Japanese Politicketeers

US-Connected ‘Politicketeers,’ Bribery, Military Contracts

Pick any of the permanently-elected Japanese ‘politicketeers’ (racketeering politicians,) or their spouse, by their heels and shake them hard to see what falls out of the pockets: US-connection, cash bribes, thousands of free rounds of golf, expensive lifestyles, gifts …

Prosecutors search Defense Ministry over bribery scandal

Public prosecutors searched the Defense Ministry headquarters in Tokyo’s Ichigaya area Thursday to back up allegations that former Vice Defense Minister Takemasa Moriya took bribes from a former defense equipment trading house executive, investigative sources said. More …

Japan PM in damage control after arrest, Iraq vote

TOKYO (AFP) — Japan’s two-month-old government was in damage control Wednesday as the former top defence bureaucrat was arrested in a bribery scandal and a resurgent opposition voted to end an air mission in Iraq.

Kyodo News said investigators believe Moriya gave preferential treatment to two Japanese companies in military deals, including one involving the purchase of aircraft engines from the giant US conglomerate General Electric. More …

Japan’s upper house passes bill to end Iraq mission

TOKYO (AFP) – Japan’s opposition-ruled upper house voted Wednesday to end the country’s air mission to Iraq, but the bill was expected to be overridden by the lower chamber of the divided parliament.

The opposition has accused the government of blindly following the United States into Iraq and opposes Japan’s Kuwait-based air mission which flies goods and supplies into the war-torn country. More …

Failing to Prevent Premeditated Murder

The speed record on Gacuette’s road was broken once again. A subsonic septic tank was clocked doing 204 km/hr (average speed) on a stretch of the road that runs straight for about 280 meters. The speed limit on the road is 40km per hour.

The road is used by several thousand students, aged 7-18, who walk or bike to the three schools in the area every day. Local police is aware of the problem but has taken no action to stop the violations. Statistically, it’s only a matter of time before a fatal accident occurs (if in fact it hasn’t already), in which case the police would be criminally negligent, indeed complicit, for failing to prevent premeditated murder.

At 100km per hour, the field of vision of the motorist is 67 percent less than at 50km per hour, and they are more likely to collide with pedestrians. The probability of pedestrian being killed in a 50km per hour collision is about 40 percent. At 70km per hour the probability shoots to 83 percent. The probability of a pedestrian being killed when a vehicle is traveling at 83 km per hour is 100 percent.

The motorists who drive their vehicles at 200km per hour on a 40km per hour speed zone are psychopathic killers about to commit premeditated murder. They ought to be put in chains and kept permanently behind locked doors to protect the public.

Related page: Violating the Speed Limit (visiting the 10-rule-90 principle, again!)

Japanifik: Death of Reason!

Was it once alive?

Japanifik is a place of excesses: Extravagant lifestyles, cars that don’t fit, people that don’t understand the limits.

Blame It On Tojo

If you flip over the rock of American foreign policy of the past century, this is what crawls out …

invasions … bombings … overthrowing governments … suppressing movements for social change … assassinating political leaders … perverting elections … manipulating labor unions … manufacturing “news” … death squads … torture … biological warfare … depleted uranium … drug trafficking … mercenaries …  [psyops] … [black ops ] … [false-flag operation] …

It’s not a pretty picture. It is enough to give imperialism a bad name.

From: Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, by William Blum [See Table of Contents below.]

A Reply to: America Cannot Be Said to Be Good

P. J. Cunningham makes legitimate references to the role of the civilians concerning the wars of aggression waged by their governments. It is true. The ‘Japanese civilians on the home front’ didn’t have to make weapons, or churn out propaganda, ‘feeding the [Imperial] beast.’ Neither do the Americans!

Moral rigor mortis soon sets in: ‘If Bush is unjust, if he is, as they say, the worst ever…’ If? As they say? You give Bush the benefit of the doubt? How generous of you! Sacré bleu! Mr Cunningham, who are they? Don’t you have any ideas of your own? Don’t know the facts about the war? Haven’t you seen the pictures? Read the alternative media? Learned the stats of the dead, injured and displaced? Could you honestly look at the body of a dead Iraqi (or a dead American occupation soldier) blown to pieces by the Bush doctrine of genocide in Iraq and still say If? Could you look in the eye of an Iraqi child who has lost her family and 50 percent of her body because an American cluster bomb was fired at her, and say ‘If Bush is unjust…?’ If America is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity? How could there be any doubt in a sane mind about Bush, the American cruelty and Iraqi genocide?

Cunningham’s attempt to obfuscate America’s infamous history, riddled with countless wars of aggression, massacres and acts of genocide, by blaming everything on the current US policy, which ‘bears some eerie parallels to that of Tojo’s Japan,’ rather than questioning the roots of America’s racism that compels her to wage unending barbaric wars against the world’s ‘colored’ races, is, at best, disingenuous (it is also ill-informed and shoddy ‘research’).

[As indefensible as their heinous war crimes and crimes against humanity were, if you could ask Tojo, his criminal cohorts, the Japanese rightists, and the ‘mean-spirited soldiers who violated the conventions of war by gratuitously killing, raping and torturing non-combatant Chinese [are you justifying rape and torture against combatants, Mr Cunningham?]’ how anyone could have committed such monstrous transgressions, they would probably cite the historical precedence set by America as a palpable ‘defense.’]

At worst, it is unadulterated Orwellian Big Brotherism. Cunningham manufactures doublethink to make you believe what you would otherwise know to be false. He attempts to create a new past because, as Orwell said, he who controls the past controls the future, and he who controls the present controls the past.

Was there a single period in the American history, even briefly, when the WASP were reprimanded, let alone prosecuted (convicted and punished), for shedding the blood of the ‘inferior’ races? To blame America’s misdeeds on ‘Tojoism,’ a miscreant administration cheered on by a repulsive generation, is selective memory and convenient amnesia and as such it is morally objectionable.

Cunningham’s half-truths, omissions and disinformation through doublethink are consistent, however, with the ’scholarly’ whitewash you would expect from Juan Cole’s den of disinformation – the ‘Informed [sic] Comment.’

Inadvertently, you have proved my point, Mr Cunningham.

A List of American Wars and Massacres

1495 Hispaniola Pacification campaign
1503 Xaraguá Massacre (1503)
1511 Cuba expedition under
1513 Pacra Massacre
1519 Tlaxcala Massacres
1519 Cholula Massacre
1520 Huitzilopochtli Festival Massacre
1521 Post-siege massacre of Tenochtitlan
1532 Cajas Massacre
1532 Cajamarca Massacre
1539 Napituca Massacre
1540 Mabila Massacre
1541 Moho Pueblo Massacre
1598 Acoma Massacre
1623 Pamunkey Peace Talks
1636 the Pequot Massacre
1637 Mystic Massacre
1644 English Massacre of sleeping village
1690 Schenectady Massacre
1763 Paxton Boys Massacre
1774 Yellow Creek Massacre
1775–1783 American Revolutionary War
1782 Gnadenhütten massacre
1798–1800 Quasi-War, France
1801–1805 First Barbary War
1812–1815 War of 1812
1815 Second Barbary War (also known as the Algerine or Algerian War)
1818 Chehaw Affair
1832 Battle of Bad Axe
1838 The Trail of Tears (forced relocation of the Cherokee Native American tribe to the Western United States, which resulted in the deaths of an estimated 4,000 Cherokees.)

1847 Battle of Contreras
1847 The Battles of Churubusco
1847 The Battle of Molino del Rey
1861–1865 The American Civil War
1850 Bloody Island Massacre
1851 “Extermination was once the official policy of the California government toward Native Americans, as Gov. Peter H. Burnett stated in 1851: ‘That a war of extermination will continue to be waged between the two races until the Indian race becomes extinct, must be expected…’” [Carla Blank]

1854 Kaibai Creek Massacre
1860 Gunther Island Massacre
1863 Bear River Massacre
1863 Keyesville Massacre
1864 Sand Creek Massacre
1864 Fort Pillow (near Memphis, Tenn.) Massacre.
1864-1890 “The massacres of Indians by the armies of the United States-in Colorado in 1864, in Montana in 1870, in South Dakota in 1890, to cite just a few-were massacres in the most literal sense: that is, wholesale slaughter in each case of hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children.” [Howard Zinn]

1865-1871 Yahi Massacres
1868 Battle of Washita River
1870 Marias Massacre
1871 Camp Grant Massacre
1873 Colfax Massacre (Grand Parish, La.) “… Easter Sunday of 1873, when the sun went down that night, it went down on the corpses of two hundred and eighty negroes.” [John G. Lewis]

1879 Ft Robinson Massacre
1885 East St. Louis massacres of black Americans
1886 Bay View Massacre in Milwaukee
1890 Wounded Knee Massacre

According to the historian David Stannard about 100 million died in the American Holocaust. Kirkpatrick Sale, Phil Lane, Jr., Lenore A. Stiffarm and Ben Kiernan, among others, share Stannard’s perspective. See also Ward Churchill’s research on the American Holocaust.

1897 Lattimer Massacre
1898 Spanish-American War
1899-1902 Philippine-American War [hostilities continued until 1913]
‘[In] the eight-year war to conquer the Philippines, a bloody affair that in many ways resembled the war in Vietnam. The United States killed [more than one million] Filipinos [mostly civilians] in the war.’ [Hoaward Zinn]

1906 “In 1906, an American military detachment attacked a village of Filipino Moslems (‘Moros’) living in the hollow of a mountain in one of the southern islands. Every one of 600 men, women, and children were killed.” [Hoaward Zinn]

1914 Ludlow [the Rockefeller] Massacre
1917 Massacre of Chinese miners in Rock Spring, Wyoming,
1921 “Negro’s Wall Street” 64 lynchings of the African American were reported.
“In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, planes dropped nitroglycerin on a thirty-six-block black business district, destroying hundreds of businesses, more than 1,000 homes, twenty churches, a hospital, libraries, and schools. The number of black people killed was estimated by some in the hundreds, by others in the thousands. Bodies were put into mass graves, stuffed into mine shafts, or thrown into the river.” [Hoard Zinn]

1927 Columbine Mine massacre (not the televised Columbine High School massacre in 1999)
1950-1953 Korean War
1952 Operation PBFORTUNE, Guatemala
1954 Operation PBSUCCESS, Guatemala
1958 Operation Blue Bat, Lebanon
1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion, Cuba
1962 Sino-Indian Border Conflict
1962-1973 Vietnam War
1965-1966 Operation Powerpack, Dominican Republic
1968 ‘My Lai Massacre of 1968, in which a company of American soldiers poured automatic rifle fire into groups of unarmed villagers, killing perhaps 500 people, many of them women and children.’ [H. Zinn]

“My Lai was not a unique event. An Army colonel charged with covering up the My Lai incident told reporters: ‘Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.’”

“And if the word ‘massacre’ means indiscriminate mass slaughter of innocent people, is it not reasonable to call the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ‘massacres,’ as well as the fire-bombing of Tokyo and the destruction of Dresden and other German cities? [Hoaward Zinn]

1980 Operation Eagle Claw, Iran hostage crisis, 1980
1983 Operation Urgent Fury, Invasion of Grenada,
1987-1989 Iran-Iraq War
1989-1990 Operation Just Cause, Panama
1991 Persian Gulf War
1992-1994 Somali Civil War
1994-1999 Yugoslav Wars
2001-Present. In the terror created by “War on Terror” about 1.2 million Iraqis 50,000 (?) Afghanis and at least 5-10,000 Americans and other Europeans have been killed.

Omissions may have occurred unintentionally.

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, by William Blum

Table of Contents

1. China – 1945 to 1960s: Was Mao Tse-tung just paranoid?
2. Italy – 1947-1948: Free elections, Hollywood style
3. Greece – 1947 to early 1950s: From cradle of democracy to client state
4. The Philippines – 1940s and 1950s: America’s oldest colony
5. Korea – 1945-1953: Was it all that it appeared to be?
6. Albania – 1949-1953: The proper English spy
7. Eastern Europe – 1948-1956: Operation Splinter Factor
8. Germany – 1950s: Everything from juvenile delinquency to terrorism
9. Iran – 1953: Making it safe for the King of Kings
10. Guatemala – 1953-1954: While the world watched
11. Costa Rica – Mid-1950s: Trying to topple an ally – Part 1
12. Syria – 1956-1957: Purchasing a new government
13. Middle East – 1957-1958: The Eisenhower Doctrine claims another backyard for America
14. Indonesia – 1957-1958: War and pornography
15. Western Europe – 1950s and 1960s: Fronts within fronts within fronts
16. British Guiana – 1953-1964: The CIA’s international labor mafia
17. Soviet Union – Late 1940s to 1960s: From spy planes to book publishing
18. Italy – 1950s to 1970s: Supporting the Cardinal’s orphans and techno-fascism
19. Vietnam – 1950-1973: The Hearts and Minds Circus
20. Cambodia – 1955-1973: Prince Sihanouk walks the high-wire of neutralism
21. Laos – 1957-1973: L’Armée Clandestine
22. Haiti – 1959-1963: The Marines land, again
23. Guatemala – 1960: One good coup deserves another
24. France/Algeria – 1960s: L’état, c’est la CIA
25. Ecuador – 1960-1963: A text book of dirty tricks
26. The Congo – 1960-1964: The assassination of Patrice Lumumba
27. Brazil – 1961-1964: Introducing the marvelous new world of death squads
28. Peru – 1960-1965: Fort Bragg moves to the jungle
29. Dominican Republic – 1960-1966: Saving democracy from communism by getting rid of democracy
30. Cuba – 1959 to 1980s: The unforgivable revolution
31. Indonesia – 1965: Liquidating President Sukarno … and 500,000 others
East Timor – 1975: And 200,000 more
32. Ghana – 1966: Kwame Nkrumah steps out of line
33. Uruguay – 1964-1970: Torture — as American as apple pie
34. Chile – 1964-1973: A hammer and sickle stamped on your child’s forehead
35. Greece – 1964-1974: “Fuck your Parliament and your Constitution,” said
the President of the United States
36. Bolivia – 1964-1975: Tracking down Che Guevara in the land of coup d’etat
37. Guatemala – 1962 to 1980s: A less publicized “final solution”
38. Costa Rica – 1970-1971: Trying to topple an ally — Part 2
39. Iraq – 1972-1975: Covert action should not be confused with missionary work
40. Australia – 1973-1975: Another free election bites the dust
41. Angola – 1975 to 1980s: The Great Powers Poker Game
42. Zaire – 1975-1978: Mobutu and the CIA, a marriage made in heaven
43. Jamaica – 1976-1980: Kissinger’s ultimatum
44. Seychelles – 1979-1981: Yet another area of great strategic importance
45. Grenada – 1979-1984: Lying — one of the few growth industries in Washington
46. Morocco – 1983: A video nasty
47. Suriname – 1982-1984: Once again, the Cuban bogeyman
48. Libya – 1981-1989: Ronald Reagan meets his match
49. Nicaragua – 1981-1990: Destabilization in slow motion
50. Panama – 1969-1991: Double-crossing our drug supplier
51. Bulgaria 1990/Albania 1991: Teaching communists what democracy is all about
52. Iraq – 1990-1991: Desert holocaust
53. Afghanistan – 1979-1992: America’s Jihad
54. El Salvador – 1980-1994: Human rights, Washington style
55. Haiti – 1986-1994: Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?
56. The American Empire – 1992 to present

Related Links:
http://cghs.dadeschools.net/african-american/precivil/index.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_massacres
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/knee.htm
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/History/Massacres_History.html
http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-650279/Wyoming-Massacre
http://www.counterpunch.org/blank05022007.html
http://www.zmag.org/bios/homepage.cfm?authorID=62
http://www.cesc.net/radicalweb/radicalconsultation/kirkpatricksale.html
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/History/American_Holocaust.html
http://www.monash.edu.au/alumni/prominent-alumni/ben-kiernan.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_American_indigenous_peoples
http://scu.edu/ethics/architects-of-peace/Lane/homepage.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/02/EDGK5PIUQE1.DTL

AMERICA CANNOT BE SAID TO BE GOOD

BY PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM

George W. Bush may indeed be the worst president ever, and Dick Cheney the worst vice-president imaginable but that does not exonerate the American people because Americans have the constitutional right and responsibility to remove miscreants from office.

The Bush-Cheney administration has not just given freedom a hollow ring, they have not just made a mockery of American democracy and human rights in the present, and they have not just put future generations at risk with reckless deficit spending, environmental degradation and the burden of war without end, but they have effectively caused the past to be rewritten as well. America is beginning to understand what it’s like to be on the wrong side of history.

This point was driven home to me when I read that respected American historian Herbert Bix, author of “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan” recently pointed out some striking similarities between Tojo’s Japan and Bush-Cheney’s America, particularly the willful disregard of international law, the pursuit of diplomacy by force and failure to account for war criminality.

Let’s consider for the moment that current US policy bears some eerie parallels to that of Tojo’s Japan. Is that a result of having judged militarist Japan unfairly, or has America gotten worse? Is that to say Japan’s criminal past was not as bad as we used to say it was, or is it still every bit as bad, only now, we, the American interlocutors, are debased in such a way that the moral distance is less distant?

Scholars have long been familiar with US lapses in civilized behavior, even in the great and just war carried out by the “greatest generation.” The enemy was understandably viewed with contempt for his actions, but improperly viewed with racist contempt. Indiscriminate killing took untold innocent life, nowhere more vividly than in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with equal cold-blooded consequences in the fire-bombing of Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka.

For decades now, scholars have been effectively challenging the Truman era myth that the atomic bombing was necessary and saved millions of lives. While reasonable interpretations differ, the twin atomic bombings remain a uniquely uncomfortable and awkward topic for Americans who subscribe to the otherwise generally positive national narrative that starts with the day of infamy, the day on which the peace-loving US was sneakily attacked at Pearl Harbor, and continues with a series of heroic battles for sea, sky and land control across the Pacific, followed by a generally enlightened occupation of Japan’s home islands.

Given the incessant mutual violence that the war extracted from both sides, epitomized by the brutal battles of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, it took decades for ordinary soldiers on both sides to be viewed with sympathetic respect –basically unfree men following orders as required by the tragedy of the time. Last year Clint Eastwood did a remarkably even-handed job of conveying the equivalency of the rank and file on both sides of the Pacific with the twin films “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”

The US occupation of Japan saw many a samurai’s sword turned into treasured souvenir, if not plowshare. It was none other than US war hero Douglas MacArthur who set the tone for sanitizing and containing Japan’s war criminality at the elite level by letting the Emperor off the hook and selectively exonerating war criminals who were of utility to the US. But if it wasn’t the people, and it wasn’t the penultimate leader, then who takes the blame?

To blame everything on a few bad apples is bad history, incongruent with the complex, interactive way things usually happen, but it allows nagging, difficult-to-resolve issues to be buried or put on the back burner as happened at the Tokyo trials. The entirety of Japan’s war guilt was deftly shifted onto the shoulders of Tojo and a handful of “Class A War Criminals.

Scapegoating, even of the obviously odious, is not fair, but it is expedient because it staves off more damaging and nuanced reckonings. That’s not to say scapegoated Class A war criminals are innocent in the same way their hapless victims were; the criminality of the Class A men is clearly documented. But they were unfairly singled out and unfairly apportioned more of the blame than even their cruel shoulders could bear. They were made caricatures of evil in contrast to the aloof, doddering emperor and the witless soldier in the field.

George W. Bush publicity handlers take note; better to spin your client as a dodderer playing with something less than a full deck than have him be held accountable. In today’s America, as in wartime Japan, there is plenty of blame to be passed around, but no takers. It’s too hurtful to the American ego to even contemplate war criminality. US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says impeachment is not an option. The State Department has granted immunity to the criminally negligible including the thugs of Blackwater. Is this apparent benevolence not just another type of denial, that Americans don’t torture, Americans don’t commit crimes of war?

Eventually, narratives that blame no one have to round up a few suspects, and that’s where the bad apples come in. But this sort of selective justice unduly burdens middling war criminals with more historical agency than they ever possessed.

Does making Tojo an example of evil incarnate exonerate Japanese war veterans, among them mean-spirited soldiers who violated the conventions of war by gratuitously killing, raping and torturing non-combatant Chinese? And what about Japanese civilians on the home front, making weapons, churning out propaganda, feeding the beast? Blame it on Tojo?

What about people like Akira Kurosawa who worked uninterrupted with ample state support during a war that wreaked murder and mayhem on Japan’s neighbors under the guise of racial superiority? To hear Kurosawa tell it in his biography, his main beef with the Tojo authorities was over artistic control, not the insane politics of the time.

The bad apple school of thought thrives in national narratives because it aids and abets denial for proud individuals and powerful constituencies.

The problem with Japanese rightists, and America’s problem understanding them, is not so much the seemingly futile attempt polish up the bad apples, the futile attempt to make the class A Criminals shine. It’s not even the rightists’ dubious campaign to re-configure war criminals as honorable Shinto spirits at Yasukuni Shrine. The problem with the rightists is they are bound to honor the penultimate leader at all costs, which short-circuits all other arguments and prevents blame from being fairly apportioned.

The result of this implacable cognitive dissonance is denial. Denial is the worst thing about the Japan’s rightists, not their contrarian desire to challenge the America-centric narrative as articulated in the admittedly clumsy and compromised Tokyo War Crimes Trials.

Americans are starting to learn more about war crimes and denial they they ever dreamed of. The divisive words and belligerent actions of George W. Bush, the contempt for diplomacy, the lack of accountability, the tortured rhetoric and the rhetoric defending torture have caused America’s global prestige to drop to an unprecedented low. America is increasingly seen as the crux of the problem rather than a flawed but otherwise normal country, let alone a beacon of hope.

The horror of an unjust and unnecessary war is forcing Americans to confront the opacity of their own self-image, and in doing so, to seek lessons and parallels than now, in a way not possible even four years ago, make it possible to see Tojo and Japan’s war criminality in slightly more sympathetic way. This is not to exonerate but rather to heave a heavy sigh of understanding, to acknowledge that even the most refined and civilized of nations can be disfigured and disabled by the politics of fear and denial.

America has been diminished to such an extent under the Bush-Cheney “unitary presidency” that a crime like torture — once comfortably seen as beyond the pale because it was only associated with the most despicable of enemies– suddenly resonates in an uncomfortably familiar way.

Just as it should be acknowledged that the people of Japan share a certain culpability in Tokyo’s terrible war, a war that ravaged Asia and eventually Japan itself, Americans have to own up to Iraq. But it can also be said in defense of the average Japanese in the days after Pearl Harbor that there was much they didn’t know and couldn’t talk about; –the media was completely censored and the Kempeitai dealt brutally with domestic opposition.

When the day of reckoning comes for ordinary Americans to assess their culpability in the debacle of Iraq, a hideous and heinous war fought in view of a free media and in the context of relatively unfettered freedom to protest, what will the excuse be?

If Bush is unjust, if he is, as they say, the worst ever, then the free people who support, tolerate and enable him cannot be said to be good.

PHILIP J CUNNINGHAM TEACHES AT DOSHISHA UNIVERSITY IN JAPAN

FAIR USE NOTICE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed for research and educational purposes.

A Reply to America Cannot Be Said to Be Good: Blame It On Tojo

A Mass Murderer Dies

Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr., pilot of plane that dropped A-bomb on Hiroshima killing 80,000 people instantly, finally died yesterday.

According to some estimates the total death toll for Hiroshima reached 237,000 with tens of thousands more victims suffering from permanent radiation illness.

Troubled by other peoples objections and strong criticism to his acts of mass murder and crimes against humanity, the war criminal told his family and friends that he wanted no funeral service or burial site because he feared his critics and antiwar protesters might use it as a rallying point.

In honor of his mother, who supported his opting out of medical school to join the military, he had her name, Enola Gay, etched on his B-29 bomber!

Studs Terkel [at end of an interview with the psychopathic Killer]: How did your mother feel about having her name on it?
-
Paul Tibbets: Well, I can only tell you what my dad said. My mother never changed her expression very much about anything, whether it was serious or light, but when she’d get tickled, her stomach would jiggle. My dad said to me that when the telephone in Miami rang, my mother was quiet first. Then, when it was announced on the radio, he said: “You should have seen the old gal’s belly jiggle on that one.”

Related Links:

American leaders knew that Japan was about to surrender
The Terror America Wrought
Atomic Bombs: Race Hatred and Mass Murder
Whitewashing Hiroshima: The Uncritical Glorification of American Militarism
The Bombs of August
War Crimes, USA

Canada, Racism, Genocide, and the Bomb