When Jon Stewart was debating torture with Cliff May, he blurted out a typical leftist position. He made the assertion that Harry Truman was a war criminal for dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Here’s the exchange:
The fact is this, hundreds of thousands, possibly more than a million, of Japanese were dying in the fire bombing of Japanese cities:
Changing their tactics to expand the coverage and increase the damage, 335 B-29s took off[1] to raid on the night of 9–10 March, with 279 of them[1] dropping around 1,700 tons of bombs. Fourteen B-29s were lost.[1] Approximately 16 square miles (41 km²) of the city were destroyed and some 100,000 people are estimated to have died in the resulting firestorm, more than the immediate deaths of either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombs.[2][3] The US Strategic Bombing Survey later estimated that nearly 88,000 people died in this one raid, 41,000 were injured, and over a million residents lost their homes. The Tokyo Fire Department estimated a higher toll: 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded. The Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department established a figure of 124,711 casualties including both killed and wounded and 286,358 buildings and homes destroyed. Richard Rhodes, historian, put deaths at over 100,000, injuries at a million and homeless residents at a million. These casualty and damage figures could be low: Mark Selden wrote in Japan Focus
The figure of roughly 100,000 deaths, provided by Japanese and American authorities, both of whom may have had reasons of their own for minimizing the death toll, seems to me arguably low in light of population density, wind conditions, and survivors’ accounts. With an average of 103,000 inhabitants per square mile and peak levels as high as 135,000 per square mile, the highest density of any industrial city in the world, and with firefighting measures ludicrously inadequate to the task, 15.8 square miles (41 km2) of Tokyo were destroyed on a night when fierce winds whipped the flames and walls of fire blocked tens of thousands fleeing for their lives. An estimated 1.5 million people lived in the burned out areas.[4]
But the left has never let a little thing like facts get in the way of ideology. So you get people like Jon Stewart saying things like the above.
There must have been some push back on his vocalizing that commons belief, because a few days later, he apologized for it:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M – Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Harry Truman Was Not a War Criminal | ||||
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I’m sure he’s sorry he let it slip, because it’s not a very popular position with most Americans, but I don’t think he’s sorry he feels that way.
What do you think?
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