Potsdam, Jellied Fire, Hiroshima and Cornell Historian Mark Selden

I have really bitten off a lot more than I can chew here. But I am working under an assumption that my lack of a scholarly background combined with an unfamiliarity with the literature, will empty the field where "Zen newcomer mind," can then grow the explication of this important central matter.

I am convinced, although I can't prove it yet, that embedded directly onto the surface of the historical record of the atomic blasts which befell Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, will be a simple to perceive truth about responsibility and destiny, and that as our eyes open to it, we will be able to know this enormous new truth in our hearts and souls. I wouldn't claim to be smarter than anybody else, but I'd stack my ability to anchor and discharge the sort of "venom" that I see coming with the best working on the planet
(open in a new tab, and you'll have to throw in that extra, final "ist" yourself.)
apocatastasis-ist

By their fruits you shall know him. If the party line about the better behavior integral to the United States were true, we would be seeing vastly different lessons being learned then we do, with better outcomes, like something approximating everlasting peace. Instead, we see outcomes so opposite, and so repetitive, the ongoing endless wars of murderous aggression that continue to kill millions of innocent people across the planet. We can see this now in Iraq. So the wrong lesson was learned, from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and from its western equivalent, the German holocaust against the Jews.

The holocaust against the Jews of Europe, while undeniable, is also morally untenable in its historical reality. It surely has been grossly exaggerated for political ends, then manipulatively misused for evil agendas, The spiritually unfolded fruit it left us with is the enthronement of militarism as a policy of "preemptive retaliation."

Luckily, other people are working in this important area of holocaust revisionism so that I don't have to face such a chilling task. And despite the extreme distortions and alterations to the record (the way "truth" could formerly be considered "subjective" by those willing to work relentlessly and mercilessly enough to alter it,) one series of videos pertaining to Buchenwald works much like I do, by noting the inconsistencies and the manipulation in the storytelling.


But in backtracking into a review of suicide terror attacks in Israel coincidental to 9/11, I began to realize that some of the most famously gruesome events---the real start to the second intifada, in the summer of 2001---coming with the devastating Dolphinarium disco attack, and the Sbarro pizza bombing, were in fact Jewish false-flag self-woundings, taken straight out of the play book of 9/11, and by that, I don't mean merely as agent provocateurs, but in the case of a another incident on September 5, 2001, which was the first case in which a supposed Palestinian was disguised as a Hasidim, was actually a self-suiciding Jewish culprit blowing himself up in a failed bid to kill other Jews. That is for another day---but be forewarned.



Might not the United States and England have given both Germany and Japan the incentives

Atlantic Charter Between Franklin Roosevelt & Winston Churchill

Joseph Stalin, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Potsdam, July 26, 1945

Does anybody else see a strange disconnect between the photograph above and the first clause in the Potsdam Declaration: Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender, below?

1. We-the President of the United States, the President of the National Government of the Republic of China, and the Prime Minister of Great Britain, representing the hundreds of millions of our countrymen, have conferred and agree that Japan shall be given an opportunity to end this war.

In addition to the Potsdam Agreement, on July 26 Churchill, Truman and Chiang Kai-shek (the Soviet Union was not at war with Japan) issued the Potsdam Declaration which outlined the terms of surrender for Japan during WWII in Asia.



Check out this quote from a terrific essay about the changing ratio of military to civilian casualties, written by Mark Selden called, Before the Bomb: The “Good War,” Air Power and the Logic of Mass Destruction. I found it first at Michael Greenwell's wonderful blog.

"Public debate in the United States, Japan and Europe has long pivoted on the ethical and political issues associated with the U.S. decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. U.S. policy in general, and the final year of the Pacific War in particular, raises important questions of morality and war concerning the elimination of restraints on the killing of noncombatants during the preceding phases of a war which took more than 50 million lives. The totalism of the war was reinforced at the outset by American insistence that the only acceptable outcome lay in unconditional surrender of the enemy, a position that it maintained with respect to Japan until immediately after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when it promptly softened its terms."

Excuse me? This is absolutely contrary to the history I was taught, which justified the atomic-bomb destruction as necessary for Japan's frenzied Generals to forgo their caves and ritual militarism. Otherwise, it was going to be a beach-to-beach, foxhole-to-foxhole slog for American fighters.

Since I've never surrendered a nation to invading forces before, I don't know the practical details, but I imagine there are lots of little legal technicalities to work out---like, who among the elites shall live? Why would we soften our terms after our display of power when we could have stiffened them? Were we suddenly feeling sorry for the Japanese? Did they surrender because of atom bombs, or because of better terms? Isn't this clear proof we didn't fully negotiate before we escalated---since we subsequently shifted our terms---and doesn't this make us much more morally corrupt?

But I submit, we didn't negotiate at all, which makes us corrupt indeed.

Elsewhere, Selden specifies that it was the "US softening of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration to guarantee the security of Hirohito," that was at issue, but my recollection of history doesn't postulate the Emperor as ever having any real power or authority to risk. It was the military leadership that mattered, so it's likely that an insider deal of much larger scope was under way. Otherwise, the logic here says a puppet dictator (nominally and ceremonially a figurehead guilty of war crimes?) was allowed to stay "on his throne," by design and intent, but under the condition that several hundred-thousand additional Japanese lives be sacrificed first. All to send a signal to a neighboring land, which was the real center of concern. Yes, this sounds right. It serves the apparent agenda of(temporarily) intimidating Stalin.

The Potsdam Declaration is a beautifully written but pointless preliminary presentation, and an obvious ploy to boot. The document's structural defect is its glaring omission--the lack of Russian participation. That originating failure in the power dynamic was rectified the day after Nagasaki, when the United States The Soviets were a part of the Allies after all. And this is not even hinted at in Wikipedia.

A proof is embedded directly on the surface of the historical record, waiting for the horrible moment when American eyes open to the panoply of her wrongs.

Read the Instrument of Surrender signed at Tokyo Bay, September 2, 1945, for the statement of principle arising out from the vanquished, and not a mandated "Proclamation Defining Terms for Japanese Surrender." As it spelled out, was the catastrophic force arrayed against Japan somehow thought to be unclear to its leadership? The previous six months had been a disaster for Japan:

"Between January and July 1945, the US firebombed and destroyed all but five Japanese cities, deliberately sparing Kyoto, the ancient imperial capital, and four others. The extent of the destruction was impressive, ranging from 50 to 60% of the urban area destroyed in cities including Kobe, Yokohama and Tokyo, to 60 to 88% in seventeen cities, to 98.6% in the case of Toyama. In the end, the Atomic Bomb Selection Committee chose Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, and Nagasaki as the pristine targets to display the awesome power of the atomic bomb to Japan and the world in the event that would both bring to a spectacular end the costliest war in human history and send a powerful message to the Soviet Union." from a May 07, 2007 essay by Mark Selden, A Forgotten Holocaust

Other than Kyoto, which was spared, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen to maximize the effects of the bomb's devastation. So such a powerful new weapon couldn't have been meant to intimidate the Japanese. The last cities could just as easily have been destroyed with incendiaries.

The official story, as told on every page of the Manhattan Project website, is a patently offensive scrim lie, making the supposedly gravely serious deliberations at Potsdam sound more like a contrived tea party than the raw assertion of behind-the-scenes power reality called for. For instance,

"The United States did know from intercepted messages between Tokyo and Moscow that the Japanese were seeking a conditional surrender. American policy-makers, however, were not inclined to accept a Japanese "surrender" that left its military dictatorship intact and even possibly allowed it to retain some of its wartime conquests."

Did it now? Why would Japan be negotiating a conditional surrender with a nation it was not at war with? Could this be some early shadow of coming a tactic, like "preemptive retaliation" by the Israelis? Did the Japanese Minister of War, and the heads of both the Army and the Navy, really think they could negotiate via the Soviet Union for an arbitration with the United States? The fact is,the U.S failed to undertake one word of surrender negotiation with Japan before the bombs fell, so any "possibilities and inclinations" discussed are the senseless ramblings of a schizophrenic.

A disconnect with reality can be glaring in the storytelling at the Manhattan Project website. For instance, they admit the never made a surrender proposal by direct communication with the Japanese:

"Prior to the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, elements existed within the Japanese government that were trying to find a way to end the war. In June and July 1945, Japan attempted to enlist the help of the Soviet Union to serve as an intermediary in negotiations. No direct communication occurred with the United States about peace talks, but American leaders knew of these maneuvers because the United States for a long time had been intercepting and decoding many internal Japanese diplomatic communications. From these intercepts, the United States learned that some within the Japanese government advocated outright surrender. A few diplomats overseas cabled home to urge just that."

Why do the Americans claim to have stayed informed through covert means, such as intercepts and decodings here? The whole point of Japan's initiative was supposedly to get the Soviet's to act as intermediaries with the Americans. Why didn't somebody just begin high-level talks at any point over the previous months? Nobody is telling us the truth here. They fail to provide even a cover story. (The Americans were supposedly intercepting Japanese transmissions remember---they could even initiated talks with the Soviets, if peace were truly their goal.) This is an enormous flaw in the kind of logical narrative normal people have. That this most serious record is riddled this way shows the U.S. lies, does what it wants, and its secret agents often are lost to ordinary reality.

And normal people are becoming more sophisticated picking up on it:

"Although Truman hoped that the atomic bomb might give the United States an edge in postwar diplomacy, the prospect of avoiding another year of bloody warfare in the end may well have figured most importantly in his decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan."

Oh how utterly bogus! Someone get a better writer! Truman didn't hope for an edge in diplomacy! He knew the atomic bomb promised to fundamentally alter every existing balance of power in his favor. Who knows what kinds of nefariousness this was stirring up in the empowered imaginations of covert America.

This unsigned, undated document seems to be key to answering some questions.

It is from the 'Records of Negotiations Related to the Acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration', and you won't find it linked to at the Manhattan Project website. It is document #9, and the first document in English in the collection. In it the Emperor of Japan accepting the terms of the July 26, 1945 Potsdam agreement, "with the United States, Great Britain and China, and later subscribed by the Soviet government," but with the caveat that it is understood that it "not comprise any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of his Majesty as a sovereign ruler." That sounds like it would stand up in court of law real well.

It asks the Government of Switzerland to act as intermediary, clearly implying that no other diplomatic channels were in existence. Truman had said he wanted to keep the Soviet's at arm's length, so why are they now brought onboard as signatories to the Declaration? Did they declare war on Japan two days before, just in order to now make peace?

The document begins by saying "the Japanese government asked several weeks ago the Soviet government, with which neutral relations then prevailed, to render good office in restoring peace vis-a-vis the enemy powers. Unfortunately, those efforts in the interest of peace, having failed..." This now makes sense of the the United States claim that it "did know from intercepted messages between Tokyo and Moscow that the Japanese were seeking a conditional surrender," but it also proves there was absolutely no contact between Japan and the drafters of the Joint Resolution, which makes the United States claim that "on July 29, 1945, the Japanese rejected the Potsdam Declaration," specious indeed.

This document is easy to date to August 10th, after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the sixth and the ninth, because the official Manhattan Project webpage tells us that,

"The day after the attack on Nagasaki, the emperor of Japan overruled the military leaders of Japan and forced them to offer to surrender (almost) unconditionally."

But that "almost" is starting to look like a lot like a joke---additional evidence there never was an offer made, requiring any softening. So why is the august Manhattan Project: An Interactive History promulgating this canard?

The problem wasn't the Emperor's delay in asserting his authority---with both his generals and the U.S. It was the United States which had refused to negotiate with Japan on even a legally meaningless point about the Emperor's ceremonial role as the nation's titular head---until after they had already dropped the bombs---at which time the U.S. appeared to "gave in," losing a bit of face even, by calling it an "almost unconditional" surrender, but all of it this is looking more and more false. It's meaningless to begin with---even to Hirohito, who I'm sure had his prerogatives prejudiced plenty in the coming months.

And there never was a stumbling block about zealous war criminals refusing to give up.

The United States of America inaugurated the nuclear age by dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki based on nothing more than this furbelow of a diplomatic nicety, lasting the lifespan of a soap bubble.

This nicely frames my new understanding of the start of the war in the Pacific, which, regardless of the degree of "surprise" involved, had the United States militarily embargoing oil shipments to Japan; the island nation had a 90-day fuel supply, then its entire war machine and national economy would grind to a halt; and we should have anticipated what the reaction was going to be. I call that an antagonist forcing a protagonist's hand, with the Pearl Harbor attack being a "self-induced" emerging consequence, (and perhaps, perceptionally falsified in its telling, in the manner of 9/11.) A bid for justification for war---also, just like 9/11.