Subject:
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Re: Hiroshima-Was It Necessary?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 18 Oct 2001 03:41:53 GMT
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Viewed:
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619 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Lindsay Frederick Braun writes:
> In lugnet.off-topic.debate, David Eaton writes:
> > Yes, I fully agree that the objective was to win. The tactic behind the
> > atomic strike, however, was fear (I believe), moreso than it was any sort of
> > actual physical damage the bomb might have done.
>
> It was two parts political, one part military. [snip] ..
> So I'm in agreement that
> there was a fear aspect, but is sowing fear in the context
> of war somehow especially evil?
Especially evil? No, or at least, I wouldn't deem it as such. As I've said
elsewhere, the fact that it employed fear doesn't necessarily make it
immoral, and even if it does, it doesn't mean it's necessarily unjustified.
> We can't argue the counterfactuals clearly,
> but if you ask the war generation, you'd be hard pressed to
> find someone who didn't find the bombing defensible. In that
> case I think that memory is a powerful indicator of what
> total war was like. Nobody involved in the current .debate--
> as far as I know--has *ever* looked from within a total war
> or a fully militarized society. Our ability to equivocate
> these actions is based upon an entirely Vietnam-era set of
> sensibilities that I don't think are applicable to WWII.
I'm highly in agreeance-- I'm sure that I can't see the situation
objectively, and that if I could perhaps my feelings on the matter would
change. So my opinion is, admittedly, quite capable of being flawed. But
based on what I do know about the events, my sense of judgement tells me
that we should have explored other alternatives before dropping the bomb.
And additionally, that we should have allowed more time inbetween bomb drops
to allow the fear factor to set in. Could my mind be swayed? Sure. I just
haven't been provided with the right evidence to convince me of such.
> > Meanwhile, I'll ask this-- if it *were* the case that scaring them was our
> > primary objective, would you then consider it a terrorist action on our
> > part? How about if it were only a 2ndary objective? Partially terroristic?
> > At least I hope you'll agree with me that far.
>
> I should ask the same question as I did in the other message:
> Do you consider Doolittle's Raid of 1942 to be terrorism? The
> biggest problem with calling these things "terrorism" is that
> it divorces those acts from their context, and it both trivializes
> the scale of the wartime acts and proclaims them morally indefen-
> sible because of its generally-understood negative connotation
> of the word "terrorism" that we've held in the last 20 years.
> Who are legitimate military targets? To whom? How far up the
> chain of producers in a national economy do the legitimate
> targets reside?
This is where things get tricky-- terminology. Personally, from a
philosophical standpoint, yes, I'd call any action whose intent it is to
cause a reaction based on fear 'terrorism', even if only to a phenomenally
small degree. However, calling it such in common speech and in a
non-philosophical arena opens it up to gross misinterpretation as you
indicate. Hence, the line between when something should and shouldn't be
deemed "terrorism" is tricky to draw out, and I bet I can't make a good hard
line point. But in context with Nagasaki and Hiroshima, I'm pretty content
to call them terrorist acts, although to a lesser extent than the Sept. 11th
incidents.
> Here's an oddball thought: Imagine a world where Hiroshima and
> Nagasaki were never bombed, and nuclear weapons were never seen
> in action on such a comparatively small scale. I'd be willing
> to posit that in such a world, a Cuban Missile Crisis would
> have become World War III, and we wouldn't be here flapping
> our jaw-meat about it. Does the end justify the means? Can
> there not be any *positive* value to having seen the horror of
> a Hiroshima and Nagasaki relative to the survival of humanity?
Certainly if such were true, I'd be glad in hindsight that the bombs were
dropped-- but I also wouldn't argue that the bomb drops weren't acts of
terrorism and were in fact "necessary". So, no, in my book committing
atrocities and having good events blossom out of them doesn't make the act
"excusable". But it also doesn't mean that I'd be saying "I wish that it
never happened."
DaveE
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Hiroshima-Was It Necessary?
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| (...) There was, in fact, an attempted coup by high-ranking officers once the Emperor's wishes had become known. The problem with Fascist thinking was that it was seen as a struggle of civilizations; Hitler in fact articulated that if the German (...) (23 years ago, 18-Oct-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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