Mitigating any sense of outrage was the unmistakable perfume of hokiness pervading the air. When I went to college, those few students who espoused virginity for religious reasons were considered benign cranks; they did not arouse any anger. Smirks, perhaps, but nothing worse. I doubt that this attitude has changed.
Nava was soon exposed as someone with a history of hoaxing, and eventually fessed up. The right must now face the fact that they have fallen for something similar to the Tawana Brawley fib. (I'd say an even better comparison goes to the classic case of Kaspar Hauser, who managed to kill himself in a staged attack.)
Some aspects of the story continue to intrigue me.
Nava belongs to something called the Anscombe society, based on the teachings of Elizabeth Anscombe, a British Catholic philosopher who gained some notoriety for opposing her nation's entry into World War II. As near as I can tell, she was not pro-Nazi, even though she denounced action against a fascist regime that had attacked her homeland.After the war, however, Anscombe assailed Truman's decision to use the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- claiming, falsely, that the Japanese had twice attempted to negotiate peace. I wonder how Nava (who, as a good conservative, no doubt supports the Iraq war) reconciles himself to these words by Anscombe:
For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder, and murder is one of the worst of human actions. So the prohibition on deliberately killing prisoners of war or the civilian population is not like the Queensbury Rules: its force does not depend on its promulgation as part of positive law, written down, agreed upon, and adhered to by the parties concerned. When I say that to choose to kill the innocent as a means to one’s ends is murder, I am saying what would generally be accepted as correct. But I shall be asked for my definition of “the innocent.” I will give it, but later. Here, it is not necessary; for with Hiroshima and Nagasaki we are not confronted with a borderline case. In the bombing of these cities it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end. And a very large number of them, all at once, without warning, without the interstices of escape or the chance to take shelter, which existed even in the “area bombing” of the German cities.I reprint these words not to open up the floor to debate over Truman's decision. (For the record, I think Truman did the right thing. Many Chinese and Koreans would agree with me, while many of my readers probably would not. Unless you really think you can tell me something I haven't heard before, let the matter rest there.)
Rather, I offer her words here to drive home the point that they apply with far greater force to our "shock and awe" attack on Iraq. Iraq never attacked us; Japan did. I think it fair to suggest that the average Japanese citizen felt a genuine reverence for the Emperor and Tojo, while the average Iraqi didn't much care for Saddam Hussein. I also think it fair to suggest that we may not want to label a civilian populace "innocent" when it offers heart-felt support for an imperialist dictatorship bent on a racist program of conquest and extermination.
So, do the conservatives of Princeton favor Anscombe's position vis-a-vis Fat Man and Little Boy? And if so, what philosophical yoga position allows them to denounce the bombing of Hiroshima while defending the continuing atrocities in Iraq?
Or is it the case that Nava likes Anscombe's don't-do-it position on fucking but doesn't like Anscombe's don't-do-it position on bombing?
Incidentally, Nava's (probably unwitting) aide in the hoax was one Robby George, a leading conservative at Princeton. George belongs to the Opus Dei sect. Although the cult does not hire albino hit men (as alleged by The Da Vinci Code), the group does have many unsavory far-right associations.
Nava happens to be a Mormon. He may now be sorry that he ever got mixed up with all this mondo-Catholic weirdness. Leave that stuff to the experts, kid.
10 comments:
Joseph, you raise more moral questions than Truman's decision raised. Anscombe calls the nuked Japanese "innocent", you say they weren't blameless, yet each of you suggests they were expendable. I wasn't around, I have no idea. But if god himself being FDR locked up America's Japanese populace, our own, it's easy to imagine that Japan's Japanese were regarded by Truman as existing beyond the pale of humanity. The US military says self-serving stuff; it isn't the final authority; it takes orders from a civilian who may or may not have the military leaders' unanimous respect; what's good for the military may not be good for the rest of us, vice-versa, etc.; what difference does it make whether Truman made the right decision or the wrong one? He didn't have to think twice the way every POTUS since HTS has had to, and isn't that a good thing? Anscombe sounds like a Quaker, Nixon was a Quaker, after the US tested H-bombs, the Quaker Oats Company agreed to feed contaminated (radioactive) cereal to an experimental group of children, I don't know if Ike signed off on that, guys like Ike have seen everything, they had to sign off on decoy deployments, boys sent to their slaughter for a breakthrough somewhere else; of course the US military opposed the nuke attacks: the US military does not fight against civilians, doh. Didn't. Maybe the military wanted the victory in the Pacific, maybe they thought they deserved more credit than the White House, and as much as their European brethren. MacArthur gets fired, Ike becomes president running with a Red-baiting Quaker, and from Princeton Einstein says the US should share all its weapons hi tech with the Soviets. Ike clears his conscience by warning us about certain "counsels" in the halls of government. Also, Truman didn't use the excuse that Hirohito or Tojo tried to kill his daddy, like Bush said about Saddam.
@ aitchd
Leave off the Quaker-bashing, please. TO quote the article Jospeh cited on Anscombe, "During her first undergraduate year she converted to Roman Catholicism, and remained a lifelong devout Catholic. "
Quaker Oats had nothing to do with the religion - it was basically a marketing tactic.
And the religion had nothing to do with Richard Nixon - he was mostly an agnostic, although his mother was very active in Whittier Friends Church, which was a programmed meeting having little to differentiate it from mainline Protestant churches. When I was a member of Seattle University Friends Meeting during the late 70s, an uncle of Nixon's periodically visited and would rant a bit about what a disgrace Nixon was to the religion.
I must apologize. I had meant to take down one offensive post and somehow several went missing. I am very sorry.
I'll try to recreate my entirely dispositive argument once again.
It is unclear why Joe denies the Japanese sought peace twice. They sought clarification of terms of surrender through two diplomatic intermediaries, the Russians and the Swiss (definitely the first, possibly somebody else for the second). Even Truman's diaries acknowledge that the 'Jap emperor wants peace.' We'd broken their codes, and knew all about their diplomatic entreaties.
What is more telling is that the entirety of the Allies thought clarifying terms of surrender could develop into the end of the war, and favored offering terms of surrender instead of dropping the bombs. That was actually written into and approved by the Allies for the Potsdam declaration, until Truman solely decided to take it out.
ALL the top military and civilian leadership of Britain and the US favored offering terms of surrender instead of continuing the war and using the bombs. That means the generals and the general staff, and the civilians, like Sec. War Stimson, former Sec. State Cordell Hull, and etc.
The sentiment to that effect among the US military was so strong that they importuned their corresponding numbers in the British military to ask their civilian leadership to work on changing Truman's mind on this-- TWICE!
Our top military leaders, Eisenhower, Adm. King, Leahy, LeMay, etc., all opposed using the bombs as militarily unnecessary, and most of them, as also a morally heinous act. (LeMay, in charge of fire-bombing the cities of Japan, wasn't troubled morally, but simply convinced that what he was doing would finish the job.)
The Strategic Bombing Survey, done by the military in '45, concluded that 'almost certainly' the Japanese would have surrendered before the end of the year, even if the Russians hadn't entered the war, even if we hadn't dropped the bombs, and even if we hadn't proceeded with the plans for an invasion of Japan. Truman's own writings showed he considered the Russians joining the war against Japan would finish the Japanese war effort.
Since all the military opposed dropping the bombs, we are left with the conclusion that it wasn't done for the military purposes claimed, but rather, for the geopolitical aim of intimidating the Russians by the demonstration of the new bomb, and the domestic political reason of avoiding impeachment over the theft/diversion of lawfully enacted spending for other areas to the secret Manhattan Project.
...sofla
Finding no follow up to my argument, I'll add my own!
Few who support the dropping of the a-bombs on Japan know that it was virtually universally opposed by our top military leadership, our top civilian leadership, and the corresponding bodies among our allies, and especially Britain, as militarily unnecessary.
Now, were they all peaceniks, or of liberal minds, willing to sacrifice a million American casualties in an invasion so as not to kill Japanese civilians?
Hardly. Nor is it clear they even knew that the Japanese wanted to surrender (since the breaking of the imperial code was surely top secret). But they knew Japan was all but totally defeated already (per Eisenhower's direct quotation), and therefore would, because they must, surrender shortly, and that the post hoc justification that Truman invented was, frankly, a lie. Just as the entire official presentation to the American people at the time and thereafter was a lie.
We said it was 'a military target.' The feature of the target most desired was the large civilian workforce adjacent to whatever military target may have been there, and the object was to kill those persons en masse. We even had to stop LeMay from killing everyone in every city by his firebombing raids, so that there would be a sufficient number of civilians in some city to incinerate with these weapons. The object of the second a-bomb dropping was to experimentally prove out the second, previously untested in the field, plutonium design.
Truman unwittingly let the cat out of the bag early on. The plan had been to continue to drop a-bombs on Japan. Truman ordered that plan off, stating that there had been enough slaughter of women and children. Meaning just then, at our hands, via the prior two atomic weapons.
Oppenheimer quoted the Baghavad Gita at the Trinity test site: "Now I have become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds." Surely, the use of the atomic bombs proved the leadership of this country had become the very evil we thought we were fighting. (Indeed, we immediately injested large amounts of unreconstructed Nazis into our national security apparatus.) Some 15 millions more of the forgotten dead at the hands of our national leadership later, the sins of the American Empire remain beyond the grasp of the vastly propagandized and tragically undereducated American public.
...sofla
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