Hiroshima, moral purity and moral blindness
Cathy Young | August 7, 2007, 3:30pm
A thoughtful, poignant post by Shaun Mullen at The Moderate Voice (and in a longer version on his own blog) commemorates yesterday's anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. Mullen opens with a heartbreaking image of human suffering -- the death of a three-year-old boy who was outside riding his tricycle when the bomb hit. Then, he examines the arguments for and against the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and concludes that Harry Truman made the right call.
Oliver Kamm, British commentator and liberal hawk, makes the same argument in The Guardian, challenging the "alternative history" which claims that Japan was on the brink of surrender and the nuclear bombs were dropped in order to intimidate Stalin's Soviet Union. Says Kamm:
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time. Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire - and for Japan itself. One of Japan's highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties. The destruction of two cities, and the suffering it caused for decades afterwards, cannot but temper our view of the Pacific war. Yet we can conclude with a high degree of probability that abjuring the bomb would have caused greater suffering still.
Here, I will say that my knowledge of World War II is limited. I don't know who is factually correct about the situation in the Pacific theater at the end of the war. (The revisionist case is made
here by the Hoover Institution's David Henderson.) The argument that the primary goal of dropping the bombs was to intimidate the Soviets doesn't make much sense, given that we allowed the Soviet Union to keep all of Eastern Europe, half of Germany, and the Baltics as part of its empire.
On a purely instinctive level, I am of course appalled by justifications for the killing of about 150,000 civilians, many of them children. One cannot, if one is a normal person, justify such an act without doing violence to one's moral sense. But are there times when the unspeakable is the lesser of two evils? Obviously, arguments that noble ends can justify terrible means can lead to some dark places, and such arguments have also served countless tyrants as excuses for barbarism. The danger of becoming "as bad as the enemy" is real.
But at the opposite extreme, the view that all use of terrible means is equal represents a kind of moral laziness, an abdication of critical distinctions and context. When some have the will and the power to do evil things -- to enslave and murder -- there is generally no way to stop them except by force; and when we choose to use force, terrible choices must sometimes be made. Yes, even necessary violence, particularly when it kills innocents, damages the soul. I will agree that we should all find it a little harder to live with ourselves knowing that the victory over evil in World War II was bought with the lives of so many innocents, not only at Hiroshima but in Dresden or in Tokyo, where the men, women and children killed by "conventional" firebombing were as dead as the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nonetheless, it was as clearcut a victory over evil as there has ever been in history.
And that's why what truly shocked me was the responses to Oliver Kamm on the
Guardian website, where many of the anti-Kamm posts were truly striking in their venom and their strident moral equivalency:
What a disgusting article. For me, the dropping of an atomic bomb on any town anywhere is entirely despicable. In my opinion it proves beyond a shadow of doubt that whilst Americans may be lovely people when they are getting their way, they will stoop to any depths to ensure their personal gain in the face of opposition. They will also, always hide behind "holier than thou" reasons for their contemptible behaviour.
Wow. Americans are just shocking in their denial. By this sick logic the jihadis are completely justified when they attack American civilians in massive acts of terror - which I might add are mere blips in comparison to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We live in a sick culture, where 60 years have passed, and there isnt even a shred of shame with regards to this heinous crime. For the sake of our species - Boycott America.
"Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome."
The other side also did similar terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome which became war crimes.
It is the winner who decides what is or is not a war crime.
America has ever been a psychopathic bully ever since it's (sic) first days and the genocide against the indiginous Americans. Why all these attempts to justify what was clearly a war crime greater than all others?
The US has never learned the lesson of treating one's enemies with grace and magnanimity once those enemies have lost--it is always vindictive, always demands unconditional surrender, complete acquiescence to US subjugation.
What is absent from these comments (and many others like them) is any awareness of things like the Rape of Nanking or the Bataan Death March, or the Holocaust for that matter; or of the fact that America's supposed determination to crush her enemies manifested itself in rebuilding postwar Germany and leaving Japan with a political system that allowed it to become a strong economic rival to America herself. A few commenters suggest that America should have allowed the Soviets to end the war by invading Japan, blithely unaware of the hell on earth that would have awaited the Japanese under Soviet occupation. This isn't mere ignorance; it's a profound conviction that only evil done by the West, and above all by "psychopathic bully" America, truly matters. Meanwhile, posters who point out Japanese atrocities in World War II are rebuffed with accusations of "the implicitly racist overtone [of] recounting the endless 'savagery' of the Japanese."
When anti-Americanism becomes so extreme that it turns the U.S. into the bad guy of World War II, that's truly frightening and depressing. As for whether the bombing was indeed the least evil of all available options: again, I don't know. I'm sure there is room for legitimate debate on this issue. But that debate is almost entirely drowned out by hate and self-righteousness. The insistence on moral purity has turned to moral blindness.
See more at The Y-Files.
Joe Dokes | August 7, 2007, 7:16pm | #
D. Greene,
Sorry Gar Alperovitz is an idiot. After reading about 30 books on the dropping of the Atomic Bomb and its relation to the foundation of the Cold War, it has become evident to me that the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the natural extension of U.S. policy at the end of the war. The US policy was under the misguided notion that air power could accomplish the following: 1) reduce a nations will to fight 2) reduce a nations capability to fight, and 3) shorten the war. In fact the US expended far more resources building bombers that did little to reduce the effectiveness of German or Japan's war machine.
Alperovitz and his cronies wish to rewrite history so that it seems as though there was a serious discussion about whether to drop the bomb or not. No such high level discussion ever took place. Once Roosevelt began the Manhattan project it was assumed by all decision makers that if the bomb were developed it would be used. The old myth that there was serious discussion as to whether to have a demonstration is just that a myth. There was a discussion, but it was held only between scientists who worked at Los Alamos and who directly witnessed the test bomb. (They were the first to understand the true significance of the weapon) Following the discussion they sent a letter to Truman which was completely ignored.
Think about this,let's say that Truman decides not to use the bomb and the war drags on another six months, during that time an additional 10,000 service men are killed. (not an unreasonable number) Japan finally surrenders in December of 1945 and people are ecstatic, six months later news of a super bomb is leaked to the press. What would America's reaction have been? Would Truman have been impeached? After all he needlessly sacrificed 10K American lives?
As far as the tired argument, that we wouldn't have used it on the Germans my research indicates that those familiar with the project were deeply disappointed that it would not be able to hasten the surrender of Germany.
The reality of the end of WWII was that it was a COMBINATION of dropping the atomic bomb AND Russia's entrance into the war, AND the US agreeing secretly to allow Japan to retain the emperor that caused Japan to surrender. Up until Russia's entrance into the war Japan was hoping to use back channel negotiations to negotiate a surrender that was conditional.
While leaders in both the US and UK understood that the atomic bomb was important, and thought it might hasten the defeat of both Germany and Japan. Leaders of both countries saw the bomb as nothing more than a really big bomb. The true significance of the Bomb was not fully understood until the development of ICBMs and the Hydrogen bomb that truly made the destruction of civilization a clear reality. This did not occur until the late 1940s or 1950s nearly a full decade after Hiroshima.
The better historical questions are, Why did it become acceptable to drop bombs on civilian populations at all? and Why has it now become unacceptable?
In my view it is understandable but lamentable that the U.S. engaged in the whole sale destruction of civilian populations. I think far more interestingly is that technology has made bombing so much more accurate that it is now a spectator sport. During the 2003 invasion Iraqi civilians would gather on roof tops to watch American bombs fall on Iraqi defense positions.
Regards
Joe Dokes
mabman | August 7, 2007, 11:04pm | #
There's always a tendency to review and judge the acts of the past by the standards of the present. Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not occur in isolation - they were the culmination of 14 years of escalating barbarity, from the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and its far more brutal "China Incident" to German bombings of civilian centers, the "Final Solution," the unimaginable horrors of the Russo-German War, the vicious racialism underlying the attitudes and motivations of both Japanese and Western forces in the Pacific, and finally the mass bombings of German and Japanese cities. Freeman Dyson had a brilliant passage in his book
Weapons and Hope, describing the "moral creep" he experienced working for the RAF in WWII as the strategic bombing campaign steadily escalated from 1940 to 1945.
It's true that civilized nations shouldn't annihilate cities full of civilians, but there was nothing "civilized" about WWII other than the technologies used to wage it. I agree with the earlier posters who claimed that if any good came from city-bombing, it was that it filled the Western world with such revulsion after the fact that it was never again considered a justifiable strategy. We didn't bomb Pyongyang or Hanoi out of existence, nor did we destroy Baghdad (we may be doing that indirectly now, but that's another story).
Let's not kid ourselves - the Pacific War wasn't going to end without a lot of dead people, one way or another. Starving the Japanese into surrender might have taken another 6 - 12 months, and millions of Japanese civilians would have died of disease and malnutrition - they were already living on less than 900 calories a day by the summer of 1945. An invasion would have been incredibly costly - the only guy who thought it might be cheap was McArthur, and he was a grandstanding bozo who was pressing for one. As for "limiting civilian casualties" in an invasion, as many Okinawans as Japanese soldiers died during that campaign (~100,000), and the number of Japanese civilians who died on Saipan was close to the number of military dead. The Japanese Army and Navy had over 4,000 aircraft stationed on Kyushu alone for kamikaze attacks on the Third Fleet, and they wouldn't have hesitated in mobilizing the civilian population to resist - they were issuing bamboo spears to civilians in the summer of 1945!
I have mixed feelings about Hiroshima and Nagasaki - my mother was ~100 miles outside Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and I can easily imagine her taking the wrong train trip at the wrong time. OTOH, my dad was in the 8th Army in the Philippines on that same day training for the invasion of Japan that fall, and as he freely admits, he was pissing his pants at the idea. For purely selfish reasons (i.e. my current existence), I'm kinda glad things worked out the way they did.
Neu Mejican | August 8, 2007, 12:41pm | #
HOWARD ZINN: Yeah. Well, we thought bombing missions were over. The war was about to come to an end. This was in April of 1945, and remember the war ended in early May 1945. This was a few weeks before the war was going to be over, and everybody knew it was going to be over, and our armies were past France into Germany, but there was a little pocket of German soldiers hanging around this little town of Royan on the Atlantic coast of France, and the Air Force decided to bomb them. 1,200 heavy bombers, and I was in one of them, flew over this little town of Royan and dropped napalm -- first use of napalm in the European theater. And we didn't know how many people were killed, how many people were terribly burned as a result of what we did. But I did it like most soldiers do, unthinkingly, mechanically, thinking we're on the right side, they're on the wrong side, and therefore we can do whatever we want, and it's okay. And only afterward, only really after the war when I was reading about Hiroshima from John Hersey and reading the stories of the survivors of Hiroshima and what they went through, only then did I begin to think about the human effects of bombing. Only then did I begin to think about what it meant to human beings on the ground when bombs were dropped on them, because as a bombardier, I was flying at 30,000 feet, six miles high, couldn’t hear screams, couldn't see blood. And this is modern warfare.
In modern warfare, soldiers fire, they drop bombs, and they have no notion, really, of what is happening to the human beings that they're firing on. Everything is done at a distance. This enables terrible atrocities to take place. And I think reflecting back on that bombing raid, and thinking of that in Hiroshima and all of the other raids on civilian cities and the killing of huge numbers of civilians in German and Japanese cities, the killing of a hundred thousand people in Tokyo in one night of fire-bombing, all of that made me realize war, even so-called good wars against fascism like World War II, wars don't solve any fundamental problems, and they always poison everybody on both sides. They poison the minds and souls of everybody on both sides. We are seeing that now in Iraq, where the minds of our soldiers are being poisoned by being an occupying army in a land where they are not wanted. And the results are terrible.
