Dope.

In 1995, for the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the Smithsonian planned on a special exhibit on the Enola Gay, using information that had been gradually released since the war. An ad hoc coalition of the American Legion and a lobbying front group supported by defense contractors mounted a successful resistance to the exhibit, portraying it as some kind of weird propaganda coup for communism and the Imperial Japanese Army Headquarters. This line was eagerly taken up by the Washington Post, the tone being set by a Charles Krauthammer column.

The controversy replayed a battle that has been going on a long time. The locus classicus of the defense of the bombing is a piece by Paul Fussell entitled, "Thank God for the Atom Bomb". Sorry, guys, no copy of this is available on-line. I'm going to reduce it to its arguments, although the piece really relies on its rhetoric. Still, the Fussell's three arguments for the bomb are common to his camp. I�ve seen them repeated, with the same rhetorical flourish of contempt for those who don't buy it, among most of the Atom Bombadiers:

1. The bombing can�t be judged by non-combatants.
2. Since war is an unconditional evil, there are no morally justified constraints on how war is fought � the only moral course is to end war as quickly as possible.
3. The bombing prevented an invasion of Japan.

Fussell spends quite a bit of time in his essay explaining the special, mystic experience of the non-combatant. Although Fussell doesn�t quite explain it � mysticism is always a little too deep for mere language � his point seems to be that the experience of seeing one�s comrade�s shot up produces a sort of hive consciousness among GIs. They meld into a collective mind, wishing for � well, the destruction of the enemy by whatever means necessary. The justification for this is irrelevant. Like German youth groups in the 20s, who claimed that non-Aryans just didn�t get the Teutonic mythos and the groovy blut-und-erdness of it all, Fussell claims that our boys in the Pacific Theater wished for Hiroshima, and so we had to give it to them. An early birthday present for the boys. Fired with this knowledge, Fussell can dismiss critics of the bombing, like John Kenneth Galbraith, as desk jockeys at best, second guessing (or is it stabbing in the back?) our best sons.

Even Fussell knows this is argument, or anti-argument (since it premises lie outside of rationality), is insufficient. Combatants, after all, don�t direct or organize combat � they perform it. It was the Truman administration that ordered the bombing, after a bunch of non-combatant ephebes in Los Alamos built the damn explosive. But Fussell goes for the Fuhrer principle � Truman, you see, had an intuitive connection to the grunts. He�d been a soldier himself. Like, in fact, that other soldier/leader, Adolf Hitler. In fact, Hitler compares favorably to Truman and truly aces Roosevelt. He had been more of a soldier than either � after all, he was gassed in WWI.

Well, hmm. Forgive me, but any argument that ends up supporting Hitler�s leadership during the war makes me worry. Besides, when the chips are down, the intuitive business fades away - leaders order their men into life threatening situations while remaining, themselves, out of life-threatening situations. The man who ordered Stalingrad held to the last soldier, and who planned, late in the war, to bring the army, hive spirit and all, down with him, was surely not connected to the Soldaten Wunsch-pool, and neither was Truman. In fact, by Truman's account, during most of the war he was out of the loop. The argument is absurd and insulting to the soldiers it is ostensibly defending, who werre more varied and intelligent than Fussell gives them credit for. Furthermore, it allows Fussell to commit a little intellectual blackguardism vis � a � vis the critics of Hiroshima � with the non-subtle implication that these guys, and of course women here are excluded from the discussion utterly, are, let�s say, limp wrested.

That�s to be expected from the fascism of this kind of argument/non-argument. That it goes over so easily in the Beltway press is to be expected, too - those guys always love a bully.

2. The second argument actually has a cognitive content, so I am not debasing my readers by presenting it.
George Orwell might have been the first to remark on a strange conjunction in World War II. English pacifists, who started out simply opposing all combat, slowly turned to pro-fascism as the war continued. This represents a fact in history of the spirit, as Hegel would say � the synthesis of pacifist assumptions with warmongering conclusions.
The pacifist assumption � which generates an enormous amount of unthinking agreement � is that killing for a political program is unconditionally wrong. Fussell, who has represented this view elsewhere, quotes General Sherman�s war is hell remark to give us a feel for this view.

The warmonger takes the pacifist interpretation one step further: since war is unconditionally bad, if a war occurs, the only good thing is to end it as quickly as possible, using all means necessary.

The first thing to say about this is � I see no reason to cede the pacifist point. I can think of killing for a political program that was good, and killing that was bad. To put it bluntly: Hooray for the shooting of Czar Alexander, the beheading of Louis XVI, and the shooting of as many Confederates as possible at Shiloh.

If, however, violence isn�t unconditionally wrong in these circumstances � which was really the attitude of the governments that, after all, fought the wars - it makes sense to talk of constraints on violence. It makes sense, in other words, to dispute with Sherman. Sherman�s remark is often quoted because he made it in the context of a war which freed the slaves, a result no sane person can dispute. The historical codicil to the Sherman doctrine was the war against the Plains and Southwestern Indians � funny how the Fussells of the world forget this. In the Indian wars, it was typical for Americans to induce Indian chiefs (the apache chief Mangas Coloradas and Sitting Bull are good examples) to parlay under a flag of truce, and then murder them. If war is hell, of course, who cares � it brought these conflicts to a quicker end. But if there are just wars and revolutions, then we are right to feel this kind of death is repulsive and thoroughly dishonors the murderers. We are right to say prisoners shouldn�t be shot, and the safety of civilians should, to the greatest extent possible, be preserved.

There�s a fake history that goes along with the claim that the era of total war was inevitable. It is that war is technologically determined. Once you have the plane, you inevitably have the bombing of cities.
This isn�t true. Even a cursory glance at the history of warfare shows no necessary connection between the level of technology and the level of allowed ferocity. If you compare the Europe�s continental wars in the 19th century with those of the 17th century, you�ll find the 17th century�s were much more total, much more wrenching to the civilian population. Yet the technology employed by, say, the Prussians against the French in 1870, is much more sophisticated than the arquebuses of Gustave Adolphus� soldiery.

3. The defenders of the Hiroshima bombing often talk about the casualties suffered by American troops in the last months of the war, as if these rates lead to a self-evident inference. The casualty rate was astonishing. But normally, this is not a signal that you attack civilians. It means that you continue, as Grant did in Virginia, taking the count in order to achieve a complete victory �or you negotiate. In other words, you reconsider the option of unconditional surrender. It doesn�t mean you firebomb Tokyo and wipe out two largely civilian cities with atom weapons.

Here I want to make a case that is, I believe, unique. The partisans on both sides agree that the surrender of Japan was wholly on the terms laid out by the Potsdam agreement. In other words, the Imperial Japanese government unconditionally surrendered. Now, formally, this is true. But I�d like to argue that in reality, not only was the Potsdam agreement violated in the course of Japanese reconstruction, but that it was in the American interest to violate it. In other words, the unconditional surrender for which so many fought, and for which 75 to 100 thousand died in Hiroshima, was a cynical sham.

I�ll make this argument tomorrow.