Delchiante:
Are you completely comfortable with the deaths of so very many women, children, disabled at Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I understand the rationalizations of speeding the surrender without having to slug it out, inch by inch, conquering the Japanese Archipelago with perhaps a million American military casualties and probably even more Japanese civilian casualties BUT was there no intermediate path to show off to Tojo (and particularly, if possible, the all too sheltered Emperor Hirohito) the power of the atomic bomb on an offshore uninhabited or evacuated island? The normally quiet as a churchmouse Hirohito (a living god in the minds of the Shinto majority in Japan) directly ORDERED Tojo and the Japanese government to unconditionally surrender after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I suspect Hirohito would have done exactly the same if he were convinced of the power of our atomic bombs BEFORE they were dropped. In that event, many innocents would have lived.
See also the firebombing of Tokyo and of Dresden. If we had lost the war, our Army Air Corps leaders would have been the ones hanged as "war criminals." Intentionally killing innocent civilians in large numbers, if allowable at all, must be only a very last resort after all other options have been exhausted.
As to the draft, a better name would have been the Selective Slavery System (in manifest violation of the 13th Amendment which outlawed not only slavery but also "involuntary servitude).
No longer would grandstanding politicians have to convince young men to risk life and limb in service to the grandstanding politicians' cause. NO! Now they could be forced into involuntary service. Many of the young voluntarily signed up for Gulf Wars I and II without a draft because they were personally convinced of the justice for which they would fight.
Without the draft, there would either have been no VietNam War (unlikely option) or Lyndon Johnson would have prosecuted that war promptly, massively, and quite finally (far more likely option) or no one would have signed up voluntarily for service.
I despise the phony "moral equivalency" of the late and unlamented Joseph Cardinal Bernardin's "seamless garment" abomination (a rationalization for Catholics to be voting Demonrat while minimizing their guilt in doing so. I can, however, see how the gullible are taken in by it. Maybe Fr. Dan Berrigan was just gullible and let his good heart get in the way of common sense on matters military and of gummint spending.
Mrs. Don-o:
Once again, thanks for your intervention on behalf of the late Fr. Berrigan and yet more expressions of justice and common sense. God bless.
Thanks/ #65
P.S., intentionally killing innocent civilians is the moral equivalent of abortion and the very definition of murder.
For 6,000 years man has been killing and enslaving their fellow man, not living for the next life.
For 2,000 years, the gospel is to be preached, promising a world of future peace in the Kingdom, and individual peace today in world with its powers and principalities run by the enemy.
I will put it this way.
I don’t think a priest’s goal is to be on the FBI Most Wanted List.
To reply to the situation with Japan in WW2, a casualty-less demonstration of the power of the atom would not have moved Tojo. Nuking Hiroshima did not move him. Nagasaki did not, either. Only when Hirohito stepped in was unconditional surrender proffered. Absent his moment of sanity, it is unimaginable to consider the carnage in what was to be the Battle of Japan.