Blogs For Victory

As we just passed the anniversaries of the atomic bombings we got yet another round of statements about it…and I do note they are getting ever more stridently anti-American and more vigorous in asserting it was a crime…that we did something akin to what the Nazis did. This ultimately stems from two sources, neither of which are good:

1. Soviet Cold War propaganda.
2. Post-WWII Nazi apologists.

It is a bit of a shame that this worked so well – even the Church has tended to fall into it. Now, to be sure, I don’t dispute that intentionally destroying a city is wrong. If that is your intent. Never, ever intend to destroy a city. Heck, never intend to destroy a mail box. Destroying things is wrong. Killing people is wrong. Don’t do it! But this doesn’t really apply, in my opinion, to the atomic bombings.

What was our intent in August of 1945?

To kill? No.

To destroy property? No.

To take land for ourselves? No.

To steal the wealth of nations? No.

Our intent in August of 1945 was to end the war – with a bias towards the fewest additional American deaths. That’s it. All we were trying to accomplish. And as August 1st, 1945 came in, American policy makers were faced with these options:

1. Invade.
2. Continued blockade.
3. Continued conventional aerial attack.
4. Just call it quits and tell the Japanese we wouldn’t invade.
5. Atomic bomb.

The first three options involved massive additional deaths. Just the naval blockade of Japan had already pushed the nation to the brink of starvation and a couple more months of it and millions would die (MacArthur’s first demand upon taking control of the occupation of Japan was for food; telling DC that it was either send him food or send him bullets; the Japanese were on their last meal by the time we got in). Invading would not only cost millions of Japanese lives but probably a hundred thousand Americans as well. Continued conventional bombing deaths would have probably run upwards to a million.

Now, we could have just called it quits: assessed all our options and decided we wouldn’t compel a Japanese surrender…too costly in lives. There is a case to be made for this. Japan was a ruin and at the time absolutely no threat to anyone. But, on the other hand, they still had millions of soldiers under arms and controlled vast amounts of territory in Asia and the Pacific. The only way to get Japan to give up all of this was to compel their surrender, so it was back to one of the other options. But suppose we decided to leave Japan in control of what she had…just too costly to finish. Ok. That would merely have confirmed the Japanese strategy post Midway: fight so hard that the Americans give up trying to conquer Japan.

And then rebuild and try again with a better plan. In other words, it meant another war. Millions more dead, just a decade or two down the road.

What you have here, guys, is a quandary: a very uncertain situation which has no easy way out. But we had to get out. The war had to end, one way or the other. The dying had to stop. Truman opted for the bomb. Can we second guess this? Of course we can. Would you want to be forced to make that decision? I sure in heck wouldn’t. I wouldn’t want to be the man who has to decide how to end a hideous, bloody war. Truman, turns out, was the man – and by his lights, he did what he thought was best. Maybe it wasn’t best. Maybe one of the other options would have worked better. We’ll never really know – we can only go with what happened: seven days after the second bomb, the Japanese surrendered. The people who had not quit for a second…the people who jumped off cliffs on Saipan rather than fall into our hands…quit. It was over. The dying was finished. Judged by results, we have to say that Truman might have been on the right track.

But Mark (you ask), what of all those innocent people killed in the bombings? Men, women and children regardless of condition all killed in an instant with a city totally destroyed. How horrible! Sure, it was. Absolutely hideous. Wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy. Would prefer it had never happened. But it happened because the Japanese made it happen.

To be sure, Japanese minors were innocent..and perhaps there were some Japanese who fought against the course of Japanese policy. But the overwhelming mass of Japanese adults participated. Eagerly. They went into the Japanese military and fought to the death. They worked in Japanese factories. They cheered their victories and grimly fought on after defeat. They saw allied POWs used as slave labor inside Japan. They knew that their soldiers were behaving like beasts in human skin in Japanese occupied territory. Here’s the reality: they weren’t innocent. It wasn’t Martians who flew down and forced the Japanese to do what they did – they did it all on their own. They were happy to do it. Gloried in it! They just thought it wouldn’t happen to them.

And, in the end, it didn’t happen to them…American soldiers didn’t rape every Japanese girl they could get their hands on. Didn’t use Japanese men for bayonet practice. Didn’t dash out the brains of Japanese children. Their conquerors were gentler than the Japanese had ever been…showing mercy and forbearance and bringing food and medical aid to a stricken nation. What happened to the Japanese was quite horrific…and it was done to them because they asked for it to be done. And then when it was all over, their victims rebuilt the Japanese nation and, letting bygones be bygones, swiftly returned them to the family of nations.

The criminals in the Pacific War were the Japanese. Not we Americans. Even if we can make an absolute determination that the atomic bombings were morally wrong – and should have been seen to be morally wrong in 1945 – they still don’t constitute a crime. Nanking is not balanced by Hiroshima. Nothing can balance Nanking. Because Nanking was a crime as such; a deliberate attempt to use rape, looting and murder to advance national policy…at worst, the atomic bombings were a moral error committed by people under extreme stress.

Who is innocent? Those who are. Minor children, of course. Those who lack the mental capacity to make a choice. But everyone who can make a choice? Well, then you’re going to choose innocence, or not. A person who chooses not to participate in crimes is not merely by that choice innocent – you must also oppose crime, actively. So, for the regular Joe or Jane it isn’t enough that they don’t rob banks…they also have to turn in the man they witness robbing banks. Demand that the police arrest bank robbers. Demand that government do all in its power to deter bank robbery. After all, what would any of us think of the person who witnessed a crime yet did nothing? Not very much. To be fair, some times people can be intimidated by criminals…but this doesn’t make you innocent; it just mitigates your guilt. The only way to be innocent is to do the right thing. And that means come what may.

You know: like Sophie Scholl. She was innocent – of all that Germany did in WWII, she played no part in it and emerged from it with a clear conscience.

It just required her head: she was beheaded by the Nazis in 1943.

It doesn’t always require your life, but being innocent does come with a price. We pray God it never comes with a high price but we equally pray that if things go bad, we’ll remain innocent no matter what cost to ourselves and those we love. Other people in both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan saw what was happening and elected to play no role in it – some were killed, some were jailed, all of them suffered to a greater or lesser degree. But all of them remained innocent. If any of them were killed in Allied bombings then that was when our bombs truly killed an innocent person. But the railroad worker who calmly eats his lunch as a train of Jews goes by? Not all that innocent.

So, are you and I morally responsible for everything? Yes and no. Obviously I’m not directly morally responsible for an agent of my government committing a crime. But it slides on scale…from me being totally ignorant of it to my active participation. You can easily be totally ignorant of one action. Even a dozen actions. Once we start getting into hundreds of actions it becomes harder and harder to pretend you don’t know about it. As human beings we do have a general responsibility to foster a just society. Our personal and political actions must go towards these ends as best we can determine. Once again, not enough for us to just want it to be, we must actively make it happen. To be sure, one of us is just one of us – small and so small effect, but the effect of all of us trying to do right is remarkable…so, too, the effect of all of us either doing wrong, or turning a blind eye to it.

We must get out of this mindset that people lack agency. Today it is the people of Gaza we’re pretending are little children who bear no responsibility. Outside of actual minor children (and that means, morally, under the age of twelve; the age of reason, as it were), everyone in Gaza bears responsibility. Even if you’re a Gazan in terror of Hamas and so you go along…you’re still going along. You aren’t innocent. You’re guilt is mitigated…but not eliminated. I fully get it and I’m sympathetic to anyone under the boot of an oppressor. I hope that if it happens to me I’ll shine as bright as Sophie Scholl…but maybe I’ll be a coward and try to go along to get along? Who knows? I’ve never been placed in that situation. But if I did play the coward and went along…then I’m guilty. What the heck is my life worth? I’m going to die one day no matter what…is a few extra years worth going along with people acting like inhuman savages? I hope not – that is, I hope if I’m ever faced with that I welcome my death with courage and spit in the eye of my executioner.

We are all of us responsible. We all have choices to make and these determine what sort of people we’ll be – and if all of us refused to go along with evil and demanded it stop, it would stop. Even something as evil as a Nazi regime, a Communist regime or an Islamist regime. Not saying it would be easy. Not saying it would be without cost (the first few in are almost certain to die)…but it would work. Evil can only happen if people allow it to happen…and the larger the evil the more it requires cooperation from the population at large. Solzhenitsyn noted this in his writings…what of the little ladies in the office who, day in and day out, typed up the sentences handed out by the NKVD? If they had all just stopped typing…how would the system continue? Sure, for quite a few early on it would mean a bullet in the back of the head…but if everyone who could type in the USSR simply refused to type out the bureaucratic orders for tyranny…it would have all stopped.

I do not demand that everyone agree with me on the atomic bombings of Japan, but I do insist that we have only one rule of behavior and that every human being with reason follow it. If you want to have a rule where only some people are responsible, then say it…and please explain to me why some people are excused? And why it is the people you favor and not me? You see what I’m saying? It is all one thing or all the other – either all of us are free human beings able to choose, or none of us are. If none of us are, then there is no crime…if we all are, then the criminal is not just the person who pulls the trigger, turns on the gas valve or sets the bomb…it is everyone who didn’t stop it from happening. The truly innocent are those who not only didn’t do it, but tried to stop it, even if in the tiniest manner.