R. Relievo (Rob Blurton)

A scene from “The Good War”: American marines boil the flesh off of a Japanese soldier’s skull, Guadalcanal, South Pacific, 1942.

After reading your articles in FE #345, Winter 1995 on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of historical and moral context was needed to balance the distortion contained therein.

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As E.B. Maple points out in the following article (which first appeared in FE #285, August 1977), the atomic bombings of civilians by the American Army Air Corps at the end of World War II was not the knockout punch that convinced an intransigent Japan to suddenly change its strategy and surrender.

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For three-quarters of a century, anarchists and other opponents of the 1917 Bolshevik putsch and subsequent counterrevolution have cited the uprising of the mutinous Baltic Fleet sailors and garrison soldiers at Kronstadt as one of the final social eruptions of the Russian Revolution.

The March 1921 events at the naval base on Kotlin Island, situated in the Gulf of Finland twenty miles west of St. Petersburg, are one of the landmark occurrences in the history of revolutionary resistance to the authoritarian state. In the wake of Kronstadt’s suppression, Lenin and his cabal were left in uncontested command of the solidified “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

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