Posted on 03/11/2008 3:41:58 PM PDT by DFG
Claude Eatherly, who flew the re-con flight which authorized the bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, spent the remainder of his life overwhelmed with guilt, made worse by being called a War Hero by everyone around him. Eatherly led a life of petty crime, passing hot checks, using stolen identification, etc. His status as a war hero made it difficult for the system to want to punish him for these "acting out" crimes, until he began to speak out in public against the atomic bomb.
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You cannot equate bombing of a city in the course of a just war with abortion.
You cannot equate bombing of a city in the course of a just war with abortion.
Yep. (This is to counteract the “nope” in the other comment)
I am against the death penalty also; but I understand you feel differently.
These are all points worthy of discussion. I’d like to consider them all. But first I have to ask: if deliberately killing an innocent person isn’t murder, what is?
In the movie Tora Tora Tora it was his plane that would radio the success code!
I did say the Rosary, BTW.
Define “Innocent”.
Not always. No.
What's "innocent"? Is it the civilians that work in a factory making war materiel? Or the people that run the lunch cart out in front of the factory? Or the children in the house near the factory?
Is it the child who unluckily happens to be in the house when we finally track down Bin Laden? Do we not bomb the house if he's not alone?
There are regrettable casualties in war. Nothing about war is clean and antiseptic. It is a dirty, filthy rotten, and sometimes utterly necessary business. It is a great many things, but it certainly isn't murder.
Paul Tibbets and others involved thought this guy was something of a con-man. No surprise that Hollywood is holding him up as a hero.
Kind of strange that you pose those questions since only in the first case are the individuals deliberately being killed, regardless of whether they are innocent. The lunch cart people and children would obviously be unintended casualties (i.e. collateral accidents).
Murder: “The crime of unlawfully killing a person especially with malice aforethought”.
That’s how my dictionary puts it.
War is, curiously enough, neither unlawful nor malicious in intent. Especially since we didn’t start it.
I don’t think it’s strange at all. Just a few examples, but they apply just as well to Hiroshima, Nagasaki... or even Dresden for that matter.
All horrible and regrettable civilian casualties made necessary by a greater strategic purpose. It’s the innocent child playing near the factory that must be bombed.
The choice of targets was, like it or not, a strategy decision. It could have been Tokyo, but it wasn’t.
There’s history and hollywood. Unfortunately, many of the great unwashed get their history from movies and TV.
I’d say the wrongful taking of an innocent life. If you bomb bad guys and others get killed I would call that just. The better our technology, the less of this.
Weren’t there innocent people in Jericho? (Joshua 2)
The Old Testament wars were quite bloody.
I not only do that, but the Catholic Church does, too.
To clarify: war against the Japanese aggressors was certainly a just war. There's no question in my mind, and I've never heard different from any moral teacher of any sort.
A war may be just in its inception (jus ad bellum) --- which was not only justified, but I'd say obligatory --- against the Imperal Japanese military --- but it must also be just in the way it is carried out.
In other words, the fact that a war was morally right to engage in, does not mean that everything done in the war has a blanket justification. Upright warfare on the part of the individual soldier and the military command, (jus in bello), is also a moral requirement.
This is very clear to most U.S. soldiers, since it is spelled out in the UCMJ: you don't do rape and pillage, you don't zero in on non-military targets (as the jihadis typically do) and you don't massacre civilians.
If you do such things, they are war crimes, even in the midst of an otherwise just war.
This is not a pacifist argument. I am not a pacifist and I do not defend pacifism.
I am also NOT saying that no collateral loss of life can be justified. It can be.
In a war like WWII, a whole lot of collateral deaths could be justified, because a lot of the Japanese war industries and military assets were located very close to, or in the midst of, residential districts where you had thousands of people living in highly flammable wooden houses, and any time you went for a miliary target with incendiaries, you could foresee setting large swaths of the city on fire.
I know that; it's collateral civlian deaths; and (within limits) it can be justified.
What I'm arguing is that if you're targeting a city as such -- as the Council said, if the act of war is "directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants" --- that's not collateral damage, it's intentional destruction of noncombatants. And as such it is not a justifiable act.
The intentional choice of indiscriminate slaughter as a means to an end is, in the words of the Council, "a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation."
I didn’t yet. But thanks for the reminder. I will as soon as I sign off.
A "hero" he never was...
When has so pure an example ever happened?
In a war context, that would be non-combatants: people who are not military, and are not directly contributing to the war effort via the weapons industry.
I'm not saying it's always clear who's combatant and who isn't: the jihadis are particularly nasty because they deliberately use civilans as military assets and as shields. Nevertheless, as a general rule the farmer farms, the mother mothers, the combatant is involved in combat. Even in Iraq, a very difficult area, our soldiers have often been protective of the "farmer" and "mother" --- the civilians --- to a heroic degree. Which is why I respect our soldiers, and am proud that my 18-year-old son has signed up for the Marine Corps.
So you see, I am not defending pacifism here. See my note to Petronski at #36.
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