[Buddha-l] Re: Greetings from Oviedo

[Dan Lusthaus]

Hi Lance,

 > This goes too far.

Hardly.

> The Japanese government had already offered to surrender.

First, we have to recognize that the deployment of the A-bomb has become a
mythic event, one deemed inconceivably "evil" (or some synonym) by a large
number of people -- who, incidentally, cringe when someone like Bush uses
that term to characterize something else. Given the arms race and post-war
angst, not to mention the awesome destructive power nuclear weapons
respresent,  this is understandable, Knowing that Hitler was working on
developing the bomb up until the end of the war, and the target he would
have dropped it on would have been London, must make all this quite poignant
for British citizens (and easy to ellide one "evil" into another).

Dispelling misconceptions so deeply encrusted in myth is not an easy task.

That we invariably talk about "Hiroshima" while Nagasaki remains at most an
afterthought shows that this "event" has become an iconic mythic event in
general discussion, rather than a subject of rational history. Dealing with
myth rather than history, moral convictions rather than historical facts
have dominated the discourse. These convictions are as deeply and zealously
clung to as religious convictions (sometimes they are even placed under that
rubric), so attempts at rational discussion are perceived as attacks on
sacred, inviolable cows. With decades of an agenda to justify classifying
the "event" as evil, lots of "conspiracy"-type theories have flooded the
discussion, eagerly embraced by whoever was seeking backup material or
vindication for their mythic convictions. All this makes it very difficult
to discuss such things calmly and rationally.

We now have lots of facts, archives, etc., at our disposal, and there are
legitimate differences of interpretation of those facts. There are also the
insupportable assertions based on misconstrual of actual facts (as, for
instance, holocaust deniers attempt to do).

We also have to remember this was an act of war that took place during a
long and brutal war initiated by the Japanese themselves, an act designed to
bring the war, killing, carnage to an end. Remove the bomb from the equation
and killing doesn't automatically stop. The firebombing of Tokyo was
actually more destructive overall than the A-bombs. Would anyone
participating in this discussion care to post for us the casualties (dead,
wounded) broken down by nationality, and the casualties of the bombs
separately? It was a tragedy, it opened a new and still dangerous page in
the canons of warfare, but in the end it was warfare

That the assertion "the Japanese government had *already* offered to
surrender" is an improper misuse of facts, distorting the actual historical
record (we need first to determine the different types of "surrender" that
were under discussion at that time) becomes obvious when we bring Nagasaki
out of the shadows. If the Japanese were so eager to surrender, why wasn't
Hiroshima sufficient to bring that about? Why did they hold out until
Nagasaki? One would have to believe that the US and Allies were not
interested in surrender at all, they just wanted to extend the war as much
as possible. That's absurd (unless one's rhetoric is based on always
attributing the worst motives to anything American). An earlier surrender
would have effectively cut the Russians out of the deal (one of the motives
the conspiratorial revisionists float), making the bomb superfluous and
unnecessary. Or one has to believe (as someone on the list claimed), it was
all just a sadistic experiment -- in which case we must believe somehow that
in the days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki the desparate pleas of the
Japanese to surrender were just falling on the deaf sadistic ears of the
Americans, and that somehow those pleas have been expunged from the
historical record by the victors who rewrote history. All of that is
nonsense.

As I wrote in a previous message:

"Violence ultimately is just another form of impermanence, one more
problematic than dying of old age since it seems in many cases to be
avoidable. "

All these revisionistic theories are attempts to make a case that the bomb
was avoidable, and hence unjustifiable violence.

Ergo, those who pose these theories for the most part do not do so by
arguing that it would have been preferable to bring about Japan's surrender
by conventional military means, since anyone even slightly aware of what
that means understands that the casualties and destruction would have been
far greater on both sides. Therefore, they have to argue that the bomb was
unnecessary, Japan would have surrendered without deploying either option.
That's just naive wishful thinking, unsupported by any of the facts -- the
loudest and simplest refutation being the lag between Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.

The US demanded unconditional surrender (a justifiable demand given the way
Japan initiated and prosecuted the war). Japan sought better terms, and some
believed Stalin would offer that. Stalin stalled and ultimately rebuked
them, advancing into Manchuria making it clear to Japan and the remaining
Allies that he had designs on Japan (Japan had been fighting with Russia
over territory since the beginning of the 20th c., and had embarrassed them,
they had also invaded Russia in an attempt to defend the Czar from the
Communist takeover). Had the bomb not been dropped and conventional means
deployed instead, the "iron curtain" would have fallen somewhere within
Japan -- the record shows that that was a concern, another reason to bring
the war to a swift conclusion before the Russian advance complicated things
(as anyone familiar with the Russian advance in Europe toward the end of the
war realizes, the last thing on the Russians' mind was limiting casualties).

The Japanese probed whether the Russians would offer more generous surrender
conditions. To the US demand for unconditional surrender, the Japanese
presented unacceptable counterproposals. They did not actually offer to
surrender.

While those negotiations continued, people under occupation were dying in
massive amounts, and battlefield casualties continued to mount. Even after
the official surrender, many Japanese soldiers refused to surrender, and
Japanese officers and diplomats themselves had to scour Asia and the Pacific
to get them to put down their weapons. Many committed seppuku, since
surrender was unacceptable and inconceivable.

What the archives show is that after Hiroshima, the Japanese believed the US
had used the only bomb they had, and so they gambled that there would be no
repeat performance. They were not surrendering. After Nagasaki it became
clear that there were more bombs where the first one came from (actually
after Nagasaki it would have been months before another bomb could have been
constructed, but the Japanese did not know that). Some factions wanted to
continue fighting regardless, though, according to some accounts, it was
Hirohito himself who finally put the brakes on (we'll probably never know).
At that point the Japanese finally made serious surrender overtures -- so
serious that the US conceded the condition that the Emperor be allowed to
remain, something that MacArthur was campaigning for anyway, rightly
believing it would make post-war occupation and reconstruction easier.


> A warning [to the Soviets] - not to push too hard in Europe.

I'm not sure that's really true, but if it were, that too would be a good.
If that sort magical alchemy really works, then I imagine the Hungarians,
Czechs, Poles, East Germans, etc. might wish that a few more bombs would
have been dropped.

By mentioning that I haven't explicitly mentioned Buddhism, have I mentioned
Buddhism?

Dan Lusthaus