Home News Bulletin

Plus: I offer brief comments about Hunter Biden and the American use of atomic weapons against Japan in World War II

Locust Walk on the University of Pennsylvania campus in West Philadelphia. (Photo by Jon Lovette / Getty Images)

A month or so ago, I made a reference to some changes that would be coming to my Substack newsletters later in the summer. Today, August 1, seems like a good day to make the full public announcement.

I have been hired as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve worked at Penn before—teaching in the critical writing program on several occasions for a total of 5-1/2 years, acquiring books as an editor at Penn Press for 6-1/2 years, and teaching occasional courses in political science and religious studies—but this will my first time as full-time teaching faculty in the field in which I received my Ph.D. I’m quite excited to have been given this opportunity.

At the moment, the plan is for me to teach courses that overlap quite well with what I write about at Notes from the Middleground. Well, mostly with what I write about in the “Eyes on the Right” newsletter. I’m starting with a seminar in the fall titled “The 2024 Republican Primaries” and will be teaching two in the spring: “The Reactionary Mind: Anti-Liberalism and the Radical Right” and “The Global Rise of Right-Wing Populism.” The overlap with my work here should be very good for both my teaching and writing.

The one way in which my new position will conflict with the Substack is time. Writing three substantive and lengthy posts per week has been a full-time job over the past 13 months. I won’t be able to keep up that pace going forward. That’s true even outside of the fall and spring semesters, because teaching requires preparation. I’m prepping for my fall course pretty intensely right now, and I’ll be prepping my two spring courses while teaching over the next several months. That is going to require different expectations at Notes from the Middleground.

The most important thing I want to convey is that my Substack is going to continue. I will simply be writing somewhat less often than I have been. What this means is that beginning this week, and aside from when I’m on vacation (as I will be the week of August 14-18), I will write at least one substantive and lengthy post per week. Some weeks I’ll do two. For others, I’ll combine one serious piece of writing with an audio post commenting on a debate, election results, or some other pertinent event in the political news. I may also experiment with the Substack feature that allows for texting-style chats with subscribers. I imagine that could be fun for some of the Republican debates—watching and talking about them together in real time.

So the big takeaway is this: I’m not going anywhere, and I hope you won’t either.

Now, on to a couple of short topics. . . .

---

Though I’m sometimes a pretty severe critic of the right, I have a fair number of conservative readers and friends. Lately they’ve been coming at me for my silence with regard to The Biden Scandals, which these conservatives are convinced would sink the president if only the media would give them the attention they deserve. Most of all, these readers and friends want to know why I’m choosing to be complicit in this conspiracy of silence. Am I more of a blind partisan—more willing to carry water for the Biden administration—than I usually let on?

I suppose it’s possible I’m missing something glaringly obvious, and that this blind spot is a function of partisanship. But I don’t think so.

By all accounts, Hunter Biden is a mess of a human being. He’s basically lived his life on a bender—doing drugs, sleeping with prostitutes, having at least one illegitimate child, and making large sums of money from various foreign sources through what sounds like an awful lot like flagrant influence peddling. That is, he’s gotten rich by his proximity to his politically powerful father. Moreover, if the IRS whistleblower is to be believed, several other members of the Biden family have profited from similar kinds of tawdry behavior as well.

None of that is great. If Republicans want to use it to paint a broad picture of The Biden Crime Family, they’re welcome to do so. Politics ain’t beanbag.

But in order to leave a serious mark on President Biden himself, someone somewhere is going to have to demonstrate that he knew about and/or was otherwise complicit in and/or benefitted from the corruption. So far, at least, no one has done that. (The best they’ve come up with is text messages that allegedly show Hunter claiming he has the ear of his father and will use that connection to advance the interests of the person on the other end of the conversation—which is exactly what you’d expect an influence-peddler to say, whether or not it was true.) And that leaves me thinking and saying after every supposedly monumental Hunter Biden revelation: Very interesting, but so what? Why on Earth should I be less inclined to vote for Joe Biden because his son (along with, possibly, some other relatives) is a creep and a crook?

Now, you could say I’m giving Joe Biden the benefit of the doubt, and that might be true. But it doesn’t come from any special warm feelings I have for the guy. It comes from his long political career and the relative absence of corruption accusations in it (until he began running for president against Donald Trump). That isn’t what one would expect from someone with a history of looking to use positions of political power (as a Senator, Vice President, and now President) to enrich himself and/or members of his family. So I’m just going to keep shrugging my shoulders unless and until I hear the sound of another dropping shoe.

---

Thanks to the film Oppenheimer, we’ve all been treated to another round of one of my least-favorite public debates: How could the United States have possibly dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Those who pose the question like this do so because they consider it self-evident that using atomic weapons on Japan was a moral abomination. The question is therefore roughly equivalent to asking: Why is the U.S. so evil?

I don’t think it’s especially illuminating to think about the issues raised by the bombings in this way. If you want to object to the choice to bomb cities, suggesting the generals and President Truman should have picked military instead of civilian targets, be my guest. But that presumes dropping the bombs somewhere was justifiable, which is something many critics refuse to concede.

I think the refusal to concede that point is evidence of a lack of seriousness on the part of critics. Japan was not on the verge of surrendering. The United States would have needed to mount an invasion of the island nation. We don’t know if this would have cost the lives of 1 million American soldiers, as defenders of the bombings have often asserted, but the number of casualties (on both sides) would have been staggering, whatever the final death toll. Most of those who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have survived, but hundreds of thousands or others (on both sides) almost certainly would have perished in their place.

To this line of argument, the critics often retort: The Japanese emperor only refused to surrender prior to the two atomic blasts because we foolishly and unreasonably demanded that they do so unconditionally; had we demanded less, the war could have been brought to a conclusion at a vastly lower cost in human lives and suffering.

But is this true? Even if we assume Japan would have accepted some form of a conditional surrender, we need to think through the implications of the counterfactual. It was the unconditional surrender of the Axis Powers that enabled the Allies to demand and receive total compliance and deference when it came to restructuring and rebuilding the Japanese political system and economy after the war. (The same could be said for West Germany.) It’s an enduring theme in my writing that there is no such thing as starting over from scratch in politics (or human life more generally), but an unconditional defeat and surrender in a total war certainly comes as close to such a clean slate as it’s possible to do. Anything less than an unconditional surrender would have made a postwar transition to friendship between the U.S. and Japan much more challenging.

But I’m not even going to concede the assumption about Japan’s willingness to surrender with conditions. Those who claim this was possible or likely often fail to engage with the brutality of Imperial Japan. They weren’t alone, of course. World War II was a bloodbath on a scale that boggles the mind. As many as 27 million Russians died fighting Nazi Germany. Six million died in the Holocaust. The Allies dropped incendiary bombs on populated city centers and made sure to inflict suffering on civilians in plenty of other ways.

And then there was Japan’s behavior in China, which is not typically included in American accounts of the war. (Estimates of Chinese deaths during World War II run as high as 20 million.) One aspect of the Japanese occupation of northeast China, in what used to be called Manchuria, was Unit 731, a covert chemical and biological research outpost that makes the viciously cruel experiments of the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele sound like child’s play in comparison.

Allow me to quote from the Wikipedia page devoted to Unit 731. (You may want to skip the quotation if accounts of extreme barbarity upset you.)  

Experiments included disease injections, controlled dehydration, biological weapons testing, hypobaricpressure chamber testing, vivisection, organ procurement, amputation, and standard weapons testing. Victims included not only kidnapped men, women (including pregnant women), and children, but also babies born from the systemic rape perpetrated by the staff inside the compound.… Additionally, Unit 731 produced biological weapons that were used in areas of China not occupied by Japanese forces, which included Chinese cities and towns, water sources, and fields. Estimates of those killed by Unit 731 and its related programs range up to half a million people, and none of the inmates survived. In the final moments of the Second World War, all prisoners were killed to conceal evidence. There were no survivors.

I bring up Unit 731 not in any way to imply that the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki somehow deserved their fate. Deserving has nothing at all to do with it. I bring up Unit 731 to remind people (or perhaps inform them for the first time) of just how unflinchingly ruthless were our opponents during the Second World War.

The sad and tragic fact is that war has a way of provoking a downward moral spiral: The goal is to prevail, and if one’s opponent gains an advantage by adopting bloodthirsty tactics, one’s own side will often be driven by necessity to match or surpass them. (That’s one very powerful reason to do everything possible to avoid going to war in the first place.)

Given this logic of escalation, I believe we should be grateful we acted with the restraint we did in bringing the war to a close—even if, decades removed from the slaughter, our actions understandably inspire soul-searching and second-guessing.

See you next on Friday. . . .