Comments Elsewhere

The fact that the US government killed more Japanese by fire bombings than by atomic bombing, the fact that the US government might have instead of dropping atomic bombs invaded Japan and racked up high casualties, and the fact that the Japanese government committed atrocities like the Rape of Nanking and aggressive war maneuvers like the attack on Pearl Harbor, do nothing at all to justify the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Nothing. At. All. These non sequiturs are invoked in the desperate attempt to, in Orwell’s words, “make murder respectable.”

You cannot justify the atomic bombings morally. The attempt to do so pragmatically is a strike against pragmatism, and otherwise wrongheaded. It is a sad spectacle that Americans and others do not want to confront the massive terrorism conducted by the US government in WWII and in other conflicts. Until it becomes an uncontroversial fact that the United States has committed indefensible terrorism and war crimes, I see no hope for a major cultural shift toward peace or freedom. You must entirely renounce the obviously unjust to become a voice for justice, and if you think exterminating a hundred thousand civilians with a push of a button can ever be justified, then you have swallowed ethical collectivism whole, and all the government needs is a good enough sounding excuse and you will sign on to virtually any barbarism.