The ethics of Hiroshima

[David]

[Mugwump]

^ I'm not so sure that war is at all easy or popular in modern democracies. Vietnam was virtually ended by democratic revolt ; and if Blair had listened to the British people he'd not have gone into Iraq II. It is true that the US lined up to do Iraq II, but you know, I think that might be last time for many years.

And I do not think there would have been democratic consent in the US for Afghanistan/Iraq II had there not been a Pearl Harbour-like mass atrocity on US soil in 2001. It takes quite a lot to make a democracy go to war, and it takes an almost existential crisis to keep a democracy at war, now.

[HAL]

I hope to be as smart as HAL in 2001.

[Tannin]

Really? No-one is going to challenge this?

I don't give a flying fig if some Jap housewife had her head blown off. Her son or husband could well have been torturing my late friend who was in Changi or shooting at my Mums Uncle in the Dutch East Indies at Balikpapan.

If the death of 100,000 Japanese war factory workers is worth more than whole countries being enslaved and starved then we have lost the plot.

This is pure psychopathy. I'm not saying that RR is a psychopath; it's psychologically easy to dehumanise people of a different culture from a different time and just chalk up their deaths as "one of those things". But the minute that you start considering the reality of it, the more appalling such sentiments become. Opinions like these are what make the Holocaust and other such atrocities possible.

David has utterly failed to comprehend the fundamental point here. There was a choice between two evils, and that one of those two evils was much smaller than the other one.

Both were terrible, wasteful, unconscionable evils killing many thousands of people. There is no compelling reason to regard each of the deaths brought about by either of those two evil acts as worse than the deaths brought about by the other, not in quality. Against the horrors of slow death by radiation poisoning you can set the horrors of slow death by torture or starvation (the Japanese starved several millions of people to death during the war, and that atrocity, like their other atrocities, was ongoing during 1945, reaching out to yet more victims.) Against a quick death by firing squad or shrapnel wounds you can set an even quicker death by ground zero firestorm. After considering these things for a moment you come to much the same conclusion you'd come to after considering them for half a lifetime: each is appalling and neither stands out as less appalling than the other.

But while the quality of these different deaths and sufferings is impossible to rank, the quantity is known with a good deal of certainty. We can very confidently state that the two atom bombs killed between 100,000 and 200,000 people (about 140,00 is the most commonly accepted figure). The death toll of the alternative is of course not known exactly and never will be, but we can be quite certain that it is much, much larger, on the scale of an entire order of magnitude larger. Make your best estimate of the atom bomb deaths and add a zero. That's a very conservative case. Given the well-evidenced history of previous events (notably Okinawa), a more likely estimate would be perhaps five times that conservative number.

In case you have forgotten, the Japanese military junta was responsible for the deaths of, on average, about 10,000 people per day, yes, every day. (That's averaged out over the course of the war; the exact number varied from one day to the next, of course.) Their ability to slaughter subject populations was shrinking by this time, but counteracting that was their ever-increasing dedication to slaughtering their own people, soldiers, women, children, even the elderly.

David's argument is based on the logical but insane belief that the slaughter of a lot of perfectly normal people is somehow worse than the slaughter of ten or twenty times that many of the same people. It makes no sense.

(For the record, I grew up, like David, believing that the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible, unforgivable war crimes. This belief was only strengthened when I visited those places myself and saw the horror of it with my own eyes. Sadly - I say "sadly" because I never like to change a strongly-held belief if I can avoid it! - I began to study that period of history more carefully a decade or two later on and, eventually, the clear and heavy weight of evidence became undeniable. Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved hundreds of thousands more lives than Mother Theresa ever did.)

[David]

[HAL]

[Mugwump]

^ Oh, probably. Though in this modern age, when the consequences of our actions are streamed home, empathy at a distance does play a part, too. Everything is intertwined, and it'd be hard to separate the opposing forces. And in all wars, the antecedent events change the weight of different opposing forces anyway.

[Wokko]

By this logic, Gengis Khan was morally right to wipe out entire cities who didn't initially surrender because it saved the lives of other cities that would subsequently surrender rather than face the same fate.

What do you know, you're advocating terrorism.

[Joel]

Got to love people debating the merits of the wrongs and rights during war, but at the same time excluding most of the context that lead up to the act.

It's easy to make judgement when you are 70 years removed from a situation and you have never had to face a situation in which hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of your fellow countrymen (friends, family etc) have been killed.

[HAL]

Try asking the Milk Mystic.

[David]

Got to love people debating the merits of the wrongs and rights during war, but at the same time excluding most of the context that lead up to the act.

It's easy to make judgement when you are 70 years removed from a situation and you have never had to face a situation in which hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of your fellow countrymen (friends, family etc) have been killed.

Yes, but that distance also gives us insight that we might not otherwise have had. As with our legal system, you don't actually want important decisions to be made by people who are emotionally involved.

[Joel]

Yes, but that distance also gives us insight that we might not otherwise have had.

True in some aspects. But war isn't so simple, never will be. I appreciate your love your hypotheticals but I'm not sure this is something we could truly debate without being in their shoes.

[Tannin]

It's easy to make judgement when you are 70 years removed from a situation and you have never had to face a situation in which hundreds of thousands (sometimes millions) of your fellow countrymen (friends, family etc) have been killed.

And very, very hard to make that judgment wen you are in the thick of it, but credit were it's due here, the Yanks got this one right. Plenty of others were they got it wrong - Dresden is the most obvious of many examples - and I'd be the first to say so except that David types faster than I do.

[swoop42]

Thank God we won the war is all I have to say.

Imagine if the Germans or Japanese had of developed nuclear weapons first.

Given how the Germans treated the Jews and the Japanese our prisoners of war it's not hard to imagine that the world would have been far worse off.

Not only did we win the war we had enough humanity to allow Germany and Japan to rebuild and develop into the prosperous countries they are today.

Would Hitler or the kamikaze crazy Japanese have been so accommodating in victory?

Doubt it.

[Tannin]

^ Not a chance in hell, Swoop. The Japanese military-religious culture was, in many ways, the direct equivalent of today's ISIS one: fanatical, often hysterical bravery, absolute obedience regardless of all kindness or humanity, no compunction whatever about torture and slavery and murder, no conception of human rights, and so on. Oh, you can highlight differences too, but the key difference is that Japan was vastly bigger and more industrialised, and had (in 1942) the toughest, best-trained troops in the world, the most powerful navy afloat, and excellent modern aircraft flown by highly trained, battle-hardened crews. They were bloody near unstoppable.

Oh, by the way, how many have ISIS killed so far? Fifty thousand max? More? Less? The Japanese killed 36 million before we stopped them. Sort of puts it into perspective, doesn't it.