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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsA People's History Of The United States - by Howard Zinn - FREE READ!
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/zinnapeopleshistory.htmlThe Note: This great book should really be read by everyone. It is difficult to describe why it so great because it both teaches and inspires. You really just have to read it. We think it is so good that it demands to be as accessible as possible. Once you've finished it, we're sure you'll agree. In fact, years ago, we would offer people twenty dollars if they read the book and didn't think it was completely worth their time. Of all the people who took us up on it, no one collected.
Before you start complaining that this is unauthorized...
This book should be mandatory reading in every school IMO.
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Ed Suspicious
(8,879 posts)it on my kindle and bought a second time. I'm 22 bucks in and a free copy pops up. Oh well. Worth every penny to me.
L0oniX
(31,493 posts)
cantbeserious
(13,039 posts)eom
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Zinn wrote Truth.
The Bombs of August
by Howard Zinn
The Progressive magazine, August 2000
EXCERPT...
That is why the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is important, because if citizens can question that, if they can declare nuclear weapons an unacceptable means, even if it ends a war a month or two earlier, they may be led to a larger question-the means (involving forty million dead) used to defeat Fascism.
And if they begin to question the moral purity of "the good war," indeed, the very best of wars, then they may get into a questioning mood that will not stop until war itself is unacceptable, whatever reasons are advanced.
So we must now, fifty-five years later, with those bombings still so sacred that a mildly critical Smithsonian exhibit could not be tolerated, insist on questioning those deadly missions of the sixth and ninth of August, 1945.
The principal justification for obliterating Hiroshima and Nagasaki is that it "saved lives" because otherwise a planned U.S. invasion of Japan would have been necessary, resulting in the deaths of tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Truman at one point used the figure "a half million lives," and Churchill "a million lives," but these were figures pulled out of the air to calm troubled consciences; even official projections for the number of casualties in an invasion did not go beyond 46,000.
In fact, the bombs that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not forestall an invasion of Japan because no invasion was necessary. The Japanese were on the verge of surrender, and American military leaders knew that. General Eisenhower, briefed by Secretary of War Henry Stimson on the imminent use of the bomb, told him that "Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary."
After the bombing, Admiral William D. Leary, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the atomic bomb "a barbarous weapon," also noting that: "The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender."
The Japanese had begun to move to end the war after the U.S. victory on Okinawa, in May of 1945, in the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War. After the middle of June, six members of the Japanese Supreme War Council authorized Foreign Minister Togo to approach the Soviet Union, which was not at war with Japan, to mediate an end to the war "if possible by September."
Togo sent Ambassador Sato to Moscow to feel out the possibility of a negotiated surrender. On July 13, four days before Truman, Churchill, and Stalin met in Potsdam to prepare for the end of the war (Germany had surrendered two months earlier), Togo sent a telegram to Sato: "Unconditional surrender is the only obstacle to peace. It is his Majesty's heart's desire to see the swift termination of the war."
The United States knew about that telegram because it had broken the Japanese code early in the war. American officials knew also that the Japanese resistance to unconditional surrender was because they had one condition enormously important to them: the retention of the Emperor as symbolic leader. Former Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew and others who knew something about Japanese society had suggested that allowing Japan to keep its Emperor would save countless lives by bringing an early end to the war.
Yet Truman would not relent, and the Potsdam conference agreed to insist on "unconditional surrender." This ensured that the bombs would fall on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It seems that the United States government was determined to drop those bombs.
But why? Gar Alperovitz, whose research on that question is unmatched (The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Knopf, 1995), concluded, based on the papers of Truman, his chief adviser James Byrnes, and others, that the bomb was seen as a diplomatic weapon against the Soviet Union. Byrnes advised Truman that the bomb "could let us dictate the terms of ending the war." The British scientist P.M.S. Blackett, one of Churchill's advisers, wrote after the war that dropping the atomic bomb was "the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia."
There is also evidence that domestic politics played an important role in the decision. In his recent book, Freedom From Fear: The United States, 1929-1945 (Oxford, 1999), David Kennedy quotes Secretary of State Cordell Hull advising Byrnes, before the Potsdam conference, that "terrible political repercussions would follow in the U.S." if the unconditional surrender principle would be abandoned. The President would be "crucified" if he did that, Byrnes said. Kennedy reports that "Byrnes accordingly repudiated the suggestions of Leahy, McCloy, Grew, and Stimson," all of whom were willing to relax the "unconditional surrender" demand just enough to permit the Japanese their face-saving requirement for ending the war.
Can we believe that our political leaders would consign hundreds of thousands of people to death or lifelong suffering because of "political repercussions" at home?
CONTINUED...
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Zinn/Bombs_August.html
History as Science.
L0oniX
(31,493 posts)
Curmudgeoness
(18,219 posts)Please take the time to read it---it took me probably a year, since I did it in sections.
I have the hardback so I don't need this one, but it is great to have it available to all...although I am not sure how Zinn authorized this since he is no longer with us.
lovemydog
(11,833 posts)before he passed away.
Agree - amazing book. Well worth studying.
Curmudgeoness
(18,219 posts)I am sure that he would have no problem with a wider circulation of The People's History.
WillyT
(72,631 posts)
Spitfire of ATJ
(32,723 posts)Dates back to these days:
http://nicksays.typepad.com/.a/6a00d834529e4569e20134861a9e9f970c-800wi
For sharing for the non-computer types in my life.
Enthusiast
(50,983 posts)
RoccoR5955
(12,471 posts)Too bad they will never use it in schools.
In schools, it's more about the propaganda that they want you to know, than what actually happened.
Curmudgeoness
(18,219 posts)until I got to college. Then I found that it really could be interesting when they talked about the bad as well as the good, and the effects of policy instead of just what happened when.
MindMover
(5,016 posts) rhett o rick
(55,981 posts)
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)Most of American history has been taught to us as great people, great leaders, were what shaped America. We frame events around the President or particular historical individuals, as if these persons were responsible for it all.
Howard Zinn's perspective of American history is "the people," and a critique of what exactly these great leaders did to "we the people." The final lesson from Zinn is we can take responsibility and change the course of America for us.
L0oniX
(31,493 posts)jtuck004
(15,882 posts)into people's heads? Open a sandwich shop and wrap sandwiches in re-prints they can read later...
Heck, a district in Idaho just banned "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" partly, I think, because it discussed masturbation, and as the woman said "it has words in it we don't use in our home". Instead of wonder at her rather small vocabulary, the board banned the book.
I suspect the concepts of freedom and the price others pay for our freedom in a work such as Zinn's would have most districts in a screaming panic.
Not suggesting that is bad...
ChisolmTrailDem
(9,463 posts)I tell them that I read a book, especially if the book was something about economics or politics or sociology, etc. The inference being that reading a work of fiction is bad enough, but one about current affairs? Yikes!
jtuck004
(15,882 posts)L0oniX
(31,493 posts)
MrMickeysMom
(20,453 posts)… and a mandatory book for everyone on the internet now.
Thank God for Howard Zinn!
Hekate
(93,438 posts)Apparently the copyright is still in effect.
Fortunately, the good thing about books made of paper is that they can be passed from hand to hand, gifted, resold, and so on practically forever. It's true they can be destroyed by fire and flood, and mildew does them no good at all, but there are physical copies of books that have made it to a tremendous age.
There is no shortage of copies of this particular book. In its own way it is an important book (I have it in paperback) -- but the US gub-mint is not coming for your books in the foreseeable future.
Do what you will with this information, and enjoy Zinn!
loudsue
(14,087 posts)Thanks for posting this! 