Krugman, Galbraith and Kamm

I have no desire (or interest) in debating anything with Mr Kamm. For a start, he is a master of using ambiguous syntax to make his statements hard to refute. For example: ‘The author of the conclusion was Paul Nitze, whose inferences about an early Japanese surrender have been refuted, on the basis of information that USSBS had available to it at the time, by the historian Robert Newman’. This would seem to be a clear sentence, were it not for the clause beginning ‘on the basis of information…’ which renders the whole statement essentially meaningless. (Is Kamm claiming that Nitze’s conclusions were the correct ones based on what USSBS knew at the time? Or that his theories have been ‘refuted’ based on a close reading of the USSBS information available to ordinary readers (i.e. excluding classified data) at the time? Or including classified data? Or what?).

Also note the euphuism of ‘historically without merit’ when he means ‘false’ or ‘wrong’ (I think: with Kamm one is never too sure).

However it’s worth pointing out that “Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan” by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa essentially backs up Galbraith’s point. I have no idea whether the Japanese had decided to surrender when the bombs fell (unfortunately I haven’t read Hasegawa’s book) but it wouldn’t surprise me as, according to him the key motivation for the Japanese surrender was the declaration of war by the Soviets.

Kamm’s own response to what seems to be a mature, serious, scholarly work is the ungrammatical rant: ‘This is an extraordinary absolution of those responsible for Pearl Harbor and the suffering of those who built the Burma Railway’ (note Kamm’s syntax runs away from him: he seems to be saying that Hasegawa forgives the suffering of those on the Burmese railway, which is nice of him). He also uses the most weaselly possible use of quotations (i.e. not naming the authors and thereby pretending that Hasegawa’s work was generally attacked by the scholarly community, which it wasn’t), and then claims that it is being used as a ‘deux ex machina’ by the peace movement, which indicates that Kamm really needs to read up on his Greek drama (he could get to that AFTER he reads up on the politics of the conclusion of the second world war).

http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/04/the_land_of_the.html

‘Brendan, that’s probably just what he would say about you. Can’t you just ignore each other?’

Fair enough. How about another post about the Tomorrow People instead? I missed the last one.

Whether or not Galbraith said “I had no part writing this conclusion” makes no odds, because JKG did, in fact, write the controversial bit of the Bombing Survey and tried to make it more controversial, which was Henry’s point.

I understood Henry’s point, though it seems Kamm also had a reasonable basis for his own point. But the (apparent) contradiction is interesting on its own.

btw, Henry, the historical reason why Krugman had a go at JKG is, if I remember correctly, that Peddling Prosperity came out at the height of the debate over NAFTA. Krugman was quite vulnerable at this point because, as the godfather of new trade theory, he was seeing a lot of his arguments about strategic trade policy being repackaged as generalised protectionist arguments, and he wanted to protect his baby from being misused in this way. I think that JKG might have been on the anti-NAFTA side – Jamie Galbraith was, and I personally think that there is decent circumstantial evidence from the famous Slate debate to suggest that Krugman often got the two confused.

Oh, man: I read the title, and thought that the post was going to somehow discuss Frances Kamm in relation to modern economics. Imagine my disappointment when it turned out to be another post about Oliver Kamm being noisome!
Anyway, I can understand wanting to set the factual record straight re. Galbraith; but please, Henry, don’t let O.K. get under your skin, and take up valuable blogging time. Instead, you should get to work on that fascinating discussion of deontology and heterodox Keynesianism that you so teasingly suggested, and so cruely didn’t provide!

Re #13: Me too!

I really enjoyed Krugman’s “The Great Unravelling” (a collection of his columns). I was very put off by his sloppy, nay shitty, column about food in England. It seemed like a column where he wanted to make a point and — contrary to any real evidence — made it.

I happened to read peddling prosperity recently myself and I was struck by the exact same thing.

Nonetheless, the book presents an excellent synthesis of a lot of ideas that are hard for even economics students at a lower level (I’m an undergraduate) to really get a perspective on. I’m curious, which parts you disagree with?

As Professor Farrell states in his update, I have written to him directly to take issue with his post, and as he has invited me to place my comments in this thread, that is what I’m doing. Here is my first email to him.

Thank you for comments regarding Galbraith and the A-bomb; I’ve read your post with interest, and I’m sorry you found mine exceptionable. I wasn’t suggesting your observations on Galbraith were dishonest; I was criticising their factual basis. If you tell me I drew a mistaken inference from your original post, then I naturally take your word on this, but I think I still would have interpreted your comments in the way I did even in the absence of the intellectual or character deficiencies you speculate about. More important, I think others would too.

I do find it misleading to say that Galbraith was “director of the USSBS”, without an indefinite article; that he “issued” an indictment of Allied bombing; and that he did so even though he “might have been expected to toe the official line”. Galbraith was one member of a board of civilian directors with extensive military staff support. Only one of those civilian directors was willing to play a significant role in the Pacific Survey, and it wasn’t Galbraith, who was in Japan for only a month and played no part in the writing of the conclusions of that survey. The “issuing” of USSBS judgements on Allied bombing was done by the chairman, Franklin D’Olier, whose imprimatur was given to only three reports out of the hundreds written by divisions of the survey. I don’t know what you mean by “the official line”, for the conclusions of the Pacific Survey’s report Japan’s Struggle to End the War were entirely consistent with Nitze’s pre-existing conclusion that Japan would have surrendered with conventional strategic bombing allied to naval blockade (which itself would have had appalling humanitarian consequences). The evidence in support of that proposition from interrogations of Japanese officials (of which Nitze attended around ten) is extremely scanty. Galbraith’s later claim that “the [atomic] bombs fell after the decision had been taken by the Japanese government to surrender” is as thoroughly debunked as a historical thesis can be. (The commenter on your post who announces that he hasn’t read Tsuyoshi Hasegawa’s Racing the Enemy is at least correct on that autobiographical point if nothing else. Hasegawa, whose book has itself been strongly criticised for “one-sided interpretations and contradictions” by Sadao Asada in The Journal of Strategic Studies, February 2006, certainly does not endorse the claim that Japan had decided to surrender before Hiroshima. His argument is the more limited one that the crucial factor in Japan’s surrender was not the A-bomb but the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War between the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.)

While of course you are right in your observation about the title of your post, the points I have made about USSBS are accurate nonetheless, and in my view are material to your post. I wonder if you would therefore consider clarifying your earlier remarks to take account of them. You’re welcome to post this email on your blog if you wish.

BTW, as Professor Farrell is fastidious about the term “historical revisionism”, let me refer him to this recent article, from the History News Network, by the New Left historian Staughton Lynd, entitled “I am a Revisionist Historian”. Professor Lynd is clearly not declaring a sympathy for Holocaust denial: he is alluding to the tradition exemplified by Appleman Williams, and – as he sees it – applying it to today’s debates. Professor Farrell’s complaint is misconceived, and I’m puzzled why he came up with it.

Well, there are two issues here, which I’ll restate and then leave, because this will otherwise be a circular exchange. The main one is that in my view you greatly overstated both J.K.Galbraith’s significance in the debates over the conclusion of the Pacific War, and the accuracy of his diagnosis. As you rightly observe in your opening sentence, I am not a Krugman or a Galbraith, but I do know my way round the recent scholarship on the Pacific War, not through any attainment of my own but because I am fortunate as a writer to number among my correspondents some of the leading historians in this field, who have guided me through their and others’ research.

The subsidiary issue is the term “historical revisionism”, as you took exception to my use of it in the context of your comments on Galbraith. I naturally regret that you interpreted this as a comparison to Holocaust denial, which any civilised person would take as a gross insult. But not only was this interpretation far from my mind, it’s also one that I consider so strained as to be illegitimate. You are simply mistaken in your account of the term. The origins of the term go back at least as far as post-WW1 reassessment of Germany’s culpability for the war and the justice of Versailles. As you know, Keynes, who termed Versailles a Carthaginian peace, was to say the least respectable and highly influential in arguing this case. More recently, the case that Galbraith argued about the A-bomb became universally and neutrally known as revisionism, exemplified in the work from the 1960s of Gar Alperovitz, as did the work of Appleman Williams and his followers in Cold War history. It is you who have misinterpreted Lynd, who explicitly pays his intellectual debt to Appleman Williams. That is the allusion in his title. “Revisionism” is how the phenomenon is known. It may denote an upward revision or a downward revision in evaluating its subject (consider Conor Cruise O’Brien’s “revisionist” biographies of Burke and Jefferson respectively); there is no necessary association of the term with fraud such as that perpetrated by Holocaust deniers, other than in the minds of the deniers themselves.

Henry: You can afford to concede this much of Oliver’s point: “historical revisionism” *has* been used to denote legitimate scholarship as well as self-serving Orwellian rewrites like Holocaust denial.

But he’s backpedaling to claim no dishonesty was implied in his use of the term above, because his full phrase was “_to_absurd_extremes_of_ historical revisionism” — which surely does *not* connote the legitimate variety.

Actually, Henry wins.

OK, let’s see if I have this straight:

1. Henry said “when he was director of…” which sounds like he was THE director. Verdict: Henry should say, “whoops. ‘a'” and move on. He was ‘a’ director, which is all that’s required for Henry’s point.
2. Oliver says Henry’s a “revisionist”, which in historical circles definitely means, “someone interested in rewriting the obvious truth to paint unjustifiably the good side in a bad historical light.” In the case of WWII and Japan, revisionists argue that there was no need to drop the bomb, or two, because we had evidence that Japan would soon surrender. Or something like that. For those who argue that this is false, such as Kamm (I glean), this is a pejorative statement, but it’s essentially the same as a political slam. It has the taint of an attempt to accuse someone of deliberately believing bad arguments for immoral political purposes. Verdict: Kamm should fess up; Henry is a revisionist in that nasty way because Kamm believes he is believing the wrong people deliberately. Henry, on the other hand, should argue that he’s a revisionist on this subject because he is convinced that this version of history is accurate and that Kamm is deliberately ignoring the truth. Then should determine winners on two-out-of-three thumb wrestling.

3. Henry (and dsquared) continue to assert that JKG “issued issue a damning indictment of the bombing”, citing Parker’s work. Verdict: I don’t have the book here, but assuming that Parker did the “archival” work necessary, JKG apparently did issue strong indictments of the bombing, but apparently in drafts and not in the final release, for which we understand that he was not responsible.

4. Kamm quotes JKG has saying, “I had no part in writing this conclusion.” in his memoirs, which seems like a direct refutation but is in fact vague. Is he saying that he disagreed? Is he saying merely that he didn’t write the released conclusion? What IS JKG saying when he says this? Verdict: None; Kamm would be required to provide more context for the quote to enable us to say what JKG was trying to communicate. It is altogether possible, as well, that JKG was trying to fudge the public record, too. Damn. Now I’m going to have to read both books. You people are annoying.

Henry (and I’m sorry to return to this when I’d resolved not to, but this is important to get right), no.

The term ‘revisionism’ as applied to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings usually relates not to Japanese victimhood, but to American motives. This is the school of American historians influenced, if at some remove, by Gar Alperovitz’s 1965 book Atomic Diplomacy. To simplify and generalise: revisionism maintains that the bombs were dropped not to force Japanese surrender, which on this reading was imminent in any event, but as a political signal to Stalin. In that form, it is very much a minority and extreme view, but it emphatically does not have the connotation of tacit sympathy for Japanese aggression that you detect. If it did, then the term would not have taken hold as it has. Every standard account of the debate between orthodox historians and their critics over Hiroshima/Nagaski makes reference to the revisionist school, without the implication of illegitimacy that you detect. Even the fiercest of orthodox critiques of revisionist scholarship (for example, Robert Maddox’s Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later) do not make such an insinuation. They will argue that revisionists tend to downplay the sheer brutality of Japanese aggression, much as historians critical of Cold War revisionists will argue that the latter understate the terror of Soviet rule, but this is as far as it goes. The term ‘revisionist’ has been widely used in reviews of Hasegawa’s recent book, but again not at all pejoratively but only descriptively (also misleadingly, as Hasegawa – who is an American historian – rejects the traditional revisionist case). Had I imagined you would interpret the term – with understandable anger – as an implict comparison of your remarks to Holocaust denial, then I would certainly have expanded or avoided it. But your complaint of sloppy usage is wrong. I have used the word correctly, in the correct context, in a standard and not idiosyncratic way, and you have misunderstood it.

(The commenter who believes that by referring to “absurd extremes of historical revisionism” I am implying the illegitimate variety of revisionism unfortunately perpetrates the same misunderstanding, so I clearly did assume more than I ought to have done when invoking the term. There is no connotation there of illegitimacy, only of bad history – much as Conor Cruise O’Brien’s now-forgotten denigration of Thomas Jefferson was an absurd extreme of revisionism, whereas his revisionist States of Ireland was highly influential on a generation of historians. I’m glad – seriously, because it’s a terrible thing to imagine you’re being accused of something akin to Holocaust denial – to clear up this misunderstanding, but if I am culpable in this, I am not culpable alone.)

On the main issue, let us try to reach a common understanding on at least some components of it. To say that Galbraith “issued” an indictment as “director of USSBS” struck me as misleading, because “issued” is to my mind a synonym for “publish” rather than “draft” or “contribute to at an early stage”. I also interpreted you to mean that Galbraith was in charge of USSBS, rather than one civilian member of it who played a minor part in USSBS’s Pacific Survey at an early stage. I am willing to accept that on both points I misunderstood you, but in that case I believe others would have misunderstood you in the same way, and some clarification of both points might be in order.

Those are relatively minor points. Your comment about Galbraith’s selfless pursuit of truth when he “might have been expected to toe the official line” is, however, a serious misunderstanding of the background to the Pacific Survey. There was, of course, rivalry among the different branches of the armed services, and Nitze didn’t handle it well, but if there was any “official line” it was precisely that bombing of civilian targets, at the extreme in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had not been necessary to secure a Japanese surrender. On this, Nitze was wrong, and can be shown to have been wrong on the basis of information that was available to USSBS at the time, but this is a separate issue from the one we’re discussing. The relevant point is that Galbraith was firmly in accord with the “official line”, if (as I doubt) that term has any meaning in this context. I believe you may have been misled on this point by relying too heavily on the Galbraith biography to the exclusion of the historians’ studies of USSBS (e.g. Robert F. Newman, “Ending the War with Japan: Paul Nitze’s ‘Early Surrender’ Counterfactual”, Pacific Historical Review, May 1995).

I’m sure Henry is a skilled politics academic. I said it was dispiriting that the remarks about Galbraith came from a politics academic, not that it was dispiriting that Henry holds that post.

This was a polemical remark such as I think you’ll find is quite common among bloggers, and I doubt that Henry was upset by it. I have dealt at some length with the issue of “revisionism”, because Henry was upset by that, and I can understand why. The confusion about the term was not mine, however; Henry believed that it denoted something pejorative, akin (and this was the analogy he cited) to Holocaust denial, and on this he was mistaken. As I have explained – doubtless pedantically, but if I had genuinely made such an insinuation against Henry, it would have been a disgraceful thing – revisionism is a standard term used by American historians in the debate that we have been discussing, namely America’s use of the A-bomb.

I also consider that Henry’s comments about Galbraith’s role in the Pacific Survey betray a serious misunderstanding of the diplomatic background. This is an issue on which historical research has been greatly advanced over the last 15 years by Newman, Frank, Giangreco (concerning the US) and Asada (concerning Japan), among others. That is more than a confusion over language. I criticise Henry for not taking account of this work when forming his laudatory judgement about Galbraith, and apparently relying on the sympathetic Galbraith biography.

A lot of misunderstanding (I mean this as a general observation rather than a comment on Henry’s remarks) is generated by the assumption that because Nitze was a well-known hawk and Galbraith was a celebrated liberal, Galbraith must have been striking a bravely heterodox course in stating that the bombings were unnecessary. But he wasn’t. He was taking an establishment view, and one that does not stand up at well in historical retrospect.

This is extremely pedantic, but it’s worth correcting citations. In #35 I cited a paper by Robert Newman. Professor Newman’s middle initial is not ‘F’ but ‘P’. (I particularly recommend the first two chapters of Newman’s book Truman and the Hiroshima Cult as a corrective to those who believe, as Henry extraordinarily does, that the Pacific Survey report was “in many respects… a whitewash”. It was no such thing, which is why it was widely cited by New Left historians of the 60s and 70s in their critiques of the Truman administration.)

Henry, let me suggest that this discussion, along with any (if any there be) we might have in the future, would advance more smoothly and with greater illumination to anyone still reading it if you weren’t quite so quick to spot possible aspersions on you. I have deliberately not followed you in the personal rhetoric with which you began and continued this discussion, and you may be assured I will not do so in future. I have certainly not levelled or implied the charge that Ralph attributes to me, viz. that you are lying. I accused you of an absurd extreme of historical revisionism because your depiction of Galbraith’s doggedly standing out against the bombings when “he might have been expected to toe the official line” involved a serious misunderstanding of the genuine stance of USSBS and the armed services. The reason I say this is not that I have a nefarious ideological or personal agenda, but that the scholarly literature published in the last 15 years since USSBS files were made available in their entirety supports me. This is the only point in our discussion where I have raised a caution about your mode of argument, because I think it is improper to turn the discussion into speculation on someone’s “purpose” in advancing an argument.

The reason I chose what you term a weasel-phrase, but is actually a fair qualification in the circumstances that you require me to address, is that your question posed a false dichotomy, and it takes more explanation than I was immediately willing to give on a Friday evening in order to outline what, if anything, constituted “the official line”. No, “the official line” was not that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were “appalling”, but it was that they were redundant. And that official line certainly and immediately generated powerful moral objections to the bombings – for terrible destruction that is militarily unnecessary deserves the strongest censure.

Thus, two separate USSBS reports concluded: “Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to November 1, 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.”

USSBS was working in the context of its previous investigations in Europe (which Galbraith touted in extravagant prose). Its conclusions on that theatre of war were that bombing had had only a marginal effect in damaging Germany’s military capability until 1944. There was a very powerful presumption in these deliberations that the function of air power was to provide support to naval and ground forces, and not to engage in area bombing.

This was not an idiosyncratic position held by the civilian directors of USSBS. There was powerful support for this view from the armed forces. There was at the time no independent air force, and the air generals pressed for one to be established after the war. For admittedly a brief time – but it was at the time we’re discussing – these military figures were antinuclear. There were institutional reasons for this position. They feared that a single plane armed with the destructive power of the A-bomb would render obsolete the notion of a developed air force.

It is not “bogus”, but highly pertinent to your depiction of Galbraith to note the congruence of these establishment views with Galbraith’s concerns. His indictment of the bombings was perfectly consistent with “the official line”: they had served no useful purpose and the air force didn’t want nuclear weapons. “The official line” (i.e. the exact quoted conclusion of USSBS) has become a mainstay of Japanese leftwing historians, and has thence made its way into Japanese school textbooks. The conduit for this was the popular writing of the Nobel physicist P.M.S. Blackett, a member of the Maud Committee established in 1940 to consider whether Britain should develop an atomic weapon. Blackett argued, long before Alperovitz (whose supervisor he later became) took up the thesis, that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in reality the first acts of the Cold War rather than the concluding acts of the Pacific War.

I have now explained twice that I consider what USSBS concluded and whether it was right to reach those conclusions to be separate issues. Whatever you think of the second is not my concern in these comments. What you assumed about the first is, to use your own phrase, baldly wrong.

Mr. Kamm,

Just for the record, although one might use the word “lying” when one is “imply[ing] that you’re wrong on the historical facts, possibly deliberately” it’s not quite what I mean. There is a strange human state between lying and honesty in which we intend to believe something that might not be the best argument. It is the squishiness of this state that is interesting, and permits the hint of this, or imputation of that. If we were just deciding whether someone lied, well, that wouldn’t even be interesting. It is the unstated question of why someone persists in believing something poorly demonstrated that is the interesting question…. Or perhaps the issue of why a particular argument is not convincing to one but is to another. Humans. What are you gonna do?

I’ve read Newman’s book, and it’s good, but not quite right. I’ve been meaning to go back and reconcern myself with the problems I had with it (now a few years foggy), and perhaps I shall now do so. If that’s something to come out of the discussion, then there it is.

Yes, Henry, that is exactly right, but I think that once you push it into that word, then often people begin to miss the interestingness of that special place. It is bullshit, no question, but really it isn’t “without regard”; it’s more like a place where the regard doesn’t overcome something else that is slightly less than rational, slightly less than “preconceived.” It is this place that is hardest to perceive in oneself, locate, and excavate. Whatever. Despite the somewhat personal dispute, I’m now quite curious to relearn what I once thought about the issue of the surrender. Motivation is good.

Ralph – Professor Newman has written more than one book, in addition to the relevant article I have cited in this thread. The most succinct account of his arguments is Enola Gay and the Court of History, 2004. Also see Gian Gentile, “Advocacy or Assessment? The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of Germany and Japan”, Pacific Historical Review , February 1997. This is really the definitive study of USSBS, and was published in much extended form by New York University Press in 2000.