When will they ever learn?

Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, at his headquarters in the European theater of operations. He wears the five-star cluster of the newly-created rank of General of the Army. In the public domain.

Kathie Malley-Morrison

As the anniversaries of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) snuck by with little acknowledgment and limited chagrin in the US, it troubled me that those world-shattering, paradigm-changing events are, for young people growing up in this country today, basically ancient history.  Doubly unfortunately, the shared “history” is woefully incomplete, the full story never told. Little learned.

The “history” I was taught in public school, which I still hear echoed today, was that the dropping of those atomic bombs was a necessary, essential, moral way to keep those aggressive, warmongering Japanese from increasing their deadly toll on innocent American lives.

Nobody ever told me that Dwight D. Eisenhower, General of the U.S. Army and Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and later a highly-respected President of the United States, opposed dropping those bombs.

In his own words:

“Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act…

“During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude…”

Eisenhower’s antipathy regarding the use of nuclear weaponry did not diminish after those blood-thirsty, saber-rattling, cock-crowing events of August 1945 .  At the Republican National Convention of August 23, 1956, he warned his party, his country, and the world that:

“We are in the era of the thermonuclear bomb that can obliterate cities and can be delivered across continents. With such weapons, war has become, not just tragic, but preposterous.”

The hour is late; can’t we find a way to address the preposterousness of nuclear arms before tragedy completes envelops the planet and obliterates a large portion of living things? And while we are at it, how about doing something about obliterating lives with drones?

 

Remembering Pearl Harbor

On December 8, 1941, in a speech to the people of the United States, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared: “Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

Rescuing a survivor of Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
Rescuing a survivor of Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (Photo in public domain; from Wikimedia Commons)

As most people in the U.S. learn in school, the nation fought a victorious war against Japan, “pacified” it (in part through the world’s first and only use of nuclear weaponry), and directed its transformation into a peaceful and successful democracy.

Following   9/11, President George W. Bush framed the invasion of Iraq in the rhetoric of Pearl Harbor and  its aftermath, arguing that once again American force could bring peace and democracy to an aggressive nation.

John W. Dower, in an unheeded message to the U.S. government in the February/March issue of the Boston Review in 2003, warned that Iraq was not Japan, and that an attack on and occupation of Iraq was not the route to democracy in that country. He pointed out that “What made the occupation of Japan a success was two years or so of genuine reformist idealism before U.S. policy became consumed by the Cold War…,” which he contrasts sharply with the prevailing conservative philosophy.

It is appropriate for Americans to continue mourning the loss of lives at Pearl Harbor, and the years of violence and death that Pearl Harbor unleashed. At the same time, it is  important to gain a better understanding of the events that led to Pearl Harbor, the events that led to 9/11, and the events that led to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

John W. Dower’s latest book, Cultures of War: Pearl Harbor / Hiroshima / 9-11 / Iraq, offers considerable food for thought on these issues. In this book, Dower warns Americans again about “how pressures and fixations multiply in the cauldron of enmity and war; how reason, emotion, and delusion commingle; how blood debts can become blood lusts, and moral passion can bleed into the practice of wanton terror.”

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology