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About ArmaVirumque ( AHR-mah wih-ROOM-kweh) In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age. Recent posts
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Aug 07, 2007 04:00 PM
I do not wish to belabor the issue of whether saving millions of lives is a good thing. But since my colleague Andrew Cusack has weighed in on the morality--or was it the theology?--of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I thought I would add a word or two to my post of yesterday from Paul Fussell, whose classic essay "Thank God for the Atom Bomb" really says all that needs to be said about the subject of whether using those fearsome engines of war was justified.
The future scholar-critic who writes The History of Canting the Twentieth Century will find much to study and interpret the utterances of those who dilate on the special wickedness of the A-bomb-droppers. He will realize that such utterance can perform for the speaker a valuable double function. First it can display the fineness of his moral weave. And second, by implication it can also inform the audience that during the war he was not socially so unfortunate as to find himself down there with the ground forces, where he might have had to compromise the purity and clarity of his moral system by the experience of weighing his own life against someone else’s. Down there, which is where the other people were, is the place where coarse self-interest is the rule. When the young soldier with the wild eyes comes at you, firing, do you shoot him in the foot, hoping he’ll be hurt badly enough to drop or misaim the gun with which he’s going to kill you, or do you shoot. him in the chest ( or, if you’re a prime shot, in the head) and make certain that you and not he will be the survivor of that mortal moment?Andrew seems deeply impressed by Elizabeth Anscombe’s contention that America’s insistence on unconditional surrender was "the root of all evil." In fact, it was our failure to insist on this in 1918 that was the root not perhaps of all evil but that particularly toxic node that paved the way for World War II and the untold suffering it caused. Do the ends really justify the means? Alas, like so much about the real world, the melancholy--but also the moral--answer is, "Often, yes."
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