Speaking of me, I often have trouble deciding which attacks on me in the blogosphere demand responses and which I am elevating to an importance they do not deserve by doing so (in addition to wasting my time). But I see that in the past few days, I've been attacked as an anti-Japanese racist by a right-wing blogger, attacked as an anti-black racist by a left-wing blogger, quoted favorably by right-wing anti-Semites, attacked by Naderites, and attacked in Commentary by"Jamie Kirchick," who I continue to maintain does not really exist but was invented as a sock puppet/imaginary friend, Lee Siegel-style, by the friendless Marty Peretz. The usual criteria I employ in these cases is to try to ignore the attacks if they appear in a place in which I would never have heard of the blogger or would have no reason to believe them if I had. (I learned the latter lesson the hard way with Gawker.) I see no point in responding to a figment of Marty Peretz's imagination or a hard-core Naderite or the anti-Semites, among others. And as for the right-wing blogger, I never heard of him either, but he's gotten some pickup among right-wingers, and I now I see that my friends at History News Network have now both run it and linked to it. I wonder if they know who he is or why he should be taken seriously, as I sure don't.

But since they are definitely a place I think people should be able to trust, have, and put the racism charge in the headline, now twice, I feel compelled to respond to the racism point, at least (as I simultaneously express my disappointment in HNN's judgment on this score). Regarding my alleged anti-Japanese racism, this Kamm fellow writes,"The most charitable explanation I can give is that Alterman is (unlike the late General [Paul] Tibbets) sufficiently ethnocentric not to take into account the deaths of Japanese civilians that would have resulted from a conventional invasion and blockade of the home islands..."

This charge is both so silly and ironic as to be funny -- at least it would be were HNN not giving it undeserved credence. Remember, General Tibbets is the guy whose Times obit quoted him as saying,"I wanted to kill the bastards." Later in the obit, he is quoted saying,"I viewed my mission as one to save lives." So clearly, Mr. Tibbets wanted to save some lives, and obliterate others. I think it's a pretty fair assumption that the lives he wished to save were American, and the lives he wished to obliterate were Japanese. I do not condemn him for this, I merely point it out. What is so silly as to be funny is the fact that this Kamm fellow seems to think that Tibbets is the great anti-enthocentric humanitarian in this story who is so much more sensitive to the value of the lives of Japanese civilians that he should be giving yours truly sensitivity lessons. (Just about everyone killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians, by the way. The U.S. military wanted it this way for"demonstration" purposes. And President Truman explicitly lied to the nation when he referred to Hiroshima as"a military base," in his radio speech of August 9, 1945, here.)

But leaving aside both this and the feelings of the late Mr. Tibbets, the point is that I was addressing the issue of American casualties, rather than Japanese casualties, in my column because that's what the issue was. Whenever the discussion of whether an invasion was necessary, Mr. Tibbets' view not merely the typical one, but the only politically palatable one. The focus was always exclusively on the likelihood of U.S. casualties in the case of an invasion. Any politician who expressed any sympathy for those poor Japanese civilians would have been run out of town on a proverbial rail. The point for virtually all Americans at the time of this debate was to"kill the bastards," and hence, there was little debate or discussion over the firebombing of Tokyo, also designed to obliterate civilian lives. Hence, this Mr. Kamm fellow is attacking my column for merely addressing the historical issue in question, which, hello, is what historians do.

And by the way, I've never taken a position on whether the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima was necessary or not. I do think the one on Nagasaki was gratuitous, but in the case of this column, I was merely calling attention to what struck me as the Times' myopia in reporting it, as well as its mistaken inference that the historical record supported Mr. Tibbets' contention, which is clearly does not.