Dr. Gary G. Kohls: The Hiroshima Myth. Unaccountable War Crimes and the Lies of US Military History.

This coming Tuesday, August 6, 2013, is the 68th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, the whole truth of which has been heavily censored and mythologized ever since war-weary Americans celebrated V-J Day 10 days later. In the pitiful history lessons that were taught by my uninspired bored history teachers which seemed to be mostly jocks came from patriotic and highly centered books where everything the British and US military ever did in war time was honorable and self-sacrificing and everything their opponents did was barbaric. Everybody in my graduating class of 26 swallowed the post-war propaganda in our history books. It was from these books that we learned about the glorious end of the war against Japan. Of course, I know that I had been given false information, orchestrated by war-justifying militarists and assorted ueber-patriotic historians starting with General Douglas MacArthor. MacArthur sucess-fully imposed total censorship of what really happened at Ground Zero. One of his first acts after taking over as viceroy of Japan was to confiscate and/or destroy all the photographic evidence documenting the horrors f the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Back in 1995, the Smithsonian Institution was preparing to correct some of the 50-year-old pseudo-patriotic myths by staging an honest, historically-accurate display dealing with the  atomic bombings. Following the vehement, orchestrated, reactionary out rage emanating from right-wing veterans groups and other patriot groups including Newt Gingrichs GOP-dominated Congress that threatened to stop federal funding of the Institute, the Smithsonian was forced to sensor out all unwelcome but contextually important parts of the story. So again, we had another example of politically-motivated groups heavily altering real history because they were afraid of revealing unpatriotic historical truths that might shake the confidence of Americans in our leaders, sort of like the near-total media black-out about the controlled demolitions of the three World Trade Center buildings on 9/11/01 that killed thousands of innocent people and unleashed the dogs of war against innocents in Afghanistan. The Smithsonian historians did have a gun to their heads, of course, but in the melee, the corporate-controlled mainstream media, and therefore the public, failed to learn an important historical point, and that is this: The war could have ended in the spring of 1945 without the summer atomic bombs, and therefore there might have been no Okinawa bloodbath for thousands of American Marines and soldiers. Also there would have been no need for an American land invasion of Japan, the basis of the subsequent propaganda campaign that justified the use of atomic weapons on defenseless civilian populations and meets the definition of an international war crime and a crime against humanity.