The ethics of Hiroshima

[swoop42]

Wokko you never told us you dated Elaine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBOJ33FFDLA

[Wokko]

lol! Always love Seinfeld.

Haven't been accused of being a Communist before, not since I was about 16 years old anyway

[swoop42]

This interesting website was linked to in an Age article from today.

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Have some fun and bomb an area of the world you've always wanted to.

[Dave The Man]

You had to end the War and Could say Saved more Lives then it Killed

[Pies4shaw]

Well, more white people, anyway.

[stui magpie]

This interesting website was linked to in an Age article from today.

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Have some fun and bomb an area of the world you've always wanted to.

You could do a great service to the Australian people by dropping one on Canberra.

[Mugwump]

Well, more white people, anyway.

Almost certainly more of both, but hey, it is all racism, innit ?

[stui magpie]

Well, more white people, anyway.

Almost certainly more of both, but hey, it is all racism, innit ?

I'm really really sick of that word lately.

[Tannin]

Well, more white people, anyway.

No. You need to read the history, Pies4shaw: the bombs cost between 100 and 200 thousand lives. The alternative - the only alternative - was full-scale amphibious invasion at a cost to Japanese civilian life vastly higher. Think a full order of magnitude, very likely more. There is no reasonable room to doubt that: we already know the horrendous cost of the invasions of outlying islands: Japanese servicemen and civilians alike, although faced with palpably hopeless military situations, fought on in a fanatical manner; throwing themselves upon machine guns armed only with sticks, throwing themselves off cliffs into the sea, mothers throwing their babies onto the rocks. These are all historical facts, as well attested as anything in history can be. Japan was in the grip of a fanatical; death cult the likes of which ISIS can only dream about.

Think I'm exaggerating? Nope: they died in their thousands upon thousands. Mostly they died of their own "free will" (or what passed for free will in that extraordinary culture, which subordinated the individual to the state dictatorship in a way probably never seen before in the whole of human history, and certainly never seen since). No possibility of doing harm to the enemy (i.e., anyone from the entire rest of the world) was neglected, even if it meant losing a thousand lives to get just one enemy, even if it meant hiding behind the lines to explode booby traps. Mostly this was their own "free will", but there are well-documented cases where large groups of Japanese civilians were forced to participate at gun-point, or just slaughtered in a mindless bloodletting.

Translate that to the homeland. It is entirely reasonable to expect a death toll not in the hundreds of thousands but in the millions. Absurd, tragic, senseless, yes. But it happened in all the other battles, regardless of their hopeless military situation, and they were simply incapable of acting any other way. In the end, the military government never did surrender: the Emperor surrendered against their advice and wishes, and the military immediately staged a coup to depose him and fight on (which was averted only by a miracle and some very daring subterfuge on the part of the Emperor's loyal personal staff.

But let's pretend that we don't care about saving those hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian lives and only think about other lives. The Japanese forces under Tojo and his cronies were a brutally murderous lot. They were killing an average of 10,000 foreign civilians per day, every day while the war dragged on - Chinese, Koreans, many others. They herded huge crowds of conquered non-combatants into buildings ast gunpoint and, to save ammunition, burned them all alive. This was routine. Even the Imperial Japanese Navy - in broad a far more humane and civilised service than the army - participated in these terrible crimes in places such as the Philippines.

Over the course of the war, Japan murdered 26 million people - that is more than Hitler, more than Stalin, and it was to less purpose. That wholesale slaughter was still going on until the bombs stopped everything.

[Mugwump]

Well, more white people, anyway.

Almost certainly more of both, but hey, it is all racism, innit ?

I'm really really sick of that word lately.

Yes, it is becoming a kind of collective delusion, I think. Witch-finding.

[Mugwump]

Well, more white people, anyway.

No. You need to read the history, Pies4shaw: the bombs cost between 100 and 200 thousand lives. The alternative - the only alternative - was full-scale amphibious invasion at a cost to Japanese civilian life vastly higher. Think a full order of magnitude, very likely more. There is no reasonable room to doubt that: we already know the horrendous cost of the invasions of outlying islands: Japanese servicemen and civilians alike, although faced with palpably hopeless military situations, fought on in a fanatical manner; throwing themselves upon machine guns armed only with sticks, throwing themselves off cliffs into the sea, mothers throwing their babies onto the rocks. These are all historical facts, as well attested as anything in history can be. Japan was in the grip of a fanatical; death cult the likes of which ISIS can only dream about.

Think I'm exaggerating? Nope: they died in their thousands upon thousands. Mostly they died of their own "free will" (or what passed for free will in that extraordinary culture, which subordinated the individual to the state dictatorship in a way probably never seen before in the whole of human history, and certainly never seen since). No possibility of doing harm to the enemy (i.e., anyone from the entire rest of the world) was neglected, even if it meant losing a thousand lives to get just one enemy, even if it meant hiding behind the lines to explode booby traps. Mostly this was their own "free will", but there are well-documented cases where large groups of Japanese civilians were forced to participate at gun-point, or just slaughtered in a mindless bloodletting.

Translate that to the homeland. It is entirely reasonable to expect a death toll not in the hundreds of thousands but in the millions. Absurd, tragic, senseless, yes. But it happened in all the other battles, regardless of their hopeless military situation, and they were simply incapable of acting any other way. In the end, the military government never did surrender: the Emperor surrendered against their advice and wishes, and the military immediately staged a coup to depose him and fight on (which was averted only by a miracle and some very daring subterfuge on the part of the Emperor's loyal personal staff.

But let's pretend that we don't care about saving those hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian lives and only think about other lives. The Japanese forces under Tojo and his cronies were a brutally murderous lot. They were killing an average of 10,000 foreign civilians per day, every day while the war dragged on - Chinese, Koreans, many others. They herded huge crowds of conquered non-combatants into buildings ast gunpoint and, to save ammunition, burned them all alive. This was routine. Even the Imperial Japanese Navy - in broad a far more humane and civilised service than the army - participated in these terrible crimes in places such as the Philippines.

Over the course of the war, Japan murdered 26 million people - that is more than Hitler, more than Stalin, and it was to less purpose. That wholesale slaughter was still going on until the bombs stopped everything.

Superb post - factual, knowledgeable, and genuinely humane.

There are arguments against dropping that bomb, but they are not utilitarian ones.

[pietillidie]

[Tannin]

Thankyou Mugwamp.

As I mentioned earlier, I grew up believing that the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible, unforgivable war crimes akin to but even worse than the many other crimes committed by the USA, such as spraying Vietnam with Agent Orange, sponsoring and supporting the Chilean butcher Pinochet against an elected democratic government, and various others too numerous to mention. The atom bombs were, in my youthful view at that time, simply the very worst examples among many.

Over the years, more and more evidence has come out to show that I was right about Chile and about Agent Orange, and indeed about many of the others, but ... no, I'll come to the "but" in a moment.

First, I'll mention that I have seen the unthinkable horror of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki with my own eyes. It was more than 40 years ago that I was there and the scars left by the bombs were still vivid; that day was a decade closer to the day the bombs were dropped than to this day as I write. I went to Hiroshima first but curiously enough, the impact of the Nagasaki blast on me was even greater.

Hiroshima is flat and even then had been largely rebuilt since the war, where Nagasaki is a city of small hills and back then you could stand in a high place and see the devastation spreading out like the blades of a circular fan. Where there was flat land leading away from ground zero, everything as far as you could see was new and modern. A few points of the compass further round, there would be a hill, and behind that hill out to a long way away, the buildings were smaller, much older, and a different colour. This was the old town (or what was left of it) protected from the blast by the shadow of the hill. And then another fan blade of modern concrete on the far side, another hill, another intact shadow, and so on all around the compass.

In Hiroshima, there is a famous pavement - sandstone steps is the memory I have - with some poor victim's shadow etched into them by the fireball. (Reverse etched, actually: the shadow is the part the fireball didn't reach.) That was the enduring image many people took away from that place: the shadow on the steps of the bank as a symbol of all the other lives lost that day. (I believe it has faded with the decades and can't be seen now.) It was a very powerful, sombre thing to see.

But for me, the truly enduring image I have is more powerful still: the shadow etched in positive across the entire city of Nagasaki by the shape of the landscape, then reversed into the negative by the massive reconstruction of the areas where there was nothing left. (I shouldn't imagine that you could see this shadow either now, after 40 years.)

And my "but". As you can understand from the above, I have strong reason to identify with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, particularly so as I have spent time in Japan and loved the place almost as much as the people (who were wonderfully kind to me and happy to share their extraordinarily subtle, beautiful culture with me).

Nevertheless, as my life went by and I learned more about the events of the Pacific War, and especially about the bizarre concluding years of it, I have had to change my mind about the bombs. I did not know about or understand the circumstances or the alternatives available. I was wrong. The Americans, whatever you may think of them more generally, did the right thing.

That hilltop view of Nagasaki remains the most awful and enduring image I have of war anywhere. I know now that the devastation I saw in Nagasaki was just a small thing compared to the full horror of the tens of millions killed by that worst of all regimes; I know that the difference in scale between the one small visible death-shadow in Hiroshima and the one huge death-shadow visible in Nagasaki is repeated when you compare the bomb blast to the full horror the Japanese inflicted on the whole of eastern Asia. Like Chinese dolls, each horror is contained inside and dwarfed by the succeeding one. But I could grasp the death of that poor man on the bank steps in Hiroshima; and I could even grasp the instant death of half a whole city full of people in Nagasaki: I can't grasp, I can't even begin to grasp, the twenty six million deaths that most evil of all regimes inflicted.

[Tannin]

Pietilidie, I agree with your last post, at least in broad.

Having described the unspeakable brutalities of the military death cult which ran Japan up until the atom bombs fell, and without the slightest trace of sympathy for them - I'd sooner symathise with Idi Amin or Hitler - we should remember the dreadful way the Americans bullied and humiliated and exploited Japan at canon point starting with Peary in 1853, and though we cannot sympathise with a regime so brutally inhuman, we can at least recognise that the Americans themselves with their arrogance and greed were a major factor fertilising the seeds of that most evil of evil regimes.

[pietillidie]

^Nice posts, Tannic One.

One insight I would add from personal experience is the fact that August 15 is Korean Liberation Day. And, in what often amounts to a deafening irony when platitudes are tossed about concerning the evils of imperialism by serious-looking folk in suits, it is also Indian Independence Day.

For Korea, the bombs represent the end of 35 years of brutal direct colonisation; while, as we know, for many other parts of Asia they represent the end of a much longer stint of brutality.

That said, Japan itself was one of its own biggest victims, which gets back to that conflation we often make between systems of power, and the average Joe bludgeoned into obeisance by systems of power.

It's the general evil of unchecked power and the nonsense it peddles which ought to be in memoriam here: Internationally, through imperialist dehumanisation, and nationally, through local tools of dehumanisation such as class and race.