Oliver Kamm: An open letter to the editors of Media Lens - finis
Gentlemen,
It is past time that I concluded my review of your excursions in the historiography of the Pacific War. I invited you to confirm what you seemed diffident about stating explicitly, viz. that you had no intention of writing to the film critic David Thomson or the BBC director Stephen Walker to apologise for having lectured them with"information" that you now know to be unreliable. It is 14 months since you learned, from my blog, that historians have known since 1995 that the conclusion of the US Strategic Bombing Survey - the counterfactual of an early Japanese surrender even if the A-bomb had not been used - is not supported by the same survey's body of evidence, and that citing that conclusion is a nice example of swallowing official propaganda because you wanted to believe it. You have since had the dispiriting experience of finding that academic historians confirm what I told you in the first place.
So far as I understood your position, you believed that no correction of your erroneous historical claims was necessary; and the reason none was necessary was that I am a supporter of the Iraq War. My readers will be unsurprised, as I am unfazed, that you decided against stating this position explicitly. I would have been genuinely and pleasantly astonished, however, if you had taken the reputable course of apologising to the journalists you'd harangued and who turned out to be better informed than you. Media Lens is known for never owning up to errors and never publishing corrections - a standard part of the way journalists operate. As George Monbiot told you last year:"Rather than offering a clear, objective analysis of why the media works the way it does, who pulls the strings, how journalists are manipulated, knowingly or otherwise, you appear to have decided instead to use your platform merely to attack those who do not accept your narrow and particular doctrine."
I find your position dishonest but I was prepared for it. I am beyond incredulity, however, at your citing once more in your defence a hapless figure whom I had assumed you'd discreetly retired from this discussion:"In our January 6, 2004 Media Alert on the terrible atomic bomb attacks on Japan, we cited a highly respected historian - Howard Zinn."
We have been through this. Howard Zinn is not"a highly respected historian", and your resort to obsequious honorific is a nice indicator of your insecurity. Zinn's magnum opus is a largely worthless popular book neatly summarised by the left-wing historian Michael Kazin as"polemic disguised as history", whose author is"an evangelist of little imagination for whom history is one long chain of stark moral dualities". Zinn has no record of scholarly attainment in the study of the Pacific War. His one essay on the subject that I'm aware of accepts the USSBS conclusion on the"early surrender" counterfactual without a trace of scepticism or critical inquiry. When you consider that Zinn's idea of "admirable and painstaking research" is a book claiming that 9/11 was an"inside job", his unquestioning approach to the USSBS conclusion doesn't seem so surprising. He will, after all, believe literally anything that accords with what he is ideologically predisposed to wish were true.
It was, in the circumstances, unfeeling of you to appeal to Zinn for help after I had first pointed out your ahistorical assertions on the A-bomb. You will doubtless remember what happened next. Zinn hadn't read the very source he claimed to be citing; had no awareness of death rates in the Pacific War; completely misunderstood the significance of messages sent from Tokyo to the Japanese ambassador in Moscow; evinced no familiarity with recent historical research on the Japanese surrender; and cited a paper (about Iwo Jima) whose import he had misunderstood and whose author he misidentified. Your disasters in this debate stem in the first place from having read nothing on the subject bar Professor Zinn, so it was hardly likely that he would be of material assistance to you in your distress. It would be churlish of me, however, to refrain from granting that, while Zinn may be a clueless crank, he is far from the most absurd of the purported" credible sources" for your work. (If you're not familiar with the mishaps of "Neil Clark, a Balkans specialist" in his encounters with source material, let alone with his unavailing efforts to prevent public exposure of them, then a rich and diverting source of recreation awaits you.)
So far as I can work out from your evasiveness, you now accept the unreliability of USSBS - which will be bad news for Zinn - but insist that it doesn't matter because it is only"one part of the evidence for the key argument", viz. that the bomb was unnecessary for securing Japanese surrender. Extraordinarily, you still haven't grasped that your new deus ex machina Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is no support to you. Hasegawa does not agree, as your initial cited source Gar Alperovitz has spent 40 years maintaining, that Japan was trying to surrender before the A-bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. I take particular exception, in explaining this point to you by means of direct quotation from Hasegawa, that you accuse me of misrepresenting Hasegawa's wider thesis. I was in fact starting from the impossibly low base of your own knowledge of this subject, and pointing out that Hasegawa directly contradicts your (and Zinn's, and Alperovitz's) previous assertions. There is a great deal wrong with Hasegawa's wider thesis of a"race" to the bomb, and I'm happy to explain it to you; but in your misnamed"Cogitation", you weren't even at the stage of understanding what that thesis was or how it related to the historiographical debate.
As you were not aware when you first wrote to the luckless David Thomson, the debate has moved on from the old revisionist arguments about"atomic diplomacy" and the"early surrender" counterfactual. Hasegawa's argument is about the importance of Soviet entry into the war relative to the shock of the bomb. He maintains that without Soviet entry into the war, Japan would have continued fighting until rendered incapable of doing so by several A-bombs, by a conventional invasion, or by a naval blockade. It is - believe me - not possible for you to accept both Hasegawa's argument and Zinn's claim to you that:"In Japan, the Emperor was supreme, and he clearly wanted to arrange surrender terms, hence the dispatch of an envoy to Moscow."
If you are going to evacuate yourselves from the wreckage of your earlier position, as taken from Zinn, you need to know first what you're giving up, and secondly what the problem is with your new position. The problem with Hasegawa is that his supporting material has been shredded by critical reviewers. I have already told you that I have no interest in your"Buddhist philosophy of compassion", but I note that this path to enlightenment is evidently compatible with a highly advanced personal vanity. You expostulate that I"have outrageously accused Hasegawa of 'manipulation of source material'". Gentlemen, you are not competent to judge Hasegawa's use of source material: you haven't even understood what Hasegawa's argument is, let alone what evidence supports it. But if you wish to argue this point, then I'm game.
I refer you again to the case of Hasegawa's misrepresentation of the eyewitness accounts of President Truman's press conference announcing Soviet entry into the Pacific War. Wishing to present that decision as a blow to Truman, Hasegawa maintains that these contemporary press reports, from the Washington Post and the New York Times, depict a man suffering"profound disappointment". Hasegawa leaves out of his account the following sentences from the NYT report (emphasis added):"[Truman's] concluding words, 'That is all,' were all but drowned out by the scramble of news and radio reporters for the nearest exit to rush to their telephones. Mr. Truman and White House officials present rocked with laughter at the sensation his 'simple announcement' had precipitated."
When my correspondent Michael Kort observed, in a review here, that Hasegawa had left out this relevant material - which casts doubt on the notion that Truman was a severely disappointed man - the point appears to have been well taken. In his edited volume The End of the Pacific War, 2007, p. 224, Hasegawa repeats his assertion about Truman's press conference but removes the footnoted references to the contemporary press reports, thereby making it impossible for the reader to check the accuracy of his account. There may well be a compassionate Buddhist explanation for this, but as those ancient mysteries are closed to me I shall boringly repeat my observation about Hasegawa's manipulation of source material to fit a prespecified conclusion.
I have dealt at some length and in several posts with your misconceptions on this issue, for various reasons. The subject is of immense intrinsic importance even if your opinions are not. Dispelling some of the hoarier myths about Truman's A-bomb decision is a worthwhile aim of historical argument. On a parochial level, I was taken aback by your insulting manner towards a working journalist who had written a perfectly defensible comment on a subject he understood better than you. I also wanted to see if Media Lens would have the grace to acknowledge error and draw back when made to confront the limits of its understanding.
Taking these factors together, I find it easier to draw a definitive conclusion about Media Lens than I do about the debates over the Pacific War. The co-founder and editor of Media Lens David Edwards is, in one important respect, of a character with David Cromwell. It is this. As a matter of demonstrable fact and not speculative hypothesis, David Cromwell, founder and editor of Media Lens, is an ignoramus.
Yours fraternally,
Oliver Kamm