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There are plenty of things wrong with the government. But what’s harmful to people about the government is that it’s a reflection of something else. And that other thing you don’t see. Why don’t you see that other thing? Because it’s been made invisible. [...]

There’s a reason why attention is f…

[...] The misgivings were that it might not succeed. Suppose that some Nazi general came around after Stalingrad and said, I realized after Stalingrad it was a mistake to fight a two-front war, but I did it anyway. That’s not the Nuremberg defense. That’s not even recognizing that a crime was commi…

[...] They unleashed the American air force against Vietnamese villagers, authorized napalm, started crop destruction. They also started attacks against the North, which was not involved seriously at the time. That was the first big decision. He doesn’t even mention it. I don’t think he’s concealin…

[...] The book has a kind of ring of honesty about it. What it reads like is an extremely narrow technocrat, a smalltime engineer who was given a particular job to do and just tried to do that job efficiently, didn’t understand anything that was going on, including what he himself was doing.

But…

Aside from that, there’s the question of the Russians. The Russians came in, I think, around August 8. That was a terrible blow to the Japanese. They could not withstand a Russian land invasion, and they knew it. It’s very likely that a large part of the motive in the atom bombing was to cut off th…