Why did Japan surrender? (Historian argues Soviet Declaration, Not A-Bomb)

Boston Globe ^ | 8/7/2011 | Gareth Cook

[Lazamataz]

The enemy, moreover, has begun to employ a new most cruel bomb, the power which to do damage is indeed incalculable, taking toll of many innocent lives.

The ignorant mess of a historian would probably argue that the Emperor was using code words, and meant the Soviets.

Y'see.

[Cronos]

Machiavelli noted that authoritarian societies were hard to subvert, but easy to hold once conquered, PROVIDED you kill everybody from the old ruling families.

Which is why communism, which arose in heavily industrialised 19th century Germany, heavily influenced by Fabianism in England and France (both industrialised) ultimately, if freakishly, succeeded in agrarian Russia

By eliminating the old elites, the Soviets managed to control the nation

Communism also took hold in East Germany yet in Poland it never managed to take deep roots -- even Stalin said that imposing Communism on Roman Catholic Poland was as absurd as putting a saddle on a cow

This country is so anti-authoritarian it puts the US to shame :)

there is the joke that if you have 2 Poles, you have 3 political parties and 5 opinions :)

Some of their film comedies made during the 70s and 80s (like "Poszukiwana/Poszukiwany" and "Sexmisja" and Wajda's classics) are so patently making fun of the communists it is incredible.

Ditto to compare China, a country with 3000 years of authoritarianism and India with 3000 years of chaos :)

[Cronos]

Another good post that answers my questions too — thank you

[PapaBear3625]

Your points are respectable I think (not wanting to comb through for every possible nuance) BUT: intentional killing of the innocent is always murder. If that's not murder, then what is murder?

Perhaps it is murder. If so, then I am willing to accept the necessity of being a murderer, if being such is necessary to the survival of those I love.

That's one thing about war: while Jesus said "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends", sometimes a man may find it necessary to lay down his soul as well.

Adding to what I said in post #112, I would add "(4) I am willing to accept the deaths of multiple enemy civilians if I judge that doing so saves one American, either military or civilian". For example, if a Taliban mortar crew is shelling a US outpost from an Afghan village, I would support an airstrike leveling the village rather than accept casualties among US forces.

[PapaBear3625]

They truly loved their country and thought they were doing the right thing following orders -- we can still see this disciplined approach in the way the Japanese recovered from the earthquake). They would have fought tooth and nail against every American soldier, and "they" would have included women and children --> they were conditioned to see us as evil monsters hence the tragedy in Okinawa.

Being forced to kill women and children, not from 30,000 feet up, but at hand-to-hand distance, would have been damaging to the souls of American servicemen.

[Cronos]

Being forced to kill women and children, not from 30,000 feet up, but at hand-to-hand distance, would have been damaging to the souls of American servicemen.

I agree.

[dfwgator]

How about restoring the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

[Cronos]

In my opinion that became a failure when they allowed "one vote can veto" and "one veto can scrap parliament"

Secondly, the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth made the mistake of not putting the Ruthenians (ancestors of Belarussians and Ukrainians) as equal partners. If they HAD done that in the 1500s, then the Cossacks would not have been enticed by Muscovy

Finally, the Swedish Vasa kings of the commonwealth made a big mistake in allowing the Hohenzollerns to consolidate their hold over Prussia -- if they had not allowed this, but absorbed Prussia, then the Hohenzollerns would never have been able to create the German Empire and force Prussian values on the other Germanic peoples.

[Cronos]

Oh and also the Poles due to their higher culture did cause antagonizm among the Lithuanians and Ruthenians, which was the problem of the Commonwealth

I also like to think of what would have happened if after 1848, instead of listening to Magyar assertions, the Austrian Empire became not the Austro-Hungarian Empire but the "United States of Central Europe" -- an idea of ArchDuke Ferdinand....

[Mrs. Don-o]

First, the destruction of the military assets in Hiroshima and Nagasaki --- which would be rational war objectives --- neither necessitates nor justifies the intentional targeting of the entire cities as such, together with all their inhabitants. The number of casualties, alone, is not the issue. The issue is "indiscriminate by intent."

And even though a totalitarian government claims to have subsumed all its citizens' human identities into a collective known as the Total Nation engaging in Total War, it was not and could not be so. Human beings have an intrinsic dignity conferred by God, not the State (not even a "God-Emperor"); and, in the practical sense, the people still spent their time living their lives: the gardener gardens, the mother mothers, the nurse nurses, and the just man, as Hopkins says, justices -- in this case, makes a distinction between those who are criminal and those who are just normal people acting normally.

Granted that a great many civilians get killed en passant when their live in a crowded city made of paper and wood, in the midst of many targettable assets, collateral deaths do not constitute murder and do not constitute the intrinsic moral objection.

Let me repeat: "Destroying Point C" in your scenario is not murder, and desroying MANY Point C's in Hiroshima is not murder, even if a great number of civilians die in a foreseeable but unintended way. I am glad you gave me the chance to clarify that.

What is damnable is the indiscriminate intent. And intent is determined by choices. Choosing to develop an intrinsically indiscriminate means of mass destruction, and then choosing to use it in a city=target manner, means that Point C is no longer the target. Thje city as such, together with its inhabitants, is the target.

This Constitutional Rights Foundation article (Link) contends that area bombing in the WWII European theater was a British RAF thing.

"When the United States entered the war in Europe, its Army Air Corps had better fighter-plane support and bombsights than the RAF. It could maintain its longstanding policy of daytime precision bombing. The Americans believed that the most effective way to destroy the enemy's ability to continue the war was to strike specific targets like aircraft factories and oil refineries."

He contends that area-bombing per se wasn't really adopted by the US until Curtis LeMay chose to emphasize it in the war against Japan.

The author cites:

Crane, Conrad C. Bombs, Cities, and Civilians. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 1993.

Werrell, Kenneth P. Blankets of Fire, U.S. Bombers Over Japan During World War II. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996.

The bottom line is, the military forces have the obligation to obliterate enemy military targets employing the best precision targeting available to shield civilian lives to the greatest extent practicable at the time. It's a line that can be blurry, but even a blurry line has some cases which are borderline, but other cases which are clearly way off to one side or the other. The decision to develop and use intrinsically indiscriminate weapons, is the decision to say "T'hell with innocent and guilty, t'hell with right and wrong, t'hell with good and evil" and destroy everybody in sight, along with the line itself.

It's for decisions of that category that Hideki Tōjō was rightly arrested, sentenced to death, and hanged on 23 December 1948.

I would strongly support the the traditional U.S. Army Air Corps policy as against the indiscriminate Curtis LeMay and RAF policy, as did Ancombe.

Which brings me to my second point: Anscombe was most certainly not a pacifist. She identified pacifism as one of the main ideological errors which prevents a rational discussion of the just use of lethal force.

[Mrs. Don-o]

In a consideration of the many deaths and other harms resulting from warfare, one must make a distinction between harms which are foreeeable but unintended consequences, and harms which are directly and deliberately intended.

It is understood, and sometimes inevitable, that harm may be done collaterally in any act of force. If, say in your flash-mob situation, the interveners aim at suppressing the looters by effective limited force, and end up in a chaotic scene in which looters and onlookers are injured and killed as well, that is bitterly sad and heart-breaking, but it is not murder -- if the cops did their due diligence of trying, however unsuccessfully, to employ only a limited and rational use of force.

However, if they just decided to wipe out the problematic neighborhood itself with incendiary devices which took out looters, onlookers, shopkeepers, private security guards, news crews, passers-by, and neighbors for 10 city blocks, you can bet that whoever made the decision would be sacked, and possibly criminally prosecuted.

(BTW, Collateral harms, including deaths, can come about from the decision not to act with force --- in other words, by omissions --- as well. If the cops stand around and watch looters set fire to shops and assault business-owners with paving stones, and fail to intervene with force, they share the morally culpability for the losses, injuries and deaths.)

In the OT, it is repeated over 20 times that God hates -- hates--- the shedding of innocent blood. The same word --- "abomination" --- is used to describe the shedding of innocent blood, as is used to describe blasphemy, idolatry and sodomy.

This is a matter of Divine Law and also of Natural Law: what people can know as rational creatures. A philosopher I mentioned in another part of this thread, G.E.M. Anscombe, found a surprising degree of consensus on this going back to Aristotle. Surveying the whole history of ethics, both Christian and pagan, Anscombe says:

"There is one consideration here which has something like the position of absolute zero or the velocity of light in current physics. It cannot possibly be an exercise of civic authority deliberately to kill or mutilate innocent subjects.'

"For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder."

This is a consensus statement of what "murder" is. If intentional or deliberately indiscriminate killing of the innocent isn't murder, then nothing is.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"Perhaps it is murder. If so, then I am willing to accept the necessity of being a murderer...That's one thing about war: while Jesus said "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends", sometimes a man may find it necessary to lay down his soul as well."

This is quite shockingly wrong, if you really mean it as written. A logical inference would be that you see God's Word as a lie, and God's Law as worthless, and prefer to be in hell --- prefer to see your loved ones in hell as well, as they would be if they admired and emulated your example.

It means you would see an infinite offense against your infinite Lord as the lesser of two evils, rejecting His aid and choosing instead to rely on powers provided by His Enemy. And this kind of deal always involves seizing a very fleeting advntage, at the price of eternal horror.

And there's no guarantee it would even "work" --- the Enemy typically likes to renege even on that, so that you and all that you love get to burn here, and hereafter as well.

Think this through again, I beg you.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"Being forced to kill women and children, not from 30,000 feet up, but at hand-to-hand distance, would have been damaging to the souls of American servicemen."

We don't know for a fact that this was the only alternative. Three points:

• First, Stalin told Roosevelt that the Japanese had asked him twice to broker a negotiated peace. There can be a lot of speculation of what this could or couldn't have, would or wouldn't have, accomplished. That's one set of unknowns.

• Second, some of the Manhattan Project scientists wanted the nuclear device to be used to destroy the sacred Mt. Fuji, or to an unpopulated island in a demonstration run, convinced that the overwhelming scope of the destruction (especially Mt, Fuji, which was a mainstay of their fanatical Shintoism) would have broken their will to fight. Another set of unknowns.

• Third, yet another group advocated using (conventional, but still stupendous) blockbuster bombs to kill the Emperor, believed by the Shintoists to be a god and the direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu. We knew where he was and how to do it. Yet even in the firebombings of Tokyo, as much care as possible had been taken to avoid bombing the Emperor's palace, even though Japanese air defence had been pulled back from the cities, and was being reserved for the defense of Kyushu. Why did we prefer to leave untouched an emperor who was just as guilty as Tojo and the militarists, and yet annihilate a hundred thousand of his battered civilian subjects whose power and culpability were far less? Yet another set of unknowns.

I would even point out that fighting women and children who are attacking you with IED's (which is something we face increasingly in Jihad World) is morally justified; but blowing civilians up in their homes, groceries, shoe-shops, schools and churches (including Nagasaki Cathedral, which was the focal point of the second atomic bombing) is not.

It is not realistic, nor historically plausible, to imagine that killing people indiscriminately from 30,000 feet did not do much damage to the souls of American soldiers. I am convinced it damaged the souls of millions and millions of people, both in the USA and around the world, by establishing consequentialism as an almost unopposable "principle" of action. It provided the world with a stunning practical demonstration that innocent life is not at all considered involate, even by allegedly "Christian" nations; and that one may always kill the innocent, by wholesale lots, if one has a good enough reason.

The spiritual fruits of this can be found in the moral cynicism and nihilism which gave us 50,000,000 abortions--- an ongoing massacre comparable to least 400 self-inflicted Hiroshimas; we may also be tutored in spiritual consequences by nuclear-armed mujahideen, who will probably wreak their quid pro quo in our own lifetime, or that of our children.

They will be glad to make a flambeau of nations which have spread moral relativism, abortion and sexual perversion as major cultural exports around the world; but we won't like it quite so well.

[Cvengr]

"...if the cops did their due diligence of trying, however unsuccessfully, to employ only a limited and rational use of force."

This is completely false.

It is not the position of law enFORCEment to try, judge and sentence whom shall be arrested and taken into custody, either by deadly force or coercion.

The executive is to exercise force to preserve law and order. Frequently the best defense is a good offense in modern firepower and small unit tactics. No LEO would be guilty of murder if placed in a situation where criminal lawlessness is underway and use of deadly force is authorized and his duty is to enforce the law. As part of his rules of engagement he might issue verbal orders to control the public behavior as an arrest, but if not obeyed, he would be authorized to use deadly force and not be encumbered to judge if maybe the criminal really might be a nice guy if given more grace.

A convenient check on this thinking is to consider how you would expect the innocent to respond to your actions if you invaded another person's home, or store, with friends in a coordinated assault, and began looting. My natural expectation would be for somebody to not only stop me, but possibly shoot me for even being there.

[Mrs. Don-o]

There seems to be a misunderstanding here. I never said that law enforcement's job is to try, judge and sentence whom shall be arrested and taken into custody, either by deadly force or coercion.

(Is that what you thought I said? Yikes.)

What I said was that there would be no moral guilt imputed to LEO's who tried to employ a limited, rationally proportioned use of force in a flash-mob looting situation, even if people were collaterally harmed or even killed.

I was making a distinction between inadvertent (accidental, unintended) fatal harm to bystanders, which would not be murder on the LEO'spart, vs. the hypothetical decision to carpet bomb the whole neighborhood indiscriminately, killing all its inhabitants, which would be murder.

I must not have expressed that clearly enough.

[mojito]

Your position comes down to believing that the use of nuclear weapons, because of their unique and terrible destructive power, constitutes a war crime. Anscombe used the same argument when she opposed awarding Truman an honorary degree at Oxford. She and you call him a murderer. I disagree.

I believe that the Japanese forfeited the distinctions which underlay just war theory niceties such as noncombatants, civilians, innocents, or whatever other word you might choose, because of the political ideals of the regime and the kind of war they fought. God may have viewed some of them as innocents; the President of the United States does not have such a luxury. Further, the Japanese leadership was warned, albeit obliquely, of what may lay in store for them if they continued the conflict, but it was a warning that was ignored. Finally, Truman's sworn obligations were to the lives of his countrymen, not to theories of jus bello.

Anscombe always claimed that she was not a pacifist, but her actions show differently. She loudly and openly opposed confronting Hitler, because it didn't quite fit in with her theory of how a war should be conducted. She had a remarkably subtle mind, but she was a very stupid woman. Fortunately, the war was conducted by Churchill, and not an Oxford professor of philosophy.

I think that's about all I have to say on the subject. You may have the last word.

[Mrs. Don-o]

It’s not the “nuclear” in nuclear weapons, precisely, that constitutes the problem. The design details are just a technicality. The real point is that targeting innocent lives is morally prohibited, not by Oxonians but by God, whether the instrument is a bomb, abortion, or a baseball bat.

You stray into a category error, I think, when you speak of the Japanese as having forfeited the relevant moral distinctions. We are speaking of human dignity, which the Christian West in general, and the U.S. political philosophy in particular (as exemplified by our founding documents) recognizes as being innate and God-given, not something conferred by a Theory, a Constitution or a Contract, and sot something that can be revoked by a President or a God-Emperor.

That God-Emperor, by the way, Hirohito, was a man who had some real power and responsibility for the blood-hurricane that was WWII. Some US strategists --- rightly, I think ---advocated using big, conventional blockbuster bombs to kill him. We knew where he was and we knew how to do it. Yet even in the firebombings of Tokyo, as much care as possible was taken to avoid bombing the Emperor's palace, even though Japanese air defence had been pulled back from the cities, and was being reserved for the defense of Kyushu.

Why did we prefer to leave untouched a homicidal Emperor who was just as guilty as Tojo and the top military staff, and yet annihilate a hundred thousand of his battered civilian subjects whose power and culpability were far less, in some cases vanishingly so?

Alongside the crime of indiscriminate lethal force against civilians, is the crime of insufficient force, of culpable omission: the crime of non-use of overwhelming power to decapitate the Japanese military, political and ideological leadership, starting with the God-Emperor. He needed a well-directed blockbuster or a public hanging.

If you have any documentation of Anscombe being “opposed to confronting Hitler,” I would like to see it. She was a 20-year-old undergraduate in 1939, and wrote nothing that I know of during WWII except her brief essay "The Justice of the Present War Examined", a statement against the policy of carpet-bombing. She withdrew it quickly from circulation when the Catholic Bishop of Birmingham warned her that it would be misinterpreted as a statement against the war per se.

Everything Anscombe wrote on the subject through the 1950’s --- that I have seen --- either defends or assumes the position that the war against Hitler was just, while consistently maintaining that direct massacres of civilians are not legitimate acts of war.

She argued against pacifism in the 1960’s, when Bertrand Russell and his posse were putting together the CND --- a movement she conspicuously refused to support because of its leftist and pacifist elements. (But if you have other information, I need to see it.) Stupid she was not.

Thanks, mojito, for the thoughts you’ve put in writing here. Neither your remarks nor mine exhaust this subject, but maybe between us we’ve pushed things a little further toward clarity.