The Passion of Eric Alterman
- 11.28.2007 - 10:17 AMIn a typically frothing and self-aggrandizing post, Eric Alterman lashes out at any and all enemies:
Speaking of me, I often have trouble deciding which attacks on me in the blogosphere demand responses and which I am elevating to an importance they do not deserve by doing so (in addition to wasting my time). But I see that in the past few days, I’ve been attacked as an anti-Japanese racist by a right-wing blogger, attacked as an anti-black racist by a left-wing blogger, quoted favorably by right-wing anti-Semites, attacked by Naderites, and attacked in Commentary by “Jamie Kirchick,” who I continue to maintain does not really exist but was invented as a sock puppet/imaginary friend, Lee Siegel-style, by the friendless Marty Peretz.
There is an especially amusing piece of this excerpt: amidst all these left-wing bloggers, Naderites, and imaginary friends of Marty Peretz attacking the brave Alterman at the barricades of reason and justice and light, the only people in agreement with him are “right-wing anti-Semites.” (That this might have something to do with Alterman’s ideas does not seem to faze our intrepid friend.) But the bulk of Alterman’s post is taken up with his response to criticism leveled by the brilliant British blogger and London Times columnist Oliver Kamm (whom Alterman incorrectly labels “right-wing;” Kamm is an Advisory Editor of Democratiya, a journal whose founding statement declares: “We will be, everywhere, pro-democracy, pro-labour rights, pro-women’s rights, pro-gay rights, pro-liberty, pro-reason and pro-social justice” and that avowedly attempts to emulate Dissent) about a recent Nation column by Alterman. In his column, Alterman asserted that “virtually no reputable historian would put the casualty figure for a U.S. invasion of Japan anywhere near [1 million].” (I wrote about Kamm’s critique earlier on contentions, here.) Ever the petulant pundit, Alterman provides no links to these critiques that would otherwise help the reader understand this intellectual dispute. But since Alterman’s readership consists, I believe, almost entirely of left-wing cranks on the one hand, and those who read it for laughs on the other (I’m in this camp), Alterman’s failure to insert a simple link to the arguments of his interlocutors comes as no surprise.
Alterman chiefly takes issue with one of Kamm’s assertions. In the midst of explaining why Alterman would so readily discount the figure of 1 million casualties, Kamm concludes that “the most charitable explanation I can give is that Alterman is (unlike the late General [Paul] Tibbets) sufficiently ethnocentric not to take into account the deaths of Japanese civilians that would have resulted from a conventional invasion and blockade of the home islands . . .” Alterman does not bother to respond to the salient argument (that is, the debate over whether dropping the bomb was necessary, in light of the number of casualties, American and Japanese, that would have resulted in either scenario), but instead repeats the straw-man argument that the only thing Americans cared about at the time were sparing American, not Japanese, lives. This casuistry is encapsulated here in a portion from his original piece about the New York Times obituary of Paul Tibbets, pilot of the Enola Gay:
Indeed, the decision to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki is presented as so uncontroversial that we read Tibbets’s admission that “I wanted to kill the bastards,” followed later by his claim that “I viewed my mission as one to save lives,” as if no inconsistency is apparent between these two sentiments.
That’s because there is nothing at all inconsistent about these sentiments. Tibbets wanted to kill enough of America’s enemies so as to convince them that further war—which would have taken the lives of even more Americans and more of said enemies—was futile. And that’s what dropping the atomic bombs did. End of story.
And yet, failing actually to engage with Kamm on the merits of the argument in play, Alterman has the gall to announce at the end of his post that “I’ve never taken a position on whether the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima was necessary or not.” This may be the first time Alterman has ever announced he does not have an opinion on something. Stranger, however, is that he could rant endlessly in indignation when he has (or claims to have) no opinion on the actual matter in dispute.
That Alterman is such a careless and nasty journalist might have something to do with his prolificness; after all, when you’re “a frequent lecturer and contributor to virtually every significant national publication in the United States and many in Europe,” it’s hard to find the time to be anything other than sloppy and ad hominem.
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November 28th, 2007 at 12:46 PM
The issue of Hiroshima’s casualties was in my opinion best framed a few years ago in a Nick Kristoff column. He noted that the battle for Okinawa cost the lives of 14,000 Americans and 200,000 Japanese. If the Japanese were fighting so ferociously for a peripheral island how much more fanatically would they have fought for their home islands.
Moreover, Kristoff pointed to the Japanese historian Sadao Asada who has cited Japan’s wartime leaders on the subject. For example, Koichi Kido, a close aid of the Emperor, said:
Mitsumasa Yonai, the navy minister called the Hiroshima bomb, a “gift from heaven,” because it broke a political stalemate.
was the opinion of Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary, in 1945.
Incidentally, the descent into personal squabbles turns these blogs into sand boxes. Whatever their arguments, it is hard to take disputants in diapers seriously.
November 28th, 2007 at 1:09 PM
Mr. Kirchick: Forgive me for repeating a story from your first post, but my first introduction to Mr. Alterman was watching him being interviewed about the Verona transcripts’ implication of I.F. Stone as having received “assistance” from the KGB. He proceeded to melt down in a way that struck me, as well, disturbed. It exceeded the usual bounds of passionate argument and strayed into other territory that in my experience (reinforced by having raised three children) tends to be inhabited by emotionally troubled sorts. This was some years ago, at a time when a few standards still existed for broadcast media. I was sure that it was the last I would ever see of Alterman. I was wrong.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:01 PM
“Jamie Kirchick,” who I continue to maintain does not really exist but was invented as a sock puppet/imaginary friend, Lee Siegel-style, by the friendless Marty Peretz.”
Jamie Kirchick is close to Marty Peretz. However, he must not allow that to deter him from researching how the leftist environmentalist crazies are responsible for millions of horrible deaths in the Third World. Their hostility towards DDT alone may have cost the lives of some twenty-five million people.
On top of that, the poor are discouraged from improving themselves economically because of the bogus threat of “global warming.” Mr. Kirchick may owe Peretz his friendship—but he owes the gentleman nothing more than that.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:12 PM
The incipient cult of Hiroshima was gently mocked as far back as the 1946 movie, “The Best Years of Our Lives,” in the brief scene where returning war vet Frederic March is almost immediately confronted by his teenaged son, who wants March to corroborate the A-Bomb side effects the kid had just learned about in high school. Thus, the victor’s narrative was already being challenged in the name of victimhood. A note on Alterman: He originally hails, like me, from Scarsdale, NY, which in the 1990s had among its residents undoubtedly one of the highest proportions of Japanese nationals of any town in the US. My one-time fellow columnist at The Scarsdale Inquirer, Phillip Nobile, made Hiroshima revisionism one of his pet causes. So there’s probably an element of Tip O’Neillism (”all politics is local”) there. For that and more obvious reasons I also doubt Alterman would have gotten so excited had Germany been nuked instead.
November 29th, 2007 at 1:11 PM
“…attacked in Commentary by “Jamie Kirchick,” who I continue to maintain does not really exist but was invented as a sock puppet/imaginary friend, Lee Siegel-style, by the friendless Marty Peretz…”
Not a big fan of Alterman, but I like that line. It’s got moxie. And Vegas is giving 5:2 that it’s true.
Never cross Vegas.
December 1st, 2007 at 12:12 AM
Jamie Kirchick does indeed exist…and he is no one’s sock puppet. Far too unpredictable for that.