Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Thank God for the Atom Bomb (Again)
By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11964461
Ricochetti are no doubt familiar with Paul Fussell’s magnificent essay Thank God for the Atom Bomb, which is available as a top-shelf audiobook with several other essays. The narration is great, the material is timeless (Kipling would cheer), the price is right, and the criticism of our sorry culture (“Sorry!”) is as it should be. Last year, Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal penned an important op-ed echoing Fussell‘s sentiment explicitly, while illuminating it in the context of his own trip to Hiroshima during the run-up to the 70th anniversary of VJ day (which does not stand for “Shame on America” day). Trenchant quote [lightly edited to shorten]:
Modern Hiroshima is a testament to an America which understood that moral certainty and even a thirst for revenge were not obstacles to magnanimity. In some ways they are the precondition for it.
I would like to see this thread about preconditions for magnanimity more fully developed.
Published in General
Anyone that is a real student of history and not a phony ideologue knows that Harry Truman could do no other than to drop the bomb. The bomb turned out to be merciful. Easily 1 million Americans and 2 million Japanese could have died in a war that could have gone on for another 2 years.
Not to mention the millions more in Japanese-occupied China and SE Asia who would have probably perished had the war continued on for another two years.
Another great book on this topic is Flyboys by James Bradley. It tells the fates of pilots shot down and captured in the battle for Chichi Jima, including George H.W. Bush. It also provides detailed and well researched historical background on both Japanese and American cultures and their histories of racism. There was no country as cruel as the Japanese in that war. They deliberately and systematically inflicted torture, starvation, and deep psychological trauma. They forced some POWs to live in or eat out of literal cesspools. Through neglect or malice, they maintained the POWs in a perpetual state of severe dysentery, so even the morsels of food they did eat provided little nourishment. They treated the POWs as slaves, forcing them to work hard labor from sunrise to sunset and beating them if they couldn’t keep up the pace. Their officers practiced cannibalism on living POWs, cutting off body parts but keeping the victim alive, then cooking and eating the body parts, sometimes in view of the victim. Not to mention the arbitrary beheadings and other executions. And this is just their treatment of POWs; for Asian civilians it was likely worse.