Why NO APOLOGY For HIROSHIMA

Yes, the fate of children in Hiroshima brings tears to one’s eyes. However… However optimizing morality is not just about crying about what happened. Optimizing morality consists in doing the best one can do, to influence the course of future events, for the better, considering the circumstances.

And the best, at the time, in August 1945, was, clearly, and in retrospect, to use atomic weapons exactly as they were used. It was a rolling of the dice which came out optimally, considering the actors involved. Thanks to a bit of luck, it worked splendidly.

The nuclear bombs shortened the war by several months and several million dead, minimum. Inside Japan, the military had been mostly untouched and ready to inflict millions of deaths, in the greatest battle. The fanatical general officers leading Japan knew when, and where the Allied invasion was going to happen, destiny had been written by history and geography, there was no choice.

The US army knew Japanese generals knew, and “Operation Olympic“, D-Day for Japan, was going to involve possibly millions of casualties, and the use of nerve gas and atomic bombs.

Moreover 10,000 civilians were dying each day, from the Japanese occupation in China.

A shock treatment was needed. The atom bombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki avoided all this by giving to the war criminal, emperor Hirohito, the opening he needed to redeem himself, and he courageously terminated the war by ordering the suicidal fanatics at the head of the military to stand down, and surrender (many of his underlings relished suicide: the entire kamikaze command, 60 planes of them, would disobey the formal order, and kill itself at sea; so would the commander in chief, who, after vaguely trying a coup, also committed suicide).

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Obama is talking (live) to the US Marines, next to Hiroshima as this is published (“I will visit this afternoon, Hiroshima!”). Obama, correctly, will not apologize for the nuclear bombings of Japan in 1945. However, it’s a good time to reiterate my old position on this subject.

The “Hitler line” had been erected across very mountainous ground in Italy, south of Rome. It was a natural barrier, the last one for hundreds of kilometers. It stopped the Allies for six months. The Commonwealth troops, Poles, British and American armies had suffered immense losses. And not advanced a mile. In 1944, the French army broke through it near Monte Cassino.

French General Juin, was nicknamed “Hannibal” by the American command for his ferocity, calm and strategic cunning. After a first test and diversion, the French army pierced in two days through the twenty miles thick with Nazis, fascists and mountains, like a hot knife through butter. This was really a Franco-North African army. And its ferocity was unequalled. Ferocity starts, but also wins wars. And the ferocity of the just always surpasses that of the unjust.

Want Peace? Don’t Make War For the Worst Reasons. Hiroshima Roasted, 8 September 1945.

Stabbed in the center and through the heart, the entire Nazi line soon collapsed. However, the American powers-that-be got soon worried that the “French”, those racially impure Franco-Africans, were committing acts of war going over the line of what they considered proper. The American generals went to see the French generals… who laughed to their face: ”C’est la guerre!” The French explained they had no love lost for the treacherous Italians. In June 1940, fascist Italy joined Hitler in attacking the French Republic. Thus the honor of Italian women was not high on the list, considering that the Italians had shown they had no honor. After covering 50 kilometers in a few days, through the mountains, giving no quarters, killing the most contemptible forces in the world, love acquired the same old meaning that real war calls for. Real tough love!

And, as far as the French were concerned, a good Nazi, was a dead Nazi. The French army would keep that relaxed attitude through the rest of the war (the US Army had a pretty similar attitude, and the Nazis were dismayed to be out-Nazified, so to speak…) In the last few weeks of the Second World War in Europe, in April-May 1945, the First French army charged through the two German states of Bade Wurttemberg and Bavaria, suffering more than 5,000 dead in combat… while destroying all Nazi units in south Germany, killing untold thousands. That’s war! Although Nazism was clearly already finished then, an unforgettable  lesson still had to be taught, a punishment for the ages (the Nazis had sent all the armies they had to try to stop the French, whom they hated the most among those they confronted in 1945; they feared the Russians more, but the French had declared war, and brought the destruction of the 1,000 year Reich).

Punishing the Nazis was the moral thing to do. The French finished the war by killing as many Nazis as they could, precisely because a hard, cruel and thorough finish was needed. The sort of hard, unforgettable finish that German racist fascism was not given in World War One. And thus it did it again, as it felt that lack of punishment meant approbation!

The German Republic we all enjoy now was born in the blood and ashes of prior fascism and barbarity.

By summer 1944, the American generals learned, indeed, and learned from the French, that ferocity was called for. During the (mostly failed) Operation Market Garden, the Nazi command bitterly complained that the Americans were taking no prisoners, even when the SS surrendered. Why not? Was not the idea of the SS that there should be no surrender?

Although technically France had declared war to Nazi Germany (with the United Kingdom and its puny army in tow), it was the Nazis who had decided to destroy civilization. They had started the war (contrarily to what they pretended later).

Who had started the war in Asia? The Japanese military command. A coup was actually attempted against it, by lower officers (in 1937). The coup failed and was repressed in (a lot of) blood. However, the fact remains that Japanese society, like the German one, or even Italy, engaged in collective mass murder.

The Japanese army massacred at least 15 times more (innocent) people than the total of Japanese (mostly military, mostly by their own hand) who died. Japan losses were of the order of two millions, mostly troops dead from bad treatment by… the Japanese high command (yes, this is a slightly biased description, but only very slightly: most Japanese who died in the war were Japanese soldiers mistreated by the conditions their command put them in!)

True, a two month old Japanese baby was innocent. And maybe her parents, too. However, collectively, all of Japanese society was culprit. Proof? The US could atom bomb, and it was the highest moral way.

Yes, I know perfectly well that the “collective responsibility” doctrine was rejected in 1945. That was clearly idiotic (and a political manoeuver, thinking of Stalin and Mao).

On the island of Okinawa, the civilian population resisted with a fanaticism that the Islamist State envies, no doubt. A consequence is that most of the civilian population of Okinawa died (I have covered all these arguments, with detailed numbers, in the past).

Hiroshima killed 70,000 right away, and for a total of 140,000 later. Nagasaki killed much less. And  the war was over within three days.

And that high rate of atrocious atom bombing was all a lie, a make-belief.

Bombing August 6, and again August 9, should have induced the Japanese High Command to believe that a bomb would be coming every three days. Several Japanese cities, including Kyoto, were still untouched. All Japanese industry was within those cities. Clearly, Japan could not sustain an atomic bombing every three days.

In truth, there were no more bombs at the ready. A few could have been dropped over the next few months. Not enough to have a big military impact. Japan could have held into 1946. The landing prepared for Fall 1945 was expected, in light of what had happened at Okinawa, to kill at least one million.

Announcing a demonstration atomic bombing would have been a very bad idea, for a variety of reasons.

So, considering the situation, the atomic bombing were morally optimal. Those who don’t want to be atom bombed, better not start a world war.

A lesson for the future, averse to war. Those who got zapped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not get zapped in vain: they gave their lives, and a lesson. Yes, it was horrible. But so is surgery without anesthesia. It doesn’t mean it’s not necessary.

Let’s help, and get help from, the Bhagavad Gita

‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds and evils’

You want to be moral? Start by not being an idiot. (Or the sort of fascist robots Japanese and Germans had turned into in the 1930s and 1940s.)

Patrice Ayme’

Tags: Hiroshma, No Apology, Nuclear Bombings, Obama, World War Two