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?
These peaceniks are the next generation of "cattle" who will be the first in line when the dictators start lining people up for the boxcar ride to the extermination camp.
I must say that the idea of the Palestinians having equal military power with the Israelis is a nightmare to contemplate. Does anyone think they would have failed to used "the bomb" if they had it? Whew, this is a chaming thought that this writer must have overlooked to about the same degree he missed the other points in his commentary.
I'm really sick and tired of people trying to spin current Israeli actions as attacks on innocent civilians. Does anyone think the men holed up with Arafat are innocents? Does anyone think that those holed up in Bethleham are innocent civilians? Do they think that all people who are shooting at the Israelis and killed, are simply innocents?
This is a cock and bull pipe dream. I'm tired of hearing it fronted as fact.
Thanks for the post.
When I was in high school, the local police department would display several totalled autos in front of the school each spring about prom time as a warning against drinking and driving. I think the impact saved lives.
All high school students should visit an exact replica of a concentration camp as General Eisenhower saw it in 1945. The victims could be wax figures, but the smell and the sound of suffering could be added by Steven Spielberg's buddies.
I'm not going to say whether or not I agree with this.
I just have one question: If the same were done to us, would you accept this as a valid defense from an enemy officer at a war crimes trial? Would you acquit an enemy officer who ordered such attacks against us?
Please don't take this as an attack on you. I'm just curious if this cuts both ways.
If other freepers have opinions on this, I'd like to hear them.
The A-Bomb was our last-ditch effort to avoid having to do this.
Check out the Autumn 1997 issue of Military History Quarterly for the article by Norman Polmar and Thomas Allen.
You can read a discussion of the implications of our prospective genocide of Japan by going to Google Advanced Groups search at:
http://groups.google.com/advanced_group_search
and do a search for the "Exact Phrase" A Study of the Possible Use of Toxic Gas in Operation Olympic.
The Emperor of Japan ordered a surrender because he knew we really would kill all of them.
He realized that when he left his palace after our first big fire-bombing raid on Tokyo to inspect the piles of charred, smoking bodies in the streets, and the piles of boiled corpses in what had become totally dry rivers, streams and ponds. A Torch to the Enemy by Martin Caidin.
Japan surrendered because the United States committed deliberate atrocities and war crimes (our fire-bomb and nuclear raids really were that) to shock Japan into surrender. We gave them two alternatives - genocide or surrender. And we posed a credible threat of genocide because we had already started doing that to Japan.
The Japanese gave orders about the same time to commit genocide on all the Allied civilians they could catch in occupied China, the East Indies, etc. IMO they'd have killed several million people a week for months - say 50 million people, about as many as had died in all of World War Two before then. Not counting the 20-30 million Japanese who would have died of gas attack, starvation, disease, napalm and ground fighting during the US invasion.
The Imperial Japanese Army was as evil an institution as the SS, and more lethal.
American fire-bombing attacks on Japan, and nuking of two of its cities, saved at least a 100-150 lives, mostly Chinese but including 20 million plus Japanese, for every Japanese who died in the fireboming and nukes.
So atrocities, war crimes and terror have a place in statecraft. The way to not lose one's moral place is to not start doing those, but when the other side does, finish it, finish it fast, and win.
The United States has known this for a long time - it's in the institutional DNA of our armed forces. From page 510 of The Journal of Military History's April 2002 issue (the current one):
"The Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field, more commonly referred to as General Orders 100, were first issued in 1863 at the height of the Civil War and reissued periodically to American combat forces for the next four decades. ...
...
If the opponent's citizenry, once occupied, continued to resist, ... they broke the compact and became subject to "protective retribution." Moreover, the preservation of the nation was paramount and justified the killing of armed and -- if unavoidable -- unarmed opponents, the destruction of private property, and the devastation of the enemy's countryside in the name of "military necessity."
The Israelis have been too squeamish about this, IMO, because they're, well, Jewish. But they'll get over that and do what they have to in order to win.
Sounds legit to me. All Israel has to use are remotely detonated car bombs . No Israeli needs to die or suicide himself.
I wonder what the new UN War Crimes "law" would say about that. Is it a crime against humanity to intentionally send a youngster to do something like that?
The workers in the World Trade Center were making a fortune for Uncle Sam, and helping him to project his power around the world. That attack was not a criminal matter, it was an act of war. Now we have to root out and destroy our enemy every bit as ruthlessly as they've attacked us.
But seeing as how I would be on the front lines, doing my level best to ensure that they don't come here and do that, I expect support not exacerbation of the situation by some wimp who doesn't even have the guts to put his/her own ass on the line. You can say that my years on active duty have made me cynical about most Americans and those "peacable" turds. They are the ones who tend to suck the life blood of the strong virulent men who've kept this country free.
I'm sure you would do your absolute best to prevent the same from happening to us. Please accept my thanks and gratitude for your service to our country.
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.
After 20 years of military service, I have seen the respect and support of the American populace hit highs and lows ... mostly lows. You are an example of the lows. You point the finger and draw conclusions which have no basis in fact. But your type are the parasites which always cause the downfall of the strong nations. You will follow but never lead. You are sheep who are waiting to be led to the slaughter.
Dolt .45? You're a moron if that is all you can do ... buttsniff.
"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." -Theodore Roosevelt
Or this - " The only reason we sleep soundly in our beds is because there are hard ruthless men who are ready to visit violence in the night upon those who would do us harm."
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile hoping it will eat him last." - Winston Churchill
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
"War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth fighting for is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing he cares about more than his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself." - author unknown.
Do I believe we did what was right in WW2? Yes, we did what was necessary against a regime that would've destroyed us if they could've. Are we doing what is right now? Yep, and if a few civilians get toasted in the process ... oh f*cking well, perhaps I'll feel bad for them later. Its not like they gave the WTC that much warning to evacuate civilians. If it is a people who wish to eradicate our way of life should I care about some possible innocents getting whacked? I'll guarantee you this ... I won't lose any sleep over them.
The men who serve are my brothers, and it is best summed up in the words of Shakespeare -
If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
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