http://www2.ari.net/home/bsabath/950711.html At 12:25 PM 2/3/96 -0800, Jordan Hayes wrote:

Sorry to inject a little scholarly research on this topic, but I would urge those of you who are interested in how this mythology was created and disseminated to do an AltaVista serach for Alperovitz; he's potentially the leading scholar on this subject. I've read his book, and Tim probably ought to as well ...

SCHOLARLY RESEARCH!!!! You do not know shit from beans: Alperovitz is no more a scholar than Zundel is: He is a historical revisionist who lies even more crudely than the holocaust revisionists. It is clear that in the opinion of the high command, the decision to surrender after they were nuked was a dramatic and radical change of position. Alperovitz says otherwise, thus he is either grotesquely ignorant or, more likely simply dishonest. Alperovitz writes: The use of the atomic bomb, most experts now believe, was totally unnecessary. Even people who support the decision for various reasons acknowledge that almost certainly the Japanese would have surrendered before the initial invasion planned for November. The U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey stated that officially in 1946. We found a top-secret War Department study that said when the Russians came in, which was August 8, the war would have ended anyway. The invasion of Honshu, the main island, was not [And so on and so forth] After the second nuclear attack, the Japanese high command had a meeting with the emperor: They heard testimony on the effects of atomic bombs. About half wanted to surrender, about half argued that Japan should die gloriously: They were unaware that the US had just used up almost its entire nuclear arsenal. They expected that surrender would be followed by the same kind of reign of terror, rape, brutal degradation, and mass murder, that they inflicted on the people that they conquered. They expected that failure to surrender would result in continued nuclear bombardment at about the same rate. (Both beliefs were incorrect.) The Emperor *at that meeting* made the decision to surrender, shocking a large part of the high command, and then made a speech on radio announcing the surrender, stating as reason for the surrender that if they did not surrender, Japan would be utterly destroyed by nuclear weapons. Seeing as they were still debating the issue *after* two nuclear weapons had landed on them, it seems reasonable to believe that without atomic weapons, it would have been necessary to fight from house to house from one end of Japan to the other. When Hirohito ordered surrender in response to atomic bombing, the high command attempted to violently overthrow him, and when they failed, many in the high command committed suicide.

If you read nothing else on this topic, I urge you to check out an interview with him at http://www2.ari.net/home/bsabath/950711.html

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/jordan

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