I don't know. The older I get the more I tend to think of myself as a citizen of the Cosmos rather than just a proud American. The older I get, the more I've seen, the less stomach I have for violence of any kind or the general concept that evil can be fought and conquered with more evil. I have gotten to a point where I am more eager than ever to hear both sides of a story, look at opposing ends of a debate, longing more than ever for universal peace and cooperation.
I have to come to believe that we humans are all part of the same family. Violence against one segment of the family is violence towards all of us. Cruelty cannot conquer cruelty. No amount of patriotism or national pride should allow us to overlook that.
I am reproducing below an editorial that was originally run on August 10, 1945, in the Nippon Times, just after we bombed Hiroshima. This was taken from Jim R. McClellan's book Changing Interpretations of America's Past, pages 322,323. It moved me tremendously when I first read it and still does. I think it will move my readers as well.
In the air attack on Hiroshima Monday morning, the enemy used a new type of bomb of unprecedented power. Not only has the greater part of the city been wiped out, but an extraordinary proportion of the inhabitants have been either killed or wounded. The use of a weapon of such terrifying destructiveness not only commands attention as a matter of a new technique in the conduct of war. More fundamentally and vitally it opens up a most grave and profound moral problem in which the very future of humanity is put at stake....
This was no mere excess committed in the heat of battle. It was an act of premeditated wholesale murder, the deliberate snuffing out of the lives of tens of thousands of innocent civilians who had no chance of protecting themselves in the slightest degree. How deliberate and callous the enemy is in his unprincipled action is proved by the infamous threat of President Truman to use this diabolical weapon on an increasing scale....
How can a human being with any claim to a sense of moral responsibility deliberately let loose an instrument of destruction which can at one stroke annihilate an appalling segment of mankind? This is not war; this is not even murder....This is a crime against God and humanity which strikes at the very basis of human existence....
The crime of the Americans stands out in ghastly repulsiveness all the more for the ironic contradiction it affords to their lying pretensions. For in all their noisy statements, they have always claimed to be the champions of fairness and humanitarianism....
This hypocritical character of the Americans had already been amply demonstrated in the previous bombings of Japanese cities. Strewing explosives and fire bombs indiscriminately over an extensive area, hitting large cities and small towns without distinction, wiping out vast districts which could not be mistaken as being anything but strictly residential in character, burning or blasting to death countless thousands of helpless women and children, and machine-gunning fleeing refugees, the American raiders had already shown how completely they violate in their actual deeds the principles of humanity which they mouth in conspicuous pretense.
But now beside the latest technique of total destruction which the Americans have adopted, their earlier crimes pale into relative insignificance. What more barbarous atrocity can there be than to wipe out at one stroke the population of a whole city without distinction - men, women, and children; the aged, the weak, the infirm; those in positions of authority, and those with no power at all....
For this American outrage against the fundamental moral sense of mankind, Japan must proclaim to the world its protest against the United States, which has made itself the arch-enemy of humanity.
3 comments:
It is very hard to argue with that. In the end one has to weigh all of the issues associated with the "bomb." An invasion of Japan with a huge loss of life on both sides as residents fought to the death was very real possibility. The fire bombing of Tokyo was just as bad as the effect of an atomic bomb. The horrors created by Japan throughout the western Pacific were horrific. So go the evils of war. There is nothing good about it and it will rarely accomplish much more than the extermination of one evil by another evil act.
Exrelayman said
Perhaps unknown to this Japanese writer is the fact that the Japanese tested their own atomic bomb? They were just slightly behind us timewise.
Perhaps this Japanese writer conveniently forgets about the rape of Nanking?
Perhaps Pearl Harbor and the brutality of Japanese prisoner of war camps eludes this writer?
No mistake about it, what we did was horrible. Tu quoque doesn't justify our action. Its just that the innocent victim card is propaganda.
@ Georgia Mountain Man - I'm certainly too far removed from that situation to speak authoritatively. There seems to be a compelling case that Japan would shortly have surrendered even had we not started the bombing. But my point is exactly what you said:
"So go the evils of war. There is nothing good about it and it will rarely accomplish much more than the extermination of one evil by another evil act."
Would that this cycle could be broken.
@ Exrelayman - Thanks for you comment. The United States plays and have played that "innocent victim card" as well as any other nation. Without propaganda, wars could not be effectively waged. It all starts with making our "enemies" out to be something subhuman - wicked monsters, vicious animals, etc. In war it is mostly a nation's citizens, the common men and women, who pay dearest for the ruthlessness, bloodthirstiness, and hateful stubbornness of their government's leadership.
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