Sunday, May 29, 2016

il miglior fabbro

It's Memorial Day weekend and we often get confused about the meaning of it. The purpose of the day is to remember those who fought and died in the service of our country.

Barack Obama was in Hiroshima the other day and was doling out the moral equivalence with a giant ladle. His remarks seem especially problematic given he was addressing a nation that was, during the time of the war, a monstrosity. The invaluable John Hayward reminds of us of a few things that Obama didn't mention:
Here’s another one every American school kid should know about: the Bataan Death March. There was no swift death for the thousands of Americans and Filipinos under siege by Japanese forces in the Philippines. They were already sick and starving when they surrendered to the Japanese.

In an act of pure, deliberate sadism, because they were enraged by stiff American resistance during the siege, the Japanese forced their prisoners to march a hundred miles to a prison camp on foot. Many of the prisoners were killed out of hand, including anyone who dared to ask for water… and anyone who collapsed from dehydration. POWs reported Japanese soldiers taking away their meager supply of water and feeding it to horses while they watched. Starving men were tortured with false offers of food. Prisoners who accepted gifts of food from civilians along the route were murdered.

Some were murdered merely for possessing Japanese items, including currency. They were killed by beheading and run through with bayonets, as well as gunshots. Bayonet victims died from orgies of frenzied stabbing, not clean and swift impalement. Some of the captives were reportedly driven insane by exposure to the sun.  They were also crammed into barbed-wire pens were malaria, dengue fever, dysentery, and other diseases ran wild.

It has been estimated that between 5,000 and 11,000 of Japan’s prisoners were killed during the Bataan Death March. That wasn’t the only death march the Empire perpetrated, either. The prisoners of Sandakan were subjected to multiple forced marches, once the Japanese lost interest in using them as slave labor. By the time they were finished, only six of the original 2,390 prisoners were still alive.
Hayward also reminds us of a few other things -- Pearl Harbor, the Rape of Nanking, the penchant of the Japanese military to murder doctors and nurses, and the occasional episode of cannibalism.

These incidents are well documented. We spend a lot of time, and rightly so, remembering the horrors that the Nazis perpetrated, but there were atrocities galore throughout the Pacific Theater. Hayward makes the salient point (emphasis in original):
This is also not an assault on Japanese citizens of today. Japan is a good friend of the United States now, and that is the happiest ending one could ask from a story this horrible. The Empire of Japan is gone. It had to go. People who think like Barack Obama have no idea how to fight a war like that. God help us all if they are in power when the next such war is forced upon us.

This is, rather, an effort to help understand what was destroyed by the right, proper, and absolutely necessary bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is the horror that would have claimed countless more victims if Japan had not been forced to surrender. It is very easy for callow politicians in 2016 to say that more Americans, and more Japanese, should have died in battle during a conventional invasion of Japan, to spare it the fury of the atomic bomb. Not many people felt that way at the time, especially if they were aware of the atrocities chronicled here.

Barack Obama treats the bombing of Hiroshima as a unique “evil.” No, sir. It was the end of an evil.
But it was the end of just one evil. There are more, and there will always be more, because evil resides in the human heart. And if we want to honor those who died horrible deaths at the hands of the Empire of Japan, and Nazi Germany, and others who still operate today, we ought to be mindful of the presence of evil in the human heart. It is a struggle we will always face. Read the whole thing.


8 comments:

Bike Bubba said...

Somehow the thought of using Japan's very real atrocities as a justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is very uncomfortable to me. For starters, what do we do with our own nation's history with the Indians in that regard, not to mention blacks? Does that give them the right to nuke Ann Arbor or Boulder, then?

Conceded, of course, that a nation with a strong history of atrocities is going to be tough to overcome, and that certainly parallels what is being said here. And I can't persuade myself that this honors Augustine's theories of just war, either.

All I can do is say that we believed we had the choice between millions of civilian and military deaths for an invasion, and the bomb gave us the option of persuading Japan that their entire nation could end up a smoldering ruin if they persisted. And if I'd been Truman and heard that, I'd have made, sadly, the exact same decision.

Mr. D said...

Somehow the thought of using Japan's very real atrocities as a justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is very uncomfortable to me. For starters, what do we do with our own nation's history with the Indians in that regard, not to mention blacks? Does that give them the right to nuke Ann Arbor or Boulder, then?

Not the point at all. It's not about justification. Read what I wrote, and what Hayward wrote. It was about stopping the war. Which you mention in the third paragraph.

Brian said...

If that wasn't Hayward's point, why did he spend the bulk of his article on it?

Put another way...why didn't we drop atomic bombs on Pyongyang? Or Hanoi? Or Baghdad? Or Tripoli? Or Aleppo...

Mr. D said...

If that wasn't Hayward's point, why did he spend the bulk of his article on it?

Context. Do you know how much time is spent on teaching WWII history in schools these days, to say nothing of the run-up to the war? My daughter is finishing AP US History this year and she told me they didn't spend much time at all on the war. If you want to understand the war and the decision that Truman made, you need to have a least a passing knowledge of how Truman and his advisors saw things. Justification, by its very nature, is subjective.

Put another way...why didn't we drop atomic bombs on Pyongyang? Or Hanoi? Or Baghdad? Or Tripoli? Or Aleppo...

Geopolitical reality changed a bit on or about August 29, 1949.

Brian said...

Geopolitical reality changed a bit on or about August 29, 1949.

Indeed it did.

Now the only broadly accepted as justifiable reason for anyone in the world to have nukes is to prevent anyone else from using them.

It's almost as though the entire world regards their use as...a unique evil.

Mr. D said...

It's almost as though the entire world regards their use as...a unique evil.

Almost. I don't know that it's a universal view at all. I wouldn't assume that.

Bike Bubba said...

We could say that the civilized world views the use of atomic weapons as evil. It can possibly be a lesser evil than not using them--say the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki in my opinion--but evil nonetheless.

Really like all of war, no? You don't go to war because it is a good thing to get young men killed and leave a bunch of widows, orphans, and grieving mothers even in the best of cases where we honor Augustine. We go to war because the alternative is believed to be worse.

And my point remains the same; given that the article leads with and concentrates on the atrocities of the Japanese, one would infer that at least a portion of his argument is that Hiroshima was justified in light of the atrocities. That's wrong. We simply need to argue that the plausible alternative was worse.

Mr. D said...

Truman made one of the most consequential decisions in human history. The war ended shortly after the second bomb was dropped. I've seen it argued that the real driver of Japan's decision was the entry of the Soviet Union into the theater; perhaps that's the case. I don't know. I've also seen arguments that the Allied commanders, especially Eisenhower, did not believe dropping the bomb was necessary. Again, I don't know.

The point Hayward is making, I think, is we need to remember and understand who our enemy was to understand the context in which Truman made his decision. It's not so much a matter of justification as it is being clear-eyed about the way someone in that moment would have seen the matter.