Bret Stephens, a frequent opinion columnist for the Wall Street Journal has essentially
freed politicians of both parties to say anything they like—no matter how
outrageous, offensive or unfactual—knowing they will not have made the most
embarrassing statement of the decade. That honor now goes to Bret, who isn’t
really all that much of a maverick, for writing a piece in praise of the
dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 70 years ago, under orders
of U.S. President Harry S. Truman.
Stephens ends
the piece with the sentence that also forms its headline: “And thank God for the atom bomb.”
How offensive can you get? It’s absolutely incomprehensible
that someone would want his or her deity to bless nuclear weapons. The
implication is that the world is better off because a large and growing number
of nations can destroy mass numbers of people in seconds, poisoning hundreds of
thousands of others with radiation-based diseases that will continue the
killing for decades to come.
The article starts from the point of view of a young
American soldier—later a writer of cultural history—who remembers his relief to
learn that he didn’t have to become part of a Japanese invasion force. Stephens
uses this anecdote by Paul Fussell to suggest that the best justification for the atom
bomb is that it saved the lives of American soldiers. But as he admits himself
later in the article, no one really knows if dropping the bombs saved lives, of
if so, how many. Stephens stacks his speculation with numbers and ideas that
are supposed to make us conclude that Truman did the right thing, because he
spared an estimated 7,000 American causalities a week.
But before Stephens makes his case, he first has to insult
the hundreds of thousands of people who join in anti-nuclear rallies or comment
on the horrors visited on the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His statement
is so shameful that I wonder if he or any of the Journal editors read the paragraph: “In all the cant that will pour forth this week to mark
the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the bombs—that the U.S. owes the victims of the bombings an
apology; that nuclear weapons ought to be abolished; that Hiroshima is a
monument to man’s inhumanity to man; that Japan could have been defeated in a
slightly nicer way…” A desire to end war is cant. The realization that
nuclear weapons are too horrific to use is cant. The idea that it was inhumane
to incinerate 240,000 civilians by pushing two buttons a few days apart is
cant. The factual record of Japan’s willingness to end the war before we
dropped the first atom bomb is cant.
The only thing cant is Stephen’s reasoning—he can’t seem to understand
that certain acts are so terrible that there can’t ever be a reason to justify
committing them.
The basic premise behind Stephens’
argument is that in wartime, we can justify all actions, no matter how
intrinsically inhumane they are. Stephens and the Journal’s editorial board did support the use of illegal torture by
the Bush II Administration, but they also wanted to invade Iraq to prevent
Saddam Hussein from unleashing what turned out to be imaginary “weapons of mass
destruction” on the region. And the fact that Bashar Assad used chemical
weapons on his own people sent Stephens and the Journal into a freaking frenzy.
The best I can determine is that Stephens believes that
extreme acts of inhumane brutality should never be allowed unless they are
committed by the United States.
Stephen ends the article by stating that it was the specific
horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that compelled Japan to develop a less martial
society and praises the United States for forgiving Japan its sins and helping
the land of the rising sun to rebuild. Thus instead of wringing our hands for
living in the land that committed the single two most ghastly and immoral acts
in human history (the Holocaust, the death toll from British imperialism and
the forced starvation of the Ukraine all consisting of a series of acts), we
should instead pat ourselves on the back to celebrate Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And instead of associating these gruesome acts
with an “insipid pacifism salted with an
implied anti-Americanism,” Stephens believes that we should learn the
lessons of having a strong leader willing to do what it takes and not feel
guilty about it.
Usually I spend some time on the anniversaries of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki apologizing for my country. This year I will apologize not just
because we dropped the bomb but also because apologists for nuclear destruction
still exist and thrive in the United States.
No comments:
Post a Comment