The New Criterion

Aug 07, 2007 11:47 AM

Do the ends really justify the means?

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By now it seems a ritual: the summer ’silly season’ is annually punctured (albeit only temporarily) by the perennial debate over the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the previous post, our editor and publisher Roger Kimball agreeingly cites the "political wisdom" of Mr. Oliver Kamm of the Guardian, the house journal of Britain’s liberal establishment.

"New historical research," writes Mr. Kamm, "in fact lends powerful support to the traditionalist interpretation of the decision to drop the bomb." Mr. Kamm neglects to enlighten us that by "traditionalist" interpretation, he of course means the standard interpretation of the liberal status quo.

"The so-called revisionist interpretation," Mr. Kamm informs us, "argued that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were less the concluding acts of the Pacific war than the opening acts of the cold war. Japan was already on the verge of surrender; the decision to drop the bomb was taken primarily to gain diplomatic advantage against the Soviet Union." Interesting enough? Well, here comes Mr. Kamm’s jaw-dropping insight to debunk the revisionists: "Yet there is no evidence that any American diplomat warned a Soviet counterpart in 1945-46 to watch out because America had the bomb."

To borrow from the popular speech of our time: well, duh! The concept that American diplomats would officially (or even informally) inform the Soviet Union, one of their formal allies, that a given act of war against the Empire of Japan was also partly a warning to the Communists of American power is so ridiculous it can be rejected at first sight.

"Hiroshima and Nagasaki," Kamm continues, "are often used as a shorthand term for war crimes. That is not how they were judged at the time." That is not how they were judged by whom, Mr. Kamm?

It was only two days after the bombing of Hiroshima that the Republican former President Herbert Hoover wrote to a friend that "the use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul." Leo Maley and Uday Mohan pick up on this over at the History News Network:

Days later, David Lawrence, the conservative owner and editor of U.S. News (now U.S. News & World Report), argued that Japan’s surrender had been inevitable without the atomic bomb. He added that justifications of "military necessity" will "never erase from our minds the simple truth that we, of all civilized nations . . . did not hesitate to employ the most destructive weapon of all times indiscriminately against men, women and children."

Just weeks after Japan’s surrender, an article published in the conservative magazine Human Events contended that America’s atomic destruction of Hiroshima might be morally "more shameful" and "more degrading" than Japan’s "indefensible and infamous act of aggression" at Pearl Harbor.

Such scathing criticism on the part of leading American conservatives continued well after 1945. A 1947 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, at the time a leading conservative voice, claimed that President Truman and his advisers were guilty of "crimes against humanity" for "the utterly unnecessary killing of uncounted Japanese."

In 1948, Henry Luce, the conservative owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, stated that "[i]f, instead of our doctrine of ’unconditional surrender,’ we had all along made our conditions clear, I have little doubt that the war with Japan would have ended soon without the bomb explosion which so jarred the Christian conscience." A steady drumbeat of conservative criticism continued throughout the 1950s. A 1958 editorial in William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review took former President Truman to task for his then-current explanation of why he had decided to drop an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The editors asked the question that "ought to haunt Harry Truman: ’Was it really necessary?’" Could a demonstration of the bomb and an ultimatum have ended the war? The editors challenged Truman to provide a satisfactory answer. Six weeks later the magazine published an article harshly critical of Truman’s atomic bomb decision.

Two years later, David Lawrence informed his magazine’s readers that it was "not too late to confess our guilt and to ask God and all the world to forgive our error" of having used atomic weapons against civilians. As a 1959 National Review article matter-of-factly stated: "The indefensibility of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima is becoming a part of the national conservative creed."

Meanwhile, George S. Schuyler, another prominent conservative (and later on a contributor to National Review) wrote in his Pittsburgh Courier column of August 14, 1945 that:

Not satisfied with being able to kill people by the thousand, we have now achieved the supreme triumph of being able to slaughter whole cities at a time. In this connection it is interesting to note that there is no longer any pretense that only military installations are targets. Skimming through in the skies over Hiroshima, one of our bombing planes dropped the fearsome atomic bomb to murder 200,000 or Japanese mothers, fathers and children indiscriminately. It seems that just yesterday we were bemoaning German barbarism in bombing Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and other industrial centers, and citing as evidence of the Japanese savagery the slaughter of a few thousand innocents in Shanghai.

Perhaps Mr. Kamm, in saying that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not judged as war crimes meant to say that that is now how the bombings were judged in Great Britain, but of course this is not the case either. The prominent conservative philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe protested voiciferously in 1956 when Oxford, her place of study and employ, awarded an honorary degree to Harry Truman.

Anscombe, of course, was a convert to Catholicism and it is naturally from Catholic conservatives that much ire is stoked in reaction to the destruction of the two cities. Bishop Fulton Sheen, the popular television personality, called it "our national sin" while Fr. James Gillis, a Paulist priest who was the editor of the Catholic World and a leading figure in the circles of the American right, called it "the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law."

Not all the conservative opposition came from Catholic circles, however. Military historian Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller wrote:

Though to save life is laudable, it in no way justifies the employment of means which run counter to every precept of humanity and the customs of war. Should it do so, then, on the pretext of shortening a war and of saving lives, every imaginable atrocity can be justified.

Admiral William D. Leahey, meanwhile, asserted:

the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. . . . My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

The splendid Richard Weaver, on whom our own Roger Kimball wrote a thoughtful essay, saw the bombings as "inimical to the foundations on which civilization is built" and attacked

the spectacle of young boys fresh out of Kansas and Texas turning nonmilitary Dresden into a holocaust . . . pulverizing ancient shrines like Monte Cassino and Nuremberg, and bringing atomic annihilation to Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Yet, as Anscombe wrote, "it was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was the root of all evil." The allied insistence on avoiding any negotiations to bring a quicker end to the war undoubtedly cost many American lives, not to mention thousands upon thousands of non-combatants who were killed in the mean time. It was a perennial discouragement for those German officers attempting to overthrow Hitler, and it was a continual encouragement to the Japanese to fight on to the bloody end, lest they risk seeing their sacred emperor hanged outside his palace by American, British, and Soviet judges. (The continual attempts to justify the atomic bombing of these cities beg the question: would our current enemies -- the "terror" against which we currently wage "war" -- therefore be justified in employing a dirty bomb or even a regular nuclear device against New York or Los Angeles? I think not.)

The great (and much-neglected) conservative thinker Thomas Molnar once said that the Revolution would be complete when both the United States and the Catholic Church were won over to the revolutionary principle. Those who saw the Iron Curtain divide Europe and then the fall of the Berlin Wall forty years later have now lived to see the ideology of worldwide revolution preached from the White House. Those who wait to see it preached from the Vatican shouldn’t hold their breath.

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