[Buddha-l] Hiroshima vs Terrorism..........?

[Dan Lusthaus]

  There is no way Hiroshima "saved" lifes...............Dan arguments are "conceptual". 

  catalina

It was anything but conceptual to the people who were no longer being eaten by Japanese soldiers, the POWs who were perishing en masse, the potential allied invading forces who would have suffered incalculable and needless casualties, the Japanese citizens who were mobilized and of an impassioned ethos to fight any invasion to the last women and child... those lives were all saved just for starters.

One cannot try to judge or extrapolate from how certain European nations respond to aggression (basically capitulate once resistance seems ineffective) with the Japanese ethos of that time. One only has to look at some of the popular Japanese cinema of recent decades -- often a pointless nihilism culminating in pointless death or suicide, which resonates 'positively' with Japanese audiences on a deep emotional level, while confounding westerners or seeming exotically bizarre (though not bizarre to Japanese) -- to see that that ethos is not gone even today.

And the prominent role Zen played in constructing and reinforcing that ethos is the subject matter of Brian Victoria's two books. Read them if you'd like more documentation than you will be comfortable with.

Go to the library and read up on Iwo Jima. That wasn't even the homeland. The expectation was that any invasion of the Japanese mainland would produce an Iwo Jima-like situation to the nth degree, an expectation confirmed by the Japanese rhetoric of the day (the chrysanthymum should perish in a blaze of glory for the Emperor), especially from the most powerful echelons of the decision makers.

While the bomb has become a mythic icon for marital overkill in the West, non-Japanese Asians have never looked at it that way. The dropping of the bombs were and remain for them liberational events, comparable to concentration camp survivors being liberated from their camps (Japanese occupational cruelty has become legendary -- comfort women, cannibalism, etc). Did any of you follow the anti-Japan internet campaign in China last Spring? Have you paid attention to what the Koreans (North and South) continue to say about Japan and the war years? Have you wondered why the anti-Japanese anger in Asia is still so powerful and palpable?

Post-War Japan -- for domestic and international reasons -- found it better PR to portray themselves as the victims of the war (Hiroshima) rather than the aggressors. Just as Austrians disclaim responsibility for what Austrians did during the War, blaming everything on the Anschluss -- forgetting that they lined the streets cheering the Nazis' arrival, and were more than willing partners.

Dan Lusthaus
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