Aaronovitch Blusters to a Well of Silence 1213

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Why Rupert Murdoch considers it worth his while to pay David Aaronovitch a large six figure sum for such puerile antics as tweeting that I am insane, is a conjecture I find difficult to resolve. Today this exchange occurred on twitter:

David Aaronovitch: This suggestion that if elected Corbyn could be quickly ousted is utter bollocks. Democracy allows Labour to commit Hara Kiri.

Mark Doran: @DAaronovitch I hope everyone is watching how these servants of the micro-elite try to paint “attracting popular support” as “committing suicide.”

Mark Doran: @DAaronovitch Craig finds the elite-serving contortions every bit as funny as I do

David Aaronovitch: @MarkJDoran I tend to find Craig Murray unpersuasive on the grounds of him being unhinged. I can see why you like him, though.

Mark Doran: Says the man who managed to find Bush and Blair credible. I can see why you liked them, though.

It is remarkably ironic that on being referred to an article which argues that views outside a very narrow neoliberal establishment narrative are marginalised and ridiculed by the media, the Murdoch hack’s response is that the author is unhinged. Aaronovitch could not have more neatly proved my point.

But something else struck me about the twitter record. Aaronovitch’ twitter account claims to have 78,000 followers. Yet of the 78,000 people who allegedly received his tweet about my insanity, only 1 retweeted and 2 favourited. That is an astonishingly low proportion – 1 in 26,000 reacted. To give context, Mark Doran has only 582 followers and yet had more retweets and favourites for his riposte. 1 in 146 to be precise, a 200 times greater response rate.

Please keep reading, I promise you this gets a great deal less boring.

Eighteen months ago I wrote an article about Aaronovitch’s confession that he solicits fake reviews of his books to boost their score on Amazon. In response a reader emailed me with an analysis of Aaronovitch’s twitter followers. He argued with the aid of graphs that the way they accrued indicated that they were not arising naturally, but being purchased in blocks. He claimed this was common practice in the Murdoch organisation to promote their hacks through false apparent popularity.

I studied his graphs at some length, and engaged in email correspondence on them. I concluded that the evidence was not absolutely conclusive, and in fairness to Aaronovitch I declined to publish, to the annoyance of my correspondent.

Naturally this came to mind again today when I noted that Aaronovitch’ tweets to his alleged legion of followers in fact tumble into a well of silence. I do not even tweet. The entire limit of my tweeting is that this blog automatically tweets the titles of articles I write. They are not aphorisms so not geared to retweet. Yet even the simple tweet “Going Mainstream” which marked the article Aaronovitch derided, obtained 20 times the reactions of Aaronovitch’s snappy denunciation of my mental health. This despite the fact he has apparently 10 times more followers than me. An initial survey seems to show this is not atypical.

In logic, I can only see two possible explanations. The first is that my correspondent was right and Aaronovitch fakes twitter followers like he does book reviews. The second is that he has a vast army of followers, nearly all of whom find him dull and uninspiring, and who heartily disapproved en masse of his slur on my sanity. I opt for the second explanation, that he is just extremely dull, on the grounds that Mr Aaronovitch’s honesty and probity were never questioned, m’Lud.

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1,213 thoughts on “Aaronovitch Blusters to a Well of Silence”

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  • The Hampshire Connection

    (Correction: I have just found a copy. I’ve corrected the linking errors and here it is.I think the Winchester/Hampshire/Wiltshire/Isle of Wight/Crown and Manor Club connection is of major current relevance because it links to Edward Heath and involvement in child abuse by individuals near the top of the English social hierarchy – the scandal that could bring the whole shebang crashing down.)

    @Nevermind quoting me: “There were restrictive covenants on Winchester College’s (unregistered) titles to some of the land. This meant that the price the DTP paid included a large sum for paying off the owners of those covenants.”

    “Sorry had to run off this morn, had stuff to do.Hmm, that is news to me, so Winchester college actually benefited twice from the bypass, and we thought that the developers had screwed the DTP.”

    The College benefited, but only for a time, from selling the land, the covenants pushing the price far higher than it would otherwise have been. Certain individuals connected with the College benefited from being paid off in respect of the covenants. And some.

    That was part of the background to a) the hiring of Nick Tate, a grammar-school educated civil servant (former head of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority), as headmaster, in 2000, and b) his resignation 3 years later.

    Whereas the leading protestors had tried to find out the details of the covenants before hitting a brick wall, those ‘certain individuals’ at the College thought it was payday. It was, and the end result was actually a hole in the College’s finances.

    Tate tried to cover the gap by doing things like 1) making senior teachers teach more than 12 hours a week, so that staff numbers could be reduced by a small number, 2) selling off a very few residential houses in the College’s large portfolio (they own more than 100 houses in the vicinity of the school; this doesn’t count all the farmland and other property), and 3) introducing a central dining hall, which in itself would have saved millions of pounds, rather than having separate catering for each of the boarding houses.

    Tate was hired so that the insiders could say, “Winchester College? Run by a closely-knit group of money-grabbing insiders? What rubbish! Look at the oik we’ve just hired as headmaster! We’re not biased against chavs and oiks, you know!”

    The financial bad smell was made worse by the exposure of the criminal fee-fixing, which had been in the air for some time.

    Needless to say, the insiders wound Tate up from the moment he arrived. Some even went on record as saying they’d never expected him to last long in the job, but no journalist had the sense or guts to ask why.

    The other reason Tate resigned is far more serious than financial fiddling. It’s what I said – he was OK with committing child sexual abuse, but only up to a point, and he
    refused to go as far as they wanted.

    (For any ‘naive innocents’ reading this:

    – all of the housemasters at Winchester are involved in child abuse to some extent or other;

    – they are part of a network which includes not just housemasters and some of the permanent and temporary teaching and non-teaching staff, but also abusers in high echelons of Winchester-connected English society – in the judiciary, the church and the City of London – who do not work at the school, and

    – abuse does not only occur directed at the more vulnerable boys at the College, but also, and in far more disgusting ways, at vulnerable working class children and lads roped into the Crown and Manor Club in Hoxton in the East End of London – basically owned by the College, a supposed “safe haven for boys and young men” – and those from care homes in Hampshire, Wiltshire and on the Isle of Wight, some have whom have died or disappeared.)

    Bits have reached the public arena, but only bits.

    In 1996, a pupil, Richard Metcalf, was found dead in the library at Winchester College, having been given a drug overdose which was falsely said to have been self-administered. (“`Overdose’ kills public schoolboy.” Daily Mail, 31 Jan 1996.) There was no suicide note.

    (Note: this pupil was not related to the similarly-named Peter Metcalfe, the housemaster exposed as having ‘taken showers with boys’, physically and emotionally abused boys, etc., who eventually resigned after parents complained about him several years later.)

    In 2004, news got out that some pupils at the College had been made to watch extremely violent internet pornography by three teachers and some senior boys.

    In 2009, Robert Smith, a senior OFSTED inspector, supposedly “hanged himself”. The inquest was told that he thought he had “blundered” during the inspection of Winchester College’s staff vetting and child protection systems. (Source: “‘Blunder’ schools inspector in suicide”, The Sun, 2 Oct 2009; see also this article in the Daily Mail and this one in the Daily Telegraph: Ofsted schools inspector found hanged after visiting Winchester College).

    Six OFSTED staff had spent several days inspecting the school. The verdict was suicide. The coroner didn’t think to ask what Mr Smith’s “blunder” had actually been. In fact, far from blundering, Smith started looking behind veils and got a glimpse of the sheer scale of the abuse that was taking place. He was warned to shut the fuck up, couldn’t stomach doing so, and ended up dead.

    OK I think that’s enough to be going with for now!

  • Ba'al Zevul

    The Hampshire Connection:

    1. The Wiki article is about fee-fixing. It says so at the top: “Independent school fee fixing scandal.” Like LIBOR – rigging, there’s no very obvious connection to paedophilia. Please outline the causal connection. If you can’t, this link is completely irrelevant.

    2. The Crown and Manor club. Please support your contention that for ‘many boys’ it has not been a safe haven. We do not have your insider knowledge, and cannot be expected to share it by telepathy. Note, the unsupported allegation that ‘er, you know, Dolphin Square, Jersey and stuff’, while imaginative, fails to advance anyone’s understanding. The CMC’s own site, 20+ years down the line, can hardly be expected to do so, either.

    3. I take it this is the part of interest:

    On top of that, days earlier Roger Custance, a former master at the school, had presented him with damning allegations involving acts at the school dating back to the 1990s.
    The nature of the allegations was not expanded upon during the inquest but it was explained that they were already known and had been investigated by the police, who found no evidence to support them.

    They’re still waiting for (especially admissible, non-anecdotal) evidence to support them. Do you have any? Pass it on to the police, then. Keep a record of the correspondence, and place it with someone you completely trust.

    4.Re the Independent article, see also (1) above. You say: The suspension wasn’t principally to do with fee-fixing. Sadly, no journalists at the time thought to probe what the real reason was for this extraordinary event.

    Well, no. The article says so itself: the suspension amounted to a vote of no-confidence in the governors’ lack of support for the (highly contentious, beancounting moderniser) Nick Tate. You may speculate, it’s a free country and an extremely tolerant blog, but it would be nice to have a few connections clearly made.

  • glenn

    RoS: It’s not an either/or – as in, you have to EITHER believe every word of the BBC, OR every word the likes of Spivey cynically manufacture.

    Thanks for your note on the nature of conspiracy theories. But again, it’s not either/or. Some conspiracies are real, others are fantasies – it would be foolish to either accept them all, or deny the existence of any.

    When it comes to the likes of your mate Spivey, my default position is to disbelieve every word he says, because of the obvious lies and BS he’s put out. Some things he says might be true – granted – but that would have to be independently verified. This puts his value as a truth-teller somewhere below zero.

  • The Hampshire Connection

    From the New York Times, 16 Mar 2014:

    Wave of Sexual Abuse Allegations for Private Boys’ Schools in Britain

    “LONDON — Prompted by publicity surrounding recent child abuse scandals involving well-known figures, dozens of British men are breaking decades of silence about molestation they say they suffered as boys at expensive private schools, forcing the schools to confront allegations that in the past might have been hushed up, ignored or treated derisively.”

    It is very positive that victims are coming forward, and that the number of justified claims for compensation is fast increasing.

    Victims who don’t want to go to the police for whatever reason should consider the option of making a compensation claim against their abusers.

    PS Ba’al Zevul – Don’t be rude, lad. Your shitty comment isn’t worth my answering at length, except to say that your sneering supposed rebuttal in your final point is crap. What the Independent article actually says is this:

    “the HMC said its decision was based on ‘issues of governance and management’ at the school. But this could refer to unease over staff comments about Mr Tate’s son, or at the school’s response to reforms he wanted to introduce.”

    That doesn’t sound in the slightest bit like journalists trying to find out what the “issues of governance” actually were – other than saying that the HMC wanted to position themselves as displeased about Tate being forced out, which is obvious.

    Oh and the role of the Crown and Manor Club isn’t “20+ years down the line”. What do you think a top private school is doing with a club for vulnerable boys and young men, that it practically owns? Honest missionary work?

    But I am not going to be cross-examined by some cocky twat on the internet. Of course I haven’t posted all the information I have got. Nor will I.

    You sneeringly tell me to contact the police. If you read what I’ve posted, you’ll find out far more about what the Hampshire police are ‘investigating’ in the Heath case than you will from their own refusal to say. But their refusal won’t last long.

  • Republicofscotland

    “When it comes to the likes of your mate Spivey, my default position is to disbelieve every word he says, because of the obvious lies and BS he’s put out. Some things he says might be true – granted – but that would have to be independently verified. This puts his value as a truth-teller somewhere below zero.”
    __________________________

    Glenn you contradict yourself in your above comment.

    Spivey presents his articles and it’s up to you to decide whether or not they hold any weight,or not.

    I fully understand your point of view, and if you feel it’s all just a load of nonsense, then that’s fair enough.

  • Republicofscotland

    The Brookings Institute — the Democrat think tank funded by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefellers, and Goldman Sachs — has called for balkanising Syria.

    Brookings made the call a few days before the Obama administration declared war on Syria. It is essentially a rehash of the neocon agenda to balkanise states in the region not aligned with the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia.

    Michael E. O’Hanlon, who supported the invasion of Iraq and teamed up with the neocon think tank Project for the New American Century during the occupation, describes how Syrian sovereignty would be eviscerated.

  • lysias

    I mentioned reading David Vine’s book about Diego Garcia, Island of Shame. I have now finished reading it. So I looked on line for more recent developments with respect to the Chagossians (Vine’s book is from 2009), and I discover the following relatively good news reported in yesterday’s Guardian: Exiled Chagossians could be allowed to return home under limited resettlement: Foreign Office consultation paper suggests tourist industry pilot in British Indian Ocean Territory that would involve up to 1,500 islanders.

  • Dave Lawton

    @Clark
    I have just watched the youtube vid Dr Helen Caldicott and George Monbiot you posted.
    I say to people read ECCR. also there are restricted NATO research papers on the Health effects
    of of exposure to low doses of radiation.Monbiot is talking out of his backside.It seems to me Monbiot
    is a ignorant useful idiot for the nuclear industry.Do you think he has had tea with Lady lady Barbara?

  • lysias

    As an Oxford man (Librarian Oxford Union, President Balliol Junior Common Room), Heath no doubt went back to Oxford a lot in later years.

  • glenn

    RoS: “Glenn you contradict yourself in your above comment.

    Spivey presents his articles and it’s up to you to decide whether or not they hold any weight,or not.”

    With all respect, RoS, I don’t see the contradiction. I did say my default position is to disbelieve that crank Spivey, but a default is not the absolute, only, and final position. It’s the normal setting, if you will, but can be subject to review.

    Spivey might state a specific day and date, for example – but I would want to check a calendar before accepting that the two matched, because the most sensible presumption is that he was lying about it.

  • The Hampshire Connection

    I’m posting six Hampshire leads here, before they get mentioned in the media which will probably be quite soon.

    1) Winchester College, Hampshire
    2) Winton House in Winchester, Hampshire
    3) Allington Manor, near Eastleigh, Hampshire
    4) Cowes, Isle of Wight
    5) Children’s Cottage Home, Cosham, near Portsmouth, Hampshire
    6) The Crown and Manor Boys Club, Hoxton

    1) Winchester College, Hampshire

    Several known suspicious deaths since the 1970s of staff or pupils at Winchester College or other figures who have come into contact with it, such as the Ofsted inspector found hanged in a Winchester hotel in 2009.

    Several cases of abuse at the College have already made headlines, but most of the iceberg remains submerged. When the scandal fully breaks, it is unclear whether anything at this 14th century institution will be left standing.

    2) Winton House in Winchester, Hampshire, a now-closed children’s care home and boarding school

    This institution was frequently visited by leading figures from Winchester College, Winchester Cathedral, the County Council and figures in upper-class music and sport and from church circles in Salisbury.

    Residents were abused in the institution itself and were also brought to locations in or near the Cathedral Close, including the Judge’s Lodgings, St Swithun’s preparatory school and the upstairs rooms at the Wykeham Arms public house.

    After ‘investigating’ numerous allegations, the CPS said in 2014 that they would not bring any charges. Nonetheless, more than 30 compensation claims for abuse are currently ongoing, and the Hampshire police have now been told to launch a new investigation owing to the alleged involvement of leading figures including Edward Heath and senior staff at Winchester College.

    3) Allington Manor, near Eastleigh, Hampshire

    This is the HQ of the Southern England Psychological Service, an outfit run by Ludwig Lowenstein, former Chief Educational Psychologist in Hampshire and one of the leading and richest child psychologists in the country. He is the father of the official discourse in this country about bullying (publishing a seminal article in 1978) and is well-known among educational psychologists even though few of the non-paedophiles in that profession now remember the perverted material he once published about how to give a child a bath, in an epoch when paedophilia was seldom discussed. He is also notorious among lawyers working in children’s cases as an ‘expert witness’ who loves a sizeable ‘bung’. (He still boasts that “at times of economic stringencies, funds have never been refused from such organisations as Legal Aid“.)

    For decades, this man has been involved in many hundreds of the most sensitive child abuse and bullying cases in Hampshire and further afield in southern England. Practically cases in Hampshire or the Isle of Wight have gone across his desk. He has also been involved on the “supply” side, picking out children suitable for putting into care institutions where they can be accessed by leading paedophiles and he has (for a large fee) arranged arguments to support senior figures who have risked either being called negligent or exposed as involved in criminal activities against children. Most of the top paedophiles in the the education sector (state or independent) know him and value his services.

    Now in his 80s, he is being investigated by the police for numerous child-abuse offences. He leases his large property at Allington Manor from Winchester College, with whom he has maintained very cordial relations for decades.

    When he gets exposed, he may well do an Saunders/Pinochet/Janner to keep himself out of jail.

    4) Cowes, Isle of Wight (no longer in the county of Hampshire, but in the Hampshire Constabulary area)

    Child-abuse parties were organised at the time of the Cowes Regatta by Tory former minister Peter Bottomley (once chair of the Church of England’s Children’s Society, and far-right Monday Clubber) and his wife Virginia, now Baroness Bottomley (once chair of the Inner London Juvenile Court).

    Abusers at the Bottomleys’ parties included Edward Heath and several other Tory politicians, and senior figures from Whitehall and the Church of England. Both Edward Heath and Prince Philip abused boys on yachts on which they set sail from Cowes.

    5) Children’s Cottage Home, Cosham, near Portsmouth, Hampshire

    As with Winton House, several cases dropped but now, post-Savile, police have been instructed to reopen investigations.

    6) The Crown and Manor Boys Club, Hoxton

    (In the East End of London, not Hampshire, but to most intents and purposes owned by Winchester College.)

    Horrendous abuse, and a number of deaths of boys who were guided towards being at this club having been raised in care.

    Frequent visits by housemasters and other academic and administrative staff from Winchester College, and senior figures from the City of London and the BBC.

  • Giyane

    Mary:

    “Hundreds of civilians killed in US-led air strikes on Isis targets – report”

    The spooks at Birmingham Airport were ready and waiting when I returned. ” Did I notice any trouble in Kurdistan? ” What do the Kurdish people think about Islamic state? “.

    Obviously they think that their own government is run by the CIA, both in Kurdistan and in Baghdad, and that UK Pakistanis who are sent by the UK mosques and Chavy Dave from here to populate Islamic State , are a pain in the bum.

    But I didn’t tell them that they were the problem, because they know that already and I’m sure they don’t need me reminding them.

    As for Turkey, it finds itself at the hub not just of the Middle East but of Russia and Africa, Europe and China, while the West’s maritime hub utilising the sea for control of distant lands is now irrelevant.

    The chaos strategy of the followers for US policy maker Strauss such as shit-face genereal Petraus and witch face Hilary Clinton has delivered power into Erdogan’s hands. Their Islamic terrorism plays to Erdogan’s dream of recuperating the imperial power of the Ottoman Caliphate.

    Not a chance of hell of that succeeding because Obama has now binned the Straussian Chaosists and decided to deal with nation states again.

    Kurdistan, apart from the gewadist robber barons of the ruling families of Barzani and Talebani, who represent the interests only of Israel, form a highly intelligent , highly practical Sunni , stable politically nation of Kurdish ethnicity.

    what a bummer for Erdogan, that Obama now sees the value of nationhood, and the stupidity of terror. We know the Americans are slow, but we always thought they’d get the message in the end.

    Sorry wonky spooks, not to give you the whole truth at the time.

    http://www.voltairenet.org/article188337.html

  • BrianFujisan

    70th Anniversary of the war crime bombing of Hiroshima… Off to meet up with Inverclyde for Independence guys, To Throw Flowers into the Clyde in Greenock, at 8;15pm ( when, in Japanese Morning time the Bombs detonated )… I hope many of the Flowers drift over to Faslane.

    Mary @ 6;01 am

    Yes and Tokyo Got it worst of all the FireStorms – Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki as single events – Where over 100,000 perished. Mostly Women, and Children, as the men were off fighting the war,

    Evil People – «may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth». ( Truman 1945. )

  • ------------·´`·.¸¸.¸¸.··.¸¸Node

    The Hampshire Connection : 6 Aug, 2015 – 6:13 pm

    WOW!

  • Republicofscotland

    “Spivey might state a specific day and date, for example – but I would want to check a calendar before accepting that the two matched, because the most sensible presumption is that he was lying about it.”
    ___________________________

    Glenn.

    I have the exact same feeling whe it comes to the media and the British government.

    So tell me Glenn what makes you so sure Spivey’s lying?

  • Republicofscotland

    Regarding the bombing of Hiroshima.

    Harry S. Truman, the 33rd president of the United States of America, gave the order to drop the bomb.

    Watching a documentary about Truman, he said he didn’t want to drop the bomb on Japanese soil, but he had no option.

    Japan point blankly refused to surrender, and Truman knew a full scale invasion of Japan, would cost the lives of hundreds if not thousands of young American soldiers.

    I’m not defending Truman’s decision, but what would you have done?

  • RobG

    RE: Hiroshima: the following is a quite lengthy piece about the ‘double hibakusha’, people who were caught in both atomic blasts:

    “Approximately 300 people are known to have made the journey, aboard two trains, from Hiroshima all the way to Nagasaki in the wake of the atomic bombing of August 6, 1945. Of this group, approximately 90% were killed by the second atomic bomb.”

    http://www.japanfocus.org/-Charles-Pellegrino/4336/article.html

  • Mary

    RoS They were finished and were going to surrender.

    ‘A Beaten Country

    Apart from the moral questions involved, were the atomic bombings militarily necessary? By any rational yardstick, they were not. Japan already had been defeated militarily by June 1945. Almost nothing was left of the once mighty Imperial Navy, and Japan’s air force had been all but totally destroyed. Against only token opposition, American war planes ranged at will over the country, and US bombers rained down devastation on her cities, steadily reducing them to rubble.

    What was left of Japan’s factories and workshops struggled fitfully to turn out weapons and other goods from inadequate raw materials. (Oil supplies had not been available since April.) By July about a quarter of all the houses in Japan had been destroyed, and her transportation system was near collapse. Food had become so scarce that most Japanese were subsisting on a sub-starvation diet.

    On the night of March 9-10, 1945, a wave of 300 American bombers struck Tokyo, killing 100,000 people. Dropping nearly 1,700 tons of bombs, the war planes ravaged much of the capital city, completely burning out 16 square miles and destroying a quarter of a million structures. A million residents were left homeless.

    On May 23, eleven weeks later, came the greatest air raid of the Pacific War, when 520 giant B-29 “Superfortress” bombers unleashed 4,500 tons of incendiary bombs on the heart of the already battered Japanese capital. Generating gale-force winds, the exploding incendiaries obliterated Tokyo’s commercial center and railway yards, and consumed the Ginza entertainment district. Two days later, on May 25, a second strike of 502 “Superfortress” planes roared low over Tokyo, raining down some 4,000 tons of explosives. Together these two B-29 raids destroyed 56 square miles of the Japanese capital.

    Even before the Hiroshima attack, American air force General Curtis LeMay boasted that American bombers were “driving them [Japanese] back to the stone age.” Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold, commanding General of the Army air forces, declared in his 1949 memoirs: “It always appeared to us, atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.” This was confirmed by former Japanese prime minister Fumimaro Konoye, who said: “Fundamentally, the thing that brought about the determination to make peace was the prolonged bombing by the B-29s.”‘

    http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html

    And then came the Cold War between the US and Russia. What a mess man has made of the planet.

  • lysias

    Of course Truman had an option. Japan was refusing to surrender unconditionally. But it was seeking through Soviet mediation to surrender under only one condition, the preservation of the institution of the emperor (which in the end the U.S. granted). And the U.S., which had broken Japanese cyphers, was well aware of that fact.

  • lysias

    Nagasaki was the center of Christianity in Japan. One wonders who in the U.S. government was aware of that fact. Surely Joseph Grew, who had been ambassador to Japan from 1932 to the time of Pearl Harbor, and who became Under Secretary of State and for a lot of the time Acting Secretary of State from Dec. 20, 1944 to Aug. 15, 1945, surely knew. Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who was in charge of the atomic bomb project and who knew quite a lot about Japan, may well have known as well.

  • John Spencer-Davis

    Mary
    7;14pm

    Well done. Edward Petherbridge I do not know about, perhaps he was the living model for it. But the portrait, which is quite real and hangs in Balliol College, Oxford, is of Wimsey, Lord Peter Death Bredon, D.S.O., born 1890, 2nd son of Mortimer Gerald Bredon Wimsey, 15th Duke of Denver, and of Honoria Lucasta, daughter of Francis Delagardie of Bellingham Manor, Hants.

    Kind regards,

    John

  • RobG

    Republicofscotland
    6 Aug, 2015 – 7:01 pm, said: “I’m not defending Truman’s decision, but what would you have done?”

    I would have dropped the bombs out at sea, to demonstrate the capability, or else, if I had psychopathic tendencies, I would have dropped them on purely military targets.

    The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were dropped on the epicenter of these cities, and they were quite patently a callous test of different types of nuclear weapons on a civilian population (Hiroshima was a uranium fueled bomb, Nagasaki was a much more powerful plutonium fueled bomb). The two explosions killed around 150,000 within a matter of seconds. Probably an equal amount died in the days and weeks that followed, and somewhere around ten times that died over the following years and decades from radiation related illnesses.

    Hiroshima and Nagasaki make the numbers killed in the Nazi holocaust look feeble by comparison; and it keeps on giving: 70 years later both these Japanese cities are still radiological hazard zones, and have very high rates of certain types of cancer (notably liver cancer, which is twice the national average).

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