Silly Thinking

Here's what Kristof has to say:

Tomorrow will mark the anniversary of one of the most morally contentious events of the 20th century, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And after 58 years, there's an emerging consensus: we Americans have blood on our hands.

There has been a chorus here and abroad that the U.S. has little moral standing on the issue of weapons of mass destruction because we were the first to use the atomic bomb. As Nelson Mandela said of Americans in a speech on Jan. 31, "Because they decided to kill innocent people in Japan, who are still suffering from that, who are they now to pretend that they are the policeman of the world?"

[snip]
While American scholarship has undercut the U.S. moral position, Japanese historical research has bolstered it. The Japanese scholarship, by historians like Sadao Asada of Doshisha University in Kyoto, notes that Japanese wartime leaders who favored surrender saw their salvation in the atomic bombing. The Japanese military was steadfastly refusing to give up, so the peace faction seized upon the bombing as a new argument to force surrender.


[snip]

"The atomic bomb was a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war," Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief cabinet secretary in 1945, said later.

[snip]

It feels unseemly to defend the vaporizing of two cities, events that are regarded in some quarters as among the most monstrous acts of the 20th century. But we owe it to history to appreciate that the greatest tragedy of Hiroshima was not that so many people were incinerated in an instant, but that in a complex and brutal world, the alternatives were worse.


The reason it seems unseemly to defend the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is because it is unseemly. Leaving aside the fact that Japan was seeking to conditionally surrender and we bombed in order to achieve unconditional surrender, leaving aside the fact that the terms we eventually accepted were those we could have locked down without an invasion, what must be taken into account now is that we are currently engaged in a perpetual preventative war in order to wipe out "future threats." We are currently bombing cities, invading countries, and so on...and the justification we used for Hiroshima is the same justification we are using now.

To defend this bombing of Hiroshima is to conconspire with war criminals in Washington.

The blood on Kristof's hands is fresh.



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