To paraphrase the old Sam Cooke song, why don’t we know much about history? Could it be because too many people manipulate it for their own destructive ends? From the 1619 Project to a couple of generations of denial and revisionism about the end of the Pacific War in 1945, the revisionism all works in the same direction, as Adam Baldwin and I discuss in our latest episode. It’s “the totalitarian impulse, again of the leftist modern critics,” Adam declares. “America has to be the bad guy because America is founded on individual liberty and freedom.”
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Welcome back to our VIP video series “The Amiable Skeptics,” featuring my friend Adam Baldwin! Adam is well-known for his long and storied Hollywood career, starting with My Bodyguard, and especially for his roles in Full Metal Jacket, Firefly, its film sequel Serenity, Chuck, and The Last Ship.
We spend a lot of time discussing revisionism in the context of the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once again, I note that these questions got definitively settled at least a generation ago when all of the relevant internal documents got declassified. Richard Frank’s Downfall covered it in extensive and comprehensive detail. Other books followed up on the same material and reached the same conclusions.
So why are the revisionists, especially in the arts, still at it? Adam and I have plenty of thoughts about that, and about the necessity of ending the war quickly in August 1945:
- “The problem with this kind of revisionism,” I point out, “is it strips all these things of the context of these decisions. … There’s just no consideration for what the alternatives here were,” I add, and “all of the alternatives to dropping these bombs were worse.”
- “America has proven that individual liberty creates the greatest amount of wealth and prosperity for individuals and for America,” Adam points out, “for Americans and throughout the world. And the leftists, they simply cannot have that, because they are again totalitarian oligarchs who want to control what our liberties and our freedoms and make us subjects.”
- “This is about the necessities of war and the balances of harms and the balances of goods,” I argue. “And in this case, it’s indisputable. Forcing Japan to collapse faster than it otherwise would have saved millions of lives, especially millions of Japanese. And any any honest assessment of it has to has to come to that conclusion.”
- Adam thinks it’s about the Left’s abhorrence of nuclear power, at least in part. “I think the Left doesn’t like nuclear power because they see it as protecting capitalism. They see it as protecting freedom, and it stands athwart international Communism, international Fascism. Because it’s the ultimate deterrent, and that’s why the Marxists don’t like it. They don’t want it around unless they control it.”
Be sure to watch it all, and join us in the comments!
