Obama Visits Japan

Dropping the atomic bomb was "an inflection point in modern history," Obama told reporters Thursday.

  NBC

The destruction of two huge cities and instantaneous incineration/evaporation of millions of people - and those were the lucky ones - in Newspeak is "an inflection point." I did not think I could become more disgusted with this president.

He said he is choosing to pay tribute at the Hiroshima Peace Park Memorial to "underscore the very real risks" still out there "and the sense of urgency that we all should have" toward nuclear disarmament.

Which is why we are going to build our nuclear arsenal even bigger.

"It's not only a reminder of the terrible toll of World War II and the death of innocents across continents but it's also to remind ourselves that the job's not done," he said.

Well, that part's true. There are still some countries we have not bombed, and there are still non-Christians inhabiting countries all over the globe.

Obama noted that "in some ways we've seen real progress" in the past few years, pointing to the Iran nuclear deal.

"Without firing a shot" a country was persuaded not to pursue nuclear weapons, he said.

However, North Korea is a "big worry for us," Obama added.

And Russia.

I don't imagine they were, but if the Japanese were looking for any kind of acknowledgement that the terror which the US rained down on their citizenry was abominable, inhuman, or even just wrong, it was in vain.

After all, dropping the bomb on them, really, was simply "an inflection point in history."

For nearly seven decades, the American public has accepted one version of the events that led to Japan’s surrender [in WWII].

[...]

On Aug. 6, the United States marks the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing’s mixed legacy. The leader of our democracy purposefully executed civilians on a mass scale. Yet the bombing also ended the deadliest conflict in human history.

In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa - a highly respected historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara - has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan’s surrender. [...] His interpretation [...] raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period.

[...]

[I]n the 1960s, a “revisionist school” of historians suggested that Japan was in fact close to surrendering before Hiroshima - that the bombing was not necessary, and that Truman gave the go-ahead primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union with our new power.

  Boston Globe

United States intelligence broke the Japanese code early in the war. Truman's diary also confirms that he knew Japan was trying desperately to get out of the war by opening a negotiating channel through Moscow.

[...]

Truman was advised not to use the atomic bombs by such figures as Adm. William D. Leahy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. We know from Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson's diaries and other documents that the rush to use atomic bombs quickly, rather than follow other available courses, was intimately connected with the desire to end the conflict before the Soviet Union entered it on Aug. 15, 1945, and with the hope that the bomb would help in disputed European negotiations.

  NYT

No, Barry, it's not "an inflection point." What it is, is the biggest terrorist attack and war crime in modern history.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.