The Day America Became The “Bad Guy”?

Guest Post by Bill Bonner

YOUGHAL, IRELAND – There being nothing serious to report from the financial front…

…we go back to our sideline job: irritating our dear readers.

Slimy and Hideous

Yes, “Bad Guy” Theory is on the table. We were set to heave it over the side, like a fish too small to meet the legal limit. But after reading our reader mail… followed by a restless night of prayer, meditation, and hard drinking… we decided to look further.

And from what we can see, it is slimy and hideous.

“Bad Guy” Theory (BGT) maintains that there are some people who are good, and others who are bad.

The good ones think they can spot the bad ones… and that they have the right and duty to kill them, because… well… they’re up to no good.

Many readers believe BGT is essentially right; they know damn well who the bad guys are… and think your editor is an SOB for suggesting otherwise.

Writes one, referring to Muslims, Iranians, or Palestinians (we’re not sure which):

If they could, they’d kill you, me, and our families.

We have some personal experience with Iranian people. We lived in Paris for many years and knew, casually, a family of Iranians.

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We had dinner with them once or twice, in their apartment in the 16th arrondissement. Never once did they go for our throats with a butcher knife. Nor was the wine poisoned. (The conversation was deathly… but not, as it turned out, fatal.)

Another reader thinks our suggestion – that even good people sometimes do bad things – was out of line:

You owe all of your subscribers an apology.

This reader was particularly annoyed by our implication that dropping an atomic bomb on civilians was perhaps not such a good idea. (We’ll come back to that in a minute.)

God Will Sort Them Out

BGT is as ancient as the Old Testament. Each generation, each culture, and each tribe has had its bad guys. The neighboring village. The nation over the mountains. Spartans. Queers. Yids. Reds. Bourgeois reactionaries. Mensheviks. Kulaks. Intellectuals. Gypsies. Heretics. Papists. Prods. Huns. Gooks. Kafirs. Insurgent Filipino savages. Rebel slaves. And bog-trotting, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging Paddies.

They all deserved to die… and all got the death sentence. Not that they necessarily did anything wrong. But their thoughts… their beliefs… their intentions and motivations marked them as bad guys.

But how could you know what was really in peoples’ hearts and minds? Use the rack and thumbscrews to find out!

Or don’t worry about it. “Kill them all,” said the Count of Citeaux before the Massacre at Béziers in 1209. “God will sort them out.”

But wait…

…a lawyer put the question to Jesus: Does “Love Thy Neighbor” apply to bad guys?

Jesus came back at him with the Parable of the Good Samaritan. A man lay on the ground, beaten and robbed. The good Jews passed him by… including a priest.

But a Samaritan – a bad guy! – came to his aid. BGT didn’t work, He implied; you would be judged on what you did, not who you were.

And it didn’t particularly matter what you had done in the past, either… What you did now and in the future were what counted. “Go forth and sin no more,” said He to the bad gal who was about to be stoned to death.

Common law, the idea that you should be judged impartially and according to common rules and “common sense,” also emerged from the swamp and blood of prehistoric life. It, too, turned away from BGT.

Justice was blind. Were you a Jew? Were you a Muslim? Were you a believer… or a sinner? It hardly mattered.

Instead, the judge wanted to know where you were on the night of the 23rd… That is, he wanted to know what you had gotten up to, not who you were.

“By their deeds shall ye know them!”

So let us look at deeds.

Million Sorry Souls

On August 8, 1945, Nagasaki, Japan was still intact. Its citizens were living on short rations. They were mostly old men, women, and children… The young men had already been drafted into the army.

If we had been able to look into their hearts and minds, we probably would have found that they wished the entire American nation would drop dead.

Admiral Nimitz ruled the sea. General LeMay was master of the air. And General MacArthur was already on Japanese soil at Okinawa.

It was because of them, they reasoned, that the Japanese were dying of disease and hunger – short of food, fuel, clothing, and just about everything else.

It was onto these people that Harry Truman dropped the second atomic bomb.

They were “bad guys,” said the U.S. press. They “supported the war,” said God-fearing Americans. Besides, it “saved our soldiers’ lives” said Truman.

Dwight Eisenhower, then supreme commander of the allied forces in Europe, disagreed. He recalled in a 1963 interview that:

…it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing… I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives…

William Leahy, the president’s chief of staff, wrote in his diary:

It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender… My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children…

Even the Uber Bomber himself, Major General Curtis LeMay, who had already scorched Tokyo with the most destructive bombing raid in history, was against it:

The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb… the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.

So was Admiral Chester Nimitz, who had beaten the Japanese fleet and chased them back to the home islands:

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace before the atomic age was announced to the world with the destruction of Hiroshima and before the Russian entry into the war… The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan…

And what about America’s top commander in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur? President Nixon recalled:

[General Douglas] MacArthur once spoke to me very eloquently about it, pacing the floor of his apartment in the Waldorf. He thought it a tragedy that the bomb was ever exploded. MacArthur believed that the same restrictions ought to apply to atomic weapons as to conventional weapons, that the military objective should always be limited damage to noncombatants… MacArthur, you see, was a soldier. He believed in using force only against military targets, and that is why the nuclear thing turned him off…

So what to make of it? Who were the bad guys?

You decide.

But keep in mind that for every person who thinks he can tell the good guys from the bad ones, there must be hundreds of broken bones… thousands of broken hearts… and a million sorry souls roasting in some ashpit in Hell…

… wishing they had never tried.

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Bob P
Bob P

The true bad guys are the deep state criminals and the New York Yankees.

Anonymous
Anonymous

As my Aunt always said, “I’ve got two favorite teams: the Baltimore Orioles, and whoever is playing the Yankees.”

tim autrey
tim autrey

Japan’s commanders had promised to fight to the death. My father was scheduled to go to Japan after fighting thru the Battle of the Buldge. He and millions of others and their children are alive today because we used the bomb!
Japs started it on Dec. 7th! We finished it! To hell with every armchair quarterback pissant, and “never in the real fight” general who second guessed this decision.

Hollywood Rob

I don’t know about this deep state that you talk of but the Yankee’s…yes they are true bad guys.

starfcker

Japan was the last country that ever attacked us. We showed the world that that was not a good idea. The problem was not our behavior in World War II, the problem has been our behavior ever since.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Remember the USS Liberty. Israel has attacked America since WWII and what was the response? USA gave them billions of dollars for years to come.

starfcker

Give it a rest. Do you realize how stupid you sound, and how much damage you do to this website when every single subject turns into the Jews did it.

Anonymous
Anonymous

The antisemitic Jew haters don’t realize this. They actually think they are professing wisdom with their hatred.

They also don’t realize they are fulfilling Biblical prophecy, the prophecy of the devil’s side of the struggle in the end times.

Pity them and those that join with them, their future is not one to desire.

Anonymous
Anonymous

You said Japan was the last country to attack USA well that’s just bull shit now isn’t it? The Jews did it well I don’t know what you define Israel as but it defines it’s self as a jewish state so in this case the Jews actually did do it didn’t they dick head. Their is nothing antiemetic about pointing out an historical fact. As for end time prophecy are you serious? I really don’t give a fuck what your whacky beliefs are. You pair sound like SJW’s getting trigged by the mere mention of Israel in a negative light.

bigfoot
bigfoot

Bill left out something. Japanese culture at the time was one where it was just fine to light an enemy soldier’s foot on fire to see him dance. Or to break all his fingers for evening fun. Or to work him to death on short rations and shoot him if he asked for water. Bamboo under the fingernails was delightful entertainment. To surrender and blow up the capturing soldier with a grenade was standard practice. And so much more. It was fine to stake out Korean women spread-eagled so they were readily available for rape, to bayonet their babies in their guts, and behead townspeople in competitions. If you ever get a chance to see videos of the Rape of Nanking, do not watch. Do not.

Those bombs were dropped on Japanese culture, Bill. I wish Truman had not dropped them, yet at the time people in the U.S. were damned angry at the Japanese and wanted some fucking payback for all the torture and mistreatment of prisoners and captives.

The bombs did their work in that Japanese culture changed. I’d hope it would have changed without the bombs, but who were the bad guys again? I’m sorry justice was won with bombs as so many others are, yet this war with the Japanese was vicious and cruel on the Japanese part because of their sense of superiority and contempt for other races. A couple of bombs made an impact on that view and the warrior culture did change as a matter of fact.

Austrian Peter

You are of course right, Bigfoot, about everything you have said. But I have just finished reading about the collapse of Signapore and this book indicates that the original purpose of Japan creating their ‘Greater Prosperity Zone’ was because they percieved the Westerner to be pompous, over-bearing and treating ‘slit eyes’ and ‘yellow skins’ as second rate people during the colonial era. They have great pride and wanted to right the wrongs. It is no excuse for their behaviour however, and I share your disgust.

Trumpeter

Yes Peter, and they attacked us when our economic embargo threatened to end their war effort in China.
Said embargo because of the Rape of Nankang.

Austrian Peter

Thanks Trumpeter for adding that important bit of info. There can be no excuse for them and I am with you.

The hypon
The hypon

Apparently at this moment in time ,after a soccer match in Kiev ,Ukraine the bad guy is a Spanish dude , a real bad hombre who inflicted injury on a Muslim.

Anonymous
Anonymous

Clearly, a decision by Byrnes & Truman directed at the Soviets.

anarchyst
anarchyst

The US as the “bad guy” came with the recognition of Israel in 1948. It’s been all downhill from there…

Austrian Peter

Anarchyst: It was the Brits that created the Israel problem in 1947 I think, like they have created much of the world’s problems before and since. All part of their declining empire. At least USA was built by people that rebelled against their own government repression and established a constitution in writing, which we don’t have in UK – so nobody knows their rights – they make it up as they go along (Brexit is a living example).

Ghost

Balfour Declaration… an interesting trip down that rabbit hole, if you dare.

rhs jr
rhs jr

ZOG, Zionist, Illuminati, Satanist, Islam, Jesuits, New Age NWO, Liberals, FSA, MS13 Animals, Abortionist, Pedophiles, Pornographers, Prostitutes, Drug Dealers, Democrats, NeoCons, RINOs, Communist, Banksters, Mafia, Antifa, NAMBLA, & the Clintons covers most of them.

Mr. Frosty
Mr. Frosty

“There’s no such things as bad guys, maaaaan. People are all just, like, people, ya know, maaaaan. It’s totally not groovy to completely defeat your enemy and break his will to fight, maaaaaan.”

Hippies are always bad guys. They act like they care about important stuff, but that just makes them liars, deceivers and cowards. Hippies are toxic to civilization itself.

Save a civilization, nuke the hippies

CCRider
CCRider

All wars are about political power and money. Period. Forget all the “war to end all wars”, “war to make the world safe for democracy” and “war to preserve the union” bullshit. That’s spoken to get the sheep eager to donate their money and children’s lives. The dropping of those nukes made the u.s. the preeminent political power in the world and paved the way for the MIC to amass vast fortunes. And that’s all that mattered. Or ever will.

Austrian Peter

All wars are Banksters’ wars

BB

I call bullshit : I’ve heard this line of thinking all my life.Tell it to the young men who would have had to ” Liberate Japan ” It was well known based on battle figures from other islands that over a million Americans would have been wounded and killed. Fuck the Japs.They attacked us before we hit them.

Austrian Peter

You tell ’em BB!

Dr. Doom
Dr. Doom

WRONG. FDR was fighting a Secret War against Japan in China. He was sending arms to the Soviet Union. He was already engaging German U-Boats. There was a plan to bomb Japan with Chenault’s “Flying Tigers”. These were ACTIVE DUTY US Military like “Pappy” Boyington from Baa, Baa Black Sheep TV Show fame with Robert Conrad.
FDR broke the law. He was chummy with Joe Stalin. He hired Communists OPENLY. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor sure, but FDR was fighting them for SEVERAL YEARS ALREADY with ACTIVE DUTY US Military.

Austrian Peter

Thanks, Dr Doom, I had forgotten about all you list, so you have made some important points to debate, but I tend to agree with you for the moment. Perhaps others will chip in?

None Ya Biz
None Ya Biz

I prefer to believe the American Generals who were prosecuting the war than any person that posts on TBP. They were there, they knew what the state of Japan was at the time and they also knew Japan had tried to surrender before that asshole Truman murdered the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now I realize there are individuals that post on TBP that subscribe to total war. Total war means no innocents such as women and children. Why? Because married women with spouses in the military tend to support their spouse. The children mostly support their fathers in the military. Just look at the U.S. Military at the time.

However, I, an ex-mil veteran that served in Vietnam, totally support what William Leahy, the presickdent’s chief of staff during the war, said in his diary:

“It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender… My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

Additionally, do not thank me for my service. If it weren’t for the draft existing at the time, I would have never been part of the military.

Austrian Peter

Thanks, None Ya Biz, you have put an entirly different light on this episode, so I guess that there are those, like you, who have etremely good arguments for the bomb. But others, who have alternative views.

I am not sure which side to support, they each have their merits but I do know that nuclear weapons are the most fearful things of today. I lived through the cold war in UK and remember the preparations for total war to break out (1950s -1980s). We in UK would not have stood a chance of survival.

Anonymous
Anonymous

TV shows are not historical documents to be relied on for historical truth.

Suds
Suds

“Flyboys” by James Bradley.
Admin, I have a copy for you, if interested.

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