Congressman Mark Takano (D. 41st Congressional District, California) is urging President Obama, from the floor of the House of Representatives and by letter, to visit Hiroshima during an upcoming visit to Japan nominally to recognize the (unspoken immoral) power of nuclear weapons (and the unspoken immorality of using them against the Japanese in a war to the bitter end).
Takano and Obama should take an Asian tour together stopping first in Nanking, China, where the mass murder count of civilians in 1937 by the Japanese Army were many more than those who died in the Hiroshima nuclear blast.
They should visit Pearl Harbor and pay homage at the USS Arizona Memorial for those who died in a surprise attack by the Japanese Navy, then go to the Philippines and walk the more than 60 mile route of the Bataan Death March, on which American and Filipino POWs were forced to walk without rest, food or water. Whomever couldn't keep up was put to death by Japanese military personnel.
Traveling what is left of the railway route through Thailand built in large part by American POWs used as slave labor should be on the itinerary. Many of those POWs were worked and starved to death as well as capriciously executed by the Japanese military.
The examples of Japanese brutality and mass murder of civilians and prisoners of war during WWII are endless as well as countless in terms of individual victims.
Perhaps Takano and Obama could pay homage to the 442nd Regiment to which Democratic Senator Daniel Inouye had belonged, the most decorated American unit of its size in WWII. The men of that unit had the same Japanese ancestry as Congressman Takano does, and I submit that their outlook as citizens then was far more patriotically American than that which the Congressman regularly demonstrates to me now.
However, if Takano wants to include WWII interment of Issei and Nissei Japanese in the United States as a part of this discussion, perhaps he should denounce Democratic Party hero President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the same breath, by whose executive order Japanese internment was carried out.
It is also true that Democratic President FDR originated the atomic bombings of Japan and that Democratic President Truman carried them out.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually saved Japanese lives many times over in the long run. The bombings prompted Japanese Emperor Hirohito to ask the Japanese people to stand down - which they did out of cultural respect for the Emperor, a Japanese population which had been primed to fight to the very end by the Japanese military hierarchy. Prime minister Hideki Tojo, who functioned in roughly the same capacity as an old time Shogun, attempted to have Hirohito
assassinated for doing so. It is important to note that while the Japanese surrendered, they were not defeated as was Nazi Germany. To defeat the culturally motivated Japanese population of the time
(unquestioning loyalty and obedience to one's master combined with no surrender to the master's adversary) by invasion would have meant extermination of the vast majority of the Japanese people as well as requiring a prohibitively massive body count of Americans.
Maybe Takano's and Obama's Asian tour could also take them to Cambodia to visit the Killing Fields where the Khmer Rouge systematically liquidated something like 2.5 million of their own countrymen in the late 1970's. There were no nuclear arms involved in that genocidal act,
and, like Nanking, the executions were much more personally brutal than
Hiroshima.
It is also true that Democratic President FDR originated the atomic bombings of Japan and that Democratic President Truman carried them out.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually saved Japanese lives many times over in the long run. The bombings prompted Japanese Emperor Hirohito to ask the Japanese people to stand down - which they did out of cultural respect for the Emperor, a Japanese population which had been primed to fight to the very end by the Japanese military hierarchy. Prime minister Hideki Tojo, who functioned in roughly the same capacity as an old time Shogun, attempted to have Hirohito
assassinated for doing so. It is important to note that while the Japanese surrendered, they were not defeated as was Nazi Germany. To defeat the culturally motivated Japanese population of the time
(unquestioning loyalty and obedience to one's master combined with no surrender to the master's adversary) by invasion would have meant extermination of the vast majority of the Japanese people as well as requiring a prohibitively massive body count of Americans.
Maybe Takano's and Obama's Asian tour could also take them to Cambodia to visit the Killing Fields where the Khmer Rouge systematically liquidated something like 2.5 million of their own countrymen in the late 1970's. There were no nuclear arms involved in that genocidal act,
and, like Nanking, the executions were much more personally brutal than
Hiroshima.
However, the larger part of Takano's motive in this matter may well be publicly furthering the propagandist notion that the United States has been an evil actor ever since the very first instance of English colonization, and is fully responsible for every negative occurrence which has happened in the world ever since its colonial emancipation from the British Empire.
Congressman Takano needs to let go of revisionist history and focus on the here and now, such as President Obama green lighting procurement of nuclear arms by the religiously apocalyptic lunatics that rule Iran. There is no reasoning with any unhinged, medieval religious nut who truly believes he is doing God's will by personally using nukes as a substitute for divinely dispensed hellfire rained down through the riven clouds by the almighty himself.
Takano's letter to Obama:
http://takano.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20President%20Obama%20on%20Hiroshima.pdf
Representative Takano's local and Washington phone numbers:
951.222.0203
202.225.2305
Call your own congressman too.
Congressman Takano needs to let go of revisionist history and focus on the here and now, such as President Obama green lighting procurement of nuclear arms by the religiously apocalyptic lunatics that rule Iran. There is no reasoning with any unhinged, medieval religious nut who truly believes he is doing God's will by personally using nukes as a substitute for divinely dispensed hellfire rained down through the riven clouds by the almighty himself.
Takano's letter to Obama:
http://takano.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20President%20Obama%20on%20Hiroshima.pdf
Representative Takano's local and Washington phone numbers:
951.222.0203
202.225.2305
Call your own congressman too.
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