Science fiction and mystery author Philip Wylie sounds, from his Wikipedia page, like an interesting guy. His stories and novels (When Worlds Collide is the best known, and the only one I’ve read) have been credited with inspiring some of popular entertainment’s most famous characters – Superman, Flash Gordon, Doc Savage, and Travis McGee. He’s been both hailed as a feminist and condemned as a misogynist for his writings on women (I haven’t read the writings in question and so can’t render a verdict).
But my present concern is with the following rather alarming anecdote:
As early as 1939, [Wylie] had written a story about the Germans making plutonium bombs in a cave in Colorado. “The Paradise Crater,” written for American Magazine, was, as Sam Moskowitz points out, rejected as “too fantastic,” but later was accepted by Bluebook, which turned the magazine over to Washington for approval. When Washington balked, the editor of Bluebook returned the manuscript to Harold Ober, Wylie’s agent, who had “already been contacted by the CIA.” Wylie, who had been put under house arrest, was told by an aggressive major that he [the major] would take Wylie’s life if necessary, to plug the leak. Wylie agreed to tear up the manuscript. But the decision was made to hold back publication instead. According to Moskowitz, “Four months later, the Atom Bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Bluebook asked to have the story back. It was published in the October, 1945 number.” Wylie, through his own research, had learned enough about atomic weaponry to become a security risk [John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Science Fiction, went through a similar experience when one of his authors submitted a story featuring an atomic bomb].
(Clifford P. Bendau, Still Worlds Collide: Philip Wylie and the End of the American Dream, pp. 42-43; brackets in original. The reference to the CIA must be a mistake for the OSS.)
When will people finally learn that being an autodidact is treason? You should only learn what you’re told to learn!
The OSS didn’t exist in 1939. I wonder if any of this is true.
I think the implication is that this all occurred in 1945, though Wylie had started writing the story as early as 1939.
Probably this was an over-reaction. But let’s say Wylie had learned the date and location of D-Day. Do you seriously want to argue that he should not have been stopped from publishing those bits of info?
I don’t think he should have been stopped from doing that either, no. Nothing to do with the present case, though.
Incredible. Freedom is a suicide pact, hey?
The way it relates to the present case is that I was seeing if your objection was to *this* case, or to the general idea that during war, freedom might be curtailed in ways not appropriate during peace.
How does allowing a sci-fi writer to publish details of d-day count as suicide?
I think the flippant revisionist response would be this: How does failing to help the USSR conquer Europe count as suicide for the US?
If you mean “oh, you’re not a utilitarian?” then that’s correct, I’m not. In a choice between justice and survival, justice of course wins. But I don’t see how anything suicidal is involved in the case you describe.
The rules of justice don’t change during war. (There are utilitarian reasons for that too, actually: if government’s powers are increased during war, that gives governments added incentive to start and/or continue wars.)
That might fly if “the rules of justice” weren’t something you made up out of whole cloth.
Explain?
What I’m saying is that there’s no real-world basis for claiming that “the principles of justice” entail this or that.
Are you a skeptic about natural science too, or only about moral science? Because their methods are comparable. (See pp. 90-94.)
“If you mean “oh, you’re not a utilitarian?” then that’s correct, I’m not.”
Nor am I. I just correctly recognize prudence as a virtue, something which crazed ideologues do not.
“The rules of justice don’t change during war.”
You know, someone who had actually understood Aristotle would understand the justice is not a matter of “rules,” but a matter of finding the virtuous mean between two vices. And when your entire civilization is threatened with being wiped out, that mean does not consist in letting some traitor reveal to the Germans where your invasion will land.
As do I. But if you think prudence endorses the idea of survival at any price, you’re certainly not understanding that virtue as Aristotle or Aquinas understood it.
Have you actually read Aristotle’s chapter on justice? (Book V of the Nicomachean Ethics.) Where he gives an extremely rule-oriented account of justice, bristling with arithmetical and geometrical analogies, and explains that it is unlike the other virtues in not being a mean between vices? (See, e.g., the part beginning “Justice is a kind of mean, but not in the same way as the other virtues ….”)
That justice is different from other virtues in being more rule-oriented is a commonplace in virtue ethics. (Adam Smith in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, for example, compares the relation between justice and the other virtues to that between grammar and style. Look also at Aquinas and Hume on justice — and anything that Aquinas and Hume agree on has got to be pretty darn orthodox.)
You really think that’s a plausible description of the situation just before D-Day? That seems … bizarre.
What Aristotle has to say about the relation between prudence and survival:
What Aristotle has to say about the idea of a good end justifying immoral means:
If it’s true that there’s no real-world basis for morality, then there’s no reason to care about survival (other than one’s own, at least, and most of us weren’t even born yet on D-Day), let alone the survival of “civilization” (which almost always survives its supposed destruction, just in a slightly altered form, and anyway the “destruction” of the US wasn’t even a possibility in WWII). From a pure pragmatic perspective, I’d rather not the state have the power to lock up or otherwise silence people who say things they don’t like (for any reason at all), and I don’t give a runny shit about protecting military operations, which at best waste resources.
And should anyone wonder why the libertarian vote never rises above 1 or 2%, just look at the sickening effect this ideology has on an intelligent man like Roderick. The majority of people have some common sense, and will never accept an idiotic doctrine that says traitors should be free to bring down their entire culture.
What about the sickening effect that statist ideology has had on an intelligent man like Gene, that leads him to accept a) the moral absurdity that individual freedom can legitimately be suppressed for the sake of the collective, b) the pragmatic absurdity that allowing such suppression could be restricted to the “right” occasions and not generate endless abuses, and c) the historical absurdity that our culture was in danger on D-Day, at a time when German defeat had become virtually inevitable?
The bit about the libertarian vote is a weird red herring, since most people deciding whether to cast a vote for the LP have never given two seconds’ thought to the question of what libertarian principle entails with regard to the sorts of issues we’re discussing. And anyway, it’s not as though all libertarians would agree with me about this. (There are plenty of consequentialist libertarians, y’know.)
Roderick,
Do you think there could ever be a case where it would be justified to stop someone from publishing some information?
I’m sure it’s possible to rig up a case where publishing some information would be a rights-violation.
Hmm, I wonder if the story that Campbell got in trouble for was Heinlein’s Solution Unsatisfactory.
Does anyone care that it wasn’t even necessary to drop the bombs on Japan (assuming it’s ever justifiable at all) as they had been trying to surrender for weeks already with the sole condition that the Emperor be kept in power? The US refused, thus dropping the bombs and killing thousands…while retaining the Emperor after they surrendered. Many believe they were dropped mainly to intimidate Stalin, who, rather than being intimidated, used his spies to gain enough knowledge to create his own. And the rest is history, in the form of the Cold War arms race that put billions more lives in danger for the next several decades and has left nuclear weapons around the world.
Far be it from me to defend the dropping of atomic bombs on civilians, but I must point out that there is a big difference between “let the emperor retain all powers under the Meiji constitution” which is the condition that the Japanese leadership placed on a surrender pre-atomic bombings and “remove all political powers from the emperor and retain him only as a ceremonial figurehead” which is what the U.S. did after the bombings and unconditional surrender.
I was under the impression the military leaders were de facto in charge already, with the Emperor being a figurehead. Also, before the surrender hardliners plotted a coup d’etat to remove wavering leaders, putting the Emperor in “protective custody.”
But you must understand that the military leader’s influence on the emperor is what kept them in power for so long, the Meiji constitution grated the emperor the power to practically remake the entire government if elections didn’t turn out the way he liked them and it was Tojo and the other military leaders’s key positions as the emperor’s top advisors that allowed the expansionist faction almost total carte blanche within the civil government. The coup came about precisely because the military elite were afraid that they were losing their influence on Hirohito and that the emperor might go behind their backs and offer the Allies an unconditional surrender.
Ok, in that case I wonder how much the US knew about this, as presumably they might have tried negotiating an unconditional surrender with Hirohito. As is contended, though, the bombings may have not turned entirely on Japan in any case.
Michael, did you know that you can just reply directly to a post by clicking the “reply” link above the post you’re replying to? It makes for easier reading, with the neatness.
Thanks Black Bloke, forgot about that. I read something that interested me recently. Hans-Hoppe claimed that WW1 might have ended in negotiated settlement absent US intervention in 1917, avoiding the Nazi and Soviet regimes. As for WW2, how would it have ended up without US intervention (though still aiding the Allies most likely). I realize this is alternate history so we can never know for sure. Just think what might have been assuming Giuseppe Zangara succeeded in assassinating FDR before he was sworn in as President.
If the US maintained a policy of open immigration and free trade in conjunction with a non-interventionist foreign and domestic policy during the WWII days, things might have been very different.
There still would’ve been Americans who went off to fight and die for the UK. The US probably still would’ve been supplying arms to the allies side, though through numerous large private organizations. Groups extreme enough might even fund expeditionary forces to Europe with missions of rescue and sabotage.
Might make for an interesting story.
The Germans might have overrun the UK in the short term, but the disastrous conflict with the USSR would have resulted in the destruction of both sides eventually.
I wonder what would have happened if Standard Oil had not transferred to Germany in the 1930s the hydrogenation process for extracting oil from coal, without which the Germans would have had to import most of the oil they needed to fight WW2, an unlikely event to say the least. And also what if Standard Oil had not transferred to Germany the process of creating tetra-ethyl lead, without which there would have been no modern Luftwaffe, and the Germans would have been unable to achieve air superiority anywhere — in the event of which there would have been no Battle of Britain. And what if weathly industrialists, Henry “The International Jew, The World’s Foremost Problem” Ford for example, had not contributed money to support the early Nazi party? And what would have happened to the so-called Bolshevik Revolution if not for the assistance of Wall Street? But I digress.
But why think an unconditional surrender was necessary, in any case?
Were you aware the Roosevelt administration outlawed US citizens from participating in the Spanish Civil War during the 1930s? Of course many still did, mostly on the Republican side, as members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
The Germans might have overrun the UK in the short term, but the disastrous conflict with the USSR…
Very interesting, Brandon. Are you sure the Soviet Union would, rather than collapsing, not have overrun Europe?
I once read How Hitler Could Have Won the War and feel grateful Nazi Germany had, despite its terrible destructiveness, a tactical incompetent at the helm, rather than anyone with more sense. The book suggests that, instead of foolishing invading the Soviet Union, if Hitler crossed into the Middle East he could have taken control of their oil at his leisure, destroying the Jews in Palestine along the way, then come back for the rest, not incidentally cutting off much of his enemies’ supply, perhaps attacking Stalin in the south, rallying fractious Muslims to his side as he did with Albanians and Bosnians.
I knew of Wall Street supporting Hitler and Mussolini (Ford was awarded Germany’s highest civilian honor), although this specific help from Standard Oil was news to me. I find the website that you cited to be especially of interest, however, being somewhat familiar with the late R.J. Rushdoony and his son-in-law Gary North. I suppose its uncharitable of me to be surprised the site hosts a book critical of Hitler, since their ideology always struck me as fascist. I suppose Nazis were bad, as unChristian (in their horrifying sense of the word).
I don’t think either the Soviets or Germans were particularly expansionist, in fact both regimes were isolationist. So I don’t think Stalin would have been interested in “overrunning” Europe, and it wouldn’t have been easy if he had.
Uh, all that site is doing is republishing books by Antony C. Sutton, who I believe had nothing to do with “Christian Reconstructionism”, or whatever it’s called.
I thought Stalin viewed a “buffer zone” as necessary to protect them from any future invasions.
As for the books, I just wondered about where their agreement with him lies…
I think the ring of surrounding states acting as buffers was Hitler’s idea. Anyway, I think Sutton’s books are basically out of copyright or re-publishable by anyone. There are pdf copies all over the place, so I doubt that the books’ appearance on that site represents any kind of endorsement by Sutton, but we can’t ask him, because he’s currently dead.
We can ask him; but he can’t answer, because he’s currently dead. (CHT Hotspur.)