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Oliver Kamm: Getting Hiroshima wrong time and again

[Mr. Kamm is a liberal journalist in the UK.]

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the ventures of the Media Lens organisation in the historiography of the Pacific War. ML is a sub-Chomskyite pressure group that purports to expose right-wing bias in the liberal communications media. To read the organisation's output and endless email campaigns is to enter, as Peter Beaumont of The Observer described it, "a closed and distorting little world that selects and twists its facts to suit its arguments, a curious willy-waving exercise where the regulars brag about the emails they've sent to people like poor Helen Boaden [Director of News] at the BBC -- and the replies they have garnered. Think a train spotters' club run by Uncle Joe Stalin."

My post recounted successive attempts by David Cromwell, co-founder and editor of Media Lens, to reveal the supposed deceit behind official accounts of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Cromwell's efforts, which I noted here and here, were pitiful. If you're attempting to expose dubious propagandistic claims, then a minimal requirement is that you don't engage in that form of argument yourself. Cromwell was ill-placed in this respect, for his entire acquaintance with the historical debates on the A-bomb was a far-left polemical book by a man (Howard Zinn) whose notion of critical inquiry encompassed the "admirable and painstaking research" conducted by 9/11 conspiracy theorists. I concluded on each occasion, and with justification, that Cromwell was an ignoramus.

Cromwell was stung by the encounter. Last month, more than a year after his earlier contributions, he produced yet another attempt on the same subject, and at exhausting length. You can read it here. Of this, I wrote in my earlier post:

"It is in vain. Cromwell's third attempt is a farrago of nonsense. He hasn't understood or even digested the fruits of his superficial and painfully restricted inquiries. He has no conception of the difference between archival research and dogmatic assertion. He desperately gathers citations where he may, regardless of the use to which they're put or the coherence of the resulting assembly. In particular, he has alighted on Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, author of Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan, 2005, to whom he clings as a talisman. He hasn't understood how Hasegawa's argument relates to the historical literature, and is apparently entirely unaware of the criticisms advanced by specialists in Soviet, Japanese and American history about Hasegawa's use of sources."
This post is the second and concluding part of my discussion of Cromwell's efforts. In his earlier attempts, Cromwell relied on the assertions of Gar Alperovitz, the principal populariser (though not originator) of the "atomic diplomacy" thesis. This proposition was initially advanced in the late 1940s by the physicist P.M.S. Blackett. Blackett was a brilliant scholar in his field (he won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1948). In politics, however, he was a Communist fellow-traveller of a type drearily familiar in British intellectual life in the 1930s. Of the benefits of a command economy, Blackett declared (quoted in David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism, 1988, p. 272, my emphasis): "The advantages on the side of Soviet science are unlimited resources, the advantages of doing things on a big scale, the planning of the relation between industry and science, together with enormous enthusiasm."

In 1948, this gifted but titanically silly man wrote a book entitled Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy. He argued that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings had been the first acts of the Cold War rather than the concluding ones of the Pacific War. Japan had already been on the point of surrender; use of the A-bomb had in reality been intended by President Truman as an intimidatory signal to the Soviet Union. This, at much greater length but with essential consistency, is the proposition that Alperovitz has spent more than forty years expounding. (Blackett indeed supervised Alperovitz's thesis at Cambridge. Remarkably, Alperovitz was also supervised by the economist Joan Robinson -- a brilliant scholar in her field as Blackett was in his, but of no obvious competence in the field Alperovitz was writing about.)

There are two fundamental problems with Alperovitz's argument that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were instruments of atomic diplomacy by the Truman administration against the Soviet Union. First, there is no evidence for it; and this is quite a serious drawback for a historical thesis. As the late Adam Ulam wrote in a contemporary review of Alperovitz's first publication (quoted in Robert H. Ferrell, Harry Truman and the Cold War Revisionists, 2006, p. 20):

"One would expect Alperovitz to adduce at least a single instance of an American negotiator saying in effect to a Russian during the period in question (1945-6), 'You ought to remember we have the bomb,' or 'If you go easy on the Poles we might share our nuclear know-how with you.' Or he might offer a public statement by an American official that 'the Russians ought to keep in mind before they go too far in Romania that we have this weapon.' Dr Alperovitz does not cite any such instances because there weren't any."

Secondly -- and there's no way of putting this politely -- Alperovitz is notorious for playing fast and loose with source material. As my correspondent Robert James Maddox states in his essay "Gar Alperovitz: Godfather of Hiroshima Revisionism" (included in a volume Professor Maddox has edited, Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism, 2007, pp. 7-23): "The most salient feature of Alperovitz's work has been his unscholarly use of ellipses. Whereas most writers employ these to spare the reader extraneous phrases, Alperovitz uses them as tactical weapons to render documents more suitable for his purposes." Maddox gives some shockers as examples. On occasion, Alperovitz doesn't even bother with ellipses, but merely cuts sentences short in order to excise identifying references....
Read entire article at http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog