From: rstanley@husc.harvard.edu (Ryan Stanley)


>Eric Bergerud <rickt@cris.com> wrote:

>It is self evident that many in the American and British public had guilt
>pangs about strategic bombing soon after World War II.

Well, I thought even stating the bleeding obvious would be better than
taking another hack at Alperovitz. Mr. Bergerud would apparently prefer to
keep hacking. Bill McAllister asked what "the A-bomb debate is REALLY
about". Noticing he didn't say "the Alperovitz debate", and the open-ended
nature of his query, I welcomed his post as an invitation to broaden the
discussion beyond the narrow confines of the specific Alperovitz thesis
(which has, I think, been well and truly demolished), and to acknowledge
that for most of the American public, there are quite different issues at
stake in discussions of the atomic bombs -- one of which, I suggested, is
how to remember World War II. I was, in short, trying to change the
subject.

I now count several attempts by various H-DIPLO members to pose questions
about the atomic bomb decisions which do NOT take the Alperovitz thesis as
their starting point. On each occasion, however, a Mr. Bergerud or a Mr.
Villa has twisted the question back into another 'thrash Alperovitz'
session. Critics have, with rare exceptions, only developed their arguments
as far as necessary to refute Alperovitz. Some time ago, Mr. Villa did
offer the sketch of an alternate interpretation, based on public opinion;
when I asked him to flesh it out more fully, however, he simply went back
to bashing Alperovitz. At the risk of sounding post-modernist, I'd submit
that there's an agenda at work here.

Why keep flogging Alperovitz? (I mean that in both senses of the verb.) Two
of his own supporters admit that only a minute fraction of US historians
accept his thesis, and that high school textbooks generally don't question
the bomb decisions. We have heard several testimonials from list members to
the effect that Alperovitz isn't taught at their schools, and NONE to the
contrary. We know which side thoroughly vanquished the other in the 1995
debate surrounding the Enola Gay exhibit (which, as proposed, would have
presented a watered-down hodgepodge of critical viewpoints).  Various
revisionist ideas are undoubtedly 'out there', exercising some degree of
influence over the public, showing up in diluted form in the occasional ABC
special, but by no means are they dominant. And Gar Alperovitz is about as
far from a household name as can be imagined.

Why, then, the persistent, vastly inflated picture of a "Chairman"
Alperovitz (Villa's image), whose views "dominate" American life
(Bergerud's word), and form the "dominant interpretation" (Ehrman's words)
in undergraduate classes through the influence of "left-wing baby boomer
historian[s]" (Kaiser's phrase)? Why is it that so many seemingly
well-adjusted, well-established professional scholars act so terribly
threatened by Alperovitz? Richard Hofstadter could write a book about them:
'The Paranoid Style of American Historians.'

Mr. Kaiser's phrase provides a hint, and Mr. Bergerud's comments
substantial confirmation, that Alperovitz is just a stand-in for something
much bigger:

>The type of questions posed [after World War II] were
>very different than those raised by Alperovitz. Some believed the Bomb had
>been a tragic mistake. Others believed it to be a tragic necessity. ...
>Alperovitz, however, would have us believe that the US intentionally
>prolonged WWII to destroy two helpless cities for no other reason than to
>terrify Stalin. This was not at all the argument made by those after WWII
>who doubted the necessity or wisdom of Hiroshima. Unfortunately the Vietnam
>War seemed to validate the radical critique of American society ...
>Alperovitz's original book was just one of many coming out in the mid-60's
that
>questioned the basic value of the United States as a nation. However, in
the
>pre-Vietnam years challenges to the essentially benign nature of American
>history were on the political fringe. Now, they dominate.

It is inaccurate to assert that in the 1960s, dismayed by Vietnam,
Alperovitz invented the notion that the A-bombs were meant as a signal to
the Russians. This idea in fact had a following well before Alperovitz came
along. To cite one instance: in 1958, a writer in the _National Review_
argued that "the tens of thousands of Japanese who were roasted at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed not to end the war or save American
and Japanese lives but to strengthen American diplomacy vis-a-vis Russia."
This is before the antiwar movement. This is before much of anybody in
America had even heard of Vietnam. This is not even a left-wing journal. It
is in fact entirely unconnected with that "radical critique of American
society" inspired by Vietnam that Mr. Bergerud finds so distressing. I
won't bother to cite other examples; interested readers may find them in
issue #2 of the 1995 _Journal of American-East Asian Relations_, in which
two of Alperovitz's disciples point out that their mentor's argument, which
Bergerud claims first appeared as a product of Vietnam-era disillusionment,
had been around for some time before that.

The point is that even before Vietnam Americans asked the hard -- and to
Bergerud, anti-American -- questions about decision-makers' motivations
that Alperovitz later asked (and failed to answer adequately, in my
opinion). Ideas later identified with left-wing revisionism were in fact
voiced in the mainstream -- even conservative journals -- before anybody
had heard of Alperovitz.

This might seem a minor point. But a neat distinction between pre- and
post-Vietnam critiques of the bomb decisions is central to Bergerud's
argument, because denouncing Alperovitz is really about denouncing the
excesses of the 1960s. That, I would submit to Mr. McAllister, is the
really "essential subtext" of the A-bomb debate, at least as it has
proceeded on this list. I wish I had a nickel for every time a reasoned,
convincing critique of Alperovitz spun off into a diatribe against
radicals, revisionists, baby boomers or post-modernists.

Pre-Vietnam comment, in Bergerud's scheme, was concerned with thoughtful
contemplation of the varieties of tragedy, and retrospective assessments of
the bombs' necessity, effectiveness, and ethics. Everything after the
mid-'60s was explicitly antipatriotic, politically motivated and biased.
Even if it means distorting the pedigree of his ideas, Alperovitz's thesis
must be as tightly identified with late-'60s radicalism as possible, in
order that its author may serve as whipping-boy for the entire decade. He
makes an easy whipping-boy because his ideas can be plausibly (if falsely)
characterized as Vietnam-era innovations, merely the products of antiwar
sympathies; because his subject touches a very sensitive patriotic nerve;
and because, in the end, his evidence isn't strong enough to allow him to
fight back effectively.

Now I realize that trashing the sixties is fashionable and fun. I do it
myself sometimes. But if you're going to do it, pick a more worthy target
than Gar Alperovitz. He's a straw man. His own supporters admit that nobody
reads him or agrees with him. Personally, I feel sorry for the guy. He's
reworking a thesis that hasn't made much of a dent.

But I have no sympathy for his critics who insist on portraying themselves
as the valiant underdogs, the besieged, the rebels against a dominant
Alperovitzian hegemony. Their posture of victimhood is spurious,
duplicitous and unbecoming to established scholars who are, in fact, in
firm possession of the high ground on this question and know it. They may
find it satisfying to imagine themselves refighting the battles of the
1960s, but it is preventing them (and others on this list) from asking more
pertinent questions about an important historical problem. Personally, I'm
now sick of the subject, but just because we've pulverized one particular
thesis doesn't mean we've come anywhere close to addressing the important
questions about the decisions surrounding the use of the atomic bombs.

Ryan Stanley




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