Hiroshima And Nagasaki: Contemporary Reflections
By Romi Mahajan
26 July, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Since my childhood, I have felt incredibly uneasy on August 6 and August 9. No less now as a 44-year old father, husband, political activist, and writer. In fact, in each of these incarnations, I am haunted by the dropping of Atomic Bombs in the two Japanese cities and cringe every time I hear Americans opine about nuclear weapons in Iran, Pakistan, India, or North Korea.
Because the fact remains that the United States is the only country to use Nuclear Weapons and that too against civilians; its claims to moral authority are therefore as hollow as the shells of the two cities obliterated in the summer of 1945. While I abhor nuclear weapons, I also abhor the hypocrisy of the West’s position on nukes- that they are only to be tolerated if WE have them. I for one have had enough of the line that Asian peoples aren’t as deserving as Americans.
Unfortunately, nuclear bombs have already done their ghastly work- if not on the entire world (Armageddon hasn’t happened) then certainly on our collective knowledge and culture. This is as true today as it was in 1945.
Virtually every time I talk about the events of 1945 with people I meet, their reactions are of faint interest but intense puzzlement. Why, they ask, would anyone outside of the academy spend so much energy thinking about events decades past? The conversation quickly degenerates: the technocratic ones (the ones that care more about details than outcomes) find some obscure point to discuss and the well-meaning ones issue some statement of pseudo-empathy (“it must have been horrible”), but the intolerable reactions emanate from those more educated on the War- they discuss the inevitability of the Bomb droppings, having bought into the logic that, somehow, the evisceration of two cities and the murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children “saved lives.” Others talk of wartime exigencies and remain stoic in the face of human catastrophe.
These reactions tell us more about the tensile strength of the mythological frame that we call “history” in the United States than it does about the individuals. While indeed the world progresses because of individuals who think beyond the norm and transcend their formal education, one cannot expect everyone to do so. And the more powerful the myth, the harder myth-busting is.
Especially when the myth has powerful backers and its destruction would call into question an entire system of power.
On such powerful backer of this myth was also one of its originators. In a Harper’s Magazine article in 1947, one of the most powerful men in the world, Harry L. Stimson, propounded the notion that the dropping of the atomic bombs on the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a necessary move, one meant to save lives. Stimson was Secretary of War from 1940-1945 and was widely-known to have Roosevelt’s and Truman’s ear. Ever a defender of the conduct of the Unites States government (of which he was a part for decades), Stimson felt compelled to write this article in order to set the record straight given the world-wide outrage at the destruction of the two Japanese cities. The article is articulate and has the veneer of compassion but at the core it is about redacting history in order to justify the post-War world, so tightly in the grip of the United States. His logic is self-serving, even circular: from the article,
“The decision to use the atomic bomb was a decision that brought death to over a hundred thousand Japanese. No explanation can change that fact and I do not want to gloss it over. But this deliberate, premeditated destruction was our least abhorrent choice. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put an end to the Japanese war. It stopped the fire raids, and the strangling blockade; it ended the ghastly specter of a clash of great land armies.”
For people reared on the mythology of the “Good War,” this might seem to be eminently reasonable. For me, three issues are glaring-
1. Reference to the fire raids and blockade are indeed curious. It was the United States that rained terror from the skies on the Japanese civilian population so to say that the atomic bomb put an end to fire raids is Orwellian at best. It’s akin to a person stabbing you because he thought that punching you needed to stop.
2. It presupposes that a clash of land armies (and the ensuing death and destruction) was inevitable. It was not.
3. It does not explain the destruction of Nagasaki. Even if one concedes (as I do not) that the destruction of Hiroshima was “necessary” what could possibly provoke the destruction of another city only three days later?
Stimson’s article, however, is just one of many artifacts of justification. While the country was at war with Japan, the callous and racist attitude towards Japanese civilians coupled with the desire to usher in a new world order with the most horrible weapons the world had ever seen (at once justifying billions of dollars of spending and putting the Soviets on notice that the new Sheriff was indeed in town) is the shocking part of the narrative.
The European front of World War 2 teaches us similar lessons albeit with one crucial difference. As regards the defeat of the Nazi regime, in the United States we grow up believing “we” did the work with some British and Soviet help. Nothing could be further from the truth. As historians like David Glantz have painstakingly shown, the Soviet people made by far the largest sacrifices in the war and over 85% of Wehrmacht casualties were on the Eastern front. In fact, the D-Day victories were due in large part to the fact that even during those periods, far fewer German troops faced the Anglo-American forces. As Andrew Bacevich says, “With regard to World War II…. In achieving the destruction of Nazi Germany, U.S. forces played at best a supporting role, with Stalin’s Red Army…doing the lion’s share of fighting, killing, and dying. “
The difference is not that a mythological frame was created; the difference is that the Japanese were treated with racist contempt (read John Dower’s “War without Mercy”) while the Germans were accorded the benefits of being white and Christian (though the British had different feelings. Churchill referred to the Germans as “The Hun” and presided over a merciless bombing campaign against the German civilian population.)
Much of what we believe today is a precipitate of the information we collectively used to create our belief systems in the first place. As Gar Alperovitz recognized in his seminal work on the use of the atomic bombs on Japan, myths have to be architected painstakingly.
The pressing needs of the current world call for us to deconstruct these myths, to break them apart brick by brick. We can no longer accept the unfounded and unfair assumptions of American exceptionalism and indulge in the justifications that Stimson wanted us to accept as inscrutable.
The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should thus weigh heavily on us all. History and truth matter. And so do people.
Romi Mahajan can be reached at [email protected]
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