[Mr. Kamm writes a column for the Times of London.]

I've referred a few times on this site to a lobbying organisation called Media Lens. Media Lens purports to be a watchdog detecting bias in the press and broadcasting media. It is in reality a shrill group of malcontents who exploit the patience of practising journalists. Journalism is a public medium and its practitioners should certainly be prepared to expound their professional methods. The practice of Media Lens, however, is - in the description by Andrew Marr, the BBC's former political editor - pernicious and anti-journalistic. I explained why and how in this post a few months ago.

I described the methods of Media Lens as including "unprofessional and often comically inept exegesis". More recently I came across a near-perfect example of this type of thing, and wrote a post about it here. One of the editors of Media Lens, David Cromwell, had written to the film critic of The Independent - yes, a film critic - taking the poor man to task for not commenting, in an article about the film Flags of Our Fathers, on "the propagandistic basis for western leaders' claim of 'half-a-million' allied lives being saved by dropping atomic bombs on Japan".

Cromwell is not a historian, but, according to his organisation's web site, a "researcher in ocean circulation". His dogmatic assertions on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki evinced no acquaintance with the historiography of the Pacific War. He even got wrong the name of his own principal cited source (about whom I shall have more to say in a moment). In the circumstances, I thought it constructive to write to the film critic, David Thomson, to assure him that Cromwell's assertions were not to be taken seriously, let alone believed. The text of my letter, including citations to recent scholarly literature debunking Cromwell's assertions may be found in the post I have linked to. I copied it to Cromwell, so he would know not only the extent of his factual errors but also the inaptness of his criticisms of Thomson. Media Lens's customary technique (as I have found when replying to emails I had assumed came from genuine inquirers) is to post on its web site private emails from journalists without first asking permission, and I was curious whether Cromwell would do so with my letter. Prudently, he didn't.

Unfortunately, Cromwell apparently didn't do either what he ought to have done. The proper course would have been for him to write again to David Thomson to apologise for having sent a hectoring letter on a subject wholly outwith Cromwell's competence. Instead, Cromwell appealed to one of his friends to bail him out, judging by this message that has been posted by Cromwell on his organisation's message board here:

We've just received an email from US historian Howard Zinn after asking him for his response to Oliver Kamm's blog entry on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (link below). Kamm had argued that "Truman based his decision [to use the atom bombs on Japan] on estimates that American casualties in a ground invasion might surpass one million". The Eds
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Dear David:
Sorry to take so long in getting back to you on this, but I've been traveling and just getting to my pile of correspondence.

Of course you will always find scholars with different points of view on this, because no one can say conclusively 1) how many Americans would have died in an invasion of Japan (all guesses) or 2) how soon the Japanese would have surrendered without the dropping of the bombs.

But I don't think anyone has successfully refuted Alperovitz. To say that Truman "based his decision" on the estimate of a million casulties is naive. The "million casualties" claim was after the fact, as a justification for that horrific act. It was a number pulled out of the air. Truman's mind was made up no matter what number of casualties would be involved. As General Groves himself said, Truman was like "a litle boy on a toboggan, already going downhill" no way to stop the momentum. Certainly, a lower estimate would not have changed Trumans' mind.

At most one can argue that the bombs speeded the end of the war by weeks or months. In Japan, the Emperor was supreme, and he clearly wanted to arrange surrender terms, hence the dispatch of an envoy to Moscow.

It is often said that given the Japanese ferocious defense of Iwa Jima and Okinawa they would have continued the war except for the bomb. But if they were such fanatics why would even the bomb have caused them to surrender. After all, they endured 100,000 dead in Tokyo and still fought on.
Iwo Jima is an interesting episode. Two years ago in the Journal of Military History, an army captain who had done extensive research on that battle concluded it was unnecessary, another example of the momentum of war leading to needless death.

There is no moral argument which to me is all-powerful. Even if the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war sooner did that justify killing several hundred thousand innocent people? Would the defenders of the bombing agree to kill 100,000 American or English children in order to shorten the war? If the answer is no, it means that Japanese children do not deserve to live as our children do. If the answer is no, one must use the word "racism" to describe the conclusion that the bombs should have been dropped.

Howard Zinn

Howard Zinn is a grand old man of the American far Left. I have only once posted a comment on this blog about him; in it I stated that "trying to reason with Professor Zinn is a near-textbook case of futility". How prophetic that was.

Zinn's best-known work is a polemical history of the United States. His scholarly contributions to the study of the Pacific War amount, so far as I am aware, to zero. (This tract, which you can read in a few minutes, contains the name 'Hiroshima' in the title but is not a work of scholarly inquiry into the conclusion of the Pacific War.) It was unfair of Cromwell to appeal to Zinn for assistance when, as I shall demonstrate, Zinn is not up to providing it. But Zinn replied, and is therefore a legitimate target.

You will note that in his message, Zinn does not even attempt to deal with the sources that I cited. Judging by the internal evidence of his message, and nothing else, I have to conclude that Zinn has never heard of that material, still less read it. I say that principally because of Zinn's assertion that "I don't think anyone has successfully refuted Alperovitz".

Gar Alperovitz is the principal populariser (though not the originator) of the theory that the A-bomb was an instrument of "atomic diplomacy". Truman dropped the bomb not to defeat Japan - which on this reading had already indicated a willingness to surrender - but to intimidate the Soviet Union. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in Alperovitz's view, not the concluding acts of the Pacific War but the initial acts of the Cold War.

It is technically true in one very restricted sense that no one has refuted this thesis. There is no direct evidence in support of Alperovitz's claim. There is not a single statement in the documentary record made by a US diplomat to a Soviet counterpart in 1945-6 to the effect that "you'd better not cross us, because we have the bomb". Given this paucity of evidence, Alperovitz turned his thesis into something unfalsifiable. In the words of the historian Robert H. Ferrell, who is widely regarded as the pre-eminent authority on President Truman (Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists, 2006, p. 20): "Alperovitz was reduced to relying on the powers of psychology: possession of the bomb, he declared, influenced American officials more than they knew or said."

Whatever else this is, it's not diplomatic history. Alperovitz presented a thesis, and - being unable to prove it with any documentary evidence – refashioned it to be impervious to the canons of evidence. If that were all, then Alperovitz would be merely a trivial figure. But unfortunately, it is worse than this. Historians have pointed to the fact that Alperovitz's use of source material is unscholarly. Ferrell, in the work cited, gives a sobering example (p. 21, and expounded at length in the accompanying footnote) of Alperovitz's taking a quotation from General George Marshall and then "trimm[ing] the quotation so as to give it a quite different meaning from what Marshall intended".

Alperovitz's book, "despite the appearance of meticulous documentation ... was based on pervasive misrepresentations of the historical record", declares Robert Maddox of Pennsylvania State University, in his Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision, 1995, p. 2 - and Professor Maddox proceeds to give examples. Alperovitz updated his thesis in a 1995 work, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth. Robert P. Newman, of the University of Pittsburgh, has noted that none of the 15 Japanese rulers who testified that the A-bomb was instrumental in securing Japan's surrender is quoted accurately by Alperovitz, and the account of one of them is edited to misrepresent its intent. (I am indebted to Professor Newman for sending me material including an unpublished paper.)

In short, Professor Zinn has demonstrated something more serious than error here. He has misrepresented the state of scholarly research into the subject Cromwell sought his advice upon. But even that is less of a disqualification to his being taken seriously than his dismissal of my cited sources with the airy formulation that "of course you will always find scholars with different points of view on this". As the scholar of German history Richard Evans has put it: "The possibilities of legitimate disagreement and variation [among historians] are limited by the evidence in front of their eyes. An objective historian is simply one who works within those limits. They are limits that allow a wide latitude for differing interpretations of the same document or source, but they are limits all the same." (The quotation comes from the author's study of the David Irving libel case, Lying About Hitler, 2001, p. 250. By citing it, I am obviously not drawing a comparison between Professor Zinn and David Irving. I am making a point about the nature of historical objectivity. I am certain Zinn is an honest historian, but equally certainly – on the subject on which Media Lens has sought his advice, at least – he is an incompetent and ill read one.)

Zinn's assertion that "the 'million casualties' claim was after the fact" is refuted by the evidence I cited, and that Zinn has ignored. The leading authority on casualty estimates in the Pacific War, D. M. Giangreco (a reader of this blog and a regular correspondent), has shown from the primary sources that the figure was most certainly not constructed after the fact. In his paper "'A Score of Bloody Okinawas and Iwo Jimas': President Truman and Casualty Estimates for the Invasion of Japan", Pacific Historical Review, Feb 2003, pp. 93-132, he demonstrates that "Truman's much-derided accounts of massive casualties projected for the two-phase invasion of Japan are richly supported by US Army, White House, Selective Service, and War Department documents produced prior to the use of nuclear weapons against Japan and stretching back through the last nine months of the Roosevelt administration". In another essay (co-authored with Kathryn Moore), "Half a Million Purple Hearts", Giangreco notes that the sheer numbers of these medals produced before the conclusion of the Pacific War indicate the extent of the casualties expected in an invasion of Japan. (Correspondence related to this article can be seen here.)

If Zinn wishes to argue that the estimates of mass casualties were manufactured after the war to justify the dropping of the A-bomb, then he is making an empirical assertion that he must substantiate with reference to the primary sources that Giangreco has consulted. Zinn needs to come to terms with the evidence presented by scholars with relevant expertise. He doesn't do this, because he can't. He has no business engaging in the evasive tactics that have so impressed his admirers at Media Lens. Zinn should have said privately he wasn't up to the task, rather than publicly demonstrate that condition....

Beneath Dresden lay the catacombs. Towards the end of the second world war, the authorities decided that these cellars under the beautiful baroque Old Town could provide cover from British air raids. On February 13 1945, the bombers arrived and many civilians fled below to avoid being killed by shrapnel or crumbling buildings, or being burned alive.

But, writes Jorg Friedrich in his book The Fire: the Bombing of Germany 1940-45, "this tightly meshed underground construction was a landscape of insanity". Such was the incendiary impact of the bombing that heat, gases, flames and smoke whipped through the labyrinth. People panicked. In one underground corridor, 50 people got so wedged that their bodies were found fused together from the heat. Underneath the junction of Margarthenstrasse and Marienstrasse there was a steel door connecting two passageways at a right angle. Two groups of people ran towards the door from opposite sides, desperately seeking a way out of a huge subterranean oven. Each blocked the other group from going through the door and so they all died. Under Moritzstrasse, a man ran for an exit shaft, but the following crowd pulled him back and he was killed in the crush. Two hundred people pressed on this crowd from behind, so that the body could not be budged. Again, everyone died.

This was where most of the 35,000 victims of the RAF on February 13 and USAAF attacks the following day died.
Friedrich's book, a bestseller in his homeland four years ago and which now appears in English, is thick with such horror stories. They were hard for him to avoid in meticulously detailing, over nearly 600 harrowing pages, how 635,000 Germans, mostly civilian, died and 7.5 million were made homeless when British and US bombs were dropped on 131 cities and towns. "For more than 50 years after the second world war," wrote the war historian and journalist Max Hastings, "German writers remained remarkably muted about the issue of Allied bombing of their country."

The Fire is part of a growing German literature, including WG Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction, that breaks this near silence about their wartime suffering. This is no neo-Nazi apologia (Friedrich is a former Trotskyist who hitherto spent his career indicting the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe for what it did to Coventry), rather an investigation of memory repressed for more than half a century. Friedrich tells me his 93-year-old mother, who experienced the bombing of Essen, cannot talk to him about what she saw: she embodies what Sebald called a "pre-conscious self-censorship, a way of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms". Surely, I ask as we sit in the gathering gloom of Friedrich's Berlin apartment, your mother must dream about the past? "I don't know. She can't talk to me about it."

For many, to mourn was not justified because of Nazi war crimes. Sebald wrote: "Some of those affected by the air raids, despite their grim but impotent fury in the face of such obvious madness, regarded the great firestorms as a just punishment."

Friedrich wants not only to put the suffering on record, but to question the moral justification for the air raids. This makes English publication fraught, at least for Friedrich, who considers some of what the British did to be war crimes. He is dreading his publicity tour: "The British have simply put a defence around this bombing campaign. It is unquestionable and yet I am questioning it."

Indeed, The Fire is being published in English by an American academic publisher, Columbia University Press. "I don't think there is any conspiracy about this," says Simon Winder, head of Penguin's history division. "I think the reason is much more lazy than that - it's just the idea of translating it may have proved too much." Winder did see a manuscript, but with another book on the subject by the historian Richard Overy commissioned, declined to take it on.

The tenor of Friedrich's book has irritated even British historians who regard the bombing as a mistake. "Everything he says in the book is true in terms of the details of the effects of the bombing," says Hastings. "It is when Friedrich speaks of 'war crimes' that I become suspicious. What worries me about Germany, and indeed Japan, today is that there is an increasing move towards the doctrine of moral equivalence, but I think it's important to reject that. It's one thing to say, as I do, that the bombing of Germany was a great mistake, and another to compare it to the killings of Jews or the appalling things the Japanese did."...

1. "The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church" Edited by F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone (Oxford University, 1997).

2. "Jesus Through the Centuries" by Jaroslav Pelikan (Yale University, 1985).

3. "The Divine Comedy" by Dante Alighieri, translated by Dorothy L. Sayers (Penguin Classics, 1949, 1955, 1957).

4. "The Challenge of Jesus" by N.T. Wright (InterVarsity, 1999).

5. The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers, O.P. (Catholic University of America, 1995).

British writer David Irving returned to England the day after he was released early from an Austrian prison -- vowing to repeat views denying the Holocaust that led to his conviction.

Irving said Thursday he felt "no need any longer to show remorse" for his views on the Holocaust, for which he was sentenced to three years in prison. Vienna's highest court granted Irving's appeal and converted two-thirds of his sentence into probation on Wednesday.

Upon arriving at London's Heathrow airport, he also called for a boycott of all Austrian and German historians until laws which make Holocaust denial illegal in those countries are overturned.

very year someone asks me to compile a list of that year's best books, and every year (except one) I have refused. I don't read enough current books to offer an educated opinion. But there are books that I occasionally recommend to my friends and colleagues--sometimes to the point where they become exasperated with me. ("Not that Sklar book again," Jonathan Chait exclaims.) This year, I thought that, in lieu of continuing to harass them, I would list some of my favorites here--with an emphasis on subjects I know something about and books that are no longer well known, or even well thought of. Here they are in no particular order.

• Up until thirty years ago, American historians regularly attempted to capture the thrust of our history. Some of the best efforts came in the decades after World War II when historians were trying to reconcile America's commitment to democracy with its rejection of socialism and embrace of racism and America's rejection of imperialism with its support for an aggressive expansionism. My two favorites are Louis Hartz's The Liberal Tradition in America and William Appleman Williams's The Contours of American History. Hartz was a less felicitous writer than Richard Hofstadter but had a more profound grasp of America's enduring liberalism. Williams became best known for his revisionist views of American foreign policy, but Contours, which explains America's shift from mercantile to laissez-faire to corporate-liberal nation, is his most important book.

• I am a godless, non-practicing Jew who has always been fascinated by the Christian roots of American history and foreign policy. Perry Miller's Errand Into the Wilderness (particularly the lead essay) got me started years ago, but I am a big fan of Ernest Tuveson's Redeemer Nation (the best book on Americans' conception of themselves as a chosen people), William G. McLoughlin's Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform, Nathan Hatch's The Sacred Cause of Liberty (where he introduces the idea of civil millennialism), and Richard Fox's biography of Reinhold Niebuhr....

[Judis goes on to cite Ronald Steel's Walter Lippmann biography, Lou Cannon's biography of Ronald Reagan, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime, Perry Miller, C. Vann Woodward, Eric Foner et al.]

The Congressionally-funded Iraq Study Group report was unveiled recently with pomp and ceremony. But quietly, inside the Pentagon, the ISG report is widely regarded as unrealistic. A rival plan from the American Enterprise Institute provides its own prescription for Iraq, and is gaining traction in the Bush administration.

[The report was written in part by former West Point historian Robert Kagan. It recommends changing the strategy of the US in Iraq. Instead of focusing on training a new Iraqi army, the US should seek to establish security for Iraqi citizens.]

Tom Engelhardt is that rare 62-year-old who can make people half his age feel old. And young. Old, because, well, if you've got the age advantage, how come he's the one with the all the vigor? Young, because his energy and enthusiasm and commitment are galvanizing—ask the hundreds of writers whose books he's edited over the years (Mike Davis, Adam Hochschild, Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky; the list goes on and on); or the journalism students he's taught and inspired; or, for that matter, just drop in on his web site, Tomdispatch, any given day to enjoy his latest gleeful (and always elegant) demolition of the Bush administration or the mainstream media, or both, or the most recent Tomdispatch essay by one of the stars of the literary left, who write for the site in part because they know they'll get the best editing around.

Tomdispatch.com started out in November 2001 as a e-mail list of about a dozen friends and family members. Stunned at the Bush administration's post-9/11 course and sensing the calamities to come, Engelhardt started sending around clippings—framed by his own ever-lengthening commentaries—from the world press, offering perspectives on America's global actions largely absent from US coverage. In 2002 the Nation Institute gave the fast-growing list a home as a web site billed as "a regular antidote to the mainstream media." The pieces typically run into the thousands of words ("Sometimes the world just can't be grasped short.") and each week brings two or three new ones. Engelhardt ballparks the average readership of each piece at up to 100,000—not bad for basement operation run by a guy with a day job and one part-time assistant editor.

This past year the site spawned two books—one, "Mission Unaccomplished", a collection of interviews Engelhardt did with an assortment of writers (and not only lefties) whose thought he admired, the other, written by former federal prosecutor and Tomdispatch star Elizabeth de la Vega, building a legal case that Bush & co. engaged in a conspiracy to "deceive the American public and Congress into supporting the war." In his introduction to the collected interviews, "Mission Unaccomplished," Engelhardt writes, "I saw my mission, modestly accomplished, as connecting some of the "dots" not being connected by our largely demobilized media, while recording as best I could the "mission unaccomplished" moments I felt certain would come," and this statement stands as a pretty good summary of what Tomdispatch has achieved over these past five years....

Turkish author Ipek Calislar was acquitted for allegedly insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, considered the founder of modern Turkey.

The BBC reported that prosecutors claimed Calislar had insulted Ataturk in a biography of Ataturk's wife Latife, in which Calislar reportedly wrote that Ataturk had once fled disguised as a woman.

Calislar faced up to four years in prison for violating Turkey's law against denigrating "Turkishness."

The first time he saw it, when he was 20, Howard Bloch was overwhelmed. The Bayeux Tapestry — perhaps the most famous textile in the world — is an exquisite 230-foot embroidered panorama dramatizing in words and images the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings between England and France, better known as the Norman Conquest of 1066. (During that time the Anglo-Saxon King Harold was killed by William the Conqueror of Normandy.)

Bloch, now a noted professor of French at Yale University and director of Yale's division of humanities, has studied the tapestry and considers it to be a stunning example of the rudiments of medieval combat.

It now hangs in an angled glass case on the interior walls of the palace of the bishops of Bayeux, France.

Bloch, who spoke from his office in New Haven, Conn., is a prolific researcher and historian of medieval France. He has written numerous books, including "The Anonymous Marie de France."
The famed tapestry remained vivid in his mind for many years, until he eventually researched his own exquisite book, "A Needle in the Right Hand of God: The Norman Conquest of 1066 and the Making and Meaning of the Bayeux Tapestry."
Even though it was created at the time of the Norman Conquest, the tapestry was lost in the 15th century and didn't resurface until the 18th century. Since rivalries between England and France were ripe, it was an appropriate time for it to reappear.

Among other challenges, the document survived being used to wrap equipment wagons during the French Revolution, as well as Hitler's attempt to decode its secrets in the hope it would help him know how to successfully invade England.

In Bloch's opinion, the tapestry brings history to life.

"You have to love it to spend that much time," he explained. "The tapestry has no meaning except as people interpret it, and as it is motivated by current-day interest. There are many questions that are still unanswered and some that are perplexing. There is writing on the tapestry, but at crucial moments it doesn't tell us what is said."

Bloch believes there may have been "an unconscious wish on the part of those who made the tapestry to encourage peace and reconciliation after 1066."

He also thinks that people today often "underestimate the complexity of medieval art. It was often highly complex and self-conscious. People too often think the Renaissance was the rebirth of sophistication. I try to connect it to the classical past. The medieval period was an incredibly rich and undervalued time."

Anyone who studies the tapestry, said Bloch, is engaging in detective work. "It's a historical record with visual images of a world-shaping event. Whoever made it was interested in detail, i.e., what arms and armor were like, the type of dress people wore, the preparation of meals, the nature of battles, etc.

"Yet there are all kinds of mysterious things in it, to which we may never know the answer."

An Orthodox historian who published a book on Jewish anti-Zionism said he was prevented from giving a blessing from the bimah in Dublin’s main synagogue.

University of Montreal professor Yakov Rabkin, whose book “A Threat From Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism” charts the history of religious objections to Zionism, tried during Shabbat services Saturday to recite a thanksgiving blessing after crossing the ocean, but was stopped by two members of the congregation.

In a letter published in Wednesday’s Irish Times, Rabkin complained that Dublin Jews had “yet to come terms with the contradictions” between religion and ideology, and therefore were “hostile” even to writing about Jewish opposition to Zionism.

Community members said they objected not to Rabkin’s political views or scholarship, but to the fact that he was in Ireland to promote his book at the invitation of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, an anti-Israel organization regarded by many in the community as a hate group.

Documenting the crimes of the Soviet Union has been a project that Jonathan Brent has been preparing for all his life. Since 1995, Brent, associate director and editorial director of the Yale University Press, has headed an effort producing 20 books documenting mass murder, espionage, imprisonment of dissidents and other atrocities engineered by the Kremlin.

Anti-Communists during the Cold War, trying to rally the West against Moscow, long accused the Soviets of such outrages. But with the Soviet Union largely closed to outsiders, foreign policy conservatives and military hawks were forced to rely on testimony from dissidents and defectors.

Brent's 20-book project, “The Annals of Communism,” provides new and vivid details from documents that have been mined by hundreds of his researchers over the years, combing Soviet archives since the collapse of the totalitarian state in 1991.

It documents Soviet espionage in the United States, efforts by the Soviets to manipulate the Spanish Civil War and a history of the Gulag slave labor camps.

The research shows “the dissolution of what anybody would think of as civilization,” Brent said. “This is why I'm studying it and why I think it's so important.”

Among the piles of books and papers in Brent's New Haven office is an enlarged copy of a memo to Soviet leader Josef Stalin recommending the execution of 16,000 Polish military officers in 1940. The mass killings were carried out by gunshots to the back of the head, Brent said. “The guns got so hot, young officers brought fresh guns,” he said.

Another book in the series details self-portraits by Bolsheviks in the 1920s that began as cartoonish caricatures of each other and evolved into grotesquely vicious and pornographic images that foreshadow the show trials of the 1930s, Communist Party purges and executions of Stalin's rivals.

“If you want to talk about the banality of evil, this is it,” said Brent, who also is a professor of history and literature at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. “Lenin and Stalin gave Hitler the blueprint.”...

More than 100 Civil War historians have signed a letter to Pennsylvania's gambling regulators asking them to deny a license to a slot-machine casino proposed near the historic battlefield.

Calling it the second battle of Gettysburg, the letter comes as the state Gaming Control Board is expected to vote on license applicants Wednesday.

The slots parlor would be a mile-and-a-half from the border of the 6,000-acre Gettysburg National Military Park in southcentral Pennsylvania. A casino so close would sully the family-friendly and thoughtful atmosphere of the battlefields where thousands died in 1863, the historians said.

"It is our solemn duty to protect this resource, not squander it through misguided choices," said the letter, which was organized by preservation groups including the Washington-based Civil War Preservation Trust.

Among the 111 signers were James M. McPherson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Battle Cry of Freedom."