Kenan Malik: Don't let the victors define morality – Hiroshima was always indefensible
"If we’d lost the
war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” So said Curtis LeMay after
America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August
1945. LeMay was no
bleeding-heart liberal. The US air force chief of staff who had directed the
assault over Japan in the final days of the Second World War, he believed in
the use of nuclear weapons and thought any action acceptable in the pursuit of
victory. Two decades later, he would say of Vietnam that America should “bomb
them back into the stone ages”. But he was also honest enough to recognise that
the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not regarded as a war crime only
because America had won the war.
Last week marked
the 75th
anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attacks. And while Hiroshima
has become a byword for existential horror, the moral implications of the
bombings have increasingly faded into the background. Seventy-five years ago,
LeMay was not alone in his verdict. “We had adopted an ethical standard common
to the barbarians of the Dark Ages,” Fleet Admiral William Leahy, chair of the
chiefs of staff under both presidents Roosevelt and Truman, wrote in his
auto-biography, I Was There. Dwight Eisenhower, too, had, as he
observed in the memoir The White House Years, “grave
misgivings” about the morality of the bombings.
Almost as soon as the
bombs had dropped, however, attempts began to justify the unjustifiable. On 9
August, the day of the Nagasaki bombing, the US president, Harry Truman, broadcast
to the nation, claiming that “the first atomic bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima, a military base… because we wished… to avoid the killing of
civilians”. In fact, more than 300,000 people lived in Hiroshima, of whom up to
40% were killed, often in the most grotesque fashion….
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/09/dont-let-the-victors-define-morality-hiroshima-was-always-indefensibleHIROSHIMA 75 years after. 'To my last breath': survivors fight for memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
