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More A-bombs, and the Immoral Presidency (?)
Warning: Very long post ahead.
As in Peter’s case, Fr. Miscamble’s (intriguing) posts have prompted some reflection on Truman’s decision here. For most of my life, I was of the opinion that Truman absolutely did the right and moral thing, for the reasons that Fr. Miscamble has explained and several Ricochet readers have argued. In the end, the dropping of the bombs surely saved many more lives—those of American and Japanese soldiers, but also of Japanese civilians—than they claimed. In the past few years, influenced by my theology-student brother and some reading on the bombings, I’ve walked back from that position, and am now in a “still puzzling through it” mode.
One conclusion I have reached, though, is that it seems wrong to lump the a-bombs in with the conventional bombing raids of German and Japanese cities that took place earlier in the war—even though the cumulative effects of those bombings may have, over time, killed more people. These weapons are apples and oranges. Little Boy and Fat Man could not be limited to specific targets; they could not be intended only for, say, dams in the Ruhr industrial region or a particular Mitsubishi aircraft factory. To use them at all was to knowingly obliterate an entire city, and thus to intentionally target innocents—something of a different nature than regrettably accepting the possibility of “collateral damage” that might or might not materialize when attacking a non-civilian target.
Moreover, the sheer amount of destruction, human misery, and, yes, death unleashed by those weapons was qualitatively different from the effects of the conventional weapons used throughout the war. Regular bombing raids didn’t vaporize scores of thousands of men, women, and children in less than an instant; they didn’t produce the same kinds of agonizing injuries and deaths, for which “horrifying” is an understatement. They didn’t unleash radiation that shot through the cells of people who otherwise appeared to have escaped the bombings unharmed, only to begin days later vomiting up the lining of their internal organs, bleeding through every orifice until they were corpses with no blood left. They didn’t contaminate toddlers who would die of cancer before reaching their teen years. I think it is impossible for us to wrap our minds around the terror that must have been experienced by people who in one instant were preparing breakfast in their kitchens and in the next climbed out from beneath the rubble into a layer of hell Dante never explored. The sheer scope of what these weapons vaporized, flattened, burned, and irradiated—and the shock that such devastation would have delivered to every human sense and feeling—defies, I think, imagination.
For personal reasons, I have found that the evil in what happened on August 6 and 9, 1945, is clearest when juxtaposed against innocence and holiness: episodes where the bombs collided with the Catholic Church. To that end, I would recommend to anyone interested in the topic of the bombs—Catholic or not—John Hersey’s Hiroshima. Originally published in The New Yorker—the magazine devoted its entire August 31, 1946, issue to the essay—it tells the story of the bombing through the eyes of six survivors. One was a German Catholic priest, living in a Jesuit community not far from the hypocenter. The compound was destroyed; some of the priests were badly injured; they escaped the fires closing in on them and struck out in search of help from a nearby Novitiate. A passage from Hersey:
The morning, again, was hot. Father Kleinsorge went to fetch water for the wounded in a bottle and a teapot he had borrowed. He had heard that it was possible to get fresh tap water outside Asano Park. Going through the rock gardens, he had to climb over and crawl under the trunks of fallen pine trees; he found he was weak. There were many dead in the gardens. At a beautiful moon bridge, he passed a naked, living woman who seemed to have been burned from head to toe and was red all over. Near the entrance of the park, an Army doctor was working, but the only medicine he had was iodine, which he painted over cuts, bruises, slimy burns, everything—and by now everything that he painted had pus on it. Outside the gate of the park, Father Kleinsorge found a faucet that still worked—part of the plumbing of a vanished house—and he filled his vessels and returned. When he had given the wounded the water, he made a second trip. This time, the woman by the bridge was dead. On his way back with the water, he got lost on a detour around a fallen tree, and as he looked for his way through the woods, he heard a voice ask from the underbrush, “Have you anything to drink?” He saw a uniform. Thinking there was just one soldier, he approached with the water. When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were about twenty men, and they were all in exactly the same nightmarish state: their faces were wholly burned, their eyesockets were hollow, and the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks. (They must have had their faces upturned when the bomb went off; perhaps they were anti-aircraft personnel.) Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot. So Father Kleinsorge got a large piece of grass and drew out the stem so as to make a straw, and gave them all water to drink that way. One of them said, “I can’t see anything.” Father Kleinsorge answered, as cheerfully as he could, “There’s a doctor at the entrance to the park. He’s busy now, but he’ll come and fix your eyes, I hope.”
Since that day, Father Kleinsorge has thought back to how queasy he had once been at the sight of pain, how someone else’s cut finger used to make him turn faint. Yet there in the park he was so benumbed that immediately after leaving this horrible sight he stopped on a path by one of the pools and discussed with a lightly wounded man whether it would be safe to eat the fat, two-foot carp that floated dead on the surface of the water. They decided, after some consideration, that it would be unwise.
Father Kleinsorge filled the containers a third time and went back to the riverbank. There, amid the dead and dying, he saw a young woman with a needle and thread mending her kimono, which had been slightly torn. Father Kleinsorge joshed her. “My, but you’re a dandy!” he said. She laughed.
He felt tired and lay down. He began to talk with two engaging children whose acquaintance he had made the afternoon before. He learned that their name was Kataoka; the girl was thirteen, the boy five. The girl had been just about to set out for a barbershop when the bomb fell. As the family started for Asano Park, their mother decided to turn back for some food and extra clothing; they became separated from her in the crowd of fleeing people, and they had not seen her since. Occasionally they stopped suddenly in their perfectly cheerful playing and began crying for their mother.
It was difficult for all the children in the park to sustain the sense of tragedy. Toshio Nakamura got quite excited when he saw his friend Seichi Sato riding up the river in a boat with his family, and he ran to the bank and waved and shouted, “Sato! Sato!”
The boy turned his head and shouted, “Who’s that?”
“Nakamura.”
“Hello, Toshio!”
“Are you all safe?”
“Yes. What about you?”
“Yes, we are all right. My sisters are vomiting, but I’m fine.”
Father Kleinsorge began to be thirsty in the dreadful heat, and he did not feel strong enough to go for water again. A little before noon, he saw a Japanese woman handing something out. Soon she came to him and said in a kindly voice, “These are tea leaves. Chew them, young man, and you won’t feel thirsty.” The woman’s gentleness made Father Kleinsorge suddenly want to cry. For weeks, he had been feeling oppressed by the hatred of foreigners that the Japanese seemed increasingly to show, and he had been uneasy even with his Japanese friends. This stranger’s gesture made him a little hysterical.
Around noon, the priests arrived from the Novitiate with the handcart [to transport priests too severely wounded to walk]. They had been to the site of the mission house in the city and had retrieved some suitcases that had been stored in the air-raid shelter and had also picked up the remains of melted holy vessels in the ashes of the chapel.
In Nagasaki, the juxtaposition is more poignant. The Nagasaki area, readers may know, is where Christianity came to Japan in the 1500s. For a time, foreign missionaries were allowed to evangelize, though the Tokugawa shogunate eventually began persecuting Catholics. In 1597, 26 were crucified in Nagasaki (the martyrs were canonized in 1862). In the years that followed, the shogunate implemented fumi-e—the term refers to both the policy and the object around which it centered—requiring Japanese to trample images of Christ or the Virgin Mary. Those who hesitated were identified as Christians; if they refused to turn from their faith, they were executed in Nagasaki. After Japan reopened itself to foreigners in the 19th century, Bernard Petitjean, a French priest who eventually became bishop of Nagasaki, oversaw construction of the Oura Catholic Church in the city; after its foundation was laid, he was approached by Japanese Christians who revealed that, without priests or chapels, they and their forebears had managed in secret to keep their faith alive for more than 200 years.
It is against this backdrop that one must consider the history of the Urakami Cathedral. Completed in 1914 after 30 years of construction, the cathedral was the largest in the Far East; it was also the centerpiece of Urakami’s Catholic district, the heart of Catholicism in Nagasaki and Japan.
Around 11 am on August 9, 1945, the cathedral was filled with priests and worshippers in spiritual preparation for the August 15th feast of the Assumption of Mary, to whom the cathedral was dedicated and to whom the Urakami Catholics had a special devotion. By that time, Bock’s Car pilot Charles Sweeney had given up on his primary target, the military factories of Kokura, because they were hidden by smoke from a nearby bombing; Nagasaki, the secondary target, was mostly hidden by cloud cover. A cruel twist of fate and an opening in the clouds meant that Urakami, not downtown Nagasaki, was hit: Urakami Cathedral was practically Ground Zero. All those inside were killed, and thousands of Christians in Urakami were destroyed along with them, surpassing in one instant the toll of Nagasaki Catholics killed in centuries of persecution.
Cathedral before and after
In October 1945, a Trappist monk, Fr. Kaemon Noguchi—originally from Urakami—visited the ruins of the cathedral before returning to his monastery in Hokkaido. He began digging around the debris in search of some artifact from his church that he could bring with him. He came across a remnant of a beloved painted wood statue of the Virgin that had been brought from Italy in the 1930s; all that had survived the bombing was her head.
The “Madonna of Nagasaki” is now on display in the rebuilt Urakami Cathedral, erected on the site of the destroyed church. When it was brought to New York last year, Archbishop Dolan said:
And it is this head that is haunting: she is scarred, singed badly, and her crystal eyes were melted by the hellish blast. So, all that remains are two empty, blackened sockets.
I’ve knelt before many images of the Mother of Jesus before: our Mother of Perpetual Help, the Pieta, the Virgin of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Lourdes, just to name a few.
But I’ve never experienced the dread and revulsion I did when the archbishop showed us the head of Our Lady of Nagasaki …
Again, it was not possible to drop Fat Man and Little Boy without intentionally incurring these results. I ask myself, If I were president of the United States, could I knowingly incinerate the faithful at Mass or priests hearing confessions? Could I vaporize or melt down chapels and chalices and tabernacles and icons? And knowing that such acts would be multiplied and multiplied again, killing thousands upon thousands of innocents, could I intentionally bring about such destruction in a matter of seconds? No matter how much it would benefit my country? I don’t think I could.
But then again, I’m not president—nor would I want to be. If I read Fr. Miscamble’s post correctly, his conclusion is that while the decision to drop the bombs was not moral, it was simply required of Truman by virtue of the office he held. And I think I may be at the same place: that it was immoral of Truman to order the bombing, but that it was the right thing to do—or at least justifiable—as an act of presidential leadership. He has blood on his hands, but the job he held sometimes requires the immoral staining of one’s hands with blood. (That’s why it’s a job I wouldn’t want.)
For the record, I’m not a pacifist. (Indeed, far from it.) I’m not anti-nuclear; in fact, I think Japan’s move away from nuclear power in the aftermath of Fukushima is economic suicide (but that’s another post). Nor am I anti-American and, again, I’m not convinced that using the a-bombs was the wrong thing for America to do in the context of a hideously brutal war. But I wonder if sometimes those of us who resist the traditional hostility to the use of the bombs don’t go too far in defending the morality of the decision, failing to distinguish what would have been prudent (and justifiable in the name of prudence) from what was morally right.
This applies to the present day as well. Decisions that make perfect sense as a matter of tactics, or grand strategy, or self-defense, or national interest are sometimes whitewashed as moral acts. The result is that, in order to defend, say, a particularly unpalatable act of war, we contort ourselves into all kinds of strange justifications that do a disservice to both our perception of morality and our appreciation of what war—and wartime leadership—really requires.
So I’m curious to know what others think of this divide: between what is demanded by presidential leadership and by other forms of responsibility for a nation’s safety and well-being, and what is strictly moral, especially in times of war. Some, I gather, will think that no responsibility can truly demand immorality. I’m not convinced of that—yet.
Thanks to readers for putting up with the long (and meandering) post, and thanks to Fr. Miscamble for opening and contributing to this discussion. I look forward to reading his book soon, now that it’s no longer $80 on Amazon.
Published in General
Does a president absolutely need to put Country before God from the time he is inaugurated until the time his successor is? I wonder if the question were put to all of today’s GOP candidates–As president, would you put Country before God?–how they would answer; I also wonder how the public would respond to those answers.
If a president puts personal opinion above country in duties associated with his office — to which he has freely given his oath — then he must resign. My point is that God is behind duty when you swear an oath — at least if one is religious. So, in this example, God cannot conflict with country in principle (otherwise a religious person would not take such an oath). If, in the course of carrying out his duties, a person decides otherwise, then he must first relinquish his position — to insure that his oath is honored and his moral duty is followed. He has decided that he cannot carry out his job — that’s all we’re talking about here.It is easy to understand — but, it might be searingly difficult to do.
Not disputing that at all, Dave. As I said in the post, I think I agree with Fr. Miscamble that sometimes immoral actions are simply necessary for people who have responsibility for the security of nations and other people. Personally, I wouldn’t want to have to be in that position; I recognize that I have that luxury only because of people who are; for that, I am extraordinarily grateful.
Moreover, as I also argued in my post, I think we can put Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a separate category–that there is something uniquely hideous about the atomic bomb. There has never been anything like it in war before or after. So it’s quite different from labeling Desert Storm aggression.
And for the record, almost everything the US military does today I would not call “immoral.” Far from it: They are and have been a great force for good.
Meghan, morality is absolute. If the decision to bomb Japan is right, then it makes no difference who is making the decision.
If Meghan Clyne as a private citizen had somehow found a way to develop and produce a nuclear weapon and find a way to deploy it, that private citizen has exactly the same moral responsibility to use it as the President of the United States. The only real difference is that the President has a lot more resources.
Ending the Japanese Empire was a moral act no matter who did it.
Not disputing that at all, Dave. As I said in the post, I think I agree with Fr. Miscamble that sometimes immoral actions are simply necessary for people who have responsibility for the security of nations and other people. Personally, I wouldn’t want to have to be in that position; I recognize that I have that luxury only because of people who are; for that, I am extraordinarily grateful.
Moreover, as I also argued in my post, I think we can put Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a separate category–that there is something uniquely hideous about the atomic bomb. There has never been anything like it in war before or after. So it’s quite different from labeling Desert Storm aggression.
And for the record, almost everything the US military does today I would not call “immoral.” Far from it: They are and have been a great force for good. ·Aug 6 at 9:46pm
I understand completely, and I’m grateful that you are making distinctions that those bishops, bless their pointy hats, were never able to grasp.
There is maintaining peace and attaining peace. One allows for the continued tyranny of a people; the other removes the boot from the necks of people. What it takes to remove that boot is often considered immoral. But it is necessary. To say that any war using any weapons is immoral is to say one believes that some should be free while others must continue to live in chains.
In the case of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US dropped leaflets over a period of time urging people to abandon their cities. The Japanese government dismissed this as propaganda and the people stayed in their homes. Did the Japanese government bear some of the responsibility for the horrors that befell its people?
As I said in the last thread on this topic, there is always a moral choice. We can unnecessarily back ourselves into corners in which the only options are repugnant, but there is always a better option. It is never evil, never immoral, to choose the best option available. God can ask no more of us.
An act can be inherently heinous and cruel. But in an ugly world we must sometimes make ugly choices. When forced to commit such an act, it is not wrong to feel disgusted by it. But one should distinguish between the act and oneself. Such choices force upon us a sharp awareness of our own limitations. A mistaken sense of guilt is a result of those limits.
Some people are better suited than others to make such terrible-but-necessary decisions. It is part of God’s beautiful order that those individuals who are so capable are balanced by persons of overwhelming sympathy and reluctance to abide life’s tragedies.
What?!
There is such a thing as moral absolutes. But whether a given act is moral or not depends very much on the moral context–the who what when where and why.
Hey Meghan! Why don’t you write as lengthy a post about Japanese atrocities such as the rape of Nanking or the death marches or the beheadings of prisoners of war.
The thing about life, and the only reason your faith has purchase, is that we are all sinners. But if we are to approximate God’s work in this [expletive deleted, I beat you to it] of a world, we have to pick up the righteous sword from time to time and let God sort out the rest.
You want horror stories, talk to some survivors of Japanese prison camps. This BS goes on every year, and its plain and simple self-indulgent nonsense. Who cares what you think a beleaguered president should have done, were you reading the casualty reports that were coming in from the Pacific or the casualty estimates that the generals were kicking around in their staff meetings with the president?
After the fact everyone wants to be holy. Walk through Auschwitz or talk to guys like my father about Siberia and burning bread, just to change the flavour, because that is all they ever got to eat and precious little of that.
I very much agree with this sentiment. And I wonder if our current hope that someone can be moral in an inherently immoral situation (I guess I’m pretty binary, too, King Prawn) is due in part to the new reality we face, that terrorism is the new form of war. Perhaps in this kind of war, a distinction can be made between combatants and civilians, yet even in this case the conundrum arises: can we bomb a home where we know plans are being made to kill innocents when we also know that men are deliberately using women and children as shields? … Sometimes I think the question god is asking us: so, you think you’re tough enough to box with me?
I’m not so sure, Aaron. In my estimation, once war is entered acts that are immoral in and of themselves become sanctioned. I suppose it all boils down to who lives and who dies. Making the choice between who eats it is not a moral decision in my mind, but I am very binary on it. I think it enters more into an amoral, rather than moral/immoral, realm. Weighing two human souls against one another eventually devolves to math, and that is certainly not a moral calculus.
Meghan, when I was a kid my mother assigned me the task of sorting through a pail of blueberries she had picked. I was then about fourteen. The goof that I was, I was sorting the berries one at at time. My mother saw me and just shook her head. She then bent over the pail of berries and began sorting thorough them with such speed that the good berries flew into a a bowl and the bad ended up on the ground. Her hands were an ambidextrous blur. Surprised, I asked her where she’d learned to do that, my mother replied in Polish “The Germans taught me.” See Meghan, she worked in an armaments plant as forced labour, and if she had been slow to learn her German bosses would have sent her to one of those quaint camps of theirs. My mum was sixteen or seventeen when she learned these life skills. Just another reason to spare me the hand wringing over how the war was won.
There is such a thing as moral absolutes. But whether a given act is moral or not depends very much on the moral context–the who what when where and why. ·Aug 7 at 10:13am
And he gave a context, didn’t he?
My father served as ground crew for RAF Bomber Command in WW2, so I’ve never had any sympathy for the leftist idiots who want to condemn the bomber aircrews as “war criminals”.
However, it’s worth asking whether the Allied bombing campaign was an effective weapon against the enemy. In his magisterial history Bomber Command, Max Hastings argued that in the European theater it was not. The Allied bombing campaign was “a catastrophe for Germany” but, he concluded, did not affect the progress of the war nearly as much as the proponents of area bombing claimed it would.
I don’t know enough about the Pacific war to comment on the efficacy of bombing in that part of the war. But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were exceptional cases in many respects–I believe they shortened the war, but only after we had brought the Japanese to the brink of defeat through the island campaign.
Well said, Larry, in comments #44 and #48.
It is not, without qualification, immoral to kill another person. It is always repugnant; not always evil.
Death is not evil. It is a consequence of evil. Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection transformed death into a beautiful transition.
God works through people. Every day, human beings act as willing instruments of God’s will, though often not consciously (meaning we do what we believe is right — if it is indeed right, it conforms to God’s will).
God takes all persons, both the good and the wicked, from this world eventually.
So why should we believe that God works through us in all ways except this one?
Now, extremely few people ever experience the sort of direct communication with God that convinced Abraham to brutally sacrifice his only son at God’s request. We would be wrong to declare a war or execution God’s will, because we cannot be sure. But there is no moment in life when God steps back and says, “You’re on your own.”
I think we can put Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a separate category–that there is something uniquely hideous about the atomic bomb.
Death and killing are horrible, and there is no really a good way to die in a war. I’m sure the city fathers of Hiroshima, Nagaski, Nanking, Dresden, would agree, as would the catholic priest who ended in the ovens of Dachau (there’s a plaque next to his crematorium).
I met a Russian grandmother who said people resorted to cannibalism – CANNIBALISM – to survive the siege of St. Petersburg. Once you’ve gone to a certain point, I think these kinds of distinctions are meaningless. Japanese women were training their kids to attack American troops with bamboos spears as they invaded the beaches. Sometime the laws of NATURE don’t even apply in total war.
7,000 American causalities a week, in a war that was ‘over’. The alternative was to bomb their rail lines, and starve them out of rice, with a projected 2 million dead. I’m not sure I would have the moxy to order it, but I will never have any doubt that Truman did exactly the right thing.
For some reason, this is to be expected. The experience of swiping a piece of plastic through a POS reader for a pre-cooked meal as opposed to pursuing, shooting, slitting, and skinning before cooking tempers the mind differently. Even in the rougher realm of Rome past, too many depended on too few to do so much in the service of their convenience in peace that the Empire ended with most failing to be able to feed their families.
This is about the elemental, not just food, about living separated from most everything else in existence needed to survive because of all of the dirty hands that do their noble and moral work are taken for granted, ignored, forgotten, then cease to exist in the exalted minds of a different temper.
Not only that, the atomic blast appeals to the celebrity culture—it’s the biggest, baddest, awesomest, and has the highest profile of weaponry under the spotlight. All of the attention goes to its aftereffects rather than on the lugubriously lonely red pools silhouetting bodies that had the misfortune of falling one by one only.
Great post, Meghan.
I suppose it depends on who writes the history books in 200 years, but I’d like to think the United States will be judged not for dropping the first atomic bombs, but for its restraint in doing so again. It says something about a culture when its sharpest sword stays sheathed.
Imagine we’d had the bomb in ’39. If the response to the Nazi invasion of Poland had been nuclear – auf wiedersehen, Berlin – there would have been similar stories of churches destroyed, generations poisoned, and they would be no less heart-rending. The loss of cultural artifacts would have been incalculable. But would anyone have preferred WW2 with its innumerable quotidian horrors? The Pacific war that might have been thwarted by the presence of an awful deterrent? The subsequent bifurcation of Europe into Free and Slave states?
If someone had the means to prevent these things, and declined to act, does he not have blood on his hands as well?
I agree to some extent. The same action performed by a toddler and performed by an adult is less of a moral decision in the case of the toddler. Why? Free will. The limits of our knowledge and wisdom affect our culpability for our decisions. Freedom requires knowledge; morality requires freedom.
Though justice sometimes demands that we make reparations for accidents and mistakes, it is the decisions made in comprehension which define who we are to God and to each other. Morality is a measure of personal relationships.
Soldiers and leaders must often be decisive, which means committing to action with limited knowledge by necessity. But wherever there is some knowledge, there is some moral choice.
In short, we can admit that we are sometimes overwhelming ignorant of a decision’s moral implications without pretending we have no clue whatsoever which is the kinder choice in a given situation.
Truman couldn’t fully comprehend what he was ordering, but he was not a child.
Our nation was dedicated to God at its founding.
The Constitution seeks to define us as Americans. Religion seeks to define us as human beings. Obviously, one is a human being (in Christianity, an adopted child of God, created in a likeness of God) before one recognizes oneself as a member of a particular people / culture.
John Adams said: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Our nation is flawed, like all nations. But it is worthy of loyalty only so long as it honors our most basic beliefs concerning right and wrong.
A national leader is responsible to honor the beliefs of the citizens he represents. But a leader is more than a mouthpiece. America is a republic (of 300+ million people), not a direct democracy. Presidents must exercise good judgment.
In some respects, national interests are morally equivalent to an individual’s self-interest. One is always most responsible for oneself. But selfish interests do not justify cruelty against others.
The definitive take on all this, from Bill Whittle. (via Instapundit)
Thought experiment: Suppose the war had been ended, in both Pacific and European theaters, *without* intensive bombing of cities. (And there were definitely military people and civilian military scientists at the time who believed that the vast resources spent on the bombing of Germany could have been better invested, eg in more antisubmarine aircraft and tactical fighter-bombers)
In that scenario, without the mass of civilians being directly exposed to the horrors of war, would Naziism and State Shinto *really* have disappeared…or would they have reappeared, as German militarism did after the armistice of WWI?
Aaron, that’s just dancing around the root of the problem. Either seperating a human soul from the corporeal body in which God placed it is immoral or it is not. If we allow even a single exception then we’ve made it either a utilitarian calculation or a question of justice. Theologically speaking, it cannot be a question of morality. If it was, there would be no divine direction for capital punishment because God cannot concone an immoral act. Hence my assertion that a question of morality concerning the bomb (or any death in war) is invalid.
Meghan,
If I understand your point, it is very troubling. Since morality (allegedly) cannot be reconciled with necessity, you are willing to cede responsibility to those who will make immoral but necessary decisions so you can keep a clean conscience?
Doesn’t this encourage those who wish to act rightly to abandon public affairs altogether?
This is a recipe for the decent to become Eloi.
…
If someone had the means to prevent these things, and declined to act, does he not have blood on his hands as well? ·Aug 6 at 11:18pm
It just seems that in war, a president is going to have blood on his hands; the question is how much. (Have addressed the moral/necessary distinction in other comments.) It’s why I’m grateful not to be president, and very (and humbly) grateful for people who make those decisions for me. ·Aug 7 at 9:13am
Meghan, I read Hersey’s book in my freshman Comp and Lit class at Notre Dame. The theme of the class readings was all sorts of horrid disasters. Very memorable stuff.
I don’t know why you feel that dying by radiation is so much worse than being impaled by a bayonet or tortured and raped or all three, which frequently happened to people in areas occupied by the Japanese.
The biggest weakness in your argument against the a-bomb is your incorrect assumption that civilians should be spared in warfare. This is a legacy of European tradition that the people were serfs and slaves and had no choice in their government. We should no longer hold to that view.
A people are responsible for its government. Why is an American male’s life less valuable than a Japanese male’s simply because one might wear a uniform and the other doesn’t? The Japanese man, or woman, lives in Japan and has the most direct ability to influence his government. The American has no influence. If one must die to end the war and tyranny, justice would rule in favor of the American.
As for the part of the post that deals with collateral damage to civilians I think you are taking the Matthew Modine “Memphis Belle” view of the bombing war in Europe. I do not think anyone in the Eighth air force flying raids in late 44 or early 45 thought they were pinpointing any industrial complexes. They knew better. What they thought about it I have no clue.
Cont’d.
This is also why “smart” weapons are less “moral” than traditional weapons. They are suitable in some situations, but they have given credence to a bankrupt ideology that civilians should never be hurt or even inconvenienced in war.
In a just world, these should be the first people hurt, killed and especially inconvenienced. No government can stay in power without the support of the people. No dictator can stay in power if the people are united against him. Who is most morally responsible for stopping a dictator, his own subjects or the other nations he might attack? When the Japanese people allowed their emperor to attack the United States and other nations, they were just as culpable.
Some farm boy from Arkansas has no culpability. He is merely trying to stop the evil. Just because he has stepped up to help end the evil does not make his life less valuable, in fact it makes it more valuable. A moral answer to the war would have every Japanese that is not actively fighting his government with the use of force should suffer before anyone else in the world does.
Addition: I realize that my views are not consistent with current law. I believe very firmly in following the law. I just think the law should be changed. If we’re going to discuss propriety of bombing cities, we need to look at the morals and not the laws.
I hate to keep coming back to this but a few large points. One, why the dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; 60 or so Million people dies in WWII, why the big concern over the last 3or 4 hundred thousand or so. Meghan also keeps mentioning who dies and how which leads me to wonder, would it be okay if we just wished away the guilty? If we did that would we then be arguing about who decided who the guilty were? I guess my point is that it was a big decision and you will never escape the doubt and self recriminations(?) after words when forced to make big decisions that effect large numbers.
Just war is related to just government. Just war doctrine presupposes a real distinction between tyranny and good government.
There are many rich discussions of just war doctrine, but to stick close to home, there is the Declaration of Independence for instance. Tyranny and the killing of non-combatants are condemned there.
I think we must distinguish just and unjust wars just as we must distinguish between just and unjust government.
The alternative is might makes right. It is untrue and the consequences are evil.
I think Truman’s decision was morally right. Your position would seem to be that if the Axis had won the war, it would have been “right” (albeit bad for us) because there is no real distinction between just and unjust.
Thanks to Truman for making the hard and correct decision from our vantage point. And screw the bishops, priests and all the rest. Who needs them anyway? ·Aug 7 at 12:38pm
By this statement I take it that you don’t believe the wrong side ever won a war?
Other random questions: Has good always triumphed in the end? If not, when? If we hadn’t dropped the bomb, the ground invasion went wrong and Japan declared victory, would that have been a moral outcome?
As to nuclear weapons being immoral in themselves, phooey. They are merely more efficient than conventional armaments, not more evil. Is a tractor immoral because it plows more ground in less time than a horse? Is a mechanized printing press evil because it turns out copies of the Bible faster than a hand cranked press? Is your car immoral because it gets you where you need to go faster than a bicycle? Cast this evil DeWalt cordless screwdriver away from me! I shall put that swing set together with a hand powered screwdriver and morally turn 487 screws.