FOX’s Exterminationist

Last week I listened with growing disgust as Charles Krauthammer berated President Obama for something that struck me as eminently defensible. According to a ranting war monger whose likes have not been seen since the fall of the Third Reich, Obama “dishonored our nation” on a recent visit to Hiroshima, when he “implicitly apologized” for the nuclear destruction of that city in August 1945. By regretting that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were incinerated in the course of what was apparently a holy crusade against infidels, the US president, it is claimed, brought shame on the entire country.

But the one who in this case is behaving foolishly is not Obama but Fox News’s resident conservative icon.  The dropping of atom bombs on two Japanese cities did not protect our armed force or advance human goodness in the world. By August 1945 Japan was no longer a significant military threat to the advancing US military forces and might have been ready to surrender earlier if the US government had not demanded unconditional surrender. No less a presumed neocon hero than Winston Churchill had warned Truman against this course in July 1945. Even the American Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had boldly challenged Japanese expansionists in 1940 and 1941, may not have been sufficiently belligerent for the likes of Krauthammer. In his memoirs, Stimson explicitly states that by insisting on unconditional surrender, we might have prolonged the war in the Pacific. The JapaneseA final point occurred to me in reading Krauthammer’s pompously expressed bilge: Would this guy and his well-financed pals give a damn if Obama had “implicitly apologized” for or lamented another controversial American military act? I mean some action taken outside of those holy wars that the neocons continue to glorify for their own doctrinal and sentimental reasons, namely the Civil War, World War One and World War Two. Would Krauthammer go off the handle if a high-ranking American politician asserted that we misrepresented what happened when we claimed that the Spanish had bombed the USS Maine in Havana Harbor in 1898?  Would Kraut care if an American president remarked that the McKinley government used the bombing as a pretext to strip a declining Spanish Empire of its colonies? Or would Kraut care if an American president on a visit to Toronto deplored the behavior of those Americans who invaded and burned Fort York, which stands on the site of what is now the largest Canadian city? Somehow I suspect such acts would elicit from Kraut nothing more ominous than a yawn.

Like other neocons Krauthammer does not object to calling attention to bad things in the American past, providing they have no special meaning for those of his persuasion. He is quite comfortable bringing up America’s history of racism and slavery and in 2002 went after Republican minority leader Trent Lott for showing insufficient appreciation for the civil rights revolution. We may, therefore, conclude that it is permissible from a conservative establishment perspective to talk about white racism in the American past, and this can be done without shaming our country or fueling Krauthammer’s righteous indignation. Perhaps it is presumptuous of me to object if Kraut considers such laments to be appropriate gestures.

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