Posted on 04/11/2002 2:15:10 PM PDT by H.R. Gross
The headline was "100,000 People Perished, but Who Remembers?" Appearing in The New York Times on March 14, it perfectly captured the essence of a powerful report from Tokyo about the forgotten victims of March 10, 1945, when, as the Times correspondent Howard French wrote, "a fleet of American B-29 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of napalm-filled bombs on Tokyo."
Sixteen square miles of the city went up in flames and 100,000 perished in a single night. Although scores of similar incendiary raids on Japanese cities followed, their memory, even in Japan, seems to have been obliterated by the mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Among one group, however, the memory was not lost: philosophers, theologians and military and political leaders concerned with the ethics of warfare. They have long considered those raids leading examples of how a well-established moral principle, forbidding direct attacks on civilian populations, collapsed.
The breakdown began earlier, with the British decision to terror bomb German cities in reprisal for the London blitz, and ended in the nuclear strategy of massive retaliation. To the defense that direct and indiscriminate attacks on civilians can ultimately end wars sooner and thus spare lives, most moralists have replied that the end does not justify the means.
Recently "who remembers?" has become a question pertinent to debates over the war in Afghanistan and more recently in the Middle East. Those who do remember can only blink their eyes at the fierce charges and countercharges last year over incidents involving Afghan civilian deaths numbered in two digits. At the same time, television documentaries on biological warfare were showing how only a few decades ago American war planners (and Soviet ones as well) were devising weapons and strategies that would have indiscriminately wiped out civilians by the tens of millions.
Determining the numbers and causes of civilian casualties in Afghanistan as precisely as possible is important, but it already seems indisputable that the United States military not only rejected direct attacks on civilians but also strove mightily to avoid what is antiseptically termed "collateral damage" — and that this represents a major reversal of earlier attitudes.
When opponents of American actions in Afghanistan, as well as in the Persian Gulf and Kosovo, refuse to acknowledge any progress in this area, it suggests that their concern about the fate of civilians cloaks an opposition springing fundamentally from other sources.
That is a complaint of Michael Walzer, the political theorist whose widely used study "Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations" (Basic Books) strongly defended the principle that civilians should be immune from direct attack.
Writing in the spring issue of Dissent magazine, Mr. Walzer challenges the unqualified demand that any response to the terrorism of Sept. 11 had to avoid endangering civilians. This demand, he says, was simply "intended to make fighting impossible."
"I haven't come across any arguments," he writes, "that seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war could be fought without putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk might be permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths.
"All these were legitimate issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf wars," he continues, but not issues really confronted by demonstrators chanting "Stop the bombing."
Mr. Walzer is ultimately more interested in addressing left-wing attitudes toward the United States than in the soundness of current moral debates about war and peace.
But the integrity of moral discourse about warfare is surely threatened when concern about civilians ceases to have much to do with what is happening on the ground but instead becomes an instrument to support a prior condemnation of all war, or at least all American war. It begins to look like the military is taking the principle of civilian immunity more seriously than many war critics.
On the other hand, one can say that it is easy for the armed forces to agree that the end doesn't justify the means now that smart bombs and other technological advances in weaponry have supplied new means for discriminating between military and civilian targets. What will the United States do if it faces a situation where these new options don't work?
That is exactly the challenge posed by the suicide bombings in the Middle East. A few have been aimed at military targets but most, like the Netanya hotel bombing on the first night of Passover, have been as pure examples of directly attacking civilians as one could conceive.
Defenders of these actions maintain that these are the only effective means that Palestinians possess in the face of overwhelming Israeli military power. What is more, defenders of suicide bombers — "martyrs" would be the language they prefer — argue that they have still not caused as many civilian casualties as the "collateral damage" of Israeli military actions. Those defenders would be incensed by the idea that their small-scale actions, however lethal, represent the same kind of immorality as the destruction of 100,000 lives in a raging inferno.
Those are not things said out loud in Europe and the United States. But they are tempting thoughts to those who identify strongly with Palestinian frustrations and perhaps even to some who feel that a greater balance of power between Palestinians and Israelis could actually force a settlement.
The questions posed by that temptation could not be more basic: Is the moral line against directly attacking civilians going to be crossed once again to fit the circumstances? Does the end justify the means? Who remembers?
NECO EOS OMNES, DEUS SUUS AGNOSCET!"
Yes. In fact, that's one of the reasons that war crimes should be tried only by military courts-- they understand the rules. I don't believe that ANY Nazi or Japanese commander was tried for any act of legitimate combat, or for ordering that act. Weren't all the Nurenburg trials about Nazi atrocities and concentration camps?
Let's go further than some arbitrary low level point at looking at 'morality" and what happens with wars. Let's go ALL the way. And then maybe learn from it instead of always doing the same things that lead to wars in general.
Amnesia between wars is most heinous. War is PROFITABLE, that's why most of them happen. "Ideology" is always the scam ruse the high level profiteers use to pull off their scams for their profits.
I suppose you can point us all to a link to copies of those documents? As I understand it, those rail lines were not bombed as a strictly military matter. They weren't aiding the Nazi war effort, so they were very low priority targets. Now I would have bombed them anyway, but it's quite a different matter to imply that the "politicians" and even the generals really wanted more Jews and others to be killed in the camps. Most, but not all, didn't even know that the camps were anything more than concentration or relocation centers, and were quite happy to have Hitler waste resources on moving people there, and guarding them, that could have been on line against the allies. Some did know or at least suspect what was really going on. Others had been told by espapees and such, but thought it Zionist Propaganda, on a par with tales of German soldiers bayoneting babies in the Great War, which were untrue. Some may have even thought the "detainees" safer in the camps than in German cities and those under their control, which the allies were bombing day and night.
Happening in Venezuela even as I type this.
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the other hand, did bring the war to an end. The did have an appreciable effect on the war and, because they saved countless more lives than were lost, they can even be seen as humanitarian. Not so good if you happened to be in Hiroshima, but very good if you were going to have to attack or defend the invasion beaches in Japan.
Incidently, I don't think nukes would have the same effect today, except possibly in Western countries. Abombs were a surprise. Now people are used to the idea and might not surrender just because you knocked out a city or two.
bttt
U.S. and British conventional bombing forced the enemy air forces to take a defensive stance, and then destroyed them in air to air combat. As for the morality of specifically attacking civilians, World War II bombing was so inexact that bombs had to be aimed at extremely large targets, mainly cities, in which there were both civilians and military. Today the U.S. can bomb so exactly that few civilians are killed. That's good, of course. On the other hand, I can't condemn my father's generation for killing civilians, when all human life is equally sacred. A mother's sorrow is no less for her conscript son than for her boy in college. Killing either boy is tragic, but may or may not be an evil act depending upon whether the killing is done in furtherance of an evil cause. The idea that civilian life is more sacred than military is modern nonsense and borders on the unpatriotic. Wasn't the crash into the Pentagon fully as evil as the crashes into the WTC? As for condemnation of bombing in general, allowing German bombing of Britian, and Japanese bombing of China, to go unanswered would have been a strategy of defeatism. And it would have meant our troops in the field being massacred by air to ground fire from undefeated axis air forces.
Unconditional surrender has been proven effective in that the Germans and Japanese are no longer militaristic. If we had insisted on unconditional surrender at the end of WWI, might WWII have been averted? Hitler said publicly, over and over, that the reason he started WWII was because Germany had never been defeated in WWI. In war it's necessary to defeat the enemy sufficiently so they will know they were defeated.
It all depends on your historical perspective. As late as Shakespeare's time, putting a city to the sword for forcing one go through the trouble of taking it was acceptable. Genocide as the natural outcome of losing a war goes back to prehistory. Check out the Bible. In fact, there are those who think we h.sapiens are responsible for the deliberate extinction of h.neanderthalis.
Therefore, the real question is not why the distinction between civilians and combatants became so blurred in the second half of the 20th Century. The question should be how and why did Western Civilization manage to maintain this distinction for about 500 years.
I read some historian (forget his name) who hypothesized that one must make the women and older men suffer before a nation admits defeat. Most young males are superfluous and thus expendable. Women and the successful "alpha males" are what perpetuate the species. Make THEM suffer and the nation figures out that this war thang ain't workin...
...or when the Jews get tired of getting blown up and all move to America.
No, the peacenicks are the first ones to cut a deal with this or that tyrant because their view is that all people are basically good except for the injustices done to them.
The peacenicks end up in the concentration camps anyway but not for lack of licking the jackboots of the despots they fully expect to feed them.
Sorry, I think they -the high level fatcats- knew full well and play acted at "surprise and shock" after the war. Exactly the same as these fatcats progeny are now ignoring the same thing going on in china. It's bad for profits to ever acknowledge that "bad stuff" is going on with any thug you are "doing business" with. Same as what's going on in russia, putin accepted SLAVES last year as payment of a debt from kim in north korea, but he is our new ally.
sorry part deux, try it on the kids, I'm too old now to fall for government lies. fool me once, your fault, fool me 5,689 times, it's my fault. I stopped being fooled by revisionist history and believing in government propoganda quite a long time ago, main reason I'm on freepers and post here "decades-and generations-of past government abuse, and lies". Government lies so much and teaches it as true facts history in schools it's pathetic. We usually find out many years later, when it doesn't matter, but in the meantime, they keep on lying, because they got a formula that works. Lie about the present, keep lying long enough so the ones involved forget about it eventually. They did it 100 years ago, 60 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, they are lying today, and will continue to do so.
One picked at random off the page.
good luck, happy surfing
The consequences of all out war are horrific and terrible ... but sometimes they must be born if we, and if liberty are to survive.
With the Germans and the Japanese, you had whole populations that were willingly, and in many cases, enthusiatically, contributing to the war effort by supplying materiel, munitions and the instruments of war to their soldiers. Those soldiers were committed enemies and the end of their intentions would have been to destroy our way of life and occupy our nation and then treat us like they were doing the peoples of Europs, Southeast Asia, China and any place else they defeated and over ran.
If you have the means to inflict severe damage on those manufacturing lines, if you have the means to break the will of the people supporting the war effort against you ... do you do it? What if you know that if you don't do it that the odds of your very survival are brought into serious doubt and question?
That's exactly what the issue is with such situations.
We are seeing the beginning, or perhaps just noticing the conditions where whole peoples are moving towards the same mindsets, or in some cases are already there.
I believe in such situations, as horrific as it is, as terrible as the decisions that are associated with it are ... that to end such an all out conflict between nations and cultures quickly and resoultely by inflicting as much damage on the war making capability of the enemy as possible is both justified and imperative ... even if that means that the civilians who are working in that capacity, indeed who are the substance of that capacity, are destroyed.
I pray we don't have to make such horrible decisions again, but I believe we are seeing the beginings of it. May God bless us to avoid it ... and if not, may God bless the right and allow liberty to survive in the world, and may He grant that we can end it quickly.
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