Entry tags:

history, principles, what's wrong with the world

Sixty three years ago today
Killing women and children first.

The anniversaries passed with little fanfare in America. No nation really likes to remember its crimes. Stories appeared about the bombings in the German and Japanese press—though both nations feel honor-bound to place them in the context of fascist atrocities which provoked them. But with a few exceptions, the American press has done little to remind us what Allied bombers wrought 60 years ago over the skies of Dresden and other German civilian targets, or over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And of course, there’s no hint of repentance. We were engaged in total war. The war had been forced on us by aggressive, inhuman regimes, of whom we could only demand unconditional surrender. In the face of so many extremes, of governments which could rape Nanking and slaughter the Jews, to win we could rightly resort to the most extreme of means. There was a powerful inner logic driving us to exterminate all those civilians. And so we did it. And so we refuse to regret it. And so we plan to do it again.

...It’s easy to lose sight of reality, when we’re dealing with such numbers. So let’s think of it this way: Every child who died from our bombs was as innocent as Anne Frank.

People who angrily respond to this with, "But the Germans and Japanese did the same and much worse besides," are missing the point entirely. For starters, it is we who now stand in a position of dominance over much of the earth, and our ability to discern the right path and to follow it will have a decisive effect on the rest of the world, and will determine whether our future is to be that of a nation intent on justice or of one devolving into just another large scale criminal enterprise, like most of the world’s now-fallen empires.

We Americans have to face and accept responsibility for the simple fact that what we did at Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, etc., was wrong. I'm quite aware that not everyone grants this as a fact or that it is simple. The simplicity I'm referring to is not to the actual historical decisions, but to the principle: it is wrong to target noncombatants in war. It is wrong to incinerate hundreds of thousands of civilians in one fell swoop. It is wrong, and maybe what needs to be said more than ever in our current cultural climate, it is wrong even if there are putatively good reasons to do it. If it isn't wrong, then our fight with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda simply becomes a question of who struck first, who had the greater provocation, who was more of a victim - we have no principled reason to disagree with their methods.

I'm not trying to say that the circumstances surrounding the decision made by Truman in 1945 were such that doing the right thing should have been easy. Nor do I seek to judge the moral culpability of those who made the decision and those who carried it out. It was not an easy decision, and anyone who says it would have been if he had been the one to make it is fooling himself. There is much that can be said and has been said about the extenuating circumstances surrounding the decision. What we, as a people, must not and cannot ever do is say that it was right.

It's important that we not ever say that because the sins of the past remain as temptations in the present. Someone who believes that stealing is wrong may, faced with the right combination of temptations and circumstances, steal anyway. But someone who doesn't believe stealing is wrong at all will certainly do it regularly. I think the great flaw - possibly the fatal flaw - with the American people is our tendency to think that if something really, really needs to be done, it must therefore be the right thing to do. It's a far lesser sin to occasionally fail to live up to the moral law than to reject it altogether.