The New York Times, by far the most trusted and esteemed US newspaper, has always buckled under the pressure of powerful interests. Throughout the several decades of his long and productive career—although perhaps mostly prominently in Manufacturing Consent—Noam Chomsky has in particular heaped much criticism on the publication for its lies of exclusion, selective reporting of facts, and downright distortions and untruths.
In an especially egregious instance of this duplicity at work, one can consider the ways in which the leading newspaper tried to cover up one of the worst crimes in all of human history, the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the incineration of hundreds of thousands of civilians, and the subsequent torture of subsequent populations with nuclear fallout. Take a look at the headline of a story it published in 1945: “No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin.”
As a reminder, in what is likely a very conservative estimate, more than 200,000 civilians were murdered in these two bombings alone. In the words of a UCLA physician’s eyewitness report, the “real mortality of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Japan will never be known. The destruction and overwhelming chaos made orderly counting impossible.”
And this is not to mention the over 100,000 innocent people—and likely significantly more—burned to death in the deadliest conventional bomb attack ever, the US’ 9–10 March 1945 air bombing of Tokyo, aka “Operation Meetinghouse.”
Virtually all respected historians agree that the bombing of these cities was not in any way, shape, or form needed to end the war. They disagree as to what the reasons were (many saw it as a way for the US to intimidate and threaten the USSR, in what might be called the first large act of the Cold War), but the overwhelming consensus is that the attacks were not necessary.
This was even admitted by the US government. In 1944, the US War Department created the Strategic Bombing Survey, in order to analyze the US’ aerial attacks in World War II. The survey included interviews with hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders. It concluded:
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
The US government is unable to procure a consistent definition of terrorism—principally because any definition it creates will apply equally to its own actions. Chomsky draws attention to the fact that, based on the description used in US Army manuals (“the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature… through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear”), the US is a terrorist state, by its own definition. Whichever denotation one chooses, one thing is clear: the US’ nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mass murder of 200,000 civilians, constituted a heinous act of terrorism. This is incontestable.
Yet the US media, and particularly the New York Times, helped to cover up these crimes against humanity and abominable acts of terror.
I came across this past story in a 2008 article by lifelong muckraking journalist John Pilger, “The lies of Hiroshima are the lies of today.” Pilger wrote (emphases mine):
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb’s blast. It was the first big lie. “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. “I write this as a warning to the world,” reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called “an atomic plague”. For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared – and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate “good war”, whose “ethical bath”, as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
…
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus “war on terror”, the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make “pre-emptive” nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current “threat”. But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK – just as the lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical.
…
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that “we did not know”? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence”? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
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h/t: Credit to Adam Johnson for digging up the headline.
Originally published at BenNorton.com on 13 March 2015.
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