I need to respond to PZ Meyer’s blog post on this, the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing.
The first thing to remember is that the main difference between what we did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki and what we did to Tokyo, or what Japan did to China (see “The Rape of Nanking”) or the Philippines, or what we did to Dresden, or what Germany did to Coventry or Leningrad or Moscow, or what Russia did to Berlin, etc., etc. was how cheap it was. One plane. One bomb. Prior to that time it tooks thousands of men to utterly destroy a city and kill all or most of inhabitants. Dresden, for example, took 1,300 heavy bombers, many of whom didn’t make it back. But despite the cost, Tokoyo and Dresden and Nanking and Coventry and Leningrad and all the rest happened anyways. It was a time of horrors.
And maybe Japan would have seen reason, had we nuked a mountaintop instead, say, or an atoll (as PZ Meyer suggested). Or, perhaps not. We can look back now, with out comfortable seat here in the 21st century, and say with perfect hindsight that Japan should have immediately realized the consequences and implications of nuclear weapons. My experience is that people don’t learn that fast. A miscalculation on the Japanese response to a demonstration means either we end up vaporizing more cities or we invade Japan- which would millions of American dead, who knows how many Japanese dead.
Yes, there is blood on America’s hands. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were great crimes. But this is the first thing we forget- that is what war is. A great crime. Innocents get killed, generally in even greater numbers than the guilty are killed. Blood is spilled. It is not noble. It is not heroic. The only times it is remotely justifiable is when the greater crime is to not fight the war. At it’s best, at it’s most righteous, most clean cut, most honorable, it is the decision whether or not to kill hundreds of thousands of people to avoid the possibility of having to kill millions. There is no good here, only varying degrees of bad and worse.
Part of the problem is scale- one person dead is a tragedy, a million dead is a statistic. So narrow the focus down, from the statistic down to the personal again. This is what it means to go to war: There is an eight year old girl. Picture her. Big eyes, dark hair, she loves her doll, her comfy blanket, and sweets. And oh yeah, Mommy and Daddy. She thinks boys are icky, and isn’t sure about school (she’s somewhat shy). War means she’s going to have her guts blown blown out. She’s going to die in excruciating agony, her dying gurgle chocked off by blood. And her father is going to get to hold the bloody hamburger that was his daughter, in the burnt out ruins that were their home.
That is war. Fix that image in your mind. That girl, she lived in Hiroshima. And Tokyo, and Dresden, and London, and Berlin, and Leningrad, and Moscow. And Korea and Viet Nam and Afghanistan and Iraq. In every war humans have ever fought, back to the dawn of time, little innocent eight year old girls died. And boys, and women, and old people, and innocents of every stripe. This is the cost of war, and it’s true nature.
So, on this date, the anniversary of an act of war only significant because of a technological advance, I hear the war drums starting again. When you tell me “we must go war”, this is what you are advocating- you are saying “we must kill that innocent eight year old girl.” This time it is Iran, last time it was Iraq. The only thing changing is which eight year old is killed. I must ask- is the goal we seek worth the cost? Is there no other way to achieve that goal other than ending an eight year old girl’s life in a paroxysm of blood and pain? Sometimes the answer is yes (I think Hiroshima was one of those times). But most of the time, all most all of the time, I find the answer is a definitive no.
“Never again”- I like the sound of that. But “never again” will only become a possibility once we start to remember the true nature of war. By singling out Hiroshima as something exceptional and noteworthy, as opposed to normal for war, he is (unintentionally, I’m sure) encouraging the very amnesia which allows for the crime to be replicated. All we have to do, according to this logic, is not nuke Tehran, and going to war isn’t that big of a crime. No, Mr. Meyers, it is. That eight year old girl, and her father holding her bloody remains, do not care if the bomb was nuclear or conventional. The technology does not matter.
So, by all means let us take this day, August 6th, to remember the true cost of war. And also Feburary 13th (Dresden), and December 13th (Nanking), and…
No related posts.
