Is the History Channel's airing of Japanese atrocities

[Ladyhawk]

during WWII (torture, killings, Rape of Nanking, Bataan Death March, etc.) a subtle attempt to justify the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It's anniversary time, right?

Yes, the Japanese were guilty of unthinkable atrocities. The documentaries made me sick to my stomach, but I don't see how focusing on these atrocities makes America's nuclear attack against cities full of citizens right. The documentaries seem to vilify the Japanese as a whole.

(Yeah, yeah, yeah, we "had" to drop the bomb to end the war, but I don't buy that either.)

[UdoKier]

1. The History Channel AKA the USA Jingoism Channel is part of Disney/ABC.

Thus the endless succession of glorious US war stories and nary a mention of Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Watergate, Iran-Contra, or any number of other very significant historical events.

It is more of a Historical Revision/Sanitation Channel.

Better to start with Howarrd Zinn's People's History and move on from there.

[psychopomp]

2. Is that right?

I did not know that. Is that something that everybody but me knows about?

[rinsd]

3. Huh?

The History Channel just did a whole series on engineering disasters covering among others Bhopal, Three Mile and Chernobyl. In addition they have done specials specificaly on nuclear power while covering both Three Mile & Chernobyl.

I agree that Iran-Contra gets nary a mention. But I have seen things on HC about Watergate though not recently.

Zinn's People's History IS historical revisionism as told from a different point of view. It's certainly a worthy read but it's hardly the end all be all of history.

Edit: I wanted to add that Fox does not own HC. It is owned by A7E Netowrosk which is a joint venture of Hearst, ABC & NBC.

[UdoKier]

5. You are correct about the ownership. My mistake.

But the programming IS heavily slanted in favor of War-Glory narratives. You mention Bhopal and TMI being covered in the context of "engineering disasters" The more important points of both stories will have been glossed over. In TMI, it was the inherent danger of nuclear power, the impossibility of safe disposal of waste, and the inevitability of occasional deadly accidents.

Bhopal was a case study of the arrogance of American multinationals. Did they mention the paltry settlement given to the victims of Bhopal or the pattern of negligence in the operation of the plant.

There may be occasional exceptions, but I do not trust this channel, it is heavily propagandistic.

(Fox owns the following, among others:

Fox News Channel

Fox Movie Channel

FX

National Geographic Channel

The Fox Sports Networks

The New York Post

20th Century Fox

Fox Searchlight Pictures

Fox Television Studios

[rinsd]

6. Nuclear power is a whole lot cleaner....

Than alot of what we have now(coal burning etc). France has used nuclear power to the point they sell/supply electricity for some of the EU.


As far as war...HC is the WW2 channel. But still it's better than alot of the other crap on TV.

[UdoKier]

7. Depends how you define clean...

Not that I would want a pile of coal slag or a smokestack in my backyard, but I'd prefer it over radioactive waste leaking into my drinking water well.

[rinsd]

10. Oh I agree.....

But France seems to have done just fine in the last 30 years.

[Massacure]

13. France reprocesses their waste if I recall

Which vastly reduces the amount of waste they need to dispose of, and also makes the half life shorter. The U.S. banned reprocessing under the Carter administration.

France built their reactors later (built in the late 70's and early 80's), which means they are much safer then our 40-50 year old reactors.

France's nuclear power program is miles ahead of ours.

[leftistagitator]

24. If we could get a government controlled, well run system of reactors

like they have in France I'd have no problem with it. The only problem is that we have Republicans here in America. They'd either privatize the Reactors or cut the budgets so bad that saftey becomes an afterthought, either way we end up with an enviromental disaster. The new reactors are quite amazing, some even physically can't meltdown. It's a shame the American tendancy to half ass everything is keeping us from enjoying nuclear power properly.

[JustJersey]

12. Bhopal was sabotage

I work in the chemical industry so I know a fair amount about the Bhopal tragedy. The cause was sabotage, not negligence. A disgruntled worker hooked up a water hose to a methyl isocyanate tank and that's what caused the explosion and gas cloud.

And the settlement wasn't particularly paltry -- about $500 million. Less than it would have been in the U.S., but probably the highest ever in India.

I'm sure Union Carbide could have had more systems in place to prevent this type of thing, but when a worker wants to sabotage a chemical plant, there's not a whole lot you can do to prevent it.

[UdoKier]

22. The settlement was about $1100 per corpse and only $520 for chronic sick.

Paltry no matter how you look it it.

Most non-chemical industry observers believe it WAS negligence -an attitude borne of the notion that it was "just" a third-world country full of brown subhumans.

http://web.mid-day.com/news/nation/2002/december/38209.htm

The report said Union Carbide, now taken over by Dow Chemical, was forced to release the documents last month by a court in New York state that was hearing a class action suit filed by Bhopal survivors in 1999.

The internal documents contradict earlier claims of the company that the accident was an act of sabotage and not due to faulty design, New Scientist said.

(snip)

"Regardless of how the water got into the MIC, the runaway reaction should have been contained," New Scientist article said. "It was not, largely because Bhopal had far more limited emergency equipment than Carbide's US plant."

Carbide's evasion of fulfilling its responsibility.
http://www.prithvisolutions.com/AIDConf2003/Bhopal_FAQs.htm


Carbide killed over 20,000 people with its blase attitudes. Tens of thousands more continue to suffer the after-effects. This was a disaster many times more significant than 9-11, but of course, being brown and foreign, the victims of Bhopal get almost no interest here.

Nice attempt at covering for Carbide, but you're wrong.

[dedhed]

4. They've also suggested Hiroshima could have been avoided...

I seem to recall a documentary on the History Channel that suggested Truman dropped the bombs for political (as opposed to strategic) reasons. The impression I got from it was that Hiroshima and Nagasaki probably could have been avoided if Truman weren't so gung-ho!

:bounce:

[fujiyama]

9. I saw that special

I'm not sure if it was on the regular History Channel or History International (which has good programs once in a while).

The special was fascinating because it showed the diplomatic channels being opened between the Soviets and Japan beforehand and that a surrender may have been possible.

Overall, while I tend to believe the HC has a right leaning stance considering their target demographic (middle aged white men), their programs are on the whole better than the junk CNN, FOX, and MSNBC has to offer.

[rinsd]

11. HCI is good....

I like it because it has alot more documentaries that I haven' already seen on HC.

[leftistagitator]

17. The A bomb was dropped for strategic reasons...

It's just none of them had anything to do with ending the war with Japan. We didn't want Russia to think they should get a piece of Japan just because they did damn near all of the fighting while we were in Europe, and we wanted a chance to show off the destructive power of our new weapons to our Communist rivals. After we dropped those bombs, the USSR launched a massive attack on the Japanese military, slaughtering a million Japanese soldiers, which is the act that really forced the Japanese surrender. By claiming the a-bombs did it we not only justifed their existence but we justified America running the post-war Japanese government, and scared the be-jeesus out of a currently a-bombless USSR.

[Parche]

8. atrocities

I dont think they were attempts to justify them
I know they were a necessary evil that had to be done, and hopefully never again.
The Japanese Army and Government, mostly the Army were fanatical
and were NOT going to surrender, even though they were surrounded
by Admiral Halsey and the 3rd fleet.
A lot of people dont know about what Japan did in the war, their
atrocities, but we do have to remember them.
Wake Island, Truk, New Guinea,Phillipines, Fukuoka to name a few
What they did to our POW's was unthinkable and savage
The bombs on Hiroshima and Nagaskai were justified, there were
no other ways to get them to surrender.
That may sound cruel, but after you read history and battles
and study it, there is no other way.

[Snow]

14. Story about my mother-in-law, during the Japanese occupation

of Korea. My (Korean) mother-in-law was a school teacher at high school level, quite young, not even married. The schools were run and inl arge part taught by Japanese. One of the issues my m-i-l butted heads with her boss over was the field work the students had to do - growing vegetables to help feed the school and so on. At one of the faculty meeting my MIL pointed out that the field work was difficult for the girls when they were having their periods, and wouldn't it be reasonable to give them a break at that time - the girls were fainting, and so on. Well, the principal said no, with no reason given, and my mother-in-law, having brought this up several times and gotten virtually ignored, blew her stack, and said something along the line of "You miserable bastard! Don't you have sisters, a mother? Can't you have any sympathy?" The principal turned purple, sat there stuttering "Yosh, yosh, yosh..." which essentially means "You'll be sorry" and the faculty meeting sort of stumbled to an end. My mother-in-law went to her office and just sort of sat down on the floor, staring into space. Shortly one of the staff came by and told her the principal was planning to send her off to be one of the infamous "comfort women", and she should leave. So she did - went from south Cholla province up nearly to the northern border of Korea, in the Paektoo Mountain area, and stayed there for a year, before returning to that school after things had quieted down.

Not exactly atrocities, but it makes a good story and is an interesting look at what went on in Korea during that war.

[leftistagitator]

18. You've been reading the wrong history books

People keep repeating the lie their grade school teacher told them about Japan, "Japan would never surrender in WW2". That's completely not true, in fact, Japan had already offered to surrender if we would spare the Emporer's life. While there were some Russian considerations to think of, this was a perfectly valid surrender offer on the table, one which we would later accept after we dropped the bombs. History does not justify the idea that dropping the a-bomb did anything to stop the war, all it did was kill a few hundred thousand civilians and intimidate the Russians, (for about 5 years).

[Jefferson_Clinton]

20. if i were alive

i would not feel any sympathy for the japanese

an unprovoked invasive attack should have been dealt with exactly what we gave them: the newest in american military

you have to admit that part of the reason we are the great nation we are is that we are capable of defending ourselves brilliantly

[leftistagitator]

23. Well, I'm not sure how sympathetic I would have been.

The fact is that war and death drive people mad, I'm sure I would be quite inured to the plight of the Japanese would I have been alive.

But here and now, in the sanity of quasi-peace, I'm against unnecessarily killing people. The minute you start holding a people as a whole responsible for the actions of a government, you become as a great a monster as the one you fight. Bin Laden thinks that the American people as a whole are responsible for what our government has done in the middle east, it's how he justifies killing innocent people to his cronies. Japan's people weren't even members of a democracy, they had no say in their governments actions. Killing them wasn't necessay...

And of course, it is nice to live in a country with a powerful militray. Someone, after all, has to keep the King of England out of your face.

[THUNDER HANDS]

15. I don't care what anyone says

BOTH of my grandfathers say it was a good thing the bombs were dropped. And they were the one's fighting in WWII. So I'll take their first-hand experience over any documentary or revisionist book or research paper.

I've never heard a veteran of WWII say dropping the bomb was NOT the right thing to do.

[leftistagitator]

21. Here's a few

http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27a/047.html
Eisenhower
Chief of Staff Admiral Leahy
General Macarthur

Of course, it had a few radical civilian critics too, like
Winston Churchill
Robert Oppenheimer

You're Grandparents have fallen for a lie, sorry. This has been exposed for decades, there's no excuse for still believing that nuking Japan was necessary to secure peace.

[Junkdrawer]

16. In Canada they have History Television - what a difference!

Saw it on my last vacation.

The TLC, Discovery, and now The History Channel are shadows of what they once were.

To quote Pink Floyd: "I've got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from." Only now, it's "hundreds of channels of shit"

[Jefferson_Clinton]

19. look from this perspective

i watched a documentary which aderessed this issue

an invasion of japan would have meant that every citizen would basically have to die because of their samurai culture of non surrender

yes war is a terrible thing, but imagine how many japanese and american lives were saved due to an invasion

besides, in the days of total warfare, it was hard to separate cilivilian targets and military targets

i believe we did the right thing

plus it kept the USSR off japan

[tkmorris]

25. Yep, that's the lie they sell alright.

The trouble is, and it's been mentioned more than once in this very thread, that isn't true. The Japanese were ready and willing to surrender provided we guaranteed the safety of the Emperor.

As for it's effect on the USSR there is something to that. It is difficult to predict with any certainty what the USSR would have done after WWII if we hadn't demonstrated the bomb but there is no doubt that dropping the bombs did give them pause.