21st Century Schizoid Boy

As of December 2009, there were 22.3 million employees of local, state, and federal governments in the United States (17.3 million full time and 5 million part time). 20 million of those were state and local, and the rest federal. The payroll for all 22.3 million part- and full-time workers is about $83.4 billion dollars per month (not including benefits).

• http://www.census.gov/govs/apes/
• http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/08fedfun.xls
• http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/08stlall.xls

Part time workers will swell temporarily an extra 1.4 million during the 2010 Census [census.gov]. In 2000, the peak for part time census workers was 860,000 [about.com]. For some reason it takes twice the number of census counters to count the 2010 population, even though the population in the last 10 years has only gone up 10%, from 280 million to 307 million [census.gov].

The largest private employer, Walmart, has 1.4 million employees (or “associates”) in the U.S. [walmartstores.com]. McDonald’s, the second largest, employs 465,000 in the U.S. [cnn.com].

About a year ago, Cato ran the story of the Little Pink House in Connecticut. The government bulldozed a small community to make way for a public/private partnership with Pfizer. One woman fought it and lost in the Supreme Court. The local government argued that the increased tax revenue and local jobs would be a “higher” public use and so took hers and her neighbors’ houses through eminent domain.

Well, Pfizer has now decided against developing the site and is moving the jobs elsewhere:

Pfizer, the huge drug company, has announced that it will be leaving a large research complex in New London, Connecticut and moving several hundred jobs to nearby Groton. Such belt-tightening in tough economic times would normally draw little criticism. In this case, however, it should.

Recall that Pfizer played a central role in getting New London to seize the homes of local residents who lived adjacent to the Pfizer site. Pfizer, according to accounts, wanted that mixed residential area, called the Ft. Trumbull section, to be leveled and replaced with an upscale development that would include a five-star luxury hotel, top-tier condos, and private office space for Pfizer’s suppliers, workers, and visitors. Now Pfizer is leaving New London “high and dry.”…

New London officials argued that greater tax revenues would be produced by the revitalization and, therefore, some public good was done by the restructuring of the Fort Trumbull area. Kelo and the Institute for Justice pointed to such a contention as ominous for all homeowners, since local governments could almost always imagine a “higher use” to which individual residential properties could be put.

Unfortunately, the Supreme Court found in favor of New London and against Kelo, but the case produced a firestorm of protest across the country, leading over 40 states to more tightly control eminent-domain abuse…

Pfizer even received special tax treatment, paying only one-fifth of the usual property taxes for the first 10 years of occupancy of its research site…

That brings us to the latest development: Pfizer is moving the research jobs elsewhere.

The city probably will not “get back” its tax forgiveness. State tax monies from Connecticut used to entice New London to revitalize have been expended. Local businesses that depended upon Pfizer and the development for patronage are now looking at financial decline. What remains is a barren undeveloped site where homeowners once kept their homes with pride.

It is a sad story of local governments drawn into projects by the promise of large state grants. The grant then allowed them to accede to the special demands of large enterprises like Pfizer for tax breaks and special treatment. What is even sadder is that in their rush to redevelop, these same local governments bulldozed the fundamental rights of their own constituents and, then, their “business partner,” Pfizer, cast them aside whenever it chose to do so. Ms. Kelo has a perfect right to say “I told you so.”

Bulldozed in New London: The Latest on Kelo and Eminent Domain, EGPNews.com, Dr. John A. Sparks, January 14, 2010, http://egpnews.com/?p=15324.

This significant power is not very well tracked: http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d0728.pdf.

Cool class @ Harvard.

Even the worst government democide of ~76 million Chinese in the 20th century was small compared to the Black Death of the 14th century. The Black Death killed an estimated 75 million people [wellcome.ac.uk] which was about 16% of the entire world population [census.gov], and about 33% of the European population:

The plague came to Europe in the fall of 1347. By 1350 it had largely passed out of western Europe. In the space of two years, one out of every three people was dead. Nothing like that has happened before or since.

These general numbers disguise the uneven nature of the epidemic. Some areas suffered little, others suffered far more. Here are some examples.

Between 45% and 75% of Florence died in a single year. One-third died in the first six months. Its entire economic system collapsed for a time.

In Venice, which kept excellent records, 60% died over the course of 18 months: five hundred to six hundred a day at the height.

Certain professions suffered higher mortality, especially those whose duties brought them into contact with the sick–doctors and clergy. In Montpellier, only seven of 140 Dominican friars survived. In Perpignan, only one of nine physicians survived, and two of eighteen barber-surgeons.

The Black Death, History of Western Civilization, Dr. Skip Knox, Boise State University, http://www.boisestate.edu/courses/westciv/plague/15.shtml.

Although percentage wise smaller than the Black Death, the 1918 flu pandemic killed an estimated 40 million people in just one year:

In just one year, it killed more than 40 million people. Conditions at the end of World War I may have contributed to the spread of the virus and hence the scale of this pandemic. It became known as the ‘Spanish flu’ because of the attention given to it by the Spanish press, which was not censored as much as the papers in other countries.

BigPicture on Epidemics, The Wellcome Trust is a charity whose mission is to foster and promote research with the aim of improving human and animal health (a charity registered in England), September, 2007, http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@msh_publishing_group/documents/web_document/wtd028110.pdf.

Even after the worst devastations of this form, the ones who survive pick up the pieces and life continues.

Anarchism, by definition, is not chaos. Anarchism is simply the lack of a government. And government is at a fundamental level — organized, monopoly force. One could argue that there is basic anarchism in the international system, amongst national governments. The United Nations had no force to use against the United States after the U.S. declared War on Iraq in 2003– an action the former United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called “illegal.” In many ways, the United Nations is very libertarian in that it should only authorize actions in self-defense or for humanitarian reasons.

The following is one man’s road from modern day conservatism (which is basically big government and military corporatism) to libertarian, limited government constitutionalism (i.e. min-archism) and ultimately to anarcho-capitalism (anarchy with capitalism, i.e. with property rights). Anarcho-capitalism actually has deep historic and theoretical thought (next thing to learn).

My arrival (very recently) at philosophical anarchism has disturbed some of my conservative and Christian friends. In fact, it surprises me, going as it does against my own inclinations.

As a child I acquired a deep respect for authority and a horror of chaos. In my case the two things were blended by the uncertainty of my existence after my parents divorced and I bounced from one home to another for several years, often living with strangers. A stable authority was something I yearned for.

Meanwhile, my public-school education imbued me with the sort of patriotism encouraged in all children in those days. I grew up feeling that if there was one thing I could trust and rely on, it was my government. I knew it was strong and benign, even if I didn’t know much else about it. The idea that some people — Communists, for example — might want to overthrow the government filled me with horror…

You love your country as you love your mother — simply because it is *yours,* not because of its superiority to others, particularly superiority of power.

This seems axiomatic to me now, but it startled me when I first read it. After all, I was an American, and American patriotism typically expresses itself in superlatives. America is the freest, the mightiest, the richest, in short the *greatest* country in the world, with the greatest form of government — the most democratic. Maybe the poor Finns or Peruvians love their countries too, but heaven knows why — they have so little to be proud of, so few “reasons.” America is also the most *envied* country in the world. Don’t all people secretly wish they were Americans?

That was the kind of patriotism instilled in me as a boy, and I was quite typical in this respect. It was the patriotism of supremacy. For one thing, America had never lost a war — I was even proud that America had created the atomic bomb (providentially, it seemed, just in time to crush the Japs) — and this is why the Vietnam war was so bitterly frustrating. Not the dead, but the defeat! The end of history’s great winning streak!

As I grew up, my patriotism began to take another form, which it took me a long time to realize was in tension with the patriotism of power. I became a philosophical conservative, with a strong libertarian streak. I believed in government, but it had to be “limited” government — confined to a few legitimate purposes, such as defense abroad and policing at home. These functions, and hardly any others, I accepted, under the influence of writers like Ayn Rand and Henry Hazlitt, whose books I read in my college years…

In fact I much preferred a literary, contemplative conservatism to the activist sort that was preoccupied with immediate political issues. During the Reagan years, which I expected to find exciting, I found myself bored to death by supply-side economics, enterprise zones, “privatizing” welfare programs, and similar principle-dodging gimmickry. I failed to see that “movement” conservatives were less interested in principles than in Republican victories. To the extent that I did see it, I failed to grasp what it meant.

Still, the last thing I expected to become was an anarchist. For many years I didn’t even know that serious philosophical anarchists existed. I’d never heard of Lysander Spooner or Murray Rothbard. How could society survive at all without a state?

Now I began to be critical of the U.S. Government, though not very. I saw that the welfare state, chiefly the legacy of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, violated the principles of limited government and would eventually have to go. But I agreed with other conservatives that in the meantime the urgent global threat of Communism had to be stopped. Since I viewed “defense” as one of the proper tasks of government, I thought of the Cold War as a necessity, the overhead, so to speak, of freedom. If the Soviet threat ever ceased (the prospect seemed remote), we could afford to slash the military budget and get back to the job of dismantling the welfare state.

Somewhere, at the rainbow’s end, America would return to her founding principles. The Federal Government would be shrunk, laws would be few, taxes minimal. That was what I thought. Hoped, anyway…

Gradually I came to see that the conservative challenge to liberalism’s jurisprudence of “loose construction” was far too narrow. Nearly everything liberals wanted the Federal Government to do was unconstitutional. The key to it all, I thought, was the Tenth Amendment, which forbids the Federal Government to exercise any powers not specifically assigned to it in the Constitution. But the Tenth Amendment had been comatose since the New Deal, when Roosevelt’s Court virtually excised it.

This meant that nearly all Federal legislation from the New Deal to the Great Society and beyond had been unconstitutional. Instead of fighting liberal programs piecemeal, conservatives could undermine the whole lot of them by reviving the true (and, really, obvious) meaning of the Constitution. Liberalism depended on a long series of usurpations of power…

About the *general* meaning of the Constitution there could, I thought, be no doubt at all. The ruling principle is that whatever the Federal Government isn’t authorized to do, it’s forbidden to do.

That alone would invalidate the Federal welfare state and, in fact, nearly all liberal legislation. But I found it hard to persuade most conservatives of this…

I never thought a constitutional renaissance would be easy, but I did think it could play an indispensable role in subverting the legitimacy of liberalism. Movement conservatives listened politely to my arguments, but without much enthusiasm. They regarded appeals to the Constitution as rather pedantic and, as a practical matter, futile — not much help in the political struggle…

Of course they were right, in an obvious sense. Even conservative courts (if they could be captured) wouldn’t be bold enough to throw out the entire liberal legacy at once. But I remained convinced that the conservative movement had to attack liberalism at its constitutional root…

In the late 1980s I began mixing with Rothbardian libertarians — they called themselves by the unprepossessing label “anarcho-capitalists” — and even met Rothbard himself. They were a brilliant, combative lot, full of challenging ideas and surprising arguments. Rothbard himself combined a profound theoretical intelligence with a deep knowledge of history. His magnum opus, Man, Economy, and State, had received the most unqualified praise of the usually reserved Henry Hazlitt…

Murray died a few years ago without quite having made an anarchist of me. It was left to his brilliant disciple, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, to finish my conversion. Hans argued that no constitution could restrain the state. Once its monopoly of force was granted legitimacy, constitutional limits became mere fictions it could disregard; nobody could have the legal standing to enforce those limits. The state itself would decide, by force, what the constitution “meant,” steadily ruling in its own favor and increasing its own power. This was true a priori, and American history bore it out.

What if the Federal Government grossly violated the Constitution? Could states withdraw from the Union? Lincoln said no. The Union was “indissoluble” unless all the states agreed to dissolve it. As a practical matter, the Civil War settled that. The United States, plural, were really a single enormous state, as witness the new habit of speaking of “it” rather than “them.”

So the people are bound to obey the government even when the rulers betray their oath to uphold the Constitution. The door to escape is barred. Lincoln in effect claimed that it is not our rights but the state that is “unalienable.” And he made it stick by force of arms. No transgression of the Constitution can impair the Union’s inherited legitimacy. Once established on specific and limited terms, the U.S. Government is forever, even if it refuses to abide by those terms.

As Hoppe argues, this is the flaw in thinking the state can be controlled by a constitution. Once granted, state power naturally becomes absolute. Obedience is a one-way street. Notionally, “We the People” create a government and specify the powers it is allowed to exercise over us; our rulers swear before God that they will respect the limits we impose on them; but when they trample down those limits, our duty to obey them remains.

Yet even after the Civil War, certain scruples survived for a while. Americans still agreed in principle that the Federal Government could acquire new powers only by constitutional amendment. Hence the postwar amendments included the words “Congress shall have power to” enact such and such legislation.

But by the time of the New Deal, such scruples were all but defunct. Franklin Roosevelt and his Supreme Court interpreted the Commerce Clause so broadly as to authorize virtually any Federal claim, and the Tenth Amendment so narrowly as to deprive it of any inhibiting force. Today these heresies are so firmly entrenched that Congress rarely even asks itself whether a proposed law is authorized or forbidden by the Constitution.

In short, the U.S. Constitution is a dead letter. It was mortally wounded in 1865. The corpse can’t be revived. This remained hard for me to admit, and even now it pains me to say it.

Other things have helped change my mind. R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii calculates that in the twentieth century alone, states murdered about 162,000,000 million of their own subjects [the actual figure is 262 million]. This figure doesn’t include the tens of millions of foreigners they killed in war. How, then, can we speak of states “protecting” their people? No amount of private crime could have claimed such a toll. As for warfare, Paul Fussell’s book WARTIME portrays battle with such horrifying vividness that, although this wasn’t its intention, I came to doubt whether any war could be justified…

The essence of the state is its legal monopoly of force. But force is subhuman; in words I quote incessantly, Simone Weil defined it as “that which turns a person into a thing — either corpse or slave.” It may sometimes be a necessary evil, in self-defense or defense of the innocent, but nobody can have by right what the state claims: an exclusive privilege of using it.

It’s entirely possible that states — organized force — will always rule this world, and that we will have at best a choice among evils. And some states are worse than others in important ways: anyone in his right mind would prefer living in the United States to life under a Stalin. But to say a thing is inevitable, or less onerous than something else, is not to say it is good.

For most people, “anarchy” is a disturbing word, suggesting chaos, violence, antinomianism — things they hope the state can control or prevent. The term “state,” despite its bloody history, doesn’t disturb them. Yet it’s the state that is truly chaotic, because it means the rule of the strong and cunning. They imagine that anarchy would naturally terminate in the rule of thugs. But mere thugs can’t assert a plausible *right* to rule. Only the state, with its propaganda apparatus, can do that. This is what “legitimacy” means. Anarchists obviously need a more seductive label.

“But what would you replace the state with?” The question reveals an inability to imagine human society without the state. Yet it would seem that an institution that can take 200,000,000 lives within a century hardly needs to be “replaced.”

Christians, and especially Americans, have long been misled about all this by their good fortune. Since the conversion of Rome, most Western rulers have been more or less inhibited by Christian morality (though, often enough, not so’s you’d notice), and even warfare became somewhat civilized for centuries; and this has bred the assumption that the state isn’t necessarily an evil at all. But as that morality loses its cultural grip, as it is rapidly doing, this confusion will dissipate. More and more we can expect the state to show its nature nakedly.

For me this is anything but a happy conclusion. I miss the serenity of believing I lived under a good government, wisely designed and benevolent in its operation. But, as St. Paul says, there comes a time to put away childish things.

The Reluctant Anarchist, Joe Sobran, December 2002, .

Looks like YouTube has ads on “mainstream” videos now… this one being CBS news:

Interestingly, after posting, it looks like there’s no ad when embedded. Presumably because the advertiser doesn’t know what else is on the site embedding it? But have you seen the comments on youtube.com underneath videos?

Some clever Germans showing how to start a raging fire in an airplane without getting caught in a full body scanner:

“While officials said [the scanners] performed as well as physical pat downs in operational tests, it remains unclear whether the AIT would have detected the weapon used in the December 2009 incident,” the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s audit arm, said Wednesday in written testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/17/AR2010031700649_pf.html

Six professors at universities in Australia and Singapore found that the Nintendo Wii board “is portable, widely available and a fraction of the cost of a [laboratory-grade force platform], it could provide the average clinician with a standing balance assessment tool suitable for the clinical setting” [sciencedirect.com]. This was shown to be useful for patients relearning how to stand.

Wiiiiii!!!

Made by one of my friends in Italy:

The atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6, 1945 and August 9, 1945, respectively, caused the deaths of approximately 150,000 to 246,000 people within 2 to 4 months of the bombings [rerf.or.jp]. On August 15th, 1945, Japan surrendered to the Allies [cfo.doe.gov]. Out of the population of Hiroshima of 350,000 at the time [rerf.or.jp], only about 43,000 were soldiers [cfo.doe.gov], therefore 50-73% (or 45,000-121,000) of the deaths in Hiroshima were civilian. Nagasaki had an even smaller proportion of soldiers in the population. Over 50 percent of the built-up areas of the two cities were destroyed [aupress.au.af.mil].

The main argument for the use of the atom bombs was that Japan would not surrender until the Allies invaded and controlled the Japanese mainland. Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall and his Army planners advised President Truman that the cost of the invasion of Japan may be anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million U.S. soldiers [cia.gov]. The CIA analysis reports that although Marshall told the president of the 250,000 minimum number, it is possible he did not mention the million upper bound. The 250,000 total estimates “were consistent with estimates made at the same time by the staffs of MacArthur and Nimitz” and the Joint War Plans Committee [cia.gov].

The main argument is that the atomic bombings would end the war with less casualties.

The counter-argument to this claim can be found in the official postmortem account of the U.S. military operations of the European and Pacific conflicts. First, what was the United States Strategic Bombing Survey?

The United States Strategic Bombing Survey was established by the Secretary of War on 3 November 1944… established for the purpose of conducting an impartial and expert study of the effects of our aerial attack on Germany, to be used in connection with air attacks on Japan and to establish a basis for evaluating air power as an instrument of military strategy, for planning the future development of the United States armed forces, and for determining future economic policies with respect to the national defense. A summary report and some 200 supporting reports containing the findings of the Survey in Germany have been published. On 15 August 1945, President Truman requested the Survey to conduct a similar study of the effects of all types of air attack in the war against Japan.

The Survey’s complement provided for 300 civilians, 350 officers, and 500 enlisted men. Sixty percent of the military segment of the organization for the Japanese study was drawn from the Army, and 40 percent from the Navy. Both the Army and the Navy gave the Survey all possible assistance in the form of men, supplies, transport, and information. The Survey operated from headquarters in Tokyo, with subheadquarters in Nagoya, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and with mobile teams operating in other parts of Japan, the islands of the Pacific, and the Asiatic mainland.

The Survey secured the principal surviving Japanese records and interrogated top Army and Navy officers, Government officials, industrialists, political leaders, and many hundreds of their subordinates throughout Japan. It was thus possible to reconstruct much of wartime Japanese military planning and execution, engagement by engagement and campaign by campaign, and to secure reasonably accurate data on Japan’s economy and war production, plant by plant, and industry by industry. In addition, studies were made of Japan’s over-all strategic plans and the background of her entry into the war, the internal discussions and negotiations leading to her acceptance of unconditional surrender, the course of health and morale among the civilian population, the effectiveness of the Japanese civilian defense organization and the effects of the atomic bomb.

The United States Strategic Bombing Surveys, European and Pacific War, Air University Press, July 1, 1946, http://aupress.au.af.mil/Books/USSBS/USSBS.pdf.

The report concluded:

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

Ibid

The broader analysis:

The first definitive break in the political coalition which began the war occurred following our success at Saipan. Ten days thereafter, on 16 July 1944, the cabinet headed by General Tojo fell. This significant turn in the course of Japan’s wartime politics was not merely the result of an immediate crisis. Even at that date, elements opposing continuation of the war had found means of applying pressure against the fanatic exponents of Japan’s militaristic clique…

Rear Admiral Takagi of the Navy General Staff made a study between 20 September 1943 and February 1944, of the war’s battle lessons up to that time. Based on analysis of air, fleet and merchant ship losses, Japan’s inability to import essential materials for production, and the potentiality of air attacks on the home islands, Takagi concluded that Japan could not win and should seek a compromise peace . His study and a similar one made by Sakomizu of the Cabinet Planning Board documented the fears of the Jushin, and through them of Marquis Kido, that all was not well with Tojo’s prosecution of the war. With the loss of Saipan, it was possible to build up sufficient pressure to force Tojo’s retirement…

The conviction and strength of the peace party was increased by the continuing Japanese military defeats, and by Japan’s helplessness in defending itself against the ever-growing weight of air attack on the home islands…

Early in May 1945, the Supreme War Direction Council began active discussion of ways and means to end the war, and talks were initiated with Soviet Russia seeking her intercession as mediator. The talks by the Japanese ambassador in Moscow and with the Soviet ambassador in Tokyo did not make progress. On 20 June the Emperor, on his own initiative, called the six members of the Supreme War Direction Council to a conference and said it was necessary to have a plan to close the war at once, as well as a plan to defend the home islands. The timing of the Potsdam Conference interfered with a plan to send Prince Konoye to Moscow as a special emissary with instructions from the cabinet to negotiate for peace on terms less than unconditional surrender, but with private instructions from the Emperor to secure peace at any price. Although the Supreme War Direction Council, in its deliberations on the Potsdam Declaration, was agreed on the advisability of ending the war, three of its members, the Prime Minister, the Foreign Minister and the Navy Minister, were prepared to accept unconditional surrender, while the other three, the Army Minister, and the Chiefs of Staff of both services, favored continued resistance unless certain mitigating conditions were obtained…

The public admission of defeat by the responsible Japanese leaders, which constituted the political objective of the United States offensive begun in 1943, was thus secured prior to invasion and while Japan was still possessed of some 2,000,000 troops and over 9,000 planes in the home islands. Military defeats in the air, at sea and on the land, destruction of shipping by submarines and by air, and direct air attack with conventional as well as atomic bombs, all contributed to this accomplishment.

There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan’s unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan’s disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.

Ibid

Other interesting details:

General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Army forces in the Pacific:

My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender. I even directed that plans be drawn up for a possible peaceful occupation without further military operations.

Thinking about international ethics: moral theory and cases from American Foreign Policy, Frances Vryling Harbour, 1998, http://tinyurl.com/yeeklbt [amazon.com].

General Curtis LeMay LeMay, Chief of Air Forces:

The war would have been over in two weeks without the Russians entering and without the atomic bomb.

Alperowitz, Gar, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, Knopf, NY 1995, p16.

It was agreed that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance. Two aspects of this are (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released…

It was agreed that for the initial use of the weapon any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb.

Memorandum from Major J. A. Derry and Dr. N.F. Ramsey to General L.R. Groves, Summary of Target Committee Meetings on 10 and 11 May 1945, May 12, 1945, Top Secret, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/6.pdf (more documents)

As the United States dropped its atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, 1.6 million Soviet troops launched a surprise attack on the Japanese army occupying eastern Asia. Within days, Emperor Hirohito’s million-man army in the region had collapsed.

It was a momentous turn on the Pacific battleground of World War II, yet one that would be largely eclipsed in the history books by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the same week 65 years ago. But in recent years some historians have argued that the Soviet action served as effectively as — or possibly more than — the A-bombs in ending the war.

Now a new history by a professor at University of California, Santa Barbara seeks to reinforce that view, arguing that fear of Soviet invasion persuaded the Japanese to opt for surrender to the Americans, who they believed would treat them more generously than the Soviets.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gTT2JIVvexygxWpYnKyDO-JVbUBAD9HJMCUG2

http://www.lewrockwell.com/raico/raico22.html