said that "no imperial designs lurk in the American mind," and at the same banquet, to the same diners, his Postmaster General, Charles Emory Smith, said that "what we want is a market for our surplus." William James, the Harvard philosopher, wrote a letter to the Boston Transcript about "the cold pot grease of McKinley's cant at the recent Boston banquet" and said the Philippine operation "reeked of the infernal adroitness of the great department store, which has reached perfect expertness in the art of killing silently, and with no public squalling or commotion, the neighboring small concerns." James was part of a movement of prominent American businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals who formed the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 and carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was an odd group (Andrew Carnegie belonged), including antilabor aristocrats and scholars, united in a common moral outrage at what was being done to the Filipinos in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James's angry statement: "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles." The Anti-Imperialist League published the letters of soldiers doing duty in the Philippines. A captain from Kansas wrote: "Caloocan was supposed to contain 17,000 inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native." A private from the same outfit said he had "with my own hand set fire to over fifty houses of Filipinos after the victory at Caloocan. Women and children were wounded by our fire." A volunteer from the state of Washington wrote: "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill 'niggers.' . . . This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces." It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs -- hanged, burned, mutilated. The Filipinos were brown-skinned, physically identifiable, strange-speaking and strange-looking to Americans. To the usual indiscriminate brutality of war was thus added the factor of racial hostility. In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:
The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog. . . . Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.
The unneeded loss of life (mass genocide) just to take over a place that the U.S. didn't need in the first place but captured just for business with China.
Early in 1901 an American general returning to the United States from southern Luzon, said:
One-sixth of the natives of Luzon have either been killed or have died of the dengue fever in the last few years. The loss of life by killing alone has been very great, but I think not one man has been slain except where his death has served the legitimate purposes of war. It has been necessary to adopt what in other countries would probably be thought harsh measures.
Secretary of War Elihu Root responded to the charges of brutality: "The war in the Philippines has been conducted by the American army with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare. . . . with self-restraint and with humanity never surpassed." In Manila, a Marine named Littletown Waller, a major, was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar. Other marine officers described his testimony:
The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied "Everything over ten."
In the province of Batangas, the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one-third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease. Mark Twain commented on the Philippine war:
We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God -- and the phrase is the government's, not mine -- we are a World Power.
American firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Filipino rebels could put together. In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled so high that the Americans used their bodies for breastworks. A British witness said: "This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery." He was wrong; it was war. For the rebels to hold out against such odds for years meant that they had the support of the population. General Arthur MacArthur, commander of the Filipino war, said: " . . . I believed that Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon -- the native population, that is -- was opposed to us." But he said he was "reluctantly compelled" to believe this because the guerrilla tactics of the Filipino army "depended upon almost complete unity of action of the entire native population."
Theodore Roosevelt wrote to a friend in the year 1897: "In strict confidence . . . I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one."....
There was heated argument in the United States about whether or not to take the Philippines. As one story has it, President McKinley told a group of ministers visiting the White House how he came to his decision:
Before you go I would like to say just a word about the Philippine business. . . . The truth is I didn't want the Philippines, and when they came to us as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with them. . . . I sought counsel from all sides -- Democrats as well as Republicans -- but got little help. I thought first we would only take Manila; then Luzon, then other islands, perhaps, also. I walked the floor of the White House night after night until midnight; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went down on my knees and prayed Almighty God for light and guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me this way -- I don't know how it was, but it came: 1) That we could not give them back to Spain -- that would be cowardly and dishonorable. 2) That we could not turn them over to France or Germany, our commercial rivals in the Orient -- that would be bad business and discreditable. 3) That we could not leave them to themselves -- they were unfit for self-government -- and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was; and 4) That there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed and went to sleep and slept soundly.
What is disturbing about this is that people back then thought of the Philippines as a business deal and not a place where actual people live.
The Filipinos did not get the same message from God. In February 1899, they rose in revolt against American rule, as they had rebelled several times against the Spanish. Emilio Aguinaldo, a Filipino leader, who had earlier been brought back from China by U.S. warships to lead soldiers against Spain, now became leader of the insurrectos fighting the United States. He proposed Filipino independence within a U.S. protectorate, but this was rejected. It took the United States three years to crush the rebellion, using seventy thousand troops -- four times as many as were landed in Cuba -- and thousands of battle casualties, many times more than in Cuba. It was a harsh war. For the Filipinos the death rate was enormous from battle casualties and from disease. The taste of empire was on the lips of politicians and business interests throughout the country now. Racism, paternalism, and talk of money mingled with talk of destiny and civilization. In the Senate, Albert Beveridge spoke, January 9, 1900, for the dominant economic and political interests of the country:
Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever. . . . And just beyond the Philippines are China's illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. . . . We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world. . . . The Pacific is our ocean. . . . Where shall we turn for consumers of our surplus? Geography answers the question. China is our natural customer. . . . The Philippines give us a base at the door of all the East. . . . No land in America surpasses in fertility the plains and valleys of Luzon. Rice and coffee, sugar and cocoanuts, hemp and tobacco. . . . The wood of the Philippines can supply the furniture of the world for a century to come. At Cebu the best informed man on the island told me that 40 miles of Cebu's mountain chain are practically mountains of coal. . . . I have a nugget of pure gold picked up in its present form on the banks of a Philippine creek. . . . My own belief is that there are not 100 men among them who comprehend what Anglo-Saxon self-government even means, and there are over 5,000,000 people to be governed. It has been charged that our conduct of the war has been cruel. Senators, it has been the reverse. . . . Senators must remember that we are not dealing with Americans or Europeans. We are dealing with Orientals.
Again with the business deals and The Philippines being "ours forever". Along with the fact that it was used for trading products with China, making it extremely valuable to America at the time.
The fighting with the rebels began, McKinley said, when the insurgents attacked American forces. But later, American soldiers testified that the United States had fired the first shot. After the war, an army officer speaking in Boston's Faneuil Hall said his colonel had given him orders to provoke a conflict with the insurgents. In February 1899, a banquet took place in Boston to celebrate the Senate's ratification of the peace treaty with Spain. President McKinley himself had been invited by the wealthy textile manufacturer W. B. Plunkett to speak. It was the biggest banquet in the nation's history: two thousand diners, four hundred waiters. McKinley said that "no imperial designs lurk in the American mind," and at the same banquet, to the same diners, his Postmaster General, Charles Emory Smith, said that "what we want is a market for our surplus." William James, the Harvard philosopher, wrote a letter to the Boston Transcript about "the cold pot grease of McKinley's cant at the recent Boston banquet" and said the Philippine operation "reeked of the infernal adroitness of the great department store, which has reached perfect expertness in the art of killing silently, and with no public squalling or commotion, the neighboring small concerns." James was part of a movement of prominent American businessmen, politicians, and intellectuals who formed the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898 and carried on a long campaign to educate the American public about the horrors of the Philippine war and the evils of imperialism. It was an odd group (Andrew Carnegie belonged), including antilabor aristocrats and scholars, united in a common moral outrage at what was being done to the Filipinos in the name of freedom. Whatever their differences on other matters, they would all agree with William James's angry statement: "God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles." The Anti-Imperialist League published the letters of soldiers doing duty in the Philippines. A captain from Kansas wrote: "Caloocan was supposed to contain 17,000 inhabitants. The Twentieth Kansas swept through it, and now Caloocan contains not one living native." A private from the same outfit said he had "with my own hand set fire to over fifty houses of Filipinos after the victory at Caloocan. Women and children were wounded by our fire." A volunteer from the state of Washington wrote: "Our fighting blood was up, and we all wanted to kill 'niggers.' . . . This shooting human beings beats rabbit hunting all to pieces." It was a time of intense racism in the United States. In the years between 1889 and 1903, on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs -- hanged, burned, mutilated. The Filipinos were brown-skinned, physically identifiable, strange-speaking and strange-looking to Americans. To the usual indiscriminate brutality of war was thus added the factor of racial hostility. In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported:
The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog. . . . Our soldiers have pumped salt water into men to make them talk, and have taken prisoners people who held up their hands and peacefully surrendered, and an hour later, without an atom of evidence to show that they were even insurrectos, stood them on a bridge and shot them down one by one, to drop into the water below and float down, as examples to those who found their bullet-loaded corpses.
The unneeded loss of life (mass genocide) just to take over a place that the U.S. didn't need in the first place but captured just for business with China.
Early in 1901 an American general returning to the United States from southern Luzon, said:
One-sixth of the natives of Luzon have either been killed or have died of the dengue fever in the last few years. The loss of life by killing alone has been very great, but I think not one man has been slain except where his death has served the legitimate purposes of war. It has been necessary to adopt what in other countries would probably be thought harsh measures.
Secretary of War Elihu Root responded to the charges of brutality: "The war in the Philippines has been conducted by the American army with scrupulous regard for the rules of civilized warfare. . . . with self-restraint and with humanity never surpassed." In Manila, a Marine named Littletown Waller, a major, was accused of shooting eleven defenseless Filipinos, without trial, on the island of Samar. Other marine officers described his testimony:
The major said that General Smith instructed him to kill and burn, and said that the more he killed and burned the better pleased he would be; that it was no time to take prisoners, and that he was to make Samar a howling wilderness. Major Waller asked General Smith to define the age limit for killing, and he replied "Everything over ten."
In the province of Batangas, the secretary of the province estimated that of the population of 300,000, one-third had been killed by combat, famine, or disease. Mark Twain commented on the Philippine war:
We have pacified some thousands of the islanders and buried them; destroyed their fields; burned their villages, and turned their widows and orphans out-of-doors; furnished heartbreak by exile to some dozens of disagreeable patriots; subjugated the remaining ten millions by Benevolent Assimilation, which is the pious new name of the musket; we have acquired property in the three hundred concubines and other slaves of our business partner, the Sultan of Sulu, and hoisted our protecting flag over that swag. And so, by these Providences of God -- and the phrase is the government's, not mine -- we are a World Power.
American firepower was overwhelmingly superior to anything the Filipino rebels could put together. In the very first battle, Admiral Dewey steamed up the Pasig River and fired 500-pound shells into the Filipino trenches. Dead Filipinos were piled so high that the Americans used their bodies for breastworks. A British witness said: "This is not war; it is simply massacre and murderous butchery." He was wrong; it was war. For the rebels to hold out against such odds for years meant that they had the support of the population. General Arthur MacArthur, commander of the Filipino war, said: " . . . I believed that Aguinaldo's troops represented only a faction. I did not like to believe that the whole population of Luzon -- the native population, that is -- was opposed to us." But he said he was "reluctantly compelled" to believe this because the guerrilla tactics of the Filipino army "depended upon almost complete unity of action of the entire native population."
Sunday, April 5, 2009
The Descision to Use Atomic Weapons
Note: Color Key for highlighted sections:
Red: Atom Bomb and Death Tole
Green: Racism used to convince Americans
Blue: Invasion and Death Tole if bomb was not used
Orange: Japan possibly surrendering before atom bombs were dropped
Yellow:
Text in red is comments on highlighted sections.
The Descision to Use Atomic Weapons
from
A People's War?
Howard Zinn
Still, the vast bulk of the American population was mobilized, in the army, and in civilian life, to fight the war, and the atmosphere of war enveloped more and more Americans. Public opinion polls show large majorities of soldiers favoring the draft for the postwar period. Hatred against the enemy, against the Japanese particularly, became widespread. Racism was clearly at work. Time magazine, reporting the battle of Iwo Jima, said: "The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing .. . indicates it." ....
Right here, Zinn is trying to convince people by quoiting things like how Time Magazine reported the battle of Iwo Jima and how racist they are being in order to convince the American public into thinking that it would be okay to kill large numbers of Japanese people because they are "ignorant" and "unreasoning". I do agree with what he is saying, that during that time racism was used to get the public fired up and convince them into thinking that killing large numbers of Japanese, and that anyone now days that has a mind would agree that it was a tactic just to get the public going and for them to except the unneeded death tole from the atom bombs dropped.
The bombing of Japanese cities continued the strategy of saturation bombing to destroy civilian morale; one nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. And then, on August 6, 1945, came the lone American plane in the sky over Hiroshima, dropping the first atomic bomb, leaving perhaps 100,000 Japanese dead, and tens of thousands more slowly dying from radiation poisoning. Twelve U.S. navy fliers in the Hiroshima city jail were killed in the bombing, a fact that the U.S. government has never officially acknowledged, according to historian Martin Sherwin (A World Destroyed). Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, with perhaps 50,000 killed.
Right here, Zinn is trying to convince people by showing the death toles from the atomic bomb attacks. In a way I do agree that they shouldn't have bombed that much just to blow up a few factories to end the war. Yet at the same time, we kind of had to use scare tactics in order to convince them to surrender.
The justification for these atrocities was that this would end the war quickly, making unnecessary an invasion of Japan. Such an invasion would cost a huge number of lives, the government said-a million, according to Secretary of State Byrnes; half a million, Truman claimed was the figure given him by General George Marshall.
Here, Zinn states the estimated amount of lives that could be lost in the atomic attacks. I do agree that is was a lot of life lost that shouldn't have been lost but then again we kind of needed to use scare tactics during that time.
(When the papers of the Manhattan Project-the project to build the atom bomb- were released years later, they showed that Marshall urged a warning to the Japanese about the bomb, so people could be removed and only military targets hit.) These estimates of invasion losses were not realistic, and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people. Japan, by August 1945, was in desperate shape and ready to surrender. New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, shortly after the war:
Right here, Zinn is saying that World War II could have ended sooner and more peacefully then it did with the atom bombs dropped. I do agree with this because sometimes the government gets information about stuff that they ignore sometimes.
If only the Americans had not insisted on unconditional surrender- that is, if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place-the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.
Why did the United States not take that small step to save both American and Japanese lives? Was it because too much money and effort had been invested in the atomic bomb not to drop it? General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, described Truman as a man on a toboggan, the momentum too great to stop it. Or was it, as British scientist P. M. S. Blackett suggested (Fear, War, and the Bomb), that the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war against Japan?
The Russians had secretly agreed (they were officially not at war with Japan) they would come into the war ninety days after the end of the European war. That turned out to be May 8, and so, on August 8, the Russians were due to declare war on Japan, But by then the big bomb had been dropped, and the next day a second one would be dropped on Nagasaki; the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan. In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was "the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.. .." Blackett is supported by American historian Gar Alperovitz (Atomic Diplomacy), who notes a diary entry for July 28, 1945, by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, describing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes as "most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in."
Truman had said, "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." It was a preposterous statement. Those 100,000 killed in Hiroshima were almost all civilians. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey said in its official report: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."
The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment? Martin Shenvin says that among the Nagasaki dead were probably American prisoners of war. He notes a message of July 31 from Headquarters, U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces, Guam, to the War Department:
True, the war then ended quickly. Italy had been defeated a year earlier. Germany had recently surrendered, crushed primarily by the armies of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, aided by the Allied armies on the West. Now Japan surrendered.
Red: Atom Bomb and Death Tole
Green: Racism used to convince Americans
Blue: Invasion and Death Tole if bomb was not used
Orange: Japan possibly surrendering before atom bombs were dropped
Yellow:
Text in red is comments on highlighted sections.
The Descision to Use Atomic Weapons
from
A People's War?
Howard Zinn
Still, the vast bulk of the American population was mobilized, in the army, and in civilian life, to fight the war, and the atmosphere of war enveloped more and more Americans. Public opinion polls show large majorities of soldiers favoring the draft for the postwar period. Hatred against the enemy, against the Japanese particularly, became widespread. Racism was clearly at work. Time magazine, reporting the battle of Iwo Jima, said: "The ordinary unreasoning Jap is ignorant. Perhaps he is human. Nothing .. . indicates it." ....
Right here, Zinn is trying to convince people by quoiting things like how Time Magazine reported the battle of Iwo Jima and how racist they are being in order to convince the American public into thinking that it would be okay to kill large numbers of Japanese people because they are "ignorant" and "unreasoning". I do agree with what he is saying, that during that time racism was used to get the public fired up and convince them into thinking that killing large numbers of Japanese, and that anyone now days that has a mind would agree that it was a tactic just to get the public going and for them to except the unneeded death tole from the atom bombs dropped.
The bombing of Japanese cities continued the strategy of saturation bombing to destroy civilian morale; one nighttime fire-bombing of Tokyo took 80,000 lives. And then, on August 6, 1945, came the lone American plane in the sky over Hiroshima, dropping the first atomic bomb, leaving perhaps 100,000 Japanese dead, and tens of thousands more slowly dying from radiation poisoning. Twelve U.S. navy fliers in the Hiroshima city jail were killed in the bombing, a fact that the U.S. government has never officially acknowledged, according to historian Martin Sherwin (A World Destroyed). Three days later, a second atomic bomb was dropped on the city of Nagasaki, with perhaps 50,000 killed.
Right here, Zinn is trying to convince people by showing the death toles from the atomic bomb attacks. In a way I do agree that they shouldn't have bombed that much just to blow up a few factories to end the war. Yet at the same time, we kind of had to use scare tactics in order to convince them to surrender.
The justification for these atrocities was that this would end the war quickly, making unnecessary an invasion of Japan. Such an invasion would cost a huge number of lives, the government said-a million, according to Secretary of State Byrnes; half a million, Truman claimed was the figure given him by General George Marshall.
Here, Zinn states the estimated amount of lives that could be lost in the atomic attacks. I do agree that is was a lot of life lost that shouldn't have been lost but then again we kind of needed to use scare tactics during that time.
(When the papers of the Manhattan Project-the project to build the atom bomb- were released years later, they showed that Marshall urged a warning to the Japanese about the bomb, so people could be removed and only military targets hit.) These estimates of invasion losses were not realistic, and seem to have been pulled out of the air to justify bombings which, as their effects became known, horrified more and more people. Japan, by August 1945, was in desperate shape and ready to surrender. New York Times military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, shortly after the war:
The enemy, in a military sense, was in a hopeless strategic position by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26.The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, set up by the War Department in 1944 to study the results of aerial attacks in the war, interviewed hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders after Japan surrendered, and reported just after the war:
Such then, was the situation when we wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Need we have done it? No one can, of course, be positive, but the answer is almost certainly negative.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.But could American leaders have known this in August 1945? The answer is, clearly, yes. The Japanese code had been broken, and Japan's messages were being intercepted. It was known the Japanese had instructed their ambassador in Moscow to work on peace negotiations with the Allies. Japanese leaders had begun talking of surrender a year before this, and the Emperor himself had begun to suggest, in June 1945, that alternatives to fighting to the end be considered. On July 13, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo wired his ambassador in Moscow: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace.. .." Martin Sherwin, after an exhaustive study of the relevant historical documents, concludes: "Having broken the Japanese code before the war, American Intelligence was able to-and did-relay this message to the President, but it had no effect whatever on efforts to bring the war to a conclusion."
Right here, Zinn is saying that World War II could have ended sooner and more peacefully then it did with the atom bombs dropped. I do agree with this because sometimes the government gets information about stuff that they ignore sometimes.
If only the Americans had not insisted on unconditional surrender- that is, if they were willing to accept one condition to the surrender, that the Emperor, a holy figure to the Japanese, remain in place-the Japanese would have agreed to stop the war.
Why did the United States not take that small step to save both American and Japanese lives? Was it because too much money and effort had been invested in the atomic bomb not to drop it? General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project, described Truman as a man on a toboggan, the momentum too great to stop it. Or was it, as British scientist P. M. S. Blackett suggested (Fear, War, and the Bomb), that the United States was anxious to drop the bomb before the Russians entered the war against Japan?
The Russians had secretly agreed (they were officially not at war with Japan) they would come into the war ninety days after the end of the European war. That turned out to be May 8, and so, on August 8, the Russians were due to declare war on Japan, But by then the big bomb had been dropped, and the next day a second one would be dropped on Nagasaki; the Japanese would surrender to the United States, not the Russians, and the United States would be the occupier of postwar Japan. In other words, Blackett says, the dropping of the bomb was "the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia.. .." Blackett is supported by American historian Gar Alperovitz (Atomic Diplomacy), who notes a diary entry for July 28, 1945, by Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal, describing Secretary of State James F. Byrnes as "most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in."
Truman had said, "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." It was a preposterous statement. Those 100,000 killed in Hiroshima were almost all civilians. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey said in its official report: "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen as targets because of their concentration of activities and population."
The dropping of the second bomb on Nagasaki seems to have been scheduled in advance, and no one has ever been able to explain why it was dropped. Was it because this was a plutonium bomb whereas the Hiroshima bomb was a uranium bomb? Were the dead and irradiated of Nagasaki victims of a scientific experiment? Martin Shenvin says that among the Nagasaki dead were probably American prisoners of war. He notes a message of July 31 from Headquarters, U.S. Army Strategic Air Forces, Guam, to the War Department:
Reports prisoner of war sources, not verified by photos, give location of Allied prisoner of war camp one mile north of center of city of Nagasaki. Does this influence the choice of this target for initial Centerboard operation? Request immediate reply.The reply: "Targets previously assigned for Centerboard remain unchanged."
True, the war then ended quickly. Italy had been defeated a year earlier. Germany had recently surrendered, crushed primarily by the armies of the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front, aided by the Allied armies on the West. Now Japan surrendered.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Weekly Reflection #2
This week in history, we learned more about World War II and the atom bombs that were dropped on Japan, which is good I guess. It was more interesting then some of the things I have learned about World War II in the past. It was finally good to learn about somewhere else besides Germany during World War II. I still don't get get how at that time an electromagnetic pulse would stop clocks in Japan during the atom bomb attacks, especially since there were no transistors in electronics at that time, simply because they did not exist, because at that time they used vacuum tubes in radios and in the early computers that were being developed at the time. From what I can see its more likely that the vacuum tubes in whatever they had for electronic devices shattered because of the shock created from the atom bombs. Anyways, that's besides the point, I guess what I'm really saying is that I'm glad that were not always focusing on Germany during World War II, because I am REALLY SICK about hearing about just Germany all the time. So yeah, that's all I have to say about that at this point.
Weekly Reflection #1
Last week was alright in history. We got a lot of information about World War II, which I guess is good, even though I can't remember a whole lot about it.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Book Portfolio: The "Good War" by Studs Terkle
"The Good War" by Studs Terkel was about how World War II effected American culture, as well as the rest of the worlds culture.
The main theme of this book, I would have to say, is how World War II effected culture in the world. It affected the people of the time in many ways because most everything at that time was focused on the war efforts. One example is that most factories, in the world, were geared for the war effort by making parts for tanks, jeeps, air planes, guns, bombs and various other war related things of the time. It also effected the soldiers of the time because there had never been a war like it before, especially since it was during the time the USA developed the Atom Bomb.
The significance of World War II was that it was when the allied forces (USA, Brittan and a few others) went against the axis forces (Germany, Japan, and Italy) in order to stop fascism from spreading throughout the world.
Personally I do think that it was necessary for the USA to join the efforts of WWII because if we didn't then we probably would be under the control of the Germans and the terrible fascist way of life.
So, in general, "The Good War" by Studs Terkel did show how WWII effected American, as well as the rest of the worlds culture by showing how people were effected by it.
Defeat of Erwin Rommel
The defeat of Erwin Rommel was mostly during the Second Battle of El Alamein. It mostly had to do with the fact that British raiding parties attacked harbors and supply points in September of 1942 that were vital for the survival of Rommel's army. Because of the shortages of supplies and motorized units, his plan for the Second Battle of El Alamein was more static (in other words mostly foot infantry, making his army kind of weak) then he would have liked.
The battle started on October 23, 1942 while Rommel was away in Italy and Germany because his health was failing. However, he returned two days later (vital days) to fight in the battle. General Georg Stumme commanded Rommel's army while he was away. He (Georg Stumme) later died of a heart attack during the battle, paralizing the German HQ until General Ritter von Thoma took over.
Bernard Montgomery, the British commander stopped major attacks against the Germans when he noticed that his armored brigades were losing tanks at an alarming rate. However, he started again on November 2nd when he launched Operation Supercharge which was able to achieve a 4 kilometer penetration of the line.
On November 3rd, Montgomery found it impossible to continue his attack until reinforcements arrived. This gave Rommel an opportunity to retreat. However, he got the order to stay from Hitler ("Victory or Death").
On November 4th Montgomery recovered his attack with 500 tanks against the 20 tanks that Rommel had remaining. By this time, Rommel decided to retreat. Later, (12 hours after his decision) he got the order from Hitler to retreat but it was already too late because most of the unmotorized part of his army was already caught.
The last offensive by Rommel was on March 6, 1943 at the Battle of Medenine, where he lost 52 tanks which forced him to call of the attack. He later (March 9th) handed over command of Armeegrouppe Afrika to General Hans-Jurgen von Arnim and left Africa, because of his health failing, never to return.
On May 13, 1943, General Messe surrendered what was left of the Armeegruppe Afrika to the Allies.
The battle started on October 23, 1942 while Rommel was away in Italy and Germany because his health was failing. However, he returned two days later (vital days) to fight in the battle. General Georg Stumme commanded Rommel's army while he was away. He (Georg Stumme) later died of a heart attack during the battle, paralizing the German HQ until General Ritter von Thoma took over.
Bernard Montgomery, the British commander stopped major attacks against the Germans when he noticed that his armored brigades were losing tanks at an alarming rate. However, he started again on November 2nd when he launched Operation Supercharge which was able to achieve a 4 kilometer penetration of the line.
On November 3rd, Montgomery found it impossible to continue his attack until reinforcements arrived. This gave Rommel an opportunity to retreat. However, he got the order to stay from Hitler ("Victory or Death").
On November 4th Montgomery recovered his attack with 500 tanks against the 20 tanks that Rommel had remaining. By this time, Rommel decided to retreat. Later, (12 hours after his decision) he got the order from Hitler to retreat but it was already too late because most of the unmotorized part of his army was already caught.
The last offensive by Rommel was on March 6, 1943 at the Battle of Medenine, where he lost 52 tanks which forced him to call of the attack. He later (March 9th) handed over command of Armeegrouppe Afrika to General Hans-Jurgen von Arnim and left Africa, because of his health failing, never to return.
On May 13, 1943, General Messe surrendered what was left of the Armeegruppe Afrika to the Allies.
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
1920's Questions
1. How does a person make money on an investment?
They make products that people want to buy for more than its worth to make it, therefore making more money faster then just charging a basic price for an item.
2. What makes 'cheap credit' mean?
When the economy is doing well, people believe that it will only get better, so they take out loans from the bank that they can't pay back even though they seem reasonable therefore creating the illusion that the money is nearly free.
3. What is 'buying on margin' mean?
It means to buy stock for 10% of cost to buy stock normally, however this is a bad idea, especially if you don't have a lot of money becausethen if the stocks that you bought lose value they you lose money.
4. How is 'speculation' different from 'investment'?
Speculation is when you don't care about the company, you only want to buy and sell stock quickly. An investment you actually believe in the company and stick with it.
5. How does 'panic selling' start?
It is when everyone wants to sell at the same time and no one wants to buy.
6. How can high unemployment start a negative economic cycle?
Not having a job causes you to not buy stuff from companies therefore causing companies to start making less products and fire people because the are not needed, this cycle keeps happening and is called the "dog chasing tail" effect.
7. How did increases in technology contribute to overproduction in the 1920's?
Technology took away jobs because it made jobs easier, therefore making too many things that nobody could buy.
8. What is meant by 'uneven distribution of wealth? Is it a bad thing?
It means the dividing of money unevenly to people, different classes would get more or less money depending on if they were in the lower, middle, higher classes.
9. What is a tariff, and why don't they seem to work in the modern economy (post-WWI)?
It is a tax that is put on goods from other countries.
10. What is 'rugged individualism? Is it real?
It is when someone tries to be self sustaining and it can work if there is a large number of people doing it as a group, like for example the Amish.
It is when someone tries to be self sustaining and it can work if there is a large number of people doing it as a group, like for example the Amish.
11. What is a Hooverville, and why is it called that?
A Hooverville is a town or city that is poor because it has suffered through a lot of poverty due to a poor economy. For example an industry town that has a paper mill might become a Hooverville due to the fact that that paper mill is where the town gets most of its income for its economy.
Essay questions for test: Nixon, Regan, and Carter
1. The ending of the cold war was a significant event because it marked a point in history that showed the start of an era that would be not as focused on nuclear weapons.
Reagan did various things to help end the cold war. One of the notable things he did was meeting with the president of Russia to discuss the cold war.
2. The two scandals that went on from 1968-1988 were the Watergate Scandal and the Iran Contra Affair.
The Watergate Scandal was when Richard Nixon had 5 people break into the Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel to wire tap and spy on the Democratic Campaign.
The Iran Contra Affair was when Ronald Reagan sold weapons to Iran to pay for the release of the hostages in Lebanon. The scandal involved Col. Oliver North who did most of the weapons trading.
From what I can, the reason why they ended the way they did was because with Nixon it was mostly him doing the work as opposed to Reagan with the Iran Contra Affair which mostly involved Col. Oliver North.
3. With the Nixon-Reagan era, there were various events that were perceived good and bad at the time.
Reagan did various things to help end the cold war. One of the notable things he did was meeting with the president of Russia to discuss the cold war.
2. The two scandals that went on from 1968-1988 were the Watergate Scandal and the Iran Contra Affair.
The Watergate Scandal was when Richard Nixon had 5 people break into the Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel to wire tap and spy on the Democratic Campaign.
The Iran Contra Affair was when Ronald Reagan sold weapons to Iran to pay for the release of the hostages in Lebanon. The scandal involved Col. Oliver North who did most of the weapons trading.
From what I can, the reason why they ended the way they did was because with Nixon it was mostly him doing the work as opposed to Reagan with the Iran Contra Affair which mostly involved Col. Oliver North.
3. With the Nixon-Reagan era, there were various events that were perceived good and bad at the time.
Monday, February 23, 2009
Malaise Speech Questions
What the real threat to America was, according to Carter, and if that threat is still with us today?
What Carter thought was the real threat was that people were becoming too materialistic and that it would lead to destruction later on. This is still a threat today because people are still very materialistic instead of being focused on values like the way America used to be.
Summary of what Carter said about American society, and an analysis of America today against his critique.
Carter basically stated that America has become a materialistic society that cares more about material goods and themselves then about each other and their needs. With the way things were then and the way things are today with the economy, I would have to say that he was right then and unfortunately things have not changed that much in the respect.
How did these plans differ, and how are they alike? How do their plans reveal what they think the problem really is?
These plans differ in the way that the one that Carter had was more about energy conservation then it was about changing the way energy is produced, unlike the Obama plan where he plans on changing things by making more hybrid cars and building solar electric plants to cut down on fuel consumption. However, these plans, are also alike because they both focus on limiting America's dependence on foreign oil.
What Carter thought was the real threat was that people were becoming too materialistic and that it would lead to destruction later on. This is still a threat today because people are still very materialistic instead of being focused on values like the way America used to be.
Summary of what Carter said about American society, and an analysis of America today against his critique.
Carter basically stated that America has become a materialistic society that cares more about material goods and themselves then about each other and their needs. With the way things were then and the way things are today with the economy, I would have to say that he was right then and unfortunately things have not changed that much in the respect.
How did these plans differ, and how are they alike? How do their plans reveal what they think the problem really is?
These plans differ in the way that the one that Carter had was more about energy conservation then it was about changing the way energy is produced, unlike the Obama plan where he plans on changing things by making more hybrid cars and building solar electric plants to cut down on fuel consumption. However, these plans, are also alike because they both focus on limiting America's dependence on foreign oil.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Book Portfolio: Flags of our Fathers
In Flags of our Fathers by James Bradley, the author, James Bradley shows how the raising of the flag on the island of Iwa Jima in Japan was an important part of World War II. He shows this by researching each of the flag holders' lives, including his father who was one of the flag holders.
Probably the main theme of this book would have to be how life was for the soldiers during D Day when they landed on the beach from the drop ships. He talks about things like how there was volcanic ask on the beach of Iwa Jima and how it absorbed the blasts from the mortars as well as slowed down the soldiers fighting on the beach. He also talks about how the was a lot of gun fire and how almost anything that was on the beach that day was hit by bullets. The significance of this theme is that it was a very difficult day to fight but in the end it was rewarding because it was the end of World War II.
The theme in history is that the raising of the flag on Iwa Jima marked the end of World War II.
Personally, I do think that it was important to have our flag placed on Iwa Jima because it showed that our military was strong and that it showed that we had defeated the Japinese and won the war.
With all this said, the raising of the flag on the island of Iwa Jima in Japan was an important part of World War II. Mostly because it showed the end of World War II.
Sunday, January 4, 2009
History Test Essays 12/19/08
#1 The increasing access to certain technologies during the 50's and 60's changed history by making it possible for things like being able to see political debates live on Television. Being able to do this, people started to judge political candidates on their looks as well as their ability to lead.
For example, JFK v. Nixon. On the radio, Nixon would win the debates because he had more political experience. However, because JFK was younger and better looking, he would win the Television debates because people were able to see what was going on and would judge by what the candidates looked like.
#2 The leadership method(s) and goal(s) of Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, and Malcolm X were similar yet very different.
With Martin Luther King, his goal(s) were to give the African American population more civil rights without having to protest with violence.
With Huey Newton, his methods were similar in the way that he did not want to do anything with violence. However, he allowed his group to have guns and would give out aid to the poor to rope people in to join their group.
Finally, with Malcolm X, his methods were not to protest without violence but to fight back through organized riots and things like that.
#3
For example, JFK v. Nixon. On the radio, Nixon would win the debates because he had more political experience. However, because JFK was younger and better looking, he would win the Television debates because people were able to see what was going on and would judge by what the candidates looked like.
#2 The leadership method(s) and goal(s) of Martin Luther King, Huey Newton, and Malcolm X were similar yet very different.
With Martin Luther King, his goal(s) were to give the African American population more civil rights without having to protest with violence.
With Huey Newton, his methods were similar in the way that he did not want to do anything with violence. However, he allowed his group to have guns and would give out aid to the poor to rope people in to join their group.
Finally, with Malcolm X, his methods were not to protest without violence but to fight back through organized riots and things like that.
#3
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