As if to confirm that she is not interested in actual historical fact and is instead committed to spinning certain events to fit her own narrative, Nikole Hannah-Jones, the founder of the New York Times’s 1619 Project, is now pushing a false and insulting “theory” about World War II.
I put “theory” in quotation marks because you’d be hard-pressed to find a single historian who would give the time of day to the nonsense Hannah-Jones is pushing. She alleged that U.S. officials only dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki “when they knew surrender was coming because they’d spent all this money developing it and to prove it was worth it.”
In short, she’s accusing the United States of wiping out hundreds of thousands of people just for fun. This isn’t that surprising, considering her entire view of U.S. history is that this country was built on and for the oppression of other people. She’s already reached her conclusion, that the U.S. is evil, which leaves her no choice but to work backward from the assumption that every single thing the U.S. has ever done, including its victory over the Nazis and their allies, was done for the worst reasons possible.
The problem, of course, is that no one with any sort of historical background or expertise thinks this is true. To be sure, the bombing of Japan is a complicated subject that has rightly brought about a lot of ethical debate. Some historians agree with the government’s explanation that it was the only way to save the most U.S. lives possible. Others reject this and buy into the revisionist theory that the atomic bomb was really just a way of keeping the Soviet Union at bay.
But no serious person — and I mean no one — has ever suggested that the U.S. dropped the bomb just because it could or just because it would have been a waste to develop the bomb without using it in the war.
(If you’re interested in reading more about the factors that contributed to Harry Truman’s decision to drop the bomb, historian Victor Davis Hanson makes a good argument here.)
But, of course, Hannah-Jones does not care what actual historians who research and study this subject think. That was made clear when she developed the 1619 Project. She has an agenda, and facts aren’t going to get in her way.
