Hideko's fears proved well-founded. Despite a sophisticated alert system and a decade of air defense drills, the arrival just after midnight of a wave of B-29 bombers plunged Toyama into chaos. Superfortresses — 173 of them — encountered only sparse antiaircraft fire as they released around 1,500 tons of incendiaries onto the city's center.

In a few short hours, Toyama was enveloped by a "sea of fire," Hideko recalled in a written account. Over 95% of the city was incinerated, leaving around 2,600 people dead. While Hideko's family survived, they numbered among the 165,000 left homeless, virtually the entire population.

With the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings upon us, we would do well to retrieve the burning of Toyama from the margins of public memory. For too long, scholarly predilections and public fascination with the atomic bomb have divorced the mushroom clouds from the firestorms that preceded them.

Rather than a sideshow to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, the incendiary destruction of cities was a fundamental facet of the war against Japan. The atomic bombings evolved out of a fierce U.S. campaign to target and destroy entire cities, in hopes of forcing a Japanese surrender.

This was not how air power strategists had initially imagined the war against Japan. The commitment at first was to the precision bombing of "war-making targets," such as airplane factories.

Planes, however, struggled to hit their targets, due in no small part to the jet streams they encountered while flying at high altitudes over Japan. Eager to both justify the immense costs of the newly developed B-29 and to play a central role in the defeat of Japan, U.S. Army Air Forces officials in Washington, D.C., were hungry for results.

Enter Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay, the commander of the 21st Bomber Command based on the Mariana Islands, who, in early 1945, ushered in a shift to nighttime incendiary area bombing — a doctrine that quickly moved to the center of the American air assault against Japan.

This unbelievable loss of life has taken place while restrictions were at their tightest and social distancing at its most extreme. What will happen when the country fully reopens, even as the number coronavirus cases continues to grow? As mostly white public officials try to get things back to normal as fast as possible, the discussions about the pandemic’s devastating consequences to black people melt into the background, consequences which become accepted as a “new normal” we will have to live or die with. If there were ever questions about whether poor and working-class African-Americans were disposable, there can be none now. It’s clear that state violence is not solely the preserve of the police.

It’s not just the higher rates of death that fuel this anger, but also publicized cases where African-Americans have been denied health care because nurses or doctors didn’t believe their complaints about their symptoms. Just as maddening is the assumption that African-Americans have particularly bad health and thus bear personal responsibility for dying in disproportionate numbers.

Instead of using this monumental crisis to change the conditions feeding the rapid rate of black deaths, the armed agents of the state continue their petty, insouciant policing. Even seemingly innocuous instructions for social distancing become new excuses for the police to harass African-Americans. In New York, blacks made up a staggering 93 percent of coronavirus-related arrests. There are similar racial disparities in Chicago. At a time when police departments have pledged to arrest fewer people to stem the spread of the virus in local jails and in the name of preserving public health, African-Americans remain in their cross hairs. After all, why were the police arresting George Floyd for forgery, a “crime” of poverty committed by desperate low-wage workers, in the first place?

Trump’s grandiosity often betrays a bitter and pathetic undercurrent of self-pity. Usually, he plays his victimization as a crowd-pleaser at his rallies, appealing to the shared sense of persecution at the hands of assorted demonic elites, the “lamestream media” and the “deep state.” Lincoln occupies an awkward place in this paranoid firmament.

Trump knows that Lincoln is considered “great.” That has always been a besetting problem. Trump explained that his appearance at the Lincoln Memorial was unique, making it truly “great,” and that the “beautiful set” overshadowed Lincoln, who he conceded was still “great,” though for reasons that went unmentioned. “I don’t think it’s ever been done, what we’re doing tonight, here,” Trump said, “and I think it’s great for the American people to see, this is a great work of art, aside from the fact that that was a great man, this is a great work of art.”

But as “great” as Lincoln might have been, Trump, with his martyr envy, has felt a compulsion to diminish him whenever he raises his name. Even murdered, Lincoln was treated better than Trump. Again, Trump wins.

The only Americans who considered Franklin Roosevelt a socialist were right-wing Republicans. “The New Deal is now undisguised state socialism,” Senator Simeon D. Fess of Ohio declared in 1934. “Roosevelt is a socialist, not a Democrat,” Congressman Robert Rich of Pennsylvania announced on the House floor a year later. Roosevelt scoffed at such talk, but in 1939 he paused to present a very concise political dictionary of his own. “A radical,” he told the New York Herald Tribune, “is a man with both feet firmly planted—in the air.” A conservative, he continued, “never learned to walk forward”; a reactionary walked backward in his sleep. A liberal, though, used legs and hands “at the behest—at the command—of his head.” The metaphor was poignant coming from him, but it also emphasized his point: In the face of all adversity, he was every inch a liberal.

In the 1936 election, FDR masterfully ran as an unabashed liberal and at the same time completely outmaneuvered the left and would-be populists like Louisiana Governor Huey Long, who, before his assassination, planned to challenge Roosevelt in the campaign on a “Share Our Wealth” platform. As Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks related in It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States, the Great Depression “presented American radicals with their greatest opportunity to build a third party since World War I.” But Roosevelt’s New Deal, in its improvisational way, offered a triumphant liberal alternative.

The election of 2016 showed how confused these old labels and distinctions have become. The socialist senator Bernie Sanders, for example, rallying his supporters with a speech at Georgetown University in November 2015, offered a surprising definition of socialism, which consisted of a paean to FDR and the social protections ushered in by the New Deal. “Almost everything he proposed, almost every program, every idea, was called socialist,” Sanders said—as if the right-wing name-calling was the rightful definition.

Somewhere the ghost of FDR burst out laughing, while the ghost of one of Sanders’s other heroes, Eugene V. Debs, scratched his head. ...

The power of dogma versus evidence. We have been transported back to 1633. To Galileo Galilei standing before the Inquisition disputing the geocentric versus the heliocentric solar system. For the Inquisition, Galileo’s calculations conflict with dogma. But for Galileo, his calculations reveal the true nature of the universe — the true nature of reality. (The scene is memorialized in a painting by Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, Galileo Galilei Before Members of the Holy Office in the Vatican in 1633 — a painting of a painting with Raphael’s Disputation of the Holy Sacrament looming in the background.)

These 17th century debates remind us that if you have an unshakable belief in something, then no amount of evidence (or lack of evidence) can convince you otherwise. (There are always anti-rationalist objections to everything and anything. It is curious, however, to hear them in the 21st century rather than in the 17th.)...

Libertarianism may be on the rise, but it has no real chance of taking over the Republican Party, much less the nation. A daunting set of obstacles lies in the path of true believers who would shrink the government down to Gilded Age dimensions.

The most obvious hurdle is that Americans may dislike “big government,” but they cherish their federal benefits. The libertarian charge, made most recently by Paul Ryan, that entitlement programs harm the people they are supposed to help speaks to few recipients of Social Security or Medicare (even elderly Tea Partiers), much less to anyone cashing an unemployment check or being cared for at a VA hospital. And even most Republican businessmen would resist stripping away tax credits for homeowners and subsidies for energy and agriculture—just to name some of the biggest examples of “corporate welfare.”...

Such statements ignore major pieces of inconvenient history. Though it is too early to say much about the 21st century, the late 20th century saw countries gobble up foreign territory. Indeed, even the more modest claim that such territorial conquest is unknown in Europe is not true. Sometimes these actions met determined international opposition, but just as often they did not. Immediate objections fade. Indeed, a comprehensive study of post-WWII conquest finds that United Nations condemnation happens in well under half the cases.

Russian President Vladimir Putin needed to look no further than his Black Sea neighbor Turkey for inspiration. In 1974, Turkey invaded northern Cyprus, and continues to occupy the northern third of the island under an unrecognized puppet regime. Cyprus is a member of NATO and the European Union. This has not prevented the development of close relations, and even solicitude, from the EU toward its own occupier....

He strengthened that two-way bridge, between republican commitments and cosmopolitan openings, not because bridge-building was his project, but because he himself was that bridge.

From his work as a correspondent for The New Yorker in the Vietnam War through his rigorous manifesto for nuclear disarmament in “The Fate of the Earth,” his magisterial re-thinking of state power and people’s power in “The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People,” and his wry, rigorous assessments of politics for The Nation, Jonathan showed how varied peoples’ democratic aspirations might lead them to address shared global challenges....

"We want a real democracy," he told me, "not like yours." When I pressed him to elaborate, he shot back with a question of his own. "How many times have you voted," he asked, "when someone named 'Bush' or 'Clinton' wasn't running?"

The answer, I sheepishly admitted, was once: in 2008. Before that — going back to 1980, the first year I cast a ballot — every single presidential ticket featured someone from one of those two families.

That's not good for our image overseas, or for our democracy at home. We tell the world that we're a land of opportunity, where anyone can grow up to be the president. Then we limit ourselves to a handful of political dynasties....

My guess is that few will. Most are instant experts. What we now see and read are how my friend, a longtime reporter, once described journalism: the first draft of journalism rather than the first draft of history. Our media chatter is of another Munich, a new Cordon Sanitaire, or encirclement, of Russia, spheres of influence, the Crimean Anschluss (memories of the Nazis marching into Vienna in 1938 and being hailed by Austrians) even the unthinkable possibility of Cold and nuclear wars.

The Times and our major media are filled with frightening commentaries, some evoking 1914. Roger Cohen’s nightmarish recollection of Gavrilo Princip, the 19- year-old Bosnian supposedly selected by Voya Tanksovich, the head of the ultra-nationalist Serbian Black Hand, to kill an inconsequential Austrian archduke and his blameless wife in Sarajevo in June 1914 and proceed to spoil everyone’s summer holiday and the rest of the bloody century. Cohen, in a later column, ridicules CNN’s “breaking news” obsession with that missing Malayan airliner, concluding, rather frantically, that, as we all remained fixated on trivia, Putin could “invade” Estonia and WW III begin....

Mark Sternberg has just edited the eighth edition of Nicholas Riasanovsky’s definitive A History of Russia and is now writing a history of the Russian Revolution. In “Putin’s Russia is Far More Complicated than A Mere Autocracy,” he draws attention to what he views as a serious misinterpretation drawn from Churchill’s famous Westminster College speech in 1946, when he warned the west about his former ally Stalin.

“Winston Churchill famously called Russia ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’ –a phrase that makes me cringe when it shows up in contemporary journalism…. Part of the problem is that we forget Churchill’s point: there is a key. “Russian national interest” [my italics]....

From his beginnings as a brave young Vietnam War correspondent for The New Yorker, to his meticulous yet sweeping case for nuclear disarmament in The Fate of the Earth, through his magisterial re-thinking of both state power and people’s power in The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, as well as in his wry but rigorous assessments of politics for The Nation, Jonathan took the best of that distinctively American, progressive civic-republican tradition - and, it seemed to me, of a WASP cultural sensibility about which he was ambivalent and humorously self-deprecating - and poured it into the beginnings of a transracial, global civil society....

"Henry, we must not miss this chance," the president said, his taping system silently recording the session. "I'm going to destroy the goddamn country [North Vietnam], believe me, I mean destroy it, if necessary. And let me say, even [use] the nuclear weapon if necessary. It isn't necessary," Nixon hastened to add, "but, you know, what I mean is, that shows you the extent to which I'm willing to go."

Nixon wanted to impress upon the Soviets that the president of the United States was, in a word, mad: unstable, erratic in his decision-making, and capable of anything. The American commander-in-chief wanted the Kremlin to know that he was willing to escalate even localized conventional military conflicts to the nuclear level. Kissinger understood: "I'll tell [the Soviets] tomorrow night," he vowed. The national security advisor even rehearsed for the president specific lines from the good cop/bad cop routine he intended to put on. "The more we do now," he would tell his Soviet interlocutor, "the better." He was akin to saying: On the shoulders of reasonable men, like you and me, rests the responsibility of preventing a madman, like Nixon, from taking things too far....

Speaking at a summit of North American leaders in Mexico last month, Obama derided those who see the Ukraine crisis, Syria, or other contexts in which Washington and Moscow are presently clashing, as "some Cold War chessboard in which we're in competition with Russia." Yet the president's own national security advisor, Susan Rice, would later tell reporters following Crimea's formal annexation: "Our interest is not in seeing the situation escalate and devolve into hot conflict." Obama's sarcasm notwithstanding, Rice's comments betrayed that the United States has little choice but to see itself as engaged in a "cold" conflict.

This time, however, it is the Russians, not the Americans, who find value in the strategic use of "madness." Following a telephone call with Putin, German Chancellor Angela Merkel is said to have confided that she was not sure the Russian leader was in touch with reality; "in another world" is how she reportedly described her interlocutor. And in the diplomatic volleys that followed Russia's military seizure of Crimea, it was Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov who, in a radio interview with the Voice of Russia, warned that the Kremlin might respond to additional sanctions by the United States and its European allies with "asymmetric measures."...

Of course, within China itself, reverence for Mao as a nationalist figure survives, long after Marxist ideology has been cast off. But this is just a phase. As Beijing currently has no choice but to pursue a whole new array of economic reforms -- eliminating more and more remnants of state control -- even as a civil society and a middle class struggle to emerge from the ruins of totalitarianism, one can imagine the historical reckoning within China itself that Mao must one day face.

Chiang, meanwhile, has been the beneficiary of much-needed historical revisionism that has gone under the radar of the Western elite. In 2003, Jonathan Fenby, former editor of the London Observer, published the revisionist biography, Chiang Kai-shek: China's Generalissimo and the Nation He Lost. Fenby partially challenges the received wisdom about Chiang -- that he was a corrupt and inept ruler who dragged his heels on fighting the Japanese despite the considerable aid he got from the United States during World War II, and who lost China to Mao because he was the lesser man....

Here are Haldeman’s notes from his meeting with Nixon:

Credit: Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum

Note that My Lai is treated as a problem in public relations, not as a war crime.  It’s to be managed by dirty tricks and the exploitation of a senator or two.  As long as we all stay on the same page and spout the same message (while suppressing the facts and intimidating and discrediting witnesses), My Lai and the 504 Vietnamese killed there in 1968 can just be made to disappear.  That’s the gist of Haldeman’s notes.

Haldeman’s notes are further evidence of what The Contrary Perspective argued previously on the Vietnam War: We lost more than a war in Vietnam.  We lost our humanity.

During the 17th century, longer winters and cooler summers disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests across Europe. It was the coldest century in a period of glacial expansion that lasted from the early 14th century until the mid-19th century. The summer of 1641 was the third-coldest recorded over the past six centuries in Europe; the winter of 1641-42 was the coldest ever recorded in Scandinavia. The unusual cold that lasted from the 1620s until the 1690s included ice on both the Bosporus and the Baltic so thick that people could walk from one side to the other....

There are two ways to consider the impact of climate change. We can predict the future based on current trends or we can study a well-documented episode of the past.

What happened in the 17th century suggests that altered weather conditions can have catastrophic political and social consequences. Today, the nation’s intelligence agencies have warned of similar repercussions as the planet warms — including more frequent but unpredictable crises involving water, food, energy supply chains and public health. States could fail, famine could overtake large populations and flood or disease could cross borders and lead to internal instability or international conflict....

They will remember coming here for the rest of their lives, for this is how nations are built: on legends, on emotions, on stories of heroes. Tales of those who stood for months in the square will be told and retold. But that doesn’t mean that the protesters will necessarily have triumphed. On the contrary, Ukrainians are about to learn that the exhilaration of “people power”—mass marches, big demonstrations, songs, and banners—is always an illusion. And sooner or later, the illusion wears off.

This is not to deny the emotional force of the protests. Anyone who has ever attended a rock concert or a football game knows how much fun it is to be part of a roaring crowd. The experience is far more intense when you are standing in a crowd that might change history. Since the eighteenth century, philosophers have tried to describe the hallucinatory power of a mass movement. When Michael Walzer interviewed American civil rights activists they all told him the same thing about protests: “It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.” It is precisely because he understands the euphoric power of crowds—and especially because he understands how they can embolden people cowed by an unjust state—that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, is so determined to prevent Ukraine’s revolution from spreading....

Sullivan has been celebrated by top legal and media figures from the moment it was decided until its half-centenary this month. Alexander Meiklejohn, the philosopher, called it at the time “an occasion for dancing in the streets.” In his meticulous 1992 book, Make No Law: The Sullivan Case and the First Amendment, famed Supreme Court reporter Anthony Lewis wrote that the case “gave [the First Amendment’s] bold words their full meaning.” And a few weeks ago, University of Chicago Professor Geoffrey Stone wrote that, whatever its flaws, Sullivan “remains one of the great Supreme Court decisions in American history.” The New York Times itself, the winner of the case, congratulated the nation and the Court on “the clearest and most forceful defense of press freedom in American history.”

I used to be a newspaper editor. I was dealing with libel threats at my college paper before I was old enough to vote. So I’m grateful for Sullivan’s broad protection of free speech and press. The Court’s decision defused an existential threat to press freedom—a systematic campaign (detailed well by Lewis in Make No Law) to drive the major networks and papers out of the South by using local libel laws to bleed or bankrupt them.  The Court was wise to stop that cold.

And yet ... and yet.

There are some ghosts at the Sullivan feast.  Here are their names: Ralph David Abernathy, S.S. Seay Sr., Fred L. Shuttlesworth, and J.E. Lowery....

And then the conservatives on the Court lost their fifth vote. Justice Tom Clark changed his mind and circulated a draft opinion granting the appeal. In a revolutionary constitutional change, lunch counters and restaurants would suddenly be liable if they violated the equal-protection clause. But Brennan foresaw a new difficulty. By now it was June 1964, and a coalition of northern Democratic and Republican senators looked set to break a southern filibuster and pass a strong civil-rights bill. Would a favorable Supreme Court ruling actually give wavering senators an excuse to vote no? They might say there was no need for legislation because the Court had already solved the problem. So Brennan, ever nimble, engineered a tactical retreat by assembling a majority that avoided the merits of the case altogether. It was an alley-oop to the political branches. They grabbed the ball and dunked it. Ten days after the Court’s decision, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act and the president signed it into law.

In the popular imagination, the Supreme Court is the governmental hero of the civil-rights era. The period conjures images of strong white pillars, Earl Warren’s horn-rims, and the almost holy words Brown v. Board of Education. But in Bell, the Court vindicated civil rights by stepping aside. As Bruce Ackerman observes in The Civil Rights Revolution, Brennan realized that a law passed by democratically elected officials would bear greater legitimacy in the South than a Supreme Court decision. He also doubtless anticipated that the act would be challenged in court, and that he would eventually have his say. The moment demonstrated not merely cooperation among the three branches of government, but a confluence of personalities: Brennan slowing down the Court, President Johnson leaning on Congress to hurry up, and the grandstanders and speechmakers of the Senate making their deals, Everett Dirksen and Hubert Humphrey foremost among them. In this age of obstruction and delay, it is heartening to recall that when the government decides to act, it can be a mighty force....

A large part of this, he explains, has everything to do with housing discrimination:

Disparities in homeownership are a major driver of the racial wealth gap, according to a recent study from Brandeis University. According to the authors of the report, “redlining [a form of discrimination in banking or insurance practices], discriminatory mortgage-lending practices, lack of access to credit, and lower incomes have blocked the homeownership path for African-Americans while creating and reinforcing communities segregated by race.”

In my earlier piece, I alluded to these policies and practices, but didn’t describe them. But it’s worth taking the time to do exactly that, given the extent to which they were a huge influence on the housing landscape of the United States, and key to creating the ghettos and housing projects that litter our inner-cities. Obviously, this won’t be comprehensive, so consider it an introduction to these issues.

Redlining is the practice of denying key services (like home loans and insurance) or increasing their costs for residents in a defined geographical area. In theory, this could be used against anyone. In reality, it was almost exclusively a tool to force blacks (and other minorities) into particular geographic areas. The practice began with the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration, as well as the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. It was this agency which created “residential security maps” for several cities to determine the safety of real estate investments in selected areas.

You should already see where this is going: Existing black neighborhoods were lined as unsafe, and thus ineligible for financing. For prospective property owner, this was terrible: Absent cash on hand, there was no way to afford a home or a business in your area. What’s more, blacks were all but barred from entering white neighborhoods, if not by restrictive racial covenants (which forbid property sales to African Americans and other minorities) then by violence and intimidation. In Chicago, for instance, anti-black riots were a regular part of public life....

Obama’s efforts to pivot the political narrative toward a focus on economic injustice reflects the fact that, despite his winning two national elections and saving Wall Street and the U.S. economy from the depths of the Great Recession, our national economy no longer works for tens of millions of poor, working- and middle-class families.

The Obama administration’s stewardship of the nation’s economic recovery favored Wall Street over Main Street and banks over homeowners. The administration also realized, too late, that corporate capital preferred to sit on trillions in profits and reserves rather than invest in the economy.

Faced with a dysfunctional and highly partisan Republican-controlled House of Representatives, the administration’s new approach—what might be called Obama 2.0—is an attempt to utilize muscular executive action to make inroads on pressing issues of employment, immigration and racial justice for black youths.

This month the president ordered the Labor Department to revamp rules that shortchange millions of low-income wage earners out of overtime pay. The changes will enable millions of Americans to receive more income. Obama’s directive comes on the heels of his SOTU support for raising the minimum wage to $10.10....