The ethics of Hiroshima

[Doc63]

[Tannin]

[Mugwump]

[HAL]

Do you experience any effects of global warming there?

[Mugwump]

[David]

[Tannin]

OK David. Seeing as you are now (to some extent) agreeing with me, we had better declare half time and change ends. I shall now argue that the atomic bombs were war crimes.

[David]

[Tannin]

There are two main weaknesses that scoundrel Tannin's two-faced defence of the American murderers. One is obvious, the other more subtle. First the obvious one.

The Allies repeatedly made peace overtures towards Japan, but in terms which, realistically, the Japanese government was never going to accept.

The best-known version of the Allied position is the Potsdam Declaration of early July 1945. This was very late in the day - only a few weeks before Hiroshima - but it was essentially a rehash of previous declarations with little by way of major change. It's worth quoting an abridged version of the Wikipedia summary:

[Tannin]

Second, the more subtle weakness in Tannin's argument. The history of western involvement with Japan.

The way I learned it in school, Japan was an insular, inward-looking society which totally ignored the outside world for hundreds of years. (This is in fact true. It was even illegal to own a ship of any kind apart from small boats for fishing.) Then the Americans turned up with battleships and shot the crap out of various Japanese coastal cities until the Emperor agreed to let them do whatever they wanted. (This is not true. It was a good deal more complex than that and it wasn't just the Americans, but it's close enough to the truth to be a decent working fiction. Japan was turned upside down by unwanted foreign contact and wound up having a 15-year civil war as a pretty direct result of it. Foreigners used their overwhelming naval power to ride roughshod over the Japanese and humiliate the entire nation. Foreigners, for example, were not subject to Japanese law - on one famous occasion, the British shelled an entire city, razing it to the ground and killing god only knows how many unsuspecting citizens in response to an incident involving one British citizen who broke Japanese law and was punished for it the same way any Japanese citizen would have been. The law was a monumentally bad one, to be sure, but that's not the point.)

The key take-home fact here is that Japan was both threatened and humiliated by the west. At that point, the Japanese decided that they couldn't beat the giant colonial powers, so they would join them. Almost overnight, Japan created a modern navy from scratch (an incredible achievement) and a strong army as well. The navy was modeled on the Royal Navy, and (with the help of hired British officers) quickly developed a culture of efficiency, consummate seamanship, and honour in the play hard-play fair tradition.

The army was modeled on the German army and perhaps for that reason, perhaps for others, became a very different and much nastier animal. (I know much less about the Japanese Army than I do about the Navy. I must read up on it as it is really the key to all that followed.)

By the closing years of the 19th Century, Japan was ready to make its mark. It began by beating up the vastly larger but weak and disorganised China. To the surprise of everyone except the Japanese, they defeated China easily. The Navy fought well and hard, the Army fought well and with a touch of the savagery it would later become infamous for.

Next, Japan took on Russia, and to the great surprise of the rest of the world (and even to their own surprise and delight) beat them pointless. The Navy in particular was well-led and vastly superior.

From this time on, Japan involved itself in a series of wars of aggression, all aimed at carving out an empire. The west largely turned a blind eye. The west was really much more interested in European power struggles and Japan only figured as a bit player. England formed a naval alliance with Japan early in the 20th Century, which allowed England to focus on the main game (German naval power), and Japan to feel safe in case of war with Russia and China. The Japanese were perfectly capable of beating either one of those two, and indeed already had beaten each of them once, but were not confident of beating both at once.

In the First World War, Japan did just enough to comply with the letter of its alliance with England, and took full measure of this opportunity to snap up various German territorial possessions in the Pacific. Nevertheless, the Japanese Navy freed up vital English forces in the Pacific for use elsewhere, and made a small but important contribution in Europe by providing a squadron of destroyers for service in the Mediterranean, where the U-boat menace was significant.

After the Great War, Japan continued to expand, mainly in China - and by "expand" I mean "invade ruthlessly and exploit all gains without compunction". The friendship between Japan and England had soured by this time. Meanwhile, America followed a senseless policy which amounted to turning a blind eye, making threats, and dropping various insults. The Japanese problem in Asia grew and grew, but America failed to address it and indeed probably fanned the flames by consistently treating Japan with thinly veiled contempt. If you asked me to come up with a policy by which America could have made matters worse than it did, I don't think I could imagine one.

In short, the West, with its arrogance, its greed, and above all its contempt goaded Japan into its actions and did little or nothing to restrain them. Given that the West bears so much responsibility for sewing the seeds of the Pacific War, it seems only fair to also assign the West some responsibility for the casualties which resulted from that war. This is why Hiroshima and Nagasaki should be regarded as war crimes.

PS: it will probably be useful to re-read my previous post in the light of this one.

[Tannin]

Your turn, David.

[Wokko]

America also imposed an industrial trade embargo on Japan while still supposedly 'Neutral' that led Japan on the path to Pearl Harbour.

[Tannin]

Indeed they did, Wokko. It was another example of their inability to find the right mix of responses. They seemed to excel at handing out carrot where a stick was needed, and then reaching for the stick when a little bit of carrot was in order. Having said that, by the time of the embargo it was almost certainly too late: Japan was set on war by that stage, it just a matter of who else with and when.

[Jezza]

[Tannin]