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War
Rabid pro-Americanism even at CBC leads to gross racism
By Kevin Potvin
In a portrayal of the American decision to nuclear bomb Japan, the blame is put squarely on the victim while the perpetrator is left blameless
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Shame on the CBC! Just because the public broadcaster is under constant pressure from conservative and pro-American forces doesn’t excuse it from broadcasting racist slurs and self-serving lies.
Case in point: in the past week, in commemoration of the American nuclear bombardment of Japan 63 years ago August 6 and 9, the Passionate Eye series broadcast a re-enactment and narrative history of the political events leading up to the US decision to drop an atomic bomb on the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
While the story at the time was understandably muddled by the rush and anxiety of war, and while dispassionate research was understandably constrained by good taste while soldiers fresh from war were still coming home, in the meantime, a fair amount of more objective revision of the storyline has revealed a far different picture. The CBC’s Passionate Eye utterly ignored all the more accurate revisionist history in the intervening years in order to take us right back to the propagandized story as told in the immediate aftermath of the American attack, as though historians still think that is the true story.
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The false story the CBC shamelessly peddles is that the Japanese were bloodthirsty for a US land invasion even at the cost of millions of lives on both sides, that they thought they were still in a position to win the war, and interpreted US negotiating concessions as a sign of weakness. In this utterly racist portrayal, the Japanese are held to account for the catastrophe visited upon the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while the Americans are given a free pass, as though they had no rational choice but to drop their nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians.
In fact, the Japanese had already conceded directly to the Americans that their imminent defeat was a fait accompli. But until 1945, it was unprecedented for a victor in war to demand of the vanquished unconditional surrender, and so it was normal for the Japanese to attempt to negotiate terms of surrender.
A US ground invasion of Japan would have been something for the Japanese government to prepare the Japanese citizenry to defend against, just as any country in the world at any point would be compelled to do when faced with a massive invasion by an enemy. Video clips used by the CBC purportedly to show just how crazy the Japs were (by arming and training women and youngsters in methods of homeland defence) instead show a responsible government taking normal precautions any government anywhere in the world would.
The real problem the Americans faced, to which the nuclear bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki citizens was the solution, was the imminent appearance on the Japanese scene of the Soviet Red Army. Japan’s surrender was a given, but what the Americans did not want was a joint surrender to both American and Soviet forces, for that would dilute the spoils of war between the two victors.
The nuclear bombardment was meant to force the Japanese to surrender before the Russians arrived, so that the Russians would not be allowed to co-accept the Japanese surrender, even though Russia was a full allied partner in the whole Pacific War.
The true story of the nuclear devastation of Japan occurs not in the closing chapter of the Second World War, which was already over in all but name, but rather in the opening chapter of the Soviet-US Cold War. In this context, the Cold War is the most inappropriately named war in history: it’s opening act was two nuclear bombs over Japan, the hottest kind of war ever imagined.
Apparently 63 years is still not enough time to get the story right, and not even a public broadcaster with a reputation, if not a mandate, to strive always for truth, is not enough to overcome American propaganda no matter how demonstrably false it is. Such is the strength of rabid pro-Americanism in Canada today.
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