IMDB plot summary description for 2008 movie "Descending from Heaven"

IMDB.COM ^ | 2008 | Puffdream

[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.

[rlmorel]

If someone is lobbing nuclear weapons at our cities, are we justified in retaliating?

[Petronski]

Dresden. Hiroshima.

Not just no but hell no.

This is the kind of soft thinking from the Catholic Church on these issues that went in for the nuclear freeze in the mid-80s. Sophomoric equivocation that, thankfully, bears the tag "ecumenical" rather than "infallible."

[Petronski]

It's not OK to target innocent human flesh.

T'was not the case at Hiroshima or Dresden.

[tanknetter]

But first I have to ask: if deliberately killing an innocent person isn’t murder, what is?

There's another important question that needs to be asked along with that to get a full answer: if an innocent person is deliberately killed, who is the party responsible for the murder?

Case in point: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially "military cities", with civillian housing, war industries and military facilities all intermixed. The decision to intermix them, and therefore put innocents in the line of fire, was made by the Japanese, not the Americans/Allies.

In essence, the innocents amongst the civillian population were turned into human shields by the Japanese (not that the term existed at the time, nor that the Japanese leadership at the time was attempting to exploit innocent civillian deaths for PR advantage in the face of Allied victories).

Beyond that, the US/Allies did go out of their way to spare large-scale civillian targets that were of limited military value. The city of Kyoto, Japan, for instance was deliberately spared (struck off the A-bomb target list in fact) because it was a cultural and religious heritage center, rather than a military/industrial city.

[AmericanDave]

‘Attacking Japan with atomic bombs ended the war and saved many more lives than it took. Not merely American lives but certainly even more Japanese lives. Orders of magnitude more. The atomic bomb didn’t so much change who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but really just when and how. Add then every other metropolis in Japan. The fighting would have been bloodier and more appalling than the world had seen ever before, or frankly, since.’

I agree! And if a million more American lives were spilled invading, given the atrocities committed by the Japanese that were repressed until recent history; we would have been loathe to forgive them as a Nation.

[null and void]

I’m a bit hazy on whether Dresden was a highly militarized target.

[tanknetter]

I’m a bit hazy on whether Dresden was a highly militarized target.

Dresden is the most questionable Allied target of the war, and is deserving of it's own line of discussion.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which is where this thread started) are substantially less questionable. To the point where the crux of the most reasonable line of argument against attacking them amounts to the "unfairness" of using a new weapon that allowed one bomb dropped from one airplane to incinerate an area that would have otherwise required hundreds of bombers dropping thousands of bombs.

[null and void]

Fair enough.

I don't have any particular problem with Dresden being burned to the ground. Actions have consequences, and one consequence of trying to subjugate the world is that the world may not go along with your plan.

[tanknetter]

I don't have any particular problem with Dresden being burned to the ground. Actions have consequences, and one consequence of trying to subjugate the world is that the world may not go along with your plan.

The bombing of Dresden vs the non-bombing of Kyoto actually provides a nice counterpoint to the argument that the US nuked Japan and not Germany** because the US was racist.


(** there are a LOT of other counterpoints to this argument as well, not the least of which include that the Manhattan Project was born of a fear that Germany was trying to develop a bomb, and the fact that Germany had surrendered prior to Trinity).

[Mrs. Don-o]

Are you really saying it's OK to directly deliberately kill an innocent person if you are quite sure you have a good-enough reason?

In place of restrictive moral absolutes, it sets up an overall benefit calculus. You're willing to adopt this as a principle?

Come to think of it, in almost every instance where an innocent person was killed, the person doing it thought he/she/they had a good enough reason.

It sure puts a different perspective on jihadi violence. "With just a limited number of subway bombings, and the like, we can intimidate wide sectors (think Eurabia) into adopting Shari'a law without continent-wide war, thus saving tens of millions of lives. This is just and compassionate! Allah Akhbar!"

And some domestic homicides: Knock off unpleasant grandpa. Estate and life insurance are a boon to two adult children and four grandchildren. One man dies. Six people benefit. A sensible calculation.

And some personal medical decisions. A mother who is the breadwinner of her family is unexpectedly pregnant. It's a complex situation, but she has to calculate what will be most workable in the long run for everybody. She decides to sacrifice the baby for the sake of the overall interests of her family. Mama Akhbar.

I know this is grotesque and you would not agree with it, but apparently it all depends upon the sincere good- enough reason of the person who has to make the decision?

Or... what?

[null and void]

If German graphite had just a little less boron in it, Germany could well have decided that building an A-Bomb was possible.

Probably no more than a thimbleful’s worth of boron made all the difference in the world.

[Mrs. Don-o]

If somebody kills your baby, can you kill their baby? You tell me.

[rlmorel]

You didn’t answer my question. If nuclear weapons are being used on you, can you use them back?

[Mrs. Don-o]

Hm. I don't know if the New Testament is of particular interesting to you (not a jab there: I just mean I don't know you) but here's something interesting from John 11, starting at v. 47:

47 Then the chief priests and the Pharisees called a meeting of the Sanhedrin. What are we accomplishing? they asked. Here is this man performing many miraculous signs.

48 If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.

49 Then one of them, named Caiaphas, who was high priest that year, spoke and said, You know nothing at all!

50 Do you not realise that it is better for one man to die than for the whole nation to perish?

[Mrs. Don-o]

Petronius, you don't know what you're talking about here. This solemn judgment against "target = city bombing" was not cooked up by some lefty American Bishops in the 1980's. This was an Ecumenical Council making an authoritative moral declaration in agreement with Popes and Doctors of the Church going back at least to Aquinas. It is parallel to the statement in the same document that "Abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes."

Ironically, it was most strongly supported by Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, who was was an ultraconservative even by pre-council standards. He addressed the 200 bishops and theologians hammering out the working document, Schema XIII, which came to be known as Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

Ottaviani, said to have been the least popular bishop among the council fathers because of his traditionalist views, rose to defend Schema XIII and to urge its acceptance against the efforts of some French and American bishops to weaken the text. Ottaviani was given the longest and loudest ovation of the council, and Gaudium et Spes was accepted resoundingly.

If the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World has no moral authority, the Catholic Church has no moral authority.

There are any number of FReepers we run into in the Religion Forum who would gleefully agree with that, but I wouldn't have thought to hear it from a Catholic.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"T'was not the case at Hiroshima or Dresden."

Are you saying that shocking the Japanese nation with the obliteration of a city as such was no part of the intention?

[Ramius]

Of course it depends on the person making the decision. It always does. Different people will come to different answers.

I think we are confusing principle with opinion. The principle is that murder is wrong. Yet there remain certain justifiable homicides.

Justification is an opinion.

I have an opinion. You have an opinion. God has an opinion. Sadly we can’t always plumb the mind of the Lord beyond praying to end up right. Where opinions differ we rely on the law and judges and juries. And sometimes armies.

One could argue that the first decision to go to war is to condemn the innocent to death. It is a certainty that fully innocent persons will die. The decision to go to war must be justified just like any pull of a single trigger must be.

Principles are of course a guide and make whole categories of questions easy to answer. But they may not be sufficiently precise to winnow between other more agonizing choices. Sometimes even not deciding, is deciding.

One way to justify an act is by measuring the cost of doing it against the cost of *not* doing it. Keep in mind too that both of these costs are mere estimates since nobody knows the future. It’s a guess at what’s right: A willingness to be judged in hindsight. A willingness, more to the point, to stand before the Lord and be able to say you did what you honestly believed to be right.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"There's another important question that needs to be asked along with that to get a full answer: if an innocent person is deliberately killed, who is the party responsible for the murder?"

This is a good point: If a target has civilian areas and military targets intermixed, there can be another layer of responsibility and judgment, as you said. See my post at #50.

However, and acknowledging what you said in this post, the relevant decision-makers made a choice to develop and then use a weapon which was intrinsically indiscriminate: a WMD which had no possibility of even the (crudely imperfect) degree of precision which the US Army Air Corps preferred to use in Europe (in contrast to the RAF, which was far more oriented toward carpet-bombing.)

I believe the position of the U.S. Army Air Corps in Europe was far more morally justified.

If bombers using conventional bombs had been deployed to obliterate the 2nd Army Headquarters and other MAJOR military targets in HIroshima, and these efforts sparked a firestorm that took out half the city, the casualties might have been comparable, but in terms of intentionality the operation could have withstood candid moral scrutiny.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower: "In 1945 ... , Secretary of War Stimson visited my headquarters in Germany, [and] informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act....

"During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and second because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.

"It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.' (Quote found HERE, with others just as thought-provoking.)

Eisenhower reiterated in a 1963 Newsweek interview that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing”.

If terrorism is the massacre of innocents to break the will of rulers, how will 20 - 30 other nuclear-armed nations today view Hiroshima and Nagasaki? As a useful precedent? God help us.

[Petronski]

Petronius, you don't know what you're talking about here.

If you are in fact addressing me, I will tell you in no uncertain terms that you are wrong.

[Petronski]

Are you saying that shocking the Japanese nation with the obliteration of a city as such was no part of the intention?

You're changing your criteria now. "No part?"