Page 16 THE VILLADOM TIMES IV • August 18, 2010 as deeply racist. (A few revenge-crazy Chinese said the Americans should keep bombing Japan today.) Readers who don’t see the non-white world as important should consider where their clothing, electronic devices, and many of their cars come from. America is still the best game in town, but America is no longer the only game in town. I just now opened some trousers I ordered at a special discount price. (I can still handle a normal waist despite my wife’s good cooking, but I need a 38-inch inseam.) The trousers were made in Bangladesh. I just brought back a specialty item from my tutorial gig: a metal model of a Renault FT-17 military tank from World War I, which I used to illustrate the difference between “archetype” and “prototype.” It’s made in China. The archetype, the British Mark IV tank, is now on order. I have no doubt that this will also be made in China. Top-quality electronics are now made in Japan or in factories in Thailand or Mexico under Japanese quality control. Consumer-grade electronics are made in South Korea, which means they are actually made in China under South Korean quality control. The Chinese bargain-basement competitor uses a Japanese family name, but the stuff is 100 percent made in China by people whose wages are an adjunct to the bowl of noodles they sometimes receive at work. Bottom-feeders in the USA don’t care where the stuff is made. They want the bottom price, never mind whether the manufacturer pays his workers a living wage, as the modern Japanese and South Koreans generally do and the Chinese generally do not. American hatred of all things Japanese is based on lack of experience. The Koreans have far more reason to hate the Japanese than any American has. After Teddy Roosevelt cut them a swap for non-intervention in the Philippines in 1905, Japan annexed Korea in 1910 and ran Korea until the Russians and the Americans bisected that unhappy country in 1945. Be it noted that the Americans killed about 10 times as many people in the Philippines as the Japanese did in Korea, while the Japanese invested about 10 times as much money in the infrastructure of Korea as the Americans did in the infrastructure of the Philippines. The Americans and the Japanese also both raped and both tortured. The Japanese, by way of reparations, have provided scholarships to South Koreans ever since. Several of my Korean tutorial students have relatives who graduated from top Japanese universities on full scholarships. Some few Koreans may revel in Hiroshima. Most call it racist. Americans can continue to vote on which talking head gets to be U.S. President, but the idea that Hiroshima was not a war crime on the level of Auschwitz is only available to East Asian extremists and home-grown racist idiots. It does not play well outside the United States, where most of the world’s manufacturing and investing is going on, while Americans persist in glamour vacations. Europeans outside Britain – a big loser to Japan at Singapore, where they put up a lousy fight, and were later brutalized as prisoners -- invariably see Hiroshima as a war crime. Douglas MacArthur and Dwight David Eisenhower both deplored Hiroshima as vicious and unnecessary. They knew the situation better than website experts today, and saw the bombings as a political mistake and a moral horror show. Had they known – as any informed person can learn today on the Web, and as MacArthur seems to have suspected – that a traitor named Harry Dexter White had contrived to trigger Pearl Harbor at the behest of the Soviet NKVD, they would have been confirmed in their strictly military opinions and averred that the Pacific War was a Marxist mistake inflicted on Japan and on the luckless Americans stuck in the Philippines and at Pearl Harbor. Most people outside China and the U.S. say that Hiroshima was an American war crime. Nobody was hanged for Hiroshima because our side won. The United States is probably the only country in the world that’s cool with that. It plays very badly in other countries, especially those, other than China, which experienced massacres of their own by Anglo-American colonialists. Few American Indians applaud Hiroshima. Using racism as an excuse to murder the boss who catches you stealing is a vicious absurdity. The fact that anybody could take this outrageous excuse for mass murder seriously, however, remains an economic problem in the global economy. Most people of color find uneducated Americans extremely racist, though it is better than it once was. Many Americans may, if they really need to, accept the argument that the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki against Japanese women and children were morally justified by Pearl Harbor. But Pearl Harbor was a strictly military attack: The 44 American civilians, autopsies revealed, were almost all hit by overshoot from our own anti-aircraft fire. (Nobody seems to have publicized this while the war was in progress, but it’s a fact.) Using Pearl Harbor to justify Hiroshima is deeply racist. Would we tolerate the number of civilian deaths in Canada, Ireland, or France that we have inflicted in Iraq? The Sept. 11 assault on the World Trade Center was a much worse sneak attack because it deliberately targeted civilians, but those terrorists were not based in Iraq. Unless the American people learn to lift their vision beyond absurd self-justifications, and beyond sports and the six-pack, we will have worse troubles ahead of us than what we are facing now. Kill eight white people because one of them fired you for good cause? That is a hardcore, inexcusable crime. Kill 140,000 women and children because some of their men attacked a military installation under serious provocation after a half-century of political racism? You tell me. Two riveting events from the nation’s news popped up recently. In Connecticut, a black man who had 16 notices for showing up late and had been videotaped stealing beer from the truck he drove was summoned to what he logically expected to be a terminal hearing. The man took out a legally registered handgun and shot eight white people, including his boss, and then committed suicide. His explanation was racism. The response was overwhelming negative. The union representative scheduled to represent him was named Christopher Roos. About the time that eight hard-working, decent and useful victims of this homicidal maniac were being buried by their weeping families in Connecticut, another man named Roos – John Roos, United States Ambassador to Japan, showed up at ceremonies marking the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Japan, which killed about 140,000 people, including 5,000 Koreans who probably didn’t want to be there, and about 140 American prisoners of war who definitely didn’t want to be there. The Korean laborers in Hiroshima were killed by the bomb. Some of the Americans were also killed by the bomb. Typically, they would have been living with Japanese families who treated them as somewhere between step-children and domestic pets. Some of them were lynched by outraged Japanese after the bomb fell. The spectacle of skinny young Americans who had been safe before the bomb fell swinging from street lamps led their Japanese foster families to shake their heads, and sometimes weep over them. Those American lives definitely weren’t saved by the bomb; they were terminated, like the Japanese women and girls whose shadows were etched in the sidewalks and on the walls of buildings when they were incinerated. Let’s look at this context very seriously, because a lot of countries now have nuclear weapons. The websites where most respondents were Americans came down about 90 percent on the side of the bomb: Hiroshima was a right thing, shortened the war, saved American lives, and avenged Pearl Harbor. Does anybody possibly not realize that Pearl Harbor was deliberately provoked after four U.S. admirals – Richardson, Kimmel, Theobald, and Layton -have written about how Japan was politically and economically provoked, how decoded and defector warnings were ignored, how Richardson got the sack for warning FDR, and how Kimmel get blamed when he too had warned that Japan was being deliberately angered and the U.S. Navy wasn’t ready for war? Richard, Kimmel, and Theobald wrote their books in the 1950s. John Toland’s book, “Infamy,” came out in 1985 and summarized a hectic history of bungled warnings. I guess waving the flag is easier than turning the pages. The websites which originated in Japan, India, Thailand, and all over Europe took rather the opposite tack: Most of the people in India, Europe, and the Muslim world saw the atomic bombings and the denial of American guilt When the race card is the death card Ramsey Knights team plays .500 ball The Ramsey Knights of Columbus softball team just completed the regular season in the Ramsey Men’s Softball League. The team finished at 5-5 and will be playing in the playoffs. Members of the team include Tony Salemo, John Creegan, Ryan Tenny, Jason Spain, Corey Duval, Alex Stecyna, Vince Francis, Tom W. Larsen, Tom Larsen, Kevin Edwards, Ken Tyburczy, Jim Franco, Ron Damato, Phil Keating, Roger Spain, Larry Walsh, Alex Bogaenko, Matt Damto, Frank Guildersleeve, Bill Corbett, and Mike Adams. Pictured: Phil Keating, Tommy Larsen, and Matt Damato.