Thursday, December 28, 2006

More Gov't Suppression Of War Reporting

Not Bush and Iraq. This goes back to World War II and a reporter's coverage of the devastation at Nagasaki. Nothing scares the government more than describing and showing the actual horrors of war. Probably because people are far less likely to accept going to war except under the most dire circumstances when they see its costs. And in the case of Nagasaki (where war with Japan was inevitable), the government knows people would be wary of weapons of mass destruction that target innocent civilians.

1 comment:

Michael in New York said...

Obviously, the decision to target and kill civilians came to a head in WW II long before the atomic bomb. That began with the bombing of Dresden, firebombing of Japan and before all of those Allied attacks the German bombing of London. As Robert S. McNamara said in the compelling, empathetic documentary "The Fog Of War," if we'd lost he fully expected top US officials would be tried and convicted (rightly so, he said) for war crimes. But I'm still not convinced using the atomic bombs this first time wasn't justified both in terms of cold-blooded ending of the war without a full-scale invasion of Japan (who had their own massive war crimes in China and elsewhere) and in a one-time demonstration of the horrors of atomic bombs that has kept them from being used ever since.